Surfing And Membranes

I have reread Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer as far as a passage that I posted about puzzled on 19 February 2013. See Ammonia Glaciers.

Jovians have nictitating membranes (see here) because they live in wind and rain (see here).

Yhtrians have nictitatng membranes because they fly (see here) and are at home in the weather (see here).

The Aleriona also have them.

Previous posts about "going bird":

Spirits Of The Air II
Going Bird
Going Bird
Going Bird

No new posts on this blog until tomorrow but meanwhile see NGC 5457 on a companion blog.

The Escape, Part II

(Jupiter Beach, Florida, as a change from the planet, Jupiter, especially since we are talking about a beach on Jupiter.)

See The Escape.

Nictitating membranes protect Theor's eyes from the rain as he tells Mark that he is pursued by a great swimming animal with a rider:

"'Haven't you any weapon?'
"'A knife and a long pike -' What he might do exploded in Theor."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 10, p. 70.

Another moment of realization!

Theor braces the pike to jut from the prow;
the anchor weighs down the butt while rope secures the shaft to the thwarts;
Mark tells Theor how to get upwind of his pursuer;
the pike strikes the monster which submerges, wrecking the boat;
Theor clings to flotsam;
he can drink sea ammonia and digest microbes from the upper atmosphere that have settled on the ocean;
(we have returned from aaf to ssf - see here).

The Escape

Let us analyze the escape. I am rereading it while blogging. Mark and Theor converse:

"'Could you overcome your guard?'
"'I am hobbled and my hands are bound. He has a pike and dagger.'
"The answer flashed into Theor even as he waited."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 9, p. 67.

A moment of realization! That is a good start. Then:

Mark and Theor plan;
Theor looks out of the booth;
the guard growls and jabs;
Theor exclaims and points;
the guard looks around;
Theor tosses the communicator disc;
transmission lag;
Mark wails through the disc;
the guard leaps;
the disc reflects a lightning flash;
(that thunder storm was more than pathetic fallacy);
the guard jabs at the disc with his pike;
lurching forward, Theor draws the guard's sheathed knife and stabs with it;
they fight;
the guard dies;
holding the pike between his foreknees, Theor cuts the bonds on his wrists;
with the knife, he cuts the hobbles on his legs;
taking the belt, sheath, knife, pike and communicator, he runs to the beach and takes a boat;
one of the invaders' large, black, long-necked sea beasts pursues him;
end of chapter...

Not bad. Imagine it as the "cliff hanger" ending of a cinema serial installment.

A Convention Of Action-Adventure Fiction

I feel an Escape coming on. Let me explain. Poul Anderson combines serious speculative fiction with action-adventure fiction. Let us coin the abbreviations, ssf and aaf.

Ssf presents future societies and their technologies or alien environments and their inhabitants whereas aaf presents battles, fights, captures, escapes and epic voyages whether the settings are historical, contemporary, futuristic or exotic. Thus, in Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer, human colonists of a Jovian moon communicate with native inhabitants of Jupiter while the colonists resist counter-revolutionaries and the Jovians resist invaders.

On Jupiter, our quadrupedal viewpoint character, Theor (see image), has:

participated in a sea battle against trans-oceanic invaders of a previously unknown species unexpectedly assisted by large domesticated sea beasts;

fought an individual invader beneath the surface of the ammonia sea;

on land, been captured at pike-point;

after a confrontation with the enemy warmaster, been pushed into a small booth by an armed guard who now stands outside in the rain while Theor converses with Mark Fraser through his communication disc.

All that remains is for Theor:

to escape, preferably with Mark's help;
to embark on an epic voyage;
to return;
to win the war.

All this will happen although I cannot remember how Theor escapes. The frequent formulaic escapes of aaf are to be assessed for their excitement value but also for their plausibility.

How The Brain Works II

See How The Brain Works.

A follow up point:

Lisbeth has just solved Fermat's Theorem but forgets the proof after she has been shot in the head.

