"Gunner Cade" by Cyril Judd aka Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merrill

Gunner Cade is a short, swiftly-paced SF novel that includes some incisive social commentary.
The titular Cade lives in a far future Earth with an interplanetary society locked in stasis by the interplay between the emperor, nobles who rule different regions such as France and Mars (called Stars), the general (called the Gunner Supreme), and the spymaster (called the Power Master (has CF read this?)). The Gunners are warrior-priests who live an austere, celibate life of ritual centered on their one gun and fatalistic devotion to battle.

Gunner Cade is a classic one-person-against-the-world SF novel, similar to AE Van Vogt’s hyper-kinetic power fantasies such as Slan or The World of Null-A and Philip K Dick’s paranoid visions such as Flow my Tears the Policeman Said. As is standard with these books, the protagonist, usually a man of inhuman skill and intelligence (although interestingly in this case Gunner Cade has trouble with social cues due to his isolated life in the militaristic convent), is cast out of society and discovers a vast conspiracy that reveals that everything they thought was true is a lie.

Spoiler:

[In Gunner Cade, the lies are that the Emperor, Stars, Gunner Supreme, and Power Master all work together in harmony to protect and nurture the commoners and gunners and that the world was created from nothing ten thousand years ago with this whole system already intact. In reality, a system of checks and balance keeps any one person from taking over by occupying everyone with superfluous warfare. We also discover that this world has rejected science because science caused a nuclear apocalypse. But this ignorance will lead to ruin again as the Earth and Mars are mined of all their natural resources such as uranium and iron. There are also some funny passages in the beginning that reveal that the guiding philosophy (it’s called Klin philosophy but I don’t get the reference, does anyone know it?) is based on a misinterpretation of common words such as “fiddling,” “crooks,” and “governors” that causes the people of the future to think that their sacred texts mean the opposite of their author’s intention.

The female characters in this book are more interesting and well-rounded than in most SF of this type and time, which makes sense when one of the writers is a woman. From Gunner Cade’s naive perspective as a celibate who’s had no contact with women since childhood, women are mysterious, alluring perils that will destroy his vows. But this isn’t the perspective of the text. There are several women in different social roles who send the plot on different trajectories and, both intentionally and inadvertently, reveal to Cade truths about society and history. By the end of the novel he sees women as people, or at least the one woman with whom he falls in love, a woman who makes it clear to Cade that she follows her own agenda. 

Gunner Cade is a slim 160 pages. It’s a fun, fast read if you can find a copy.  (William Cardini, GoodReads)