The Best Ye Breed

Last updated
The Best Ye Breed
The Best Ye Breed.jpg
First edition
Author Mack Reynolds
Cover artistDavis Meltzer
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience Fiction
Publisher Ace Books
Publication date
March 1978
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages279
Preceded by Border, Breed nor Birth  

The Best Ye Breed is a science fiction novella by American writer Mack Reynolds. It is the third in a sequence of near-future stories set in North Africa, which also includes Black Man's Burden (1961-1962), Border, Breed nor Birth (1962), and "Black Sheep Astray" (1973). The Best Ye Breed and the North Africa series have been called a "notable exception" to the indirect treatment of racial issues in 1960s science fiction magazines. [1]

Contents

Plot

In parallel stories, four operatives are given conflicting missions in response to the North African war of liberation headed by black American sociologist Homer Crawford, also known as El Hassan. Counter espionage agent Paul Kosloff is dispatched by the U.S. State Department to stop Crawford's revolution before it brings about the financial collapse of the developed world, Major Sean Ryan is hired by the Arab Union to lead a mercenary team in the assassination of Crawford and his followers, Japanese Colonel Tokugawa Hidetada is commissioned to investigate Crawford's stance toward trade with Japan, and KGB agent Serge Sverdlov is sent to promote Crawford's program for North Africa to ensure that the region will be ripe for Soviet propaganda in the future.

Meantime, having scored a victory over the Arab Union forces in Tamanrasset, Crawford and his team turn to governmental issues, which include naming their new country Ifriqiyah and the creation of a Desert Camel Corps to defend the progressive field projects sponsored by El Hassan. Crawford then leaves the administration of the government temporarily in the hands of Isobel Cunningham, who is to pretend that El Hassan and his closest viziers are in a secluded planning session. In actuality, Crawford, Bey-ag-Akhamouk, Kenneth Ballalou, and Clifford Jackson go on a mission to save teammate Elmer Allen, who has been captured by one of Crawford's enemies, the leader of the Ouled Touameur clan, Abd-el-Kader. Allen is kept in a portable iron cage at the council of chiefs of the Chaambra confederation, which has been convened so that Abd-el-Kader can be proclaimed as the reincarnation of Mahdi, the holiest prophet since Mohammed. On their arrival to the council, Crawford challenges Abd-el-Kader to combat. When Abd-el-Kader refuses, Bey proposes that El Hassan and two of his men fight the one thousand warriors of Abd-el-Kader's clan in a secluded area. When the chiefs balk at this outlandish suggestion, Crawford seems to think the idea over and suggests he and his men fight the one thousand men three warriors at a time. After twenty-seven clan champions fail to emerge victorious from the arena, Abd-el-Kader's men turn their backs on him and Abd-el-Kader is laughed off the encampment. Later, Bey explains to Kenny that Crawford and Cliff used a small clearance after the narrow path leading to the fighting area to ambush Abd-el-Kader's warriors one by one.

The evening after liberating Allen, Crawford meets first with Serge Sverdlov, who offers Soviet weapons aid, and later with Paul Kosloff, who pretends he is interested in Crawford's cause to scout the place for his assassination attempt. Sverdlov then attempts to kill Kosloff, but is interrupted by Crawford and his men and by Tokugawa Hidetada. Sverdlov shoots Hidetada, who hits Bey with his laser beam. Kosloff's assistant then kills Sverdlov. Hidetada dies. In disgust at the deadly outcome, Kosloff resigns his mission.

Meantime, Major Ryan and his mercenary group have joined the foreign delegations in Tamanrasset under the pretension offering their services as bodyguards to El Hassan. When Crawford returns and asks them to leave his territory, two of their number who have warmed up to El Hassan's cause, Doctor Megan McDaid and Sergeant Lon Charles, decide to stay. After Ryan's team has left town, Sergeant Charles reveals that the mercenaries' real plan was to lay down fission grenades to destroy Tamanrasset and everyone in it, but that the grenades are now in his possession. Crawford decides to send a message to all such unscrupulous adventurers by going after the twenty-three mercenaries with twenty-two of his men and having the ensuing battle covered by the foreign news agencies in Tamanrasset. Crawford's men win the battle, only to learn that the Arab Union has declared war on Ifriqiyah.

