I don’t know why Robert Heinlein built his novel Citizen of the Galaxy around slavery. As far as I know, he never commented publicly on it. On the surface it would have seemed a problem that no longer existed. Hadn’t we ended slavery with the Civil War? He may have looked deeper at practices that weren’t part of an institution anymore, but were still part of that oppressive pattern. But we have no evidence that he did. The novel doesn’t portray that.
What it DOES portray is people looking the other way if not actively abetting slavers. In a future of interstellar travel with many worlds colonized by Earth there are too many without functioning legal systems, and also numerous that are attracted to slavery for the reason people always have been: it’s profitable.
The novel begins with a slave auction just after a slave ship has landed. One boy (about six years old) is very small, malnourished, dirty, and rebellious. Not what slave owners look for. He is bought, though, for a ridiculously small price by a beggar. The beggar takes him home, and we get hints that this is no ordinary beggar.
He lives under a ruined coliseum, where lot of others also live. But where he stays is different: it has a door that locks, electric lights, and furniture. And the man, who is missing a leg and an eye, has a prosthetic leg and artificial eye. We don’t learn much more about this aspect of his life at first. The focus is on his relationship with the boy.
As might be expected, the boy is troubled, as most would be after having been a slave and having been punished like one. There’s more to it than that, but we don’t learn about that for awhile.
Another aspect of the man’s difference from other beggars is then exhibited. Somewhere in the past he’s learned hypnotism. He hypnotizes the boy to find out the roots of his trauma, and gives him suggestions to help him heal emotionally as well as physically. Of course his physical healing is easier, but the hypnotism takes, and he grows up for about 10 years.
Then the authorities come for the beggar. The boy hasn’t really thought about what his stepfather does, though he assists him somewhat, delivering messages, etc. So it’s not a total surprise, but certainly a shock when the boy finds their home broken into and trashed. Then he finds out that HE’S wanted by the police, and has to go on the run.
Fortunately, his stepfather has foreseen this, and has arranged for him to be picked up by several Free Traders, and one just happens to be in port. It takes some hocus-pocus, but the captain of the Free Trader ship manages to get him into the ship, which takes off, leaving his major troubles behind.
The Free Traders, as portrayed in the novel, are a fascinating subculture. The ship Thorby lands on is a family enterprise that travels from one world to another, trading. The easiest way for them to fulfill the first part of what the old beggar has asked of them is to adopt Thorby, and after some adjustments he finds himself happy in his environment.
But the old beggar has asked more of his new family: to deliver him to the Hegemonic Guard (the Hegemony is the government centered on Earth which includes a number of other worlds. When he arrives to the Guard he becomes a recruit, which makes him feel like he’s part of something again. A sort of family.
We now discover that Thorby’s adoptive father (however informally) was part of the Guard, and that the reason he can ask favors of Free Traders is that he had rescued traders from a ship captured by slavers, during which he had lost an eye and a leg. Rather than sit at a desk for the rest of his career, he decides to become a spy, and sends messages to his superiors through Free Traders.
He has landed on the world where he and Thorby meet because slavery is legal there, which makes it a big center of the trade. He picks the city where the spaceport is so he can work out which ships are bringing slaves. In an interstellar culture slavers need ships to transport slaves. They not only need a place to buy them, but places to get equipment and supplies.
Thorby’s stepfather has prepared him by giving him coded messages to memorize under hypnosis. He tells his superior in his new “family” this, and they begin debriefing him. While he doesn’t know the information the beggar discovered, he does know various ships, and can tell the Guard what they brought. It appears that there are people in the Hegemony actively helping the slavers.
Then comes the big plot twist: Thorby turns out to be the heir to a vast fortune on earth.
