Book Review: Stewards of the Flame by Sylvia Engdahl

Stewards of the Flame
By Sylvia Engdahl

Sylvia Engdahl’s book, Stewards of The Flame has set about a difficult task – to write a science fiction story, making it entertaining while simultaneously delivering a message about today’s world, without preaching or being ‘in-your-face’ about the ideas.

Good sci-fi takes something we know and shows what the logical or sometimes ridiculous eventuality might be if we extend the behaviour, philosophy or technology too far. Engdahl tells a story of a man, trapped involuntarily by circumstance on a planet that practices Medicine in ways that, while she presents the local planetary practices as a repugnant controlling set of laws, is not too far removed from some rather scary situations happening right now, right here.

Big Pharma and most of Medicine are heavily prejudiced towards palliative care – there are instances where apparent cures are banned, not from lack of success or for want of trials, but because they offer cures, rather than symptom relief.

In Stewards, the central character, Jesse Sanders, erstwhile Starship Captain, finds a society with the ultimate in lines of palliative care.

Plunging straight into the storyline, Engdahl takes us into the nastier side of this society, making it easy to forget as we learn to hate it, that we live in a society that could very easily be the one about which we read.

Along the way, as we follow Jesse’s adventures into more esoteric fields, we are treated to some interesting ideas about Mind and, although I’m not sure Engdahl means it, Spirit.

It is something I have noticed a lot around our society – there is almost a sense of puzzlement and certainly a good deal of ignorance about the body, brain, mind and spirit combination. I seem to see some of that here where, to me, Mind and Spirit are being interchanged. Perhaps Engdahl has further stories in mind to explore these boundaries, but already in this one she is distinguishing nicely between Brain and Mind – something many in the psychology and psychiatric fields seem unable to do.

Engdahl writes well, if perhaps she is a little ‘soft’ in style for my tastes. While it is fully understandable, given who her main characters are, that they would seem a touch naive, I think the story needs a baddie, a villain to give some vibrancy and colour, in the forefront of the tale. The conflict in most of the book is sort of second hand, being talked about rather than up front and personal to the reader.

One area of disappointment for me was something that is prevalent in many writers these days, even some very successful ones – I am unsure if it is a result of TV or whether our Education system has failed us so completely that writers have to dumb things down or lose their readers.

There is a central mystery about the reasons why the underground group want Jesse – and it is telegraphed probably 200 pages before the characters find out. And it isn’t a particularly hidden reference; it comes up over and again and, to me, provided a moment of disappointment when it came to pass just as I had seen early in the book.

I like my mysteries to be a little more difficult to work out.

Stewards of the Flame is a good book to read, containing a decent story, a message for our times, and some interesting thoughts on the future of Humans and the Mind. Utilising even current biofeedback, some of the things Engdahl uses as story structure could be achievable even now. And it is easy to see how the book could be the start of a series that either follows on from this one or perhaps goes off exploring some of the aspects left untouched here.

I’d recommend it as a read, and it is suitable for both younger readers and adults. Some may even find it kick starts their journey into their own minds and it should also get some people thinking about how they should be using Medicine.