"'Isn't that part of the brain associated with numbers and mathematical ability?' Jonasson said.
"Ellis shrugged. 'Mumbo jumbo. I have no idea what these particular gray cells are for.'" (p. 13)

Not quite "mumbo jumbo" if an empirical connection has been established between one part of the brain and one set of mental abilities. But it is only an empirical connection and might not hold in all cases. I have also read that brains can be versatile enough to move their functions around, e.g., in response to physical damage. And there is no necessary connection between gray cells and understanding a theorem. Might there be organisms that have developed central nervous systems and even complex signals resembling language but that have not made that qualitative leap from unconsciousness to consciousness, kind of elaborate mobile vegetables?

How The Brain Works

To end tonight with a relevant quotation from another author, a brain surgeon describes some inexplicable cases, then comments:

"'I don't believe we'll ever figure out precisely how the brain works.'"
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (London, 2009), Chapter 1, p. 12.

See Philosophy And Fiction.

The premises and plots of Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis assume the possibility of the artificial duplication of human cerebral/mental processes, including memory, self-consciousness and personal identity. This in turn would probably require someone to figure out precisely how brains work, including how they generate minds. As yet, we have no idea whether it is possible to figure this out. There is not a one-to-one identity but a qualitative difference between externally observable cerebral processes and our inner subjective experiences.

Theor And The Pathetic Fallacy

When both of Theor's he-parents die, he becomes the new Reeve but the Nyarrans are a free people and need not heed him if he calls on them to surrender to the invaders. In any case, he refuses to make such a call despite the threats of slaughter or enslavement made by Chalkhiz, warmaster of Ulunt-Khazul.

"Chalkhiz made a spitting noise. Thunder banged overhead."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 9, p. 64.

It seems to be automatic for Anderson to underline a dramatic moment for his characters by immediately following it up with a reference to threatening weather. The pathetic fallacy is almost Andersonian punctuation.

I begin to feel naked if I do not have either a Time Patrol comparison or a pathetic fallacy to draw attention to. Close behind these are multi-sensory descriptions and moments of realization.

Communication With Another World

"...he gripped a small crucifix that hung about his neck, symbol and source of help from beyond this world."
-Poul Anderson, "Death and the Knight" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 737-765 AT p. 746.

The crucifix is not only a symbol but also a source of help because it is a Time Patrol communicator.

"'You've been seen muttering at them, not in any way a man would pray to a saint. What were you invoking?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1245beta, p. 409.

Invoking fellow Patrol agents.

"...he could still reach the communicator hung around his neck. Doubtless a superstitious unease had saved it from being taken off him. Once again he pressed the button. 'Mark,' he whispered. 'Anyone. I am in need.' There was still no answer."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 9, p. 63.

But Mark exists and is a human being on a moon.

Dragoika And Theor

How do intelligent beings throughout the universe(s) respond to adversity?

Dominic Flandry tells Dragoika that her home planet will be destroyed:

"He had not known she could weep."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Seventeen, p. 183.

The Nyarrans might be destroyed by trans-oceanic invaders:

"Theor bent his head. They do not weep on Jupiter."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 8, p. 59.

They do not weep on Jupiter! We do not know what they do on Jupiter or even whether "they" exist there. However, it is legitimate for any author to tell us that, within the parameters of his fictional narrative, they do not weep there. Again, this is the omniscient narrator speaking. Theor knows that he is bending his head but presumably does not know that he is not weeping! - unless in the unlikely event that Fraser has described this human response to him and he is now reflecting on it. By contrast, Flandry realizes that he had not known that Tigeries could weep. Thus, that passage in Ensign Flandry is narrated entirely from Flandry's third person point of view. I am a stickler for povs.

A Disguised Moment Of Realization?

"'His sort would rather bring the whole works down than surrender to what they hate,' Hoshi said.
"'A praiseworthy attitude when our side has it,' Fraser remarked with a sardonicism that was acrid in his mouth.
"Hoshi regarded him out of narrowed slant eyes. 'What do you mean by that, Mark?'
"'Nothing. Forget it.'"
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 6, pp. 46-47.

(I googled "sardonicism" because it is one of those words that I recognize but this time I wanted to get a more precise meaning.)

Nothing? Ordinary conversation is full of unexplained, unfinished or interrupted remarks but, in a novel, every word and phrase is there for a reason. This remark does not seem to refer to anything that has happened so I expect that it prepares us for something that is still to come. Will Fraser later take a big risk to defeat the enemy?

