Three dead men walked across the face of hell. Their feet groped past frozen rock, now and then they stumbled in the wan light, and always they heard the thin, bitter mumble of or wind and felt the cold gnawing at their flesh (1).
When certain fractious fans whine about the current state of science fiction because, you know, social issues and womanfolk and not enough boldly going, they're probably misremembering books like this one. In fact, Poul Anderson's short novel, first published in Startling Stories (1955) and later as half of an Ace Double (1958)1 stands as a decent example of period SF. It forms part of the prolific author's Psychotechnic League future history. And, while it features lots of boldly going by square-jawed tech-savvy heroes, social and scientific issues are central to the story.2
World War III is history. It was followed, in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, by the rise of technological elites and the inevitable backlash against them. The reactionaries included extremist, "violently anti-intellectual" (14) and often racist fundamentalist churches in the U.S. Some politicians even encouraged these, in order to secure a "reliable voting body" (14). As humanity began settling bodies in the solar system, some of these extremists colonized one of Jupiter's moons, Ganymede.
Forward-thinking engineers belong to the Order. They help spread technological progress, while remaining theoretically apolitical. A crew of such stolid and intelligent men-- Davenant, Falkenhorst, Kruse, Lyell, Yamagata, and Yuan-- set forth on the spaceship Let There be Light. The religious colonists of that Jovian but not always jovial moon have engaged the Order to perform a terraforming job.
The engineers receive a problematic welcome. They're an interracial group; the colony is all-white. The colonists require their technological prowess, but they have genetic engineering skills, and they've bred a number of brave new variants of humanity. The Light's crew soon realize that their rooms are bugged, and mysteries abound that threaten their lives.
The book has strengths: some progressive thinking, an interesting plot, and a lot of ideas that must have seemed particularly revolutionary in the 1950s.
It also features predictable weaknesses and dated elements. People speak in expository dialogue, female characters receive short shrift, all characters remain underdeveloped, and (typical of the era) space travel and extraterrestrial colonization happen very easily.
Ganymede also stumbles with a rushed conclusion which resolves everything too quickly and neatly. The fault may lie with Ace rather than Anderson. Although Ace proudly declared their Doubles "complete and unabridged," the works had to fit certain limits. Tales that exceeded them were rewritten either by the author or Ace editors. The endings seem to suffer the most.
It doesn't live up to either its opening scene or its Hemingway-inspired title. Nonetheless, if you want to experience middling mid-twentieth-century SF, you could do a good deal worse than The Snows of Ganymede.
1. The flip side features Anderson's own War of the Wing Men. This novel does not, in fact, concern a conflict between two bros over which one can best help their buddy score. It involves the survivors of a spaceship crash and a hostile world's bat-like inhabitants.
2. Anderson set more than twenty stories in this chronology. They were written between 1949 and 1969, by which point it had become alternate rather than future history. A 1981 Psychotechnic compilation excluded several of these stories, including The Snows of Ganymede. It differs from the author's Polesotechnic League future history, which mostly came later. Curiously, War of the Wing Men would retroactively become part of the Polesotechnic League timeline.