Future histories: The Childe Cycle

[bibliogramma]

Antagonist, Gordon R. Dickson & David W. Wixon
The Chantry Guild, Gordon R. Dixon

Once upon a time, George R. Dickson wrote a short novel called Dorsai! (there's also a revised version called The Genetic General). The overall future he created for that novel, and the specific culture of Dorsai, captivated a lot of people, so he wrote more Dorsai novels. Then, because all the cool kids like Heinlein and Asimov were doing it, he decided to made his Dorsai novels the cornerstone of a projected, multi-volume series that traced the past and future development of the human race while at the same time expounding upon a pet theory of the forces behind human history and the evolution of civilization.

I loved the Dorsai novels when I was young, and I enjoyed many of the ones that followed, even though they got kind of weird - the main protagonist of one of the novels (Donal Graeme) goes off into deep space as an old man and reappears decades later as an infant drifting in space (Hal Mayne), while having also sent his consciousness back into time to become someone else (Paul Formain) who takes some crucial actions that make the existence of his present and future selves possible...

Anyway, Dickson's main sequence of novels - the ones involving Graeme and the other Dorsai, Formain, and finally Hal Mayne (who ends up being Dickson's version of a Kwisatz Haderach who can be in all places and times) - reaches a climax of sorts in the novel The Chantry Guild which was published in 1988. Hal Mayne and the people of Earth are under blockade and the bad guys are just about to take over the whole known universe, when Mayne reaches a profound philosophical breakthrough which is presumably going to save the day in stunning fashion. It was a great climax, but I wanted to see more - what happens after Mayne reaches his his apotheosis, how does he fix what his major opponent has done to the settled worlds beyond Earth, and what does that do for humanity?

Instead of doing what I'd hoped he would do, and continue this future history post-apotheosis, Dickson became fascinated with a character he had developed for the Hal Mayne novels, Bleys Ahrens, the antithesis to Mayne's thesis, whose own plans for domination of known space are continually thwarted by Mayne, yet whose opposition is the force that drives Mayne to reach the synthesis of becoming the first fully evolved human being. So Dickson wrote a series of novels that began with Ahrens' childhood and told the whole story from the other side. I kept reading, even though the books about Ahrens became increasingly annoying - Dickson's style deteriorated, and while sometimes telling the same story from two different perspectives can be very powerful, it helps if you can identify with all of the POV characters, and Ahrens simply isn't the sort of character you really want to identify with. Think John Galt with an interplanetary military organization and a desire to rule the universe.

Antagonist was apparently written from detailed notes left by Dickson after his death. I'd kind of hoped that it would take the story not just up to, but past, the events at the end of The Chantry Guild, but no such luck. The novel ends with Ahrens' attempt to take control of Earth, after subordinating all of the outer settled worlds - the last major confrontation they have before Mayne's timely transcendence of time and space. Nothing new, not much of interest, and Dixon, alas, is not nearly the writer that Dickson was in his prime.

So when I'd finished Antagonist, I decided to re-read The Chantry Guild, because that's where the series really ends, not with any of these Bleys Ahrens novels, and that's all there is - unless there are more notes left in the Dickson estate, and someone else with more skill on tap to turn them into the final Childe Cycle book I always hoped that Dickson would write.