How A Jovian Feels

Poul Anderson tries to convey how a Jovian feels. We get that the feelings are alien more than anything else.

"His forebodings could not very well be put in human terms. A man carries half the sex of his race, Theor only a third. He was an individual, with his own personality, and he was self-aware, but both to a lesser degree than the typical Homo Sapiens. What troubled him was not so much fear of being hurt as a sense of wrongness. That which had happened and that which was going to happen should not, and shook him on a purely biological level."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 5, pp. 37-38.

"The wrongness of the day, the disorientation, bit into him."
-op. cit., Chapter 8, p. 57.

On pp. 37-38, the omniscient narrator addresses the reader. This narrator knows and contrasts Jovian and human feelings. P. 57 gives us just Theor's point of view.

"Theo -" means "God." "Or" is "gold" in French. Thus: "God of Gold" or "Golden God"?

Cosmic Interference II

See Cosmic Interference.

"Another pause came, a stillness so absolute that he heard the hiss of cosmic radio interference in his earplugs."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 7, p. 55.

"All he heard was the seething between galaxies." (ibid.)

This is the universal background of all hard sf. In this novel, there is only interplanetary space travel and the viewpoint character is on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter in the outer Solar System, not further out between stars or galaxies. However, from space, the universe is visible and even audible. Poul Anderson rightly reminds us of this cosmic background.

Punsters And The Powers

Jovians pun. They chant:

"'SO, dear,
"'Why not
"'WRITE? One! Left, one!'"
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 5, p. 41.

Maybe they do personify natural forces (see here):

"'What Powers have we crossed?'" (ibid.)

But is a Power a person? Is this primitive polytheism or even pre-polytheism? Theor greets his demi-father:

"'May the Powers be serene within you...'" (op. cit., Chapter 3, p. 23)

Within, not just external. "Within" is capable of subtler interpretations. I believe that all the gods are within us.

Ganymede And Counterrevolution

"That's not exactly the way I heard it, just before Earth went behind the sun, Fraser thought."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 6, p. 43.

Nowadays, we hear global news instantly. Imagine living so far away that Earth was sometimes on the other side of the sun. In some ways, space travel will restore earlier conditions like communication time lags. How long did it take the news of the Russian Revolution to spread around Earth? It was not instantly known about in European trenches.

Somewhere in Anderson's Psychotechnic History, extrasolar colonies are compared to colonies on Earth in previous centuries. Their cultures diverge because of the distances involved.

In the Psychotechnic History, the Humanists overthrow the Institute on Earth but some psychotechnicians plan to make a comeback from Ganymede. In Three Worlds To Conquer, the Sam Halls overthrow the Protectorate on Earth but one loyalist Admiral plans to restore American hegemony form a base on Ganymede. Ganymede's distance from Earth makes it an appropriate base for counterrevolution in more than one timeline.

I am amazed at what I learn by reading Poul Anderson.

Ythrians And Jovians

By imagining an alien viewpoint, an sf author comments on familiar institutions. An Ythrian writes:

"To explain the concept 'nation' is stiffly upwind."
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 23-48 AT p. 23.

What is odd to an Ythrian is that, within a Terrestrial nation-state, law and obligation are maintained less by usage and pride than by force:

"It is as if a single group could permanently cry Oherran against the rest of society..." (op. cit., p.24)

Each nation claims:

"...powers which are limited not by justice, decency, or prudence, but only by its own strength." (ibid.)

These strange claims are explained by human history just as the Ythrians' arrangements are explained by their distinctive biology and psychology.

A Jovian does not understand how a government can first rule, then be overthrown, because he does not understand how a leadership that did not benefit the people could have maintained itself in the first place. In Jovian environmental conditions, a Reeve who was not an efficient and successful master engineer would never have been a Reeve and his people would have remained barbarians. When Fraser explains that some human beings did think that this government benefited the people whereas others valued freedom more than security, Theor does not quite grasp this. Jovians primarily value survival.

