Looking at the Eye of God. Right in the Eye.
Hard To Be A God (1989) examines the problem of subjective, emotion-ridden creatures attempting to assume the guise of objective investigators. Subjectivity refers, in my mind, to the phenomenon of applying our preconceptions and automatic judgments to our observations, often without being cognizant of it, and it tends to skew our observations away from accuracy and proper analysis. Subjectivity can have negative or positive survival value, and as it tends to be much faster than objectivity, it has a certain advantage over objectivity in the great game of survival.
Except when it doesn’t.
Our pawn in the game of observation is Anton, a scientist who has traveled from Earth to an unnamed planet, populated with indigenous folks of a barbaric nature, who happen to strongly resemble humans. This permits Anton to enter the planet’s society as Rumata, an exiled aristocrat from another country, with a convenient reputation.
The society is rife with political factions and personal animosities, all existing within a royalist government framework, sometimes competing with theological forces, and it’s an existential competition up and down the board. Into this welter of emotion, power-chasing, and undisciplined corruption wades Anton as Rumata. Along with his observations, relayed in real time to an orbital space station populated with fellow anthropologists, he’s searching for a missing colleague who has removed himself from communications with the station, and a local who appears to be in the process of inventing the printing press, a potentially planet-changing advance.
And existing power structures hate uncontrolled advances. He’d best watch his step.
For all of the violence and corruption of the society, Anton cannot help but be drawn in. These are, after all, people like himself, but not benefiting from the advances in government and ethics which his people have achieved. That raises the sticky question that faces the colonialist: when is interference ever tolerable? Is it a meaningful question when the balance of power is a teeter-totter with an adult on one end, a child on the other?
But what can one man do? Especially the guy with the nickname, The One Who Does Not Kill?
It’s an interesting story, but there are some jolting problems. For one, it’s not in English, so get ready to do a lot of caption-reading or learn German. Second, the story style is a collage of German and 1980s tropes, which means segues are painfully abrupt, story background is non-existent, and sometimes it seems that characters pop out of nowhere. Oh, and the hair of the indigenous is terrifying.
But it remains an interesting exploration of a plausible question: How do we explore other societies? You may want to explore this story.
