"Gather, Darkness!" -- a Fritz Leiber OSS tale

by John Michael Greer
(Cumberland, MD USA)

Several things, this website very much among them, have sent me back to the SF novels I used to devour in my misspent youth. One consequence was a pleasant couple of days spent reading, for the first time in better than thirty years, Fritz Leiber's "Gather, Darkness!" It's as good as I remembered -- one heck of a lively read, in fact -- but it's only in retrospect that I realized that it's an OSS tale. Though it's set entirely on Earth, it's a 2305 AD Earth with two, count 'em two, colony worlds, and those are Mars and Venus.

In Leiber's fictive future -- well, this one, at least -- technological progress continued steadily from the dawn of the Atomic Age to the coming of the short-lived Golden Age, which began circa 2099 and ended in the wake of an interplanetary war circa 2166. A group of scientists, hoping to prevent a dark age, launched a fake religion -- the religion of the Great God -- equipped with real miracles courtesy of advanced technology. The ploy proved unstoppable; the Hierarchy, as the priesthood of the Great God called itself, rose to power, turned corrupt in the usual way, and imposed an oppressive theocratic state on Earth and its two colony worlds.

Fast forward to 2305, aka Year 139 of the Great God. Rumors spread that a Witchcraft just as powerful as the Hierarchy lurks in secret -- and the rumors are quite true; the supposed servants of Sathanas have a technology comparable to that of the servants of the fictional Great God. As the conflict begins, a renegade priest named Armon Jarles begins his own quest to find out the truth of the matter...and the story takes off from there. I'll leave the rest for readers to enjoy.

Leiber doesn't say much at all about the colony worlds. There's at least one city on Venus, where armaments can be had that don't exist on Earth. Communications with the colony worlds are subject to realistic limits -- neither planet can be contacted by radio when it's on the far side of the Sun from Earth, for example -- and space travel takes time, too. The one spaceship that makes an appearance is a nice bit of advanced technology, but not too advanced:

"The thunder rose to a shattering climax. A great shadow darkened the Sanctuary. A vast ellipsoid construction appeared overhead from the direction of the sun and came to rest above the Blasted Heath, its mighty repulsor beams plowing like huge pillars into the gray soil, digging great pits. While it still rocked their aloft, circular ports began to open in its dully gleaming surface."

All in all, among its other virtues, "Gather, Darkness!" was another good reminder that it's possible to tell a rousing science fiction tale on a single planet, with only the solar system (and indeed only the inner planets) for background. Since Leiber didn't say otherwise, I exercised the reader's prerogative to imagine the Venus colony surrounded by lush jungles, and the Mars colony on a dry desert world worn out by countless ages...

{Comment from Zendexor: I'd heard about this book but had never read it; this article whets my appetite. I can think of parallels in the false cult of "Gordelpus" in "Last And First Men", and the false cult of the Prophet in Heinlein's "If This Goes On - ". I'm looking forward to comparing these with Leiber's take on the theme. One point of interest is the way the motivations for the deception vary in each case; more or less accidental in Stapledon, fanatic in Heinlein and, from what you say, practical/idealistic in Leiber.

The setting - on Earth but with added planetary-colony background - reminds me of van Vogt's The Mind Cage, though in that one we've lost contact with the colonies, and even doubt their existence.}