Planet of No Return

One of the first posts I made on this blog was about sci-fi books that I used to find in the laundry room of the apartment building where I used to live.  Someone had dropped a bunch of pulp books from '70s down there and I liberated a bunch when I moved out.  One of these is titled The Worlds of Poul Anderson and contains three of his novels.  To be honest, I had not heard of Poul Anderson before but the books looked cool, so I took this one.  I have seen the name pop up a lot since that time and now, after having read the first novel in the book, Planet of No Return, I am a little surprised that I have not heard more about him. 
His writing is like a lot of sci-fi authors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  It is somewhat spare and straightforward.  There are fantastical elements, to be sure, but they are related in an earnest way that actually downplays the invention in it.  There is almost a reportage style that Anderson uses (Heinlein does this some, too) that mirrors some aspects of American Modernism. 

Planet of No Return is a novel of ideas, the plot being rather simple.  The primary conceit is that humans have developed a means of faster-than-light speed travel that can take them out into the stars.  The crew of one ship makes an expedition to a planet that a previous ship had gone to but gotten lost.  This expedition is partly to try to discover what happened to the first mission and partly to fulfill the purpose of the first mission, which was to judge the planet for suitability for colonization. 
Upon arrival, the crew finds that the planet is already populated by Rorvan, a seemingly primitive civilization.  As they try to learn the language, the crew ends up traveling a circuitous path with the Rorvan to the seat of their civilization.  It ends up that the Rorvan are actually far advanced compared with Earth humans and they have set up a ruse to try to dissuade the colonization.  Once the crew discovers this, they have to decide whether they are going to expose the plan or keep the secret and leave the planet alone.  A pretty cool idea. 
One of the big wrinkles in this is that one member of the crew, Avery, had actually been on the first expedition and was working in concert with the Rorvan.  See, Avery had been a member of a cabal on Earth that was, itself, attempting to work against outer space colonization because they perceived diverging arcs of history for humankind.  One arc leads to outer-space colonization and a decline of human civilization because they never need to learn to solve the problems of a home planet.  The second arc keeps humans on Earth for long enough to mature as a species and work together.  Avery sides with the more utopian sect that wants to remain on Earth longer. 
I like this idea because it removes the Rorvan from the equation.  They just happened to want the same thing that Avery's folks did.  The true conflict is between two visions of humanity's future, and it is not revealed until the very final pages of this short book.  But Anderson builds the tension in such a way that it does come as a surprise.
There is one last twist, and that is that the members of the crew who must decide the fate of humanity are of the opinion that venturing out into space is the way of freedom and that remaining on Earth according to Avery's plan (which does, to be fair, involve deception) is a limitation on this freedom.  This sort of frontiersmanship fits in with the libertarian philosophy of someone like Robert Heinlein.  Avery is cast as paternalistic because of his desire to shield humanity from outside influence and escapism, but he ultimately works against extraterrestrial colonialism and a far greater potential for paternalistic oppression.
The answers are not simple in this text and Anderson leaves this up to the reader.  No character's perspective stands out as the obvious answer but the question is left open as to the best course of action for humanity.