Winchell Chung (@Nyrath) points to Jo Walton’s review of Piper’s Space Viking — a book from 1963 that sounds juvenile and isn’t at all literary but addresses some big questions:
Space Viking (1963) starts out looking like a story of vengeance among the neobarbarian remnants of a collapsed Galactic Empire, and then becomes a meditation on the benefits of civilization and how that is distinct from technology.
Many of the commenters seem perplexed by Piper’s anti-fascist yet not-at-all progressive views. Only Doug M. seems to “get” it — a bit:
Well, Piper was a romantic. He loved Great Men and heroic history. He adored the Confederate States, the British Empire, and ancient Rome. Empires were cool. Empire building was an inherently admirable activity. Democracy, well… “There’s something wrong with democracy. If there weren’t, it couldn’t be overthrown by people like Zaspar Makann, attacking it from within by democratic processes.”
There’s a scene in the book where the fascists (who of course call themselves the People’s Welfare Party) are rioting. Trask suggests mowing them down with gunfire.
“That may be the way you do things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It’s not the way we do things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of its people.”
He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn’t, the people would end up shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:
“I’m sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it’s too late now. You’ve torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.”
It’s not really surprising that Jerry ‘fill the stadium’ Pournelle was a huge admirer of Piper.
That said, Piper wasn’t a fascist, or even a particularly authoritarian conservative. He was a romantic individualist, and his reading of history was colored by that.
Protesters are always fighting against tyranny, right?
I believe that Pournelle also was given permission to write sequels to Space Viking but never got around to it.
The novel also notes the difference between “reign” and “rule”, the gradual degeneration of a planetary society when the best stock escapes into space, and the two ways a planet can fall into barbarianism (too few techs or too few workers).
Since Space Viking is out of copyright, you can find it — and search it — on Project Gutenberg. Here’s one such passage (p. 139) on reigning — and how Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party rose to power:
Here’s the passage (p. 162) referenced earlier, which has a rather small-c conservative tone: