Ultima Thule

Fun but short SF classic. Offers some interesting ideas.

Mack Reynolds is one of the better SF magazine writers who went on to write books. He is little remembered today but his books are pretty good. I will find and read more of his books.

This is not his best book. I recommend "Status Quo" or "Planet of the Damned".

Mankind was exploding through this spiral arm of the galaxy. There was a racial enthusiasm about it all. Man's destiny lay out in the stars, only a laggard stayed home of his own accord. It was the ambition of every youth to join the snowballing avalanche of man into the neighboring stars.
It took absolute severity by Earth authorities to prevent the depopulation of the planet. But someone had to stay to administer the ever more complicated racial destiny. Earth became a clearing house for a thousand cultures, attempting, with only moderate success, to co-ordinate her widely spreading children. She couldn't afford to let her best seed depart. Few there were, any more, allowed to emigrate from Earth. New colonies drew their immigrants from older ones.
Lucky was the Earthling able to find service in interplanetary affairs, in any of the thousands of tasks that involved journey between member planets of UP. Possibly one hundredth of the population at one time or another, and for varying lengths of time, managed it.
Ronny Bronston was lucky and knew it. The thing now was to pull off this assignment and cinch the appointment for good.

When Ronny Bronston manages to land a job at Section G of the Bureau of Investigation he is told that it is a cloak and dagger department, whose role is to upholding articles one and two of the United Planets Charter, which forbid United Planets and its member planets from interfering in each others' political, socioeconomic and religious institutions.

His first off-planet assignment s a probationary agent is to track down 'Tommy Paine', a legendary revolutionary who has been active throughout the United Planets for the past couple of decades., although Branch G don't know if he is one man, or a group, or even if he exists at all. After several months of training by experienced agents, Tommy Paine surfaces again, rumoured to be involved in the assassination of an immortal god-king on the planet of New Delos and Ronny is sent off with a super-competent female agent called Tog as his assistant. The planets they visit are not much known by the outside world, since the less planets know about each others' internal political, socioeconomic and religious institutions, they less likely they are to break the rules by interfering.

Project Gutenberg created this illustrated e-book from an illustrated version of this novella that was published in Analog Science Fact and Fiction Magazine in March 1961. The story is basically a mystery, as Ronny tries to work out the identity of Tommy Paine as he follows his tracks from planet to planet, and although I had worked out his identity before Ronny did, the final revelation back on earth came as a surprise. I am glad that I read the illustrated version, as the illustrations really brought home the period feel of the story.

This is a great science fiction story. I highly recommend it. It's rather short (about 30k words), so it's a quick read (about 2 hours of listening if you get the free LibriVox recording that I did—see the book link above).Anyway, there are a lot of ideas seen in this story that future authors (such as Orson Scott Card, in /Speaker for the Dead/) revisit. It reminds me of a mix between the said Card book and /The Scarlet Pimpernel/, with the perspective all switched around. It's kind of a mystery story, though, but a good one, I think. There's enough plot for a novel, and so the story seems fulfilling, unlike some stories of this length might be.