Major themes

The rejection of white supremacy

The novella's title comes from the second line of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem on the civilizing mission of the white colonizer, "The White Man's Burden." [2] Written for Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897, and revised as a response "to resistance in the Philippines to the United States' assumption of colonial power" after the Spanish–American War of 1898., [3] the poem's depiction of whites as having the responsibility to rule the nonwhite peoples of the world with beneficence implies the superiority of the white race. [4] In The Best Ye Breed, this notion of white supremacy is rejected [2] at the socioeconomic level when Crawford and his men reveal to Paul Kosloff that they wish to undermine the West's "mad system" of a "waste economy," which necessitates the voracious exploitation of Africa's raw materials and thereby denies Africa the ability to develop; [5] [6] at the historical level, when Isobel Cunningham instructs Sergeant Charles on the fact that North Africa is the origin of civilization; [7] at the cultural level when Doctor Megan McDaid distances herself from Major Ryan's white mercenaries, one of whom is her fiancé, and explains herself by reciting the first two lines of Kipling's poem to indicate that Ryan and his men are the worst the white race can offer; [8] and at the anthropological level when Crawford deploys exactly twenty-three nonwhites to battle the twenty-three white mercenaries to reverse the message that "a handful of whites [are] worth hundreds of blacks." [9]

Turncoat heroism

The turncoat hero is a recurring figure in Reynolds work, especially in his many stories dealing with underground movements in the Soviet Bloc and the United States [10] (see, for instance, the short story "Freedom"). While in the earlier installments of the series, Black Man's Burden and Border, Breed nor Birth , the turncoat heroes were always highly educated blacks buying into the dream of modernizing the continent of their racial heritage, [10] [11] in The Best Ye Breed the dream is extended to both less educated blacks in the figure of Vietnam veteran Sergeant Lon Charles as well as to historically oppressed whites as represented by Doctor Megan McDaid, who back at home has a hard time finding work because she is a woman [12] and whose Irish heritage helps her understand the need of a peoples to fight for their independence. [13]

The slipperiness of ideology

Reynolds' work often features organizations or agents finding themselves acting against their espoused worldview (see, for example, the short stories "Subversive" and "Pacifist"). [6] In The Best Ye Breed, this ironic shift in ideology occurs when Sverdlov, a Soviet agent, is sent to help El Hassan overthrow North Africa's Marxist governments while Kosloff, a Western agent, is sent to stop the El Hassan program, even though Homer Crawford is anti-Soviet. [6]

Third-World independence

In The Best Ye Breed, the "totally unbought and unbuyable" Crawford argues that underdeveloped nations such as Ifriqiyah have to become radically independent from the first-world powers (here, capitalism and Soviet communism). Total independence would require refusing financial and technological foreign aid and charging the first-world properly for the access to raw materials they require from the third world, even if it means the collapse of the world economy. [6]

Publication history and reception

While The Best Ye Breed picks up where Border, Breed nor Birth (1962) left off, it was published after a sixteen-year hiatus and five years after Reynolds published the short story "Black Sheep Astray" (1973), which ends the series.

One of the storylines of The Best Ye Breed reuses Reynolds' 1973 short story "The Cold War...Continued," which follows the cross-purpose missions of special agents Kosloff, Sverdlov, and Hidetada in response to a revolution in North Africa. [14] The revised storyline expands the backstories of agents Tokugawa Hidetada and Serge Sverdlov and explains Sverdlov's mission as preparing North Africa for a Soviet takeover in the long term. As a consequence of Reynolds' elaboration of previous material, The Best Ye Breed has been deemed, one the one hand, as "a pointless exercise" in "story -inflation", [10] and, on the other, as "the best of the three [North Africa] novels" because it enhances the original story's ironic point about the slipperiness of ideology [6] (see "Major Themes" above).

Related Research Articles

Abd el-Krim Moroccan rebel leader and Riffian president (1882/1883–1963)

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim el-Khattabi, better known as Abd el-Krim was a Moroccan political and military leader and the President of the Republic of the Rif. He and his brother M'Hammad led a large-scale revolt by a coalition of Riffian tribes against French and Spanish colonization of the Rif, in Morocco. His guerrilla tactics, which included the first-ever use of tunneling as a technique of modern warfare, directly influenced Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.

Mack Reynolds American science fiction writer

Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer. His pen names included Dallas Ross, Mark Mallory, Clark Collins, Dallas Rose, Guy McCord, Maxine Reynolds, Bob Belmont, and Todd Harding. His work focused on socioeconomic speculation, usually expressed in thought-provoking explorations of utopian societies from a radical, sometime satiric perspective. He was a popular author from the 1950s to the 1970s, especially with readers of science fiction and fantasy magazines.

Emir Abdelkader Algerian religious and military leader (1808–1883)

Abdelkader ibn Muhieddine, known as the Emir Abdelkader or Abdelkader El Hassani El Djazairi, was an Algerian religious and military leader who led a struggle against the French colonial invasion of Algiers in the early 19th century. As an Islamic scholar and Sufi who unexpectedly found himself leading a military campaign, he built up a collection of Algerian tribesmen that for many years successfully held out against one of the most advanced armies in Europe. His consistent regard for what would now be called human rights, especially as regards his Christian opponents, drew widespread admiration, and a crucial intervention to save the Christian community of Damascus from a massacre in 1860 brought honours and awards from around the world. Within Algeria, his efforts to unite the country against French invaders saw him hailed as the "modern Jugurtha", and his ability to combine religious and political authority has led to his being acclaimed as the "Saint among the Princes, the Prince among the Saints".

