Stewards of the Flame

by Sylvia Engdahl

The Founders of Maclairn duology, Book One

An adult science fiction novel inapropriate for YA readers

When burned-out starship captain Jesse Sanders is seized by a dictatorial medical regime and detained on the colony planet Undine, he has no idea that he is about to be plunged into a bewildering new life that will involve ordeals and joys beyond anything he has ever imagined, as well as the love of a woman with powers that seem superhuman. Still less does he suspect that he must soon take responsibility for the lives of people he has come to care about and the preservation of their hopes for the future of humankind.

This controversial novel deals with government-imposed health care, with end-of-life issues, and with the so-called paranormal powers of the human mind. Despite being set in the distant future on another world, it appeals not just to science fiction fans but to a wide range of readers who question the dominant medical philosophy of today’s society, or who value personal freedom of choice.

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"Mind-stretching speculative fiction for the thinking person." --Rambles

"Builds just the right amount of tension, and shows the stark reality of benevolent tyranny." --Prometheus

"Seems so plausible that it sends chills up my spine." --Rebecca's Reads

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Crime is considered illness, untreated illness is crime; ambulance crews are the only police. Dead bodies stay on "life support" forever. Can anyone gain freedom?

The world in which Jesse Sanders finds himself is a bit more restrictive than our own--but it's where current trends in ours would lead if carried to their logical conclusion. One reviewer wrote, "Stewards of the Flame is a brave book, and the numbers of those holding to the sentiments it conveys are growing. While the novel portrays extreme measures taken to prolong life to reductio ad absurdum lengths, it can’t be faulted for challenging our comfort zone, when after all, that is one sure measure of worthwhile fiction." (--ScifiDimensions, February 2008)

If you are happy with the ever-increasing obsession with--and cost of--health care in our society on the part of, or for the alleged benefit of, people who are not sick, then you probably won't like this novel. Nor will you like it if you believe patients for whom treatment does more harm than good should be subjected to every medical procedure thst is technologically possible. And please be aware that it's not typical of the other Flame novels, which are set on different worlds and don't involve these issues. But if on the other hand you agree with the epigraphs below, you'll enjoy the story.

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent." --Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 1928

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." --C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, 1970

"Formerly, people rushed to embrace totalitarian states. Now they rush to embrace the therapeutic state. When they discover that the therapeutic state is about tyranny, not therapy, it will be too late.. --Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy, 2001.

Purchase the ebook edition of Stewards of the Flame for $2.99 at Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, Smashwords, or Google Play.

Purchase the paperback and/or audiobook edition at Amazon. (The print version can be ordered from other booksellers but at a higher price due to distribution costs.)

Read a book group discussion guide for this novel.

See more quotes from reviews.

Read an excerpt from the story.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes this novel unsuitable for YA readers?

In the first place, it wouldn't interest them, as the hero is middle-aged and there aren't any young characters in the story. And it contains some mild sex and profanity to which parents might object, especially since I'm known as a YA author and those familiar with my books don't expect it. Furthermore, it includes discussions of the connection between sex and telepathy that would be confusing to readers too young to know much about ordinary sex.

My main reason for not wanting it given to young teens, however, is that it strongly opposes what they are taught about health both at home and at school, and the alternative adopted by the characters in the story is not something that's possible in our era. It's not my intention to suggest that we can avoid all medical care in our own world, and I don't want adults to think I'm using my reputation as a trustworthy author to tell kids that we should. To a young reader, the difference between what we can do in our situation and speculation about the distant future wouldn't be clear. (In fact it's not clear to all adults; I have had to put a disclaimer in the book saying that it is not meant to be viewed as advice about the personal healthcare decisions of people living today.)

For more detail, please read Why My Adult Novels Aren't Suitable for Kids.

Why do you avoid calling the five Flame novels a series and refer only to a duology, "The Founders of Maclairn," and a trilogy, "The Captain of Estel"?

Because Defender of the Flame and its sequels Herald of the Flame and Envoy of the Flame are a separate story that has a different hero from the two preceding books and takes place 200 years later; it doesn't depend on having read them, nor does it deal with medical issues. Each group should be read in order (though each of the five books can stand alone), but the only disadvantage to starting with the trilogy is that the included backstory would spoil some of the suspense of the earlier books if you plan to read them all. Yet few readers want to start with a book labeled No. 3 or No. 4 in a series. Also, it's generally impossible to get reviewers to read a book that is not the first in its series. And finally, the trilogy is less unsuitable for young teens than the two earlier books.