He has already endured several abrupt changes in fortune. At first, becoming rich doesn’t seem so bad, but that doesn’t last. First, he’s invited to party and vacation all the time, which is fun at first, but gets boring. And he’s used to working, so he wants to find out what his new responsibilities are and begin picking them up. But the CEO who has been running the financial empire Thorby will be inheriting asks him to sign a document telling him to continue doing the same job he’s been doing. Thorby demurs. He doesn’t want to sign anything until he understands what it means, his trader experience coming out. The CEO gives him some time, but when he still doesn’t feel he understands sufficiently, becomes impatient with him, and snows him under with obscure paperwork almost impossible to understand.
But Thorby has an ally in the CEO’s daughter (who tells him her father is hoping he’ll marry her). She points him to a high-powered lawyer who helps him get free of the CEO, and to take over his company. But that just brings new problems. His empire is vast, and it’s nearly impossible to oversee much of it at all. Thorby is particularly concerned about one corner of it that produces spaceships. It’s left as an open question whether slavers coincidentally attacked the ship his father and mother were in, but somebody observes that it wouldn’t be the first time that underlings became upset at bosses paying too much attention to something they want to hide.
And he thinks his spaceship company may be producing ships for slavers. He visits the headquarters of the Patrol and shows the person interviewing him that much of the business of slavery is conducted in one sector of the galaxy. He wants to work at eradicating slavery, but can’t do so until he can get his vast inheritance under some kind of control.
At the end of the novel he’s apologizing to the CEO’s daughter that he can’t come to a dinner party. He’s much too busy. He tells the lawyer about his problem, and the lawyer tells him he’s trying to do too much at once, and will only burn out that way. He has to take time for himself, the lawyer tells him, and says he needs to go out, instead of eating at his desk, and look at pretty girls.
Thorby decides he’s right, and then feels that his stepfather approves of the task he’s taken on, and how he’s approaching it.
I don’t know if Heinlein wrote this novel because he was aware that though slavery seems superficially to be over since the American Civil War, it continues beneath the radar. The legal institution is no more, but the state of mind that approves of slavery remains. The subject seems to move him, so I think that may be a good assumption.
Slavery is still common in the Middle East, where “agents” arrange for young people from Africa or the Philippines to come and work for families who often abuse them, withholding salary or physically punishing them, according to a PBS documentary. One woman from Kenya who decided to work in order to help support her family is sent back to Kenya burnt so badly that she doesn’t survive long. A woman lawyer in the country is trying to get the country to demand restrictions on how Middle Eastern families treat the young people they “hire”, but the Kenyan government benefits from the workers, so that doesn’t seem likely.
In India there are laws against slavery, but the police aren’t necessarily very interested in enforcing them. Many of the slaves come from Bengal, in the far east of the country, and when young people from rural areas are taken to large cities like Delhi or Mumbai in the far west of the country it’s not easy to track them down, assuming anyone is trying very hard.
North Korea has a different sort of slavery. One could probably count all of the lower classes as slaves, more or less, but there are quite a number of people who work in other countries “patriotically” bringing the country hard currency. Some work in Russia in areas not far from the Korean peninsula. Others in China, and some even in such distant countries as Poland. The usual reason applies: they work more cheaply than native workers. One such worker tells us the only way they can stand what they do is to drink on their infrequent days off.
Not that the USA can afford to feel very superior. Once the institution of slavery was over and the Southern states made it perfectly clear that they weren’t going to treat the former slaves humanely, Jim Crow ensued. Besides Jim Crow there were enterprises like the mining and the clothing industries that tied workers to their jobs by paying them in scrip only redeemable at company stores. Workers in other parts of the country had little job security, were paid very little, and worked long hours in unsafe conditions. And such conditions aren’t a thing of the past, either. Fast food restaurants make workers sign promises not to apply to any other similar restaurants. The free market in that case is only free for the owners of the businesses.
Slavery is a very old bad habit for the human race. Heinlein’s point is the same many of today’s progressives make: we can’t expect to immediately eradicate the practice and its near relatives, but we have to keep opposing the forces that over and over find the temptation too much to resist.
allenstarbuck 