This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

Source: The Hugo Winners Vol. 1 and 2 Edited by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov’s introduction to No Truce with Kings is quite revealing of the sentiment at the time in the science fiction community. Asimov notes that he was always an advocate of peace in Vietnam and he had signed a petition at the WorldCon calling for peace. In response conservative science fiction fans had countered with a petition for intervention (war) in Vietnam to counter communism, which Poul Anderson signed. Asimov’s quaint summary of the situation was that they agreed to disagree. This anecdote illustrates the divides forming in the science fiction community, and United States society in general, during the mid-1960s.

No Truce with Kings is an interesting story that follows a colonel and his forces as they rebel against the president of a government administering the western coast of North America. Apparently the United States collapsed following some vague apocalyptic event. The president was elected in dubious circumstances after the former president was voted out. As a result, this story on the one hand is a celebration of the military with lots of battles and on the other a questioning of authority and a call to resist tyranny. How one is meant to resist an authority unless you are in the military is not addressed though.

This story is also oddly anti-intellectual. There are a group of pacifist psychics that help the poor and are aligned with the president who took power. The rebels route one of the psychic’s settlements after they refuse to cooperate with them and the rebels discover that the psychic’s abilities are really advanced technology provided by aliens. This adds an element of technological and expertise to the tyranny portrayed in the story. Yet also does not really seem needed in a story about clashing armies. Plus the upstart president’s relation to the psychics is never made clear. One could imagine a retelling of this story in which the upstart president and the psychics are over throwing a tyrannical military dictatorship and the rebels are in fact trying to restore a dictatorship.

“No Truce with Kings” continues the trilogy of conservative Hugo short story winners from the mid-1960s that celebrated the military during the ramp up to the Vietnam war and escalating tensions in the Cold War. No Truce fro Kings and the other conservative stories of this era are really a celebration of military power and violence over and illustrate the growing distrust of political and intellectual power in the United States that started in the 1960s. Unlike the first story in this conservative moment (“The Dragon Masters” by Jack Vance), “No Truce with Kings” at least has engaging characters and a geography you can follow. Yet it still oddly questions some forms of tyranny (political and intellectual) while leaving others (martial and violent power) unquestioned and celebrated. Overall, this story is well told and an interesting illustration of the culture and thinking of the time it was written. At the same time, I don’t know that anyone outside of die-hard science fiction fans, academics and people reading the Hugo winners need to read this story.