Wind And Homer

The wind howls around the house as I type this. We remember many howling, roaring or, alternatively, soothing or singing winds in Poul Anderson's works.

Tabitha Falkayn had not heard of Homer but can screen him when she returns to her hotel. See Tabitha And Arinnian. We find that we have referenced Homer, as the beginning of European literature, numerous times.

After Chapter VI set in Centauri, the action of The People Of The Wind shifts to Admiral Cajal explaining the Terran strategy, so current rereading pauses. Too big a wrench! The scenes on Avalon are the real substance of this novel.

Retired people need not venture out into the blustering wind although we will have to cross town to the Cenotaph early this evening. Forecasts refer to wind warnings. There is a police siren in the distance. Life and reading continue in parallel. We have begun the second Inspector Morse novel.

Salvation

Real life is becoming somewhat intense, don't you think? At least it is for a lot of people. On this blog, we refer to current affairs when they are relevant to works of fiction. Any discussion (just about!) is acceptable in the combox. (Any racist remarks would be removed but we never get any of them, anyway.)

I have twice referred to a gaunt man who shouts of some obscure salvation in Centauri on Avalon in Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind. That detail resonates with our current experience. An Evangelical propagandist tells me that his deity is transforming him from within. If this is so, then I judge that he himself is currently impeding that transformation by over-confidence and arrogance and by propagating divisive falsehoods, accusing some of his hearers of transgressions of which they are certainly innocent. Some of what is said comes from the Devil - to use that apocalyptic language.

"By their fruits you shall know them."

Poul Anderson conveys the sense of street life in many cities past, present, future and extraterrestrial. Walking through Lancaster, I think of Centauri. Shouted salvation is just one detail.

Choth Rank

The People Of The Wind, VI.

Draun is Tabitha Falkayn's Ythrian business partner and a fellow member of Highsky Choth.

"Her partner was her superior in the guard; she was in Centauri as his aide. But the choth concept of rank was at once more complex and more flexible than the Technic." (pp. 58-59)

So let's learn more about those complexities and flexibilities... Unfortunately, we can't.

A Circus Of Hells (I think) contrasts the distanced formality of officer-men relationships in the Terran Navy with something more relaxed, more like a dance (?), between ranks in a Merseian ship. I have had a quick search through the text at this late hour but have not found that passage although CHAPTER ONE of this novel does inform us that Merseians are:

"...variously bemused or amused by the rigid Terran concept of rank..."

-Poul Anderson, A Circus Of Hells IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverside, NY, 2010), pp. 193-365 AT p. 198.

(Whether bemused or amused, Merseians respect alien traditions.)

We find parallels between Anderson's treatments of different intelligent species. He also reminds us that they will have as many cultural differences as we do.

Addendum: The passage that I had sought is in Ensign Flandry:

"Flandry was getting used to the interplay of formality and ease between officers and enlisted personnel in the Merseian service. Instead of the mutual aloofness on Terran ships, there was an intimacy which the seniors led but did not rigidly control, a sort of perpetual dance."

-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Young Flandry, pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 105.

Chris/Arinnian And Tabitha/Hrill

The People Of The Wind, VI.

Chris/Arinnian asks Tabitha/Hrill why she speaks Anglic and addresses him by his human name. She reminds him that he and she are human and that they do not have feathers, which are part of the Planha language, and asks him why he minds. His inner reflection on this question is revealing:

"That personal a question...an insult, except between the closest friends, when it becomes an endearment.... No, I suppose she's just thinking human again." (p. 56)

Two Observations, The First Minor, The Second Major

(i) At school, a friend who had borrowed Time Patrol came across a short italicized passage and asked me, "Who says this?" I thought that it was obvious but I explained that Poul Anderson always italicizes inner thoughts to differentiate them clearly from dialogue between his characters. Chris thinks, "That personal a question...," but Tabitha does not hear it. We read it because we are outside their universe and are informed by an omniscient narrator.

(ii) Of course Tabitha is thinking human again, Chris. She is human as she has just reminded you! But Arinnian of Stormgate Choth has an idee fixe. Poul Anderson presents very clearly both the outer and the inner problems faced by his characters.

