The Peregrine

"She said to me 'O Nomad, see I cannot follow you. The star ways were so cold and dree where all the wild winds blew. The wind between the stars, my love the restless wander call, blew low blew high, into the sky, the withered leaves of fall, and we were blown and all alone we flew from sunlit day. Into the waste where stars are sown and planets have their way. ' "

- Nomad ballad from The Peregrine

This is a short Space Opera book by Poul Anderson written as part of the Psychotechnic History (distinct from the perhaps better known Technic History) series. Humans are expanding from Earth and forming loosely connected colonies in the unknown. At the far frontiers, the Nomads, an itinerant race of human traders are meeting at the planet Rendezvous for the Captains council between the captains of each clan/ship. Joachim, captain of the Peregrine, has news. A mysterious and potentially dangerous race has left signs that need to be discovered. He proposed to take his ship for the job. Meanwhile Trevelan, an agent of the Coordination Office or "cordies" from Earth is off to the frontier on the same mission.

Sean, a lonely Nomad whose wife has left him falls in love with a mysterious native named Ilaloa. It is agreed to allow him to take her along.

When the Peregrine docks at a space port, Trevelan ostentatiously pretends to snoop around in the hopes of deliberately causing suspicion until Joachim orders him abducted as a precaution. By this roundabout means he gets aboard the Peregrine and gains time to convince Joachim to ally with him. They follow up leads until they get to the planet of the Alori, a race devoted to their love of nature and fearful of technological society to the point of xenophobia. They are held captive with the hope that they will assimilate. Instead the Nomads revolt, recapture their ship and head home. In the meantime Trevelan has fallen in love with and married a Nomad woman and decides to resign from his job and stay with the Nomads.

First published as Star Ways in 1956, and later republished as The Peregrine. An online edition is available from Amazon as Star Ways. Unfortunately the conversion into E-format was badly done but it is worth the read even so. The book version is also available from Amazon as The Peregrine.


 * Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction: Very much social. The science is not particularly hard and there is little action per se, but it focuses on the characteristics of cultures and relations between individuals and peoples.
 * Bittersweet Ending: The Nomads escape to warn their people but because of this the Alori will almost certainly have their way of life destroyed by contact with humans.
 * Ilaloa, torn between her love for her people and her love for Sean ends up committing suicide.
 * Bothering by the Book: It is against Nomad law to marry a native. So Joachim decrees that Ilaloa will ship as a "pet".
 * The Chick: Ilaloa.
 * The Clan: The Nomads are a tribe of wandering ships that meets regularly. Each ship is a single clan and always marries outside.
 * Closer to Earth: The Alori are this in spades.
 * Cool Starship: The Peregrine. Inside there are splendid decorations and artwork and facilities for a small town, which of course it is. The Nomads make their own craftwork both for sale and to decorate their ships and the council hall.
 * Conflicting Loyalty: Ilaloa is an Alori spy but finds she really cares for her human lover.
 * Culture Clash: Between humans and alori. There is a lesser culture clash between Nomads and Cordies.
 * Fantastic Racism: The Alori. The humans in many ways admire them but the Alori cannot accept the legitimacy of technological culture. The idea that humans love starships and cities and independance enough to fight for it when they could have flowers and trees is incomprehensible to them.
 * Generican Empire: The Nomads have no other name but Nomads.
 * Going Native: Trevelan joins the Nomads because he is attracted to their culture and because his wife is there. He also muses that more Cordies will intermarry with Nomads and that might not be such a bad thing as they could help each other.
 * Grey And Gray Morality: Both parties retain some sympathy and while the Alori are the aggressors they are also trying to protect themselves from relentlessly expansionist humans.
 * The Heart: Ilaloa is a subversion. While her affection is attractive and her love of nature infectious, a heart must teach or encourage his or her comrades and in the end she has only so much to teach humans who cannot live as she does, and she cannot really understand why humans love their own creations as well as loving nature.
 * Hidden Elf Village: The Alori are motivated by desire to preserve their world as this.
 * Interspecies Romance: Between Sean (one of the Nomads) and Ilaloa.
 * Lotus Eater Machine: The Alori have a whole planet to use as one.
 * Magical Database: Inverted. The reason it took the Cordies so long to react to the rumors of an alien race is that their computers could not digest all the reports coming in.
 * Meaningful Name: Nomad ships tend to have names that have something to do with traveling, like Bedouin, Traveler, Wayfarer, and Roma. Peregrine would at first seem to be a curious exception -- however, the original and now archaic meaning of "peregrine" is "roving or wandering" (which can still be seen in fossil form in the word "peregrination").
 * The original Traveler was the founding ship of the Nomads and after that, the council President was always Captain of a successive (Traveler II, Traveler III, etc.) Traveler.
 * The Mole: is really an Alori spy.
 * Mighty Whitey: Trevelan is a subversion. He is competent and helpful, and has useful perspectives but he is not obviously superior to the Nomads and Joachim is equally competent.
 * Noble Savage: Both the Nomads and the Alori are subversions of this being neither savage nor completely noble despite first glance. The Alori are closer to earth and never tire of reminding humans of it. They can also be treacherous and brutal. They are charming but not exactly noble. And they are not exactly savages in the sense of being primitive; rather they emphasized a different path to development. The Nomads have a romantic footloose existence but they are masters of technology and each ship has enough perks for a small town including books, music, and artwork. They are not always noble either; we find later that a pair of Nomad ships had tired of nomadism and used their possession of technology to become planetary conquerors and the descendants of this split off had given up wandering and now rule as a tyrannical oligarchy over an alien race.
 * Order Versus Chaos: The Cordies who enforce order find Nomads rather irritating. But they can get along and cooperate.
 * Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Trevelan represents extreme enlightenment. The Alori represent extreme romanticism. The Nomads are romantic in a different way but they also have enlightened characteristics.
 * The Alori represent Edenic nature, Trevelan represents reason, the Nomads honor and both Trevelan and the Nomads represent discipline.
 * Scenery Porn: There is a plenitude of beautiful descriptions along the way. Examples include the interior of the Peregrine, the Nomad's meeting hall at Rendezvous and others. In general Anderson always likes laying that sort of thing on thick.
 * Space Elves: The Alori. They are closest to Fair Folk in style but they are not inexplicable and their motivations are understandable to humans. They also resemble Naavi. You can say they are between type 2 and type 3 space elves.
 * Space Cold War: Except the humans don't know that a war is on yet or that the enemy exists.
 * Space Cossacks: The Nomads
 * Space People: The Nomads don't just go to space but their ships are their homes and they only go on planetside for business or leave.
 * Space Police: the Coordination office, or "cordies".
 * The Spock: Trevelayn
 * We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: Large numbers of the frontierfolk, including the Nomads work manually simply because one of the main reasons they had left Earth was that robots had crowded out all the jobs.
 * Worldbuilding: A surprising amount for two hundred pages.
 * You Will Be Assimilated: The Alori expect the Nomads to start adopting Alori ways after living on a garden world made for their captivity. The hope is that their descendants will serve them.