Vintage Treasures: None But Man by Gordon R. Dickson
 |
 |
 |
When I was young, there was a peculiar sub-genre of science fiction that many folks attributed to the influence of John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding. If you were an SF reader in the 1950s-1980s, you read a fair share of novels in which mankind began a reign of conquest in outer space, carving a glorious empire among the stars. And when we inevitably crossed paths with aliens who frustrated our boundless ambitions, we’d show those godless E.T’s in relatively short order why you don’t mess with homo sapiens.
This always seemed to me to be a uniquely American branch of SF. Growing up in Ottawa, right across the river from the province of Quebec, my natural response when I met folks from an alien culture, with their own strange language and incomprehensible customs, was not to immediately attempt to assert my superiority. Instead you tried to score some French comics, and asked if they minded if you dated their sister. And if they drove a truck, you bought poutine from them, because that stuff was frickin’ manna from heaven.
To my mind Gordon R. Dickson (who was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1923) was never part of the Manifest Destiny in Outer Space crowd but, like most career SF writers at the time, he tried a little bit of everything. His 1969 novel None But Man, the tale of ‘brave human frontiersmen’ who defy a peace treaty and engage in guerrilla warfare against “unhuman Aliens” rather than surrender their homes, seemed pretty firmly in the “Nobody does war the way humans do” Campbell tradition.