OK, folks. Food, then an evening elsewhere and some other reading in between.

Laterz.

Centauri

The opening paragraph of The People Of The Wind, VI, might be my favourite passage in Poul Anderson's Technic History. We have quoted from it in whole or in part nine times.

"Where the mighty Sagittarius flows into the Gulf of Centaurs..." (p. 55)

Now ten times.

Centauri, human town and spaceport, is like a gateway to the Empire. Arinnian must be Christopher Holm while there and the West Coronan home guard and the Seamen's Brotherhood confer there. Afterwards, Arinnian and Hrill eat in the Phoenix House (not to be confused with the Old Phoenix) and drink in the Nest. (Unfortunately, for blog searching purposes, there are two "Nests" in Anderson's multiverse.) I hope to find previously unnoticed details but will shortly depart to the gym with the first Inspector Morse novel to read in the cafe.

Tomorrow evening, a proposed family meal has had to be postponed because it would have clashed with Holocaust Memorial at the Cenotaph. We still live real history and read future history.

Some Facts About Ythrians

The People Of The Wind.

Of course, these "facts" are really fictions but we know what we mean or at least I hope that we do. I once suggested to a University graduate that a good fictional premise for a sequel to The Time Machine could be that Wells wrote a true account that has been mistaken for fiction for all these years because the Time Traveller never returned. What would follow from such a premise? In no time, however, the guy with whom I had shared this idea had got so confused that he asked me, puzzledly, whether I though that The Time Machine was true? If we ask whether it is "true" that in 1984, the world was divided into three states, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania, that were perpetually at war, then the answer is "yes" provided that it is understood that this entire discussion takes place within the context of the fictional scenario in George Orwell's novel, 1984, and is not about the real world in 1984 AD, a year that had still been in the future when Orwell wrote 1984.

Obvious, we hope. Here is a "fact" about the Ythrians' usually regular sexual cycle. Grief can prematurely initiate female receptivity and fertility. Philippe Rochefort's training video informs him that:

"Doubtless this was originally a provision of nature for rapid replacement of losses. It seems to have brought about a partial fusion of Eros and Thanatos in the Ythrian psyche which makes much of the race's art, and doubtless thought, incomprehensible to man." (IV, p. 44)

I had to google "Eros" and "Thanatos" to get a more exact understanding of these terms as used in psychology. If (i) these principles are partially fused in Ythrian psychology and if (ii) this partial fusion makes much Ythrian thought incomprehensible to humanity, then surely there should be bigger communication problems than we are shown in these narratives? Yet this potential problem is mentioned only in this single sentence. We did see in In Oronesia And The Weathermother, that western Coronans and northern Oronesians would first confer human-to-human and Ythrian-to-Ythrian. Tabitha Falkayn judged that this procedure would initially avoid:

"'...the handicap of differing species.'" (III, p. 30)

Later, the omniscient narrator informs us that:

"...one is tempted to call [Ythrian Planha-speakers] 'Hellenistic.'" (V, p. 53)

However, is this an omniscient narrator if he speaks/writes about "one" being tempted...? Who is this "one"? An omniscient narrator should in no way obtrude into the text. Instead, he should be completely outside of the readers' sight and hearing like the supposed invisible, omnipresent deity. This sentence reads more like one of our many Technic historians and commentators reflecting on his subject-matter.

Lastly, for now, Khruaths, assemblies which any free adult can attend, work for Ythrians because members of that species differ from humanity in the following ways. They are less:

talkative

busybody

easily bullied

crowded

Modern communications spread Khruaths planet- and Domain-wide.

Your blogger needs a food break.

Detective Fiction

Anyone who reads a lot of Poul Anderson leads some particular lifestyle (in the case of the present blogger, retired) and also reads other authors. Consequently, over time, some other stuff should could come through in a blog. We can focus on details within Anderson's works but can also appreciate those works in their wider literary contexts of the Bible, Eddas, Sagas, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Heinlein, James Blish etc. 

