EDITORIAL PREFACE

Hope Hubris was just fifty years old as he became the government of the United States of North Jupiter, by the grace of the Constitutional Convention to Balance the Budget. He had reached this pinnacle by surviving the terrors of travel in space that decimated his family, rising through the ranks of the Jupiter Navy to become a planetary hero, and through the political levels to become the first Hispanic to win the presidency, only to be denied it on a technicality. But his sister, Spirit Hubris, had been active behind the scenes, and so the victory was restored to him in a fashion never before accomplished on Jupiter.

He was called the Tyrant, but his ascension was legitimate, and he was highly popular at the outset. He was to become unpopular and then feared and hated by some, but it is today generally conceded that he did what was necessary to restore Jupiter to equilibrium financially and in other respects. Such restoration was bound to be painful initially, which was why the democracy that preceded the Tyrancy had been unable to accomplish it. Only the absolute authority of a dictator could have unraveled the complex morass of conventions and special interests that existed. But he did balance the budget—eventually.

Other texts have examined the myriad technical and social changes wrought by the Tyrant and analyzed them for their net effect on Jupiter. This personal diary by Hubris himself covers the other side of it: the private experience of the man who made it all possible. The business of running the Tyrancy, which was actually quite detailed and complicated, he mostly skims over, mentioning that Spirit handled it. She did—and there is surely a major untold story there. Spirit was competent and disciplined in ways that Hope was not, and she evidently lacked the private social and sexual passions he possessed. Thus he could afford to dally with incidentals and even suffer a siege of madness while the Tyrancy endured.

However, a good deal of substance is also revealed here. We learn that the so-called "Siege of Saturn" was neither impulse nor madness, nor was the disarmament that followed it. Critics have suggested that the Tyrant was appallingly lucky; now we know that he acted with reckless genius at the outset to accomplish his purposes. This is not to say that he never suffered madness, merely that it was not of the precise nature we supposed. He had after all been memory-washed; perhaps that had a long-term effect on his sanity. Certainly the way he passes off the conquest of the other nations of Jupiter as if it were a minor incident is suspect; it was, in fact, a savage and dangerous exercise of military and economic power.

But if Hope Hubris was less than the popular image made of him, he was at least honest and dedicated and gifted in special ways, and perhaps he was the only person who could have accomplished what he did. Spirit and the others had competence; Hope had magic. There was no other person who could motivate an audience the way he could, or inspire the absolute and enduring loyalty he did. When he addressed an audience, that audience swayed to his power. He could make almost any man join him, and, as is apparent here, almost any woman love him.

Herewith his version of the story, written in the months after he was deposed. This volume was written in English, needing no translation; it has been edited only for chapterization, though it must be confessed that there are portions that this particular editor would have preferred to delete.

HMH