Personal Relationships

The Avatar, XII.

Personal relationships play a big part. Broderson's deceased first wife's family are influential on Earth. One of them is in the impounded interstellar ship, Emissary, as is Joelle the holothete with whom Broderson had a relationship. The crew of Broderson's own ship, Chinook, includes the brother of Broderson's current wife and that brother resents the presence of Broderson's mistress. Things get more complicated.

The mistress, Catlin, is an "avatar" with a mysterious birth who feels one with the universe. This makes her sound like a Hindu deity. Her mysterious birth apparently involved Irish mythological beings but Hinduism can easily incorporate that. The real explanation is extraterrestrial but we have a long way to go before the eventual meeting with the Others.

Storm

The Avatar, XI.

The "objective correlative" is made explicit when Joelle and Christine walk through rain:

"...bearing their private storms." (p. 114)

Pp. 114-115 describe a Betan storm in which Christine dies:

inky sky

forking lightning

banging thunder

flying clouds

blowing spindrift

rearing, trampling, crashing, exploding sea

white foambursts

grinding shingles

millstone noise

moving bushes

flailing trees

whipping leaves and fronds

roaring, yelling, strengthening wind

rain like spears, axes, a hammer

dissolving soil

blasting, shrieking, yowling tempest

bone-shaking thunder

rising and rising wind

lightning, then booming lightlessness

hail stones whitening land, bruising and drawing blood

whip-thin branch flaying Joelle into the mud and water and fracturing Christine's larynx...

Fictional Evolution And History: The Betans

 

The Avatar, XI. 

III, pp. 16-18, summarized some future Terrestrial history.

XI, pp. 109-114, summarize the fictional evolution and history of the Betans. Because travel between human and Betan space is via T machines, we do not know whether the events summarized here are "past" or "future" in relation to human history.

The summary is complex and condensed and I do not propose to condense it even further here. Basically, the Betans' technological advances have generated a social crisis which they hope that human beings will be able to help them with.

There are echoes of other Anderson works. The Betans have met a winged migratory race. They have discovered that the placing of T machines does not allow for any temporal paradoxes. Thus, they cannot get into their own history to try to change it. Footnotes could refer readers to Anderson's The Man who Counts and Time Patrol. 

Wind And More On Beta

The Avatar, XI.

One woman, Chris, asks another woman, Joelle, for advice about personal relationships. The conversation reaches a dramatic point when a choice has to be made. Then we notice what happens during a pause in the dialogue:

"They tramped on. The wind loudened, the sea ramped. Clouds in the east lifted their wall higher, startlingly fast. Wrack blew off them, to scud across indigo heaven.

"Chris hunched shoulders against a gathering chill." (pp. 198-109)

Pathetic fallacy: nature does everything that it can to underline the impasse of the conversation -

wind does not whisper or caress but loudens;

sea does not touch the shore gently but ramps;

clouds lift a wall, a barrier;

they raise it fast;

they raise it startlingly fast;

wrack scuds;

it scuds across what otherwise would have been a peaceful heaven;

chill gathers;

the woman who seeks advice hunches her shoulders against this gathering chill.

Everything indicates that personal relationships will remain problematic. A problem-solving conversation would have been accompanied by very different weather!

Supernatural Changes

As you know, I think of Poul Anderson and James Blish in parallel:

hard sf

original imaginative means of FTL travel, e.g., quantum hyperdrive and "spindizzies"

future histories, e.g., the Technic History and Cities In Flight

historical fiction

fantasy

That is quite a lot in common. Blish had a smaller output and much less time travel.

While staffing a stall at a musical event at Lancaster Kanteena this afternoon, I passed the time mentally by reviewing the dramatic events of Blish's Black Easter and The Day After Judgment. The closest approach among Anderson's works is The King Of Ys (with Karen Anderson). In both cases, the action is mainly on the human level while the behind-the-scenes supernatural realms change.

The Andersons: Gratillonius is King of Ys while its gods and other gods withdraw before the advent of a single new god.

Blish: the demons win Armageddon but with unexpected results.

But we have summarized all this on this blog before. Comparable supernatural changes occur in the graphic fiction sequence of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman followed by Mike Carey's Lucifer:

Lucifer retires;

Dream dies;

God withdraws and is succeeded by his granddaughter, a British schoolgirl!

Despite all these fantastic changes, the universe continues, fortunately.

Four Senses On Beta

The Avatar, XI.

Two Terrestrials walk by a Betan shore:

heat

sea salt

odors sweet, sulfurous, rosy, cheesy, spicy, indescribable

booming surf

skirling wind

a fluting flier

deep purple blue sky

the sun, Centrum, a dim orange disc, smaller than Sol

immense red- and gold-edged clouds, lightning winking in dark depths

white-capped, gunmetal ocean crashing on shingle

rattling canebrakes

fluttering fronds

wildly whipping branches

shades of brown, sorrel, ruby, apricot, ocher and gold

"...a somber, Rembrantesque richness." (p. 106)

Is that rich enough for us? Beta is the second extra-solar planet described in this novel.