Ordinarily authors promote the first book in a series, often making it free, in order to encourage people to read the following books. In my case this backfired, though it couldn't have been avoided because Stewards of the Flame was published first. It appeared at a time when there were fewer indie books than there are now and advertising was less expensive, so it got a lot more publicity and thousands of free copies were downloaded. But Stewards has a controversial premise, and it's slower-moving than most of my novels, and so despite its praise from reviewers relatively few of those readers liked it enough to go on to the later books. If I had written Defender of the Flame first I would have a much larger audience.

Why did you change the series name from "The Hidden Flame" to "The Founders of Maclairn"?

`The orginal series names "The Hidden Flame" and "The Rising Flame" were the only labels I could think of when i wanted to make plain that the four (now five) "Flame" novels are two separate stories that are quite different and some readers will prefer the second set. But they were not very interesting series names. Recently it occurred to me that "The Captain of Estel" would give a better idea of what the trilogy is about -- Book One is about the hero's youth before he acquired the starship Estel, Book Two is about his life as its captain, and Book Three is about the impact of his legacy on humankind after his death in old age. So I also had to think of a name for the duology Stewards of the Flame and Promise of the Flame although its two books aren't as similar to each other. "The Founders of Maclairn" doesn't give much idea of the story but at least indicates that it's set in a different era.

Did you plan all five books while writing the first one?

No, I got the ideas for them unexpectedly, one at a time. Incidentally, some people have said Stewards of the Flame has a cliff-hanger ending, which has surprised me. I had no intention of writing a sequel, and I assumed that readers would realize that it's too optimistic a book to end in tragedy--I felt that for it to state what happened later would be anticlimactic. Only after the first draft was finished did I begin to think about following it with a new story.

People's reactions to Stewards' ending seem to depend on how closely they share the feelings of the characters about preservation of bodies in stasis. Some readers think that's horrific, while others think it might be a good thing, at least if there were some theoretical possibility of eventually restoring them. To those not bothered by the idea, the story's ending seems rather flat, while others view it as suspenseful, and at least one reviewer thought it was "one of the best endings I've ever come across."

Why did you publish these books yourself?

Because publishers of adult fiction demand that it be strictly categorized by genre, and these novels don’t fit genre marketing requirements. Since they’re set in the future on other planets, they’re considered science fiction--yet like my YA novels, they appeal more to general audiences than to those with extensive science fiction background. They're not action-adventure stories and yet they're not far enough removed from today's reality in terms of the culture and concepts portrayed to be suitable for mass-market sf paperback lines. In any case I want my books to reach people who don't usually read science fiction as well as those who do.

That said, a lot of science fiction fans have liked Stewards of the Flame and they may like the other three novels even better since they deal with topics and events more typical of science fiction. The problem is simply that in order to to be accepted by a genre publisher nowadays, a book must be expected to sell to mass audiences within that genre, not just to a subset of its readers. Also, fiction sales depend heavily on "name" and my name is known only in the YA field, which from the marketing standpoint is entirely separate.

Stewards of the Flame won a 2008 bronze IPPY (Independent Publishers) medal, so why isn't it listed among the science fiction IPPY award winners for that year?

Because it won in the Visionary Fiction category. According to one website I stumbled across, "Visionary fiction is fiction in which the expansion of the human mind drives the plot." It states, "Visionary fiction is not science fiction, yet if a skeptic needs “scientific proof” of the reality of the visionary landscape, it can be connected to the new neural sciences -- neuro-biology, neuro-psychology, neuro-physics. All visionary fiction is driven by new and uncanny experiences (mystical, spiritual and paranormal) in the neural web. The new sciences have shown us over the last three decades how vast and limitless is the increasing power of the human mind. As in so many eras of human life, where our science goes our literature follows. A new genre is developing, one that parallels the new neural sciences, and helps to chart the vastly uncharted human mind."

This description excited me because I thought I'd at last found a genre into which my novel might fit; certainly it deals with some of the topics listed at the site, such as telepathy and other psi powers. However, the term didn't seem to catch on and was often confused with "New Age" type fiction with a somewhat different conception of the paranormal from mine, so I stopped using it in marketing.

The characters in the Flame novels have many of the same abilities as those in your YA books. Was this intentional?

Yes. My original idea for the adult novels was to explore how, and why, a civilization might begin to move from the present level of ours to the level of Elana's people in my YA novels Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil, who had very advanced psi powers. The two groups are set in the same SF "universe," although the new books deal with colonies of Earth. (For more detail about this, see Thoughts Aabut the Flame Novels.) It is never said in any of the books whether Elana lived at the time of our ancestors or our descendants; either assumption will fit.

How much do you personally believe of what's said in the story about paranormal capabilities?

