Theodore R. Cogswell (1918–1987)

Absolutely wonderful. It's a short story, originally published in one of the pulp SF magazines, and reprinted in anthologies over and over. Two cultures meet, and it's great for both of them, and possibly for the whole galaxy. One is a lost unit of spaceship technicians, who were sent to settle a planet and set up an advance base for their Empire...but the Empire fell apart before any ships actually made it. They had families with them (long-term settlement!) so they settled - but they stuck to their assignment, as well. Generations down the line, there's no one who remembers and very few who know what they were doing there, but everyone gets tech training - by rote, but solid. The other culture is the Protectorate, the strongman government that filled in after the Empire (or possibly after a few other governments/polities fell, the timeline is very unclear). It's a crabs-in-a-bucket culture, where the top folk survive mostly by pushing down those on their level or below (and keeping an eye out for a way to pull down those above, but keeping that secret). The base commander struggling to fulfill his orders with every tech either taken to support the Protector, or executed for failing to keep things running...comes across this base of technicians. The result is not a disaster, amazingly - it might even be the seed for a new start, escaping the terrible situation with the Protectorate. That's where the story ends - not with what happens next, just with possibilities. The Spectre General of the title is a highly amusing fiction-become-reality. I love it, when I didn't have a copy I remembered it for years, I'm delighted it's come back in electronic form so I can own it at last!… (més)