Yakov Sverdlov Soviet politician (1885–1919)

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was a Bolshevik Party administrator and chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1917 to 1919. He is sometimes regarded as the first head of state of the Soviet Union, although it was not established until 1922, three years after his death.

Abdelaziz of Morocco Sultan of Morocco from 1894 to 1908

MawlayAbd al-Aziz bin Hassan, born on 24 February 1881 in Marrakesh and died on 10 June 1943 in Tangier, was a sultan of Morocco from 9 June 1894 to 21 August 1908, as a ruler of the 'Alawi dynasty. He was proclaimed sultan at the age of sixteen after the death of his father Hassan I. Mawlay Abd al-Aziz tried to strengthen the central government by implementing a new tax on agriculture and livestock, a measure which was strongly opposed by sections of the society. This in turn led Abd al-Aziz to mortgage the customs revenues and to borrow heavily from the French, which was met with widespread revolt and a revolution that deposed him in 1908 in favor of his brother Abd al-Hafid.

Marinid Sultanate 1244–1465 Berber empire in Morocco

The Marinid Sultanate was a Berber Muslim empire from the mid-13th to the 15th century which controlled present-day Morocco and, intermittently, other parts of North Africa and of the southern Iberian Peninsula (Spain) around Gibraltar. It was named after the Banu Marin, a Zenata Berber tribe. The sultanate was ruled by the Marinid dynasty, founded by Abd al-Haqq I.

Muhammad IV of Morocco Sultan of Morocco

MawlayMuhammad bin Abd al-Rahman, known as Muhammad IV, born in Fes in 1803 and died in Marrakesh in 1873, was the Sultan of Morocco from 28 August 1859 to 16 September 1873 as a ruler of the 'Alawi dynasty. He was proclaimed sultan after the death of his father, Abd al-Rahman. His reign marked a series of reform to tackle European influence on Morocco, as Ottoman Algeria had just been conquered by France in 1830, leading to European nations entering military conflicts with Morocco, such as the Battle of Isly with France in 1844 and the Battle of Tetuan with Spain in 1860. He was succeeded by his son Hassan I.

The White Mans Burden Poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling

"The White Man's Burden" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country. Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling poem about empire.

Battle of Isly

The Battle of Isly was fought on August 14, 1844 between France and Morocco, near the Isly River. French forces under Marshal Thomas Robert Bugeaud routed a much larger, but poorly organized, Moroccan force, mainly fighters from the tribes of Beni Snassen, but also from the Beni Angad and Beni Oukil; under Muhammad, son of the Sultan of Morocco, Abd al-Rahman. Bugeaud, attempting to complete the French conquest of Algeria, instigated the battle without a declaration of war in order to force negotiations concerning Moroccan support for the Algerian resistance leader Abd el-Kader to conclude on terms favorable to the French who begged the Sultan of Morocco to withdraw support for Abd el-Kader.

<i>The Tamarind Seed</i> 1974 film by Evelyn Anthony, Blake Edwards

The Tamarind Seed is a 1974 British-American romantic drama thriller film written and directed by Blake Edwards and starring Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. Based on the 1971 novel The Tamarind Seed by Evelyn Anthony, the film is about a British Home Office functionary and a Soviet era attaché who are lovers involved in Cold War intrigue. The Tamarind Seed was the first film produced by Lorimar Productions. The film score was composed by John Barry.

"Black Sheep Astray" is a science fiction short story by American writer Mack Reynolds. It is one of thirteen narratives included in the collection Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, a special tribute by Astounding SF authors to the memory of science fiction and fantasy magazine editor John W. Campbell. In terms of plot, "Black Sheep Astray" is the last in a sequence of near-future stories set in North Africa, which also includes Black Man's Burden (1961-2), Border, Breed nor Birth (1962), and The Best Ye Breed (1978). "Black Sheep Astray" and the North Africa series have been called a "notable exception" to the indirect treatment of racial issues in 1960s science fiction magazines.

<i>Sundown</i> (1941 film) 1941 film

Sundown is a 1941 American black-and-white World War II film starring Gene Tierney, Bruce Cabot and George Sanders. It was directed by Henry Hathaway, produced by Jack Moss and Walter Wanger, written by Charles G. Booth and Barré Lyndon, and released by United Artists. Set in British East Africa, the film's adventure story was well received by critics, earning three Academy Award nominations, but it was a failure at the box office.