Detective fiction is relevant to Poul Anderson Appreciation, first, because Anderson wrote three novels and at least one short story about a fictional detective, Trygve Yamamura, and would have continued to write detective fiction if sf had not paid better and, secondly, because of the Holmesian influence on several of his works. (An alternative literary history: Anderson writes a long Trygve Yamamura series and many other detective novels and only a few sf works!)

In the course of blogging, we have mentioned some other fictional detectives, e.g., Father Brown and Inspector Montalbano. (Scroll down.) Here is one more before we return to Ythrians, maybe, this evening. Today, while out for a walk, we bought for £10 in a charity shop a boxed set of all thirteen Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter. That might constitute my late night other reading for a long time to come. Early in the opening novel, a minor viewpoint character compares Morse unfavourably to Holmes and Poirot. And Holmes referred disparagingly to Poe's Dupin. Detective fiction authors always acknowledge their predecessors. British ITV dramatized Morse and cleverly created both a sequel and a prequel.

As Kevin, whom I meet in the Gregson Institute, once said, "It's endless, i'n't it?"

Telephone Conference

The People Of The Wind, V.

Matthew Vickery, President of the Parliament of Man on Avalon

Liaw of The Tarns, Wyvan of the High Khruath of Avalon

Ferune of Mistwood, First Marchwarden of the Lauran System

Daniel Holm, Second Marchwarden

Liaw discloses, confidentially because this is a deathpride matter for the choths concerned, that three choths had refused to support the latest defence measures but yielded when the Wyvans threatened to call Oherran against them.

A choth's possessions can be a single stretch of land or sea but can also be scattered. For a second time, we are given an implausible sounding list of the possible diversity of choths:

"Tradition determined what constituted a choth, though this was a tradition which slowly changed itself, as every living usage must. Tribe, anarchism, despotism, loose federation, theocracy, clan, extended family, corporation, on and on through concepts for which there are no human words, a choth ran itself." (p. 53)

United action is difficult but this is where Khruaths come in but we in this household are about to set out on a walk.

Good And Empire

The People Of The Wind, IV.

Eve Davisson to Philippe Rochefort:

"'Do you believe the Terran Empire is a force for good?'"  (p. 47)

Rochefort replies:

"'On balance, yes. It commits evil. But nothing mortal can avoid that. Our duty is to correct the wrongs...and also to recognize the values that the Empire does, in fact, preserve.'" (ibid.)

This is not like any empire on a single planet. If a human colony or a non-human intelligent species practices communism or anarchism, it can be incorporated into the Terran Empire under the minimal conditions that:

it pays modest taxes;

it receives Imperial protection;

it is free to, although not compelled to, trade with other Imperial planets.

The human colony on Esperance tries to set an example of pacifism. Eventually, Esperance is used as a naval base in the war between Empire and Domain. But the Empire has made no attempt to suppress Esperancian pacifism.

Eventually, we see Dominic Flandry involved in the violent Imperial annexation of the non-human planet, Brae. At that stage, Rochefort, your Empire has not only committed evil. It has transgressed the conditions that I outlined above.

Philippe Rochefort And The Ythrians

The People Of The Wind is an important novel by Poul Anderson. It is one volume of this sf author's main future history series, the History of Technic Civilization. However, The People Of The Wind belongs neither to the Polesotechnic League sub-series nor to the Dominic Flandry sub-series. Instead, it is one of only five instalments, and the only novel, to be set between these two main Technic historical periods. It has no characters in common with any other instalment but nevertheless presents a broad cast of newly introduced characters on both sides of an interstellar conflict.

Chapter IV introduces a sympathetic Terran character, Philippe Rochefort, who informs himself, and thus also us, by watching a training video about the enemy Ythrians. Because these beings are winged carnivores, their:

"Society remained divided into families or clans, which seldom fought wars but which, on the other hand, did not have much contact of any sort." (p. 45)

Ytrhians did not have any equivalent of the human need to cooperate in large numbers to dig pits for mammoths or to stand together against charging lions. When, eventually, herding generated a food surplus that did lead to leisure, culture and larger, more complicated social units, these were not based in anything corresponding to cities and that is all that we are told here. We expect to read something about "choths" but are disappointed.