(Lewis' The Cosmic Trilogy was not on a bookshelf because it was on top of the bookshelves. "Difficult things have simple explanations. Discuss." There should still be a copy of Voyage To Venus somewhere.)

An Argument

The Avatar, X.

The anti-stellar politician, cabalist and conspirator, Ira Quick, tries to flannel and of course winds up arguing with the imprisoned interstellar explorers. It is perfectly clear which side of the argument we, the readers, are supposed to be on! I am certainly against Quick, an obnoxious self-serving professional performer and manipulator. But I am not fully on either side of the argument as put.

Quick is outraged because the most talented Terrestrials divert resources into their interstellar adventuring, abandoning the poor and downtrodden millions on Earth to their fate (!) First, interstellar exploration via T machines with the help of a more experienced race is not adventuring but hard work with immeasurable benefits - "profits," if we must still use that word. Secondly, those millions are not passive recipients of welfare but human beings who periodically take collective action that can be the death, whether literally or metaphorically, of politicians like Quick. Meanwhile, government policy could encourage populations around the world to organize their own affairs in their own communities instead of, or as well as, receiving a dole and watching Quick's speeches, and hopefully also more edifying material, on TV.

Quick gropes his way towards a "...final..." (p. 103) solution for the astronauts.

Blurring A Distinction

 

Arthur C. Clarke's third law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thus, in Poul Anderson's The Avatar, the Others, a technologically advanced race, are able to pass themselves off as beings from Irish mythology. On this analysis, all beings and laws are natural but some can be made to appear supernatural.

In other works of fiction, natural and supernatural coexist and interact. See Martians And Morpheus.

CS Lewis takes a third course of blurring the distinction between natural and supernatural. Because of the disruption associated with a house move, certain books are not currently to hand. These include both Lewis' Voyage To Venus/Perelandra and his The Cosmic Trilogy which includes Perelandra. However, I find the entire text of Perelandra on-line. This passage is worth quoting in full:

 "As to my intense wish never to come into contact with the eldila myself, I am not sure whether I can make you understand it. It was something more than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful, and very intelligent. The truth was that all I heard about them served to connect two things which one's mind tends to keep separate, and that connecting gave one a sort of shock. We tend to think about non-human intelligences in two distinct categories which we label "scientific" and "supernatural" respectively. We think, in one mood, of Mr. Wells' Martians (very unlike the real Malacandrians, by the bye), or his Selenites. In quite a different mood we let our minds loose on the possibility of angels, ghosts, fairies, and the like. But the very moment we are compelled to recognise a creature in either class as real the distinction begins to get blurred: and when it is a creature like an eldil the distinction vanishes altogether. These things were not animals--to that extent one had to classify them with the second group; but they had some kind of material vehicle whose presence could (in principle) be scientifically verified. To that extent they belonged to the first group. The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realised how great a comfort it had been--how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context. What price we may have paid for this comfort in the way of false security and accepted confusion of thought is another matter."

-copied from here (ONE, paragraph 4)

The Phoebean System And Ireland

The Avatar, IX.

The moons of Demeter are Persephone and Erion. The planets of the system include not only a Zeus and an Aphrodite but also an Ares. In a Demetrian lake, a large dark wassergeist rises, whistles and sinks. Its whistle is "...eldritch..." (p. 85) This is appropriate.

The Troubles impoverished some parts of Ireland. (Not the "Troubles" that some of us remember but those that are still to come in this fictional future.) Uneducated smallholders again believe in the Sidhe. If Others, why not Sidhe?

The two are connected. Caitlin has always felt one with the universe. When her mother, Norah, tramped through Ireland and slept in the open air near Slieve Bernagh, a man of awesome beauty invited her into the mountain where she experienced:

"'...rainbows and suns, purple and gold, wind and wild seas and everything a glory.'" (ibid.)

Nine months later, Caitlin was born. She is our title character. She refers to Lady Gregory.

Novy Mir On Demeter

The Avatar, IX.

Apparently, "mir" can mean:

world

peace

universe

kingdom

quiet

pax

quietude

system

See here. Some of these words have the same meaning so I do not understand why they are listed separately.

"Mir" was a Russian space station. Novy (New) Mir is a Russian-language village on Demeter. Its only public phone, which however has a screen, is on a wall inside its tavern where there is also an ikon. Outside, there is a single dusty street of brightly decorated timber houses and a communal cropland. Broderson sees a cat, a babushka, children, a green valley and sheer mountains. 

Can all of this exist on a colonized extrasolar planet? Yes, because:

geneticists have modified Terrestrial plants;

agrochemists have converted the soil;

ecological technology, mostly microbial, holds back native life.

Thus, the ecology will revert if the colonists fail or withdraw.