Missionaries With Sidearms
John Boyd's *The Rakehells of Heaven* is a novel about two men sent to scout an alien planet who immediately begin doing what humans have always done on foreign soil: teaching the locals to play basketball, staging Shakespeare, and establishing a criminal justice system nobody asked for. That it frames this as a buddy comedy — the pious one and the rakish one, the straight man and the con artist — does not diminish the accuracy of the colonial portrait. It sharpens it. Boyd published this in 1971, the same year the Stanford Prison Experiment ran and three years before the Church Committee began pulling back curtains on American intelligence operations abroad. The novel reads less like science fiction than like a missionary memoir written by someone who suspects the mission was a mistake but can't quite bring himself to say so.
What Boyd got right, with uncomfortable precision, is the way cultural export disguises itself as education. Jack Adams doesn't think he's colonizing Harlech. He thinks he's introducing beauty, law, sin, and basketball — gifts, not impositions. The Harlechians are genetically engineered exiles from a more advanced civilization, post-religious and sexually permissive, and Adams's response is to build a church and a police force. The novel anticipates, decades early, the debates around cultural imperialism in development aid, the weaponization of "capacity building," and the particular arrogance of assuming that a society without your specific moral architecture is a society in need of repair. The trial of Nesser — where organ transplantation dissolves the legal definition of murder — is a genuinely clever thought experiment that prefigures real bioethics dilemmas around organ markets, bodily integrity, and the juridical status of distributed biological identity. Boyd saw that law would struggle to keep up with medicine. He was right.
What he couldn't see, or chose not to, is equally telling. The novel's gender politics are firmly 1971: Cara exists to be beautiful, jealous, and pregnant, and the alien women function primarily as temptations or rewards. The "permissive society" of Harlech is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a legitimate alternative, and the novel never seriously entertains the possibility that Adams and O'Hara might be the pathogens in this ecosystem. The psychiatric framing device — a military psychiatrist debriefing Adams — gestures toward institutional critique but never arrives there. The Navy sent two unsupervised men to a planet and gave them authority to reshape its culture; the novel treats this as a setup for personal drama rather than systemic failure. Boyd's blind spot is the blind spot of his era: the assumption that individual character, not structural design, determines outcomes. We have since learned otherwise, repeatedly, and refused to remember.
The book sits in a lineage that runs from *A Case of Conscience* through *The Left Hand of Darkness* and forward to *The Sparrow* — novels where contact with alien civilizations forces a reckoning with human theology and ethics. Boyd is lighter on his feet than Blish, less rigorous than Le Guin, and less devastating than Mary Doria Russell, but he occupies a useful middle position: the contact novel as dark comedy, where the tragedy is that the protagonists never fully grasp what they've done. The time-travel coda, with its suggestion that O'Hara has somehow looped back and escaped consequences entirely, feels less like a science fiction resolution than like an allegory for institutional impunity. The rakehell gets away. The believer gets debriefed. The planet gets whatever's left.
Fifty-five years later, with the language of "hearts and minds" campaigns still echoing from Kabul to Silicon Valley's ethics boards, the question the novel now raises is not the one Boyd intended: Given that Adams and O'Hara introduced religion, law enforcement, jealousy, capital punishment, and theatrical violence to a functioning society in under a year, and that the novel frames this as a story about *their* suffering — at what point does a first-contact narrative become a confession?