"Snows of Ganymede" by Poul Anderson

The Snows of Ganymede is a quite obscure Anderson "novel". As far as I know its only two 
appearances are in this Ace Double and in the Startling Stories issue where it first appeared. [This was true when I first wrote this review -- since then it has been reprinted in ebook form by Gateway/Orion, and in the NESFA collection A Bicycle Built For Brew, and just now in the Baen collection The Complete Psychotechnic League Volume 2.) One might suppose that Anderson repudiated some of the politics behind the Psychotechnic League stories, but the rest of them were reprinted in the rush of late 70s and early 80s Anderson reissues, for Ace and Tor. These include the novels The Peregrine (aka Star Ways) and Virgin Planet, and the stories in the collections Cold Victory, Starship, and The Psychotechnic League. Perhaps Anderson was simply not very pleased with the quality of the story, though I must say I found it adequate, if hardly very good.

The story opens with three men, including Hall Davenant, trudging across the surface of Ganymede, trying to find refuge before their oxygen runs out. We then flash back to the beginning of their project -- Hall Davenant is an Engineer of the Order of Planetary Engineers, engaged in a project to terraform Ganymede. The Order is an apolitical organization, hiring its services to whatever entity will pay them. It is also oddly monkish in its setup -- people are chosen as members young, and seem wholly educated and housed within the Order until several years into their career. The terraforming project is controversial, because Ganymede is independent of the inner Solar System, and it is controlled by a renegade group of racists from the former White American Party. Ganymedan society is stratified along quasi-genetic lines. But Hall and his fellows are informed that the Order must take this job, partly for the needed experience, and partly to demonstrate that they are above politics.

Once on Ganymede, the Engineer team soon learns that strange things are going on. Their rooms are bugged, the thuggish rulers seem uncertain that they want to allow the project to continue, and then there is the spooky religious service that Hall witnesses, culminating in the assassination of one leader. Furthermore, there is something strange about the Angels, priests who share power with the rulers (called "Cincs"). Before long the Engineers are arrested on trumped up charges, leading to a desperate escape and the three men walking across Ganymede's snows.

The ending involves discovering a renegade group on the Jovian moon, and a jury-rigged spaceship taking over mysterious abandoned orbiting ship. And Hall must decide whether he can truly remain above politics. Naturally, there is a final revelation about the true purpose of the Order of Planetary Engineers.

It's not a bad story qua story, though it's not particularly great either. The science seems a bit shaky in spots, but not bad for the 50s. Certainly there is some silliness to the political setup, but nothing unusual for SF of any era, really. A minor book, but one that I think Anderson completists, at least, would want to read.  (Strange At Ecteban)