Voyage From Yesteryear

When Earth sends an automated spacecraft carrying human genetic material to establish a colony around another star, the settlers grow up without parents, governments, money or the accumulated administrative wisdom of terrestrial civilisation. Despite these grave disadvantages, they somehow create a peaceful, prosperous society. Many years later, a conventional human expedition arrives from Earth to take charge and explain how everything ought to be organised, which is approximately when the trouble begins.

James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear imagines the colony of Chiron, populated by children raised and educated by machines. With abundant resources provided by automated production, the Chironians have no need for wages, private wealth or traditional hierarchies. People work because they find something worth doing, share what is freely available and accord status according to demonstrated ability rather than job title, uniform or possession of a particularly large office. It is an arrangement almost calculated to upset anyone who has spent a lifetime successfully climbing an organisational chart.

The newcomers arrive aboard the Mayflower II, bringing military authority, political leadership, social class and firm expectations of obedience. They assume that the colonists will welcome proper government and recognise the natural superiority of systems imported from Earth. The Chironians, unfortunately, have never learned to be impressed by rank for its own sake. A general without soldiers willing to obey him is merely an unusually decorated man making suggestions.

What follows is less a conventional interstellar war than a collision between incompatible social assumptions. The Earth expedition attempts to establish control over people who have no concept of ownership in the familiar sense, no economic dependence that can be exploited and very little interest in being governed. Hogan uses the confrontation to explore authority, scarcity, education, coercion and the question of whether institutions created under one set of conditions retain any purpose when those conditions disappear.

Published in 1982, Voyage from Yesteryear is a novel of ideas presented on the scale of a space-colonisation story. Hogan approaches political and economic questions with his customary confidence and provides readers with the enjoyable spectacle of a rigid hierarchy discovering that its powers work only when everybody else agrees to participate. There are spacecraft and advanced machines, but the most disruptive technology in the book may simply be the ability to provide people with what they need without first requiring them to earn permission.

This 1984 Penguin edition is in Good condition. It shows the ordinary evidence of having travelled from yesteryear to the present by the traditional one-year-per-year method, but remains sound, readable and ready to carry another passenger to Chiron.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, a small commercial enterprise operating firmly within the old Earth economy. Regrettably, our stock has not yet achieved post-scarcity abundance, so unlike the Chironians we still have to charge for it.

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