A lot of it, though some of the capabilities the characters have are obviously exaggerated and are intended more as symbols than as predictions of what may become possible. I literally believe everything I've said about unconscious telepathy. The degree to which conscious control of it may someday be attained, I don't know. It probably will never be expressed the way it's written in words, as dialogue; that's a necessary literary device.

Be sure to read my page with factual background information about psi, which is linked above, and also my page about fire immunity. At the time I wrote the book and for many years afterward, I believed that the ability of the characters to put their hands in fire was purely metaphorical, not something that could really happen. But recently I learned that it does happen--I read a paper by an anthropologist who repeatedly observed it among religious groups in the rural South that consider it a demontration of their faith. I see no reason to doubt his testimony.

In both Stewards of the Flame and Defender of the Flame, the protagonists fall in love very quickly without enough time to get to know each other. Isn't this unreasonable?

My assumption is that because they are telepathic, they know each other's personalities very well through unspoken and sometimes unconscious communication. Telepathy is an instantaneous mode of perception; it doesn't take the time ordinarily required to gain familiary with someone. In addition, in both stories the man and woman have been without partners for some time due to circumstances, and are eager for a caring relationship.

How much of the medical technology mentioned in the story is real?

Much more than I knew when I initially wrote it. I wrote a draft of Part One in 1989, and by the time I came to write the book itself in 2005 some of the things I imagined were already in use. I had to add some more drastic than anything I had imagined, such as the toilets that automatically analyze urine, which were on the market in Japan and are now under development worldwide. There are many pages on the Web sbout the potential use of wi-fi connected toilets for tracking both individual and public health--before long the story won't seem like science fiction anymore. After finishing the book and looking for ways to publicize it, I discovered a lot of excitement on the Web about issues I hadn't realized are already "hot," notably the implanting of microchips in humans. See my factual background pages (linked above) for more information.

The major development since the book was written, however, has been the introduction of implanted monitors.The implantation of real-time heart monitors is a significant element in the story's plot--yet it's no longer credible that these would be an innovation in a small colony at a time when we have starships, as they are already in use on Earth. So far they don't have tracking capability, but that will come soon. So from a technologial standpoint, the novel is in some respects outdated.

A few of the less intrusive technologies in the story are also proving to have a basis in reality. For example, several months after it was completed and many years after the first draft of Part Two was written, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science published a paper describing research in which people have been taught to control pain perception through real-time functional MRI brain scanning. And although an fMRI scanner is now a huge machine, one expert has announced that she expects to develop a scanner "the size of a ski hat."

Do you really think our society is on the way to becoming like the one in the story?

In many respects, yes, particularly in regard to intrusive technologies and dictatorial pronouncements from the government about what people should and should not do. But there is also a countertrend developing. A few doctors are becoming seriously concerned about the damage done by overtreatment and are trying to raise consciousness about it. My background information for Stewards of the Flame was first posted in the fall of 2007. At that time, medical overtreatment was not a recognized issue; it was so rarely discussed in publications for the general public that I titled my page about it "Heresy in Medicine." Since then it has received a good deal of attention in the press and a number of recent books have appeared by physicians and investigative journalists, which are listed on my page (linked above) about overtreatment..

What do you think of the Affordable Care Act?

It increases government intrusion into health care decisions, so if you've read Stewards of the Flame you don't need to ask! I will say in general, though, that society can never provide medical care to everyone who really needs it as long as so much money is being spent on unecessary--and often even harmful--tests and/or treatment for those who do not. This is something nobody on either side of the argument about health care reform has considered..

Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your view of government involvement in health care?

Personally, I think it has made the story is more timely than ever. The worldwide response to COVID-19 has shown the scope of government control that the public will accept in the name of health. Who would have thought that people would tolerate being told they could not leave their homes, go to church, meet friends, hold private weddings or funerals, or even gather with their extended families under their own roofs without being raided by the police? Certainly COVID-19 did make it necessary for the government to restrict large public gatherings, but in my opinion the extent to which private actions were forbidden in some areas was less justifiable. In any case, the lack of widespread protest demonstrates that when curtailment of freedom is related to health, there's no limit to what people will stand for. The dictatorship ruled by medical authority in the story, which is supported by the colony's voters, goes only one step further; and I'm afraid it's less of an exaggeration than it may have seemed when the book was first published.

Will there ever be less expensive paperback editions of these books?

Unfortunately, no. They are print-on-demand books, which are costly to produce, and are priced as low as they can be without giving me less royalty per copy than the ebook editions. The ebooks are priced at only $2.99. If you don't want the Kindle or epub editions you can get pdf editions at Google Play that are formatted as exact images of the printed pages.