Tuf Voyaging - Character Development

Character Development

In the beginning of the novel Tuf is an unassuming and rather inept interstellar trader, of humble and somewhat bland (on the surface) nature, an aversion to human contact, and a love of cats. As the story progresses, Tuf's character is revealed to be that of Piper's self-reliant man, as the power of the Ark allows him to solve the apparently intractable problems of several worlds. Tolly Mune, in explaining why she was helping him escape with the Ark in the first of the S'uthlam stories, says that "Power corrupts..., and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (an uncredited quotation of the ancient dictum by Lord Acton). Mune further says that she doesn't think that there is such a thing as an incorruptible man, but if there is, Tuf is it. She also says that she wouldn't trust the leaders of her world with the potentially terrible biowarfare capabilities of Ark.

Eventually this becomes a grim prediction. Finding that most of his clients' problems arise not primarily from true ecological catastrophes but rather as the result of their cupidity, stupidity, bureaucracy, religious fanaticism, and obstinate bloody-mindedness, he resolves their situations by addressing their failings, beginning (1976) with rendering it impossible for the Great Houses of Lyronica to continue the gladitorial animal contests of the Bronze Arena ("A Beast for Norn").

On Namor, he finds a solution - seeking out contact with the previously unsuspected native sapient race - that had escaped the "fighting guild" of unthinkingly truculent Guardians to end the attacks being inflicted upon the human colonists by the planet's mudpot hivemind. On Charity, he copes with both the incompetence of the arcology's administrators ("ou are by training a bureaucrat," says Tuf to Jaime Kreen, "and thus good for virtually nothing") and the religious tyranny of Moses' Holy Altruistic Restoration.

Finally, in "Manna from Heaven" (1985), he provides the S'uthlamese and their enemies with a solution that simultaneously averts both famine and war but covertly imposes birth control upon the "religious crazies" of S'uthlam's Church of Life Evolving (characterized as "Anti-entropists, kiddie-culters, helix-humpers, genepool puddlers"), forcing Tolly Mune to accept Tuf's induced population implosion as the only alternative to social breakdown and genocide.