Caliphate of Córdoba State in Islamic Iberia (929–1031)

The Caliphate of Córdoba, also known as the Cordoban Caliphate, was an Islamic state ruled by the Umayyad dynasty from 929 to 1031. Its territory comprised Iberia and parts of North Africa, with its capital in Córdoba. It succeeded the Emirate of Córdoba upon the self-proclamation of Umayyad emir Abd ar-Rahman III as caliph in January 929. The period was characterized by an expansion of trade and culture, and saw the construction of masterpieces of al-Andalus architecture.

<i>Black Mans Burden</i> 1962 novel by Mack Reynolds

Black Man's Burden is a science fiction novel by American writer Mack Reynolds. It is the first in a sequence of near-future stories set in North Africa, which also includes Border, Breed nor Birth (1962), "Black Sheep Astray" (1973), and The Best Ye Breed (1978). Black Man's Burden and its sequels have been called a "notable exception" to the indirect treatment of racial issues in 1960s science fiction magazines.

<i>Border, Breed nor Birth</i> 1962 novel by Mack Reynolds

Border, Breed nor Birth is a science fiction novella by American writer Mack Reynolds. It is the second in a sequence of near-future stories set in North Africa, which also includes Black Man's Burden (1961-1962), "Black Sheep Astray" (1973), and The Best Ye Breed (1978). Border, Breed nor Birth and the North Africa series have been called a "notable exception" to the indirect treatment of racial issues in 1960s science fiction magazines.

Antoine-Adolphe Dupuch French priest

Antoine-Louis-Adolphe Dupuch (1800-1856) was a French Roman Catholic priest. He served as the first-ever Bishop of Algiers from 1838 to 1845 in Algiers, French Algeria. He attempted to evangelise the local Arab population and he built nearly 60 new churches in Algeria.

Emirate of Abdelkader Former emirate

The Emirate of Mascara, Emirate of Abd al-Qadir, or the Resistance of Mascara, was founded by Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi with the allegiance of the people of Algeria to resist the French conquest of Algeria with its first capital at Mascara then Tagdemt after it was taken by France.

Bishr ibn Safwan al-Kalbi was a provincial governor for the Umayyad Caliphate, serving in Egypt (720–721) and Ifriqiyah (721–727).

The Battle of Agueddin was a battle between the Emirate of Abdelkader and the Alaouite Dynasty of Morocco that took place in December 1847.

References

  1. Langford, David, Peter Nicholls, and Brian Stableford. "Race in SF." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , 3d edition (online). Ed. John Clute, David Langford, and Peter Nicholls. 2012. par. 3. Web.
  2. 1 2 Price, George W. "Mack Reynolds and Politics." eI43 8.2. (April 2009). Web. Text available at eFanzines.com.
  3. Greenblatt, Stephen. et al., ed. Editorial note for "White Man's Burden." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: The Victorian Age, 8th Edition. New York: Norton, 2006. p.1821. ISBN   0393927210 (10). ISBN   978-0393927214 (13). Print.
  4. Brantlinger, Patrick "Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' and Its Afterlives." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 50. 2 (2007).172.
  5. Reynolds, Mack. The Best Ye Breed. New York: Ace, 1978. 214-5. Print.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Smith, Curtis C. Welcome to the Revolution: the Literary Legacy of Mack Reynolds. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo, 1995. 68-70. ISBN   1557422362 (10). ISBN   978-1557422361 (13).
  7. Reynolds, Mack. The Best Ye Breed. New York: Ace, 1978. 230-1. ISBN   0441054811 (10). ISBN   978-0441054817 (13). Print.
  8. Reynolds, Mack. The Best Ye Breed. New York: Ace, 1978. 258. ISBN   0441054811 (10). ISBN   978-0441054817 (13). Print.
  9. Reynolds, Mack. The Best Ye Breed. New York: Ace, 1978. 266. ISBN   0441054811 (10). ISBN   978-0441054817 (13). Print.
  10. 1 2 3 Stableford, Brian. "The Utopian Dream Revisited: Socioeconomic Speculation in the SF of Mack Reynolds." Foundation 16 (May 1979): 37-8. Print. Reprinted in Outside the Human Aquarium: Masters of Science Fiction . Rockville, MD: Wildside LLC, 2008. ISBN   0893704571 (10). ISBN   978-0893704575 (13).
  11. Reynolds, Mack. Border, Breed nor Birth. Project Gutenberg. December 9, 2009. EBook 30639. Part VII, section 11. Web.
  12. Reynolds, Mack. The Best Ye Breed. New York: Ace, 1978. 99. ISBN   0441054811 (10). ISBN   978-0441054817 (13). Print.
  13. Reynolds, Mack. The Best Ye Breed. New York: Ace, 1978. 227. ISBN   0441054811 (10). ISBN   978-0441054817 (13). Print.
  14. Reynolds, Mack. "The Cold War...Continued." Nova 3. Ed. Harry Harrison. London: Sphere, 1975. ISBN   0722143214 (10). ISBN   978-0722143216 (13).