My reactions to reading this novel in 1994. Spoilers follow.

I’d read the first installment of this fixup in its magazine appearance, and it was ok. I mainly liked it as a story of violating the rule of noninterference – that silly rule much revered in Star Trek and created by Turtledove’s literary idol L. Sprague de Camp.

The second part of the novel was interesting as a suspense story and a somewhat insightful look (and satire about) the bureaucracy of the Survey Service. As Turtledove points out, bureaucrats are expected to lie to cover up mistakes, to lie to the very end (with skillful lies that concede what they must and are built around careful omissions. Yet he does have sympathy for the poor bureaucrat who tries to be of help but doesn’t want to jeopardize their job or the high level bureaucrat who must deal with hostile legislators.

Paulina Koch, head of the Survey Service, is such a high level bureaucrat but also the villain of the piece. She’s a clever villain and of a strange mind. She orders an escalating set of murders but doesn’t want to think too much about what she’s doing or even know any details (all the better for plausible denialability). (There is a Watergate analogy here since she starts out with a break-in to trash Professor Fogelman’s records of the Bilbeis IV survey and an allusion is made to the “eighteen missing days” gap in Survey Service records regarding the ship returning from Bilbeis IV.) The details of these crimes (intimidation and forgery and murder) are left to her subordinate Roupen Hovannis who also tries to blackmail Koch. Unfortunately Turtledove doesn’t give us much detail about the unnamed “discrete individual” who does much of the actual legwork on these crimes though he feels sympathy towards Magda Kodaly (a Survey Service employee on the expedition – all but her murdered – that detects the 1,500 year old debacle of Queen Sabium’s immortality) and cultural anthropology student Stavros Monemvasios (who stumbles on the one copy of the unsuppressed Bilbeis IV report) and wishes they would just let themselves be scared into silence rather than him having to kill them. He’s killed by an unnamed henchman of Koch.

At novel’s end, she’s exposed but, in a perfectly believable scene, just says mistakes were made and she acted with the interests of the Survey Service (which she may mean altruistically or in the sense of the Service as a fiefdom of hers). An entertaining conspiracy thriller that manages to blend a satire of bureaucracy with a fairly accurate depiction of the psychology of one type (the career type – at one point Koch thinks it would have been better not to suppress the report but by then too many murders have been committed) of bureaucrat. However, the plot isn’t very realistic. Frankly, I don’t see most bureaucrats as organized enough to have personal assassins at their beck and call though I will say Turtledove wisely shows Koch pursuing her objectives outside the Survey Service structure and members of their organization wittingly and unwittingly working against her. ( )

Apparently this book is out of print, which is too bad.

At first glance, it’s a science-fictional first-contact novel. Anthropologists working for the Survey Service are checking out a developing culture on a distant planet. As with Star Trek’s Prime Directive, they are bound to noninterference with developing cultures, so they can look, but not touch, and definitely not help in any way.

But a particularly progressive ruler is dying, and one anthropologist convinces his colleagues that simply curing her cancer couldn’t possibly make enough of a difference to affect the culture. They do it, and the anthropologist is dismissed and becomes the primary teaching example of why interfering is bad.

Only they have no idea just how bad, and when a new team, sent hundreds of years later, does find out, the book shifts its focus from the field investigators to the bureaucrats who run their agency. Job One in a bureaucracy is to make sure you stick around, and if that means you have to get rid of some inconvenient facts (and people), well, so be it…. ( )