Jovians At Sea And At War

Freeboard is small in liquid ammonia. This plus the Jovians' quadrupedal bodies makes a treadmill turning paddlewheels more efficient than oars for a large vessel. Wheels are also outriggers. Waves are sixty per cent faster than on Earth. The slow winds in a dense, weakly insolated atmosphere make sails unhelpful.

Elkor's fleet has about ten octad ships. Eight-fingered Jovians count in eights. Norlak estimates that the Nyarrans outnumber their enemies by sixteen per sixty-four.

Reeves wage continual warfare against floods, volcanoes, landslides etc but Theor acknowledges that these differ from hostile minds. So the Jovians have not personified natural forces?

Theor, a quadruped, does not run but gallops. Carrying only a third of the sex of his race, he is said to be less self-aware than a human being but why should this be?

Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 5, pp. 36-38.

How Ganymedean-Jovian Communication Was Established II

The communication is described in:

Neutrinos To Jupiter
Neutrinos To Jupiter II
Neutrinos To Ganymede

- and how it was established is described here. However, I skipped over some of the details. Obviously, Earthmen could not send the message, "We want to establish communication," because communication had to be established before such a message could be sent.

When probes had sent data that proved that there was intelligent life on the surface, so many functioning scanners, receivers and transmitters were sent that eventually one landed near a Jovian settlement. Then, intellects on both sides were able to advance from maths in beeps to verbal language. Thus, a human semanticists learned enough about the structure of Nyarran to be able to devise an artificial common language. Would this be possible? Anderson at least understands and conveys that it would not be easy.

A Jovian City

I want to describe the Jovian city, Nyarr, but find that I have already done so in (x) here. In fact, searching the blog for "Nyarr" brings up this and two other previous posts: see here. (Scroll down.)

Present agenda:

continue to reread Three Worlds To Conquer and Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy;

read for the first time SM Stirling's Prince Of Outcasts;

finish breakfast and perform certain tasks around the Terrestrial city of Lancaster - in fact, I had better get back to that now.

Not Killing A Guy

"Castelar stabbed. Varagan clutched his belly. Blood squirted between his fingers. He leaned against the wall and shouted.
"Castelar wasted no time finishing him."
-Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 641-735 AT p. 666.

"She opened the pistol and checked that she had one round left and considered shooting Zalachenko in the skull. Then she remembered that Niedermann was still there, out in the dark, and she had better save it."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), Chapter 32, p. 562.

So these two major villains, Varagan and Zala, could have been finished off there and then but Castelar did not want to waste time and Lisbeth needed to save her last bullet for Niedermann! Fictional ironies.

Anderson's Time Patrol series is a remarkable source of quotations and comparisons as I have remarked before, e.g., here.

An Andersonian Exercise

See Hexapodality and Some Quadrupeds.

The Jovians in Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer are quadrupeds as also is the artificial Jovian organism, Joe, in Anderson's "Call Me Joe." At least, I thought that Joe was quadrupedal. See the attached image.

So here is an exercise for Andersonians: compare and contrast the descriptions of the Jovians and of Joe. I will get around to it eventually but meanwhile I am very slowly rereading Three Worlds... between reading SM Stirling and rereading Stieg Larsson so this is going to take a while. We have, if not all the time in the world, then at least all the remaining time that the Norns have allotted to the current blogger.

Meanwhile, if anyone out there wants to tackle the Joe-Jovians comparison, then please either post it in the combox or email it as an article to be published on the blog provided that my technical assistant can handle the transfer from email to blog, not always easy apparently.

I am finding that appropriate subject-matter for the blog is quite literally endless.

Another Jovian Species

"Male and demimale must both impregnate a female, within a few hours of each other, for conception to result."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 3, p. 25.

Trisexuality increases genetic diversity, compensating for the low mutation rate in a cold, less radiated, environment.

The Ulunt-Khazul are a different species from the Nyarrans:

a foot taller;
small tusks;
broad webbed feet;
natural swimmers;
long thick tails;
shining gray skin;
alien angles and proportions;
acrid animal smell;
wearing hooded mantles and looted Nyarran bracelets.

Imagine a different species of Terrestrials, never seen before, sailing across the Atlantic or the Pacific, to wage war and conquer...

The Jovian Environment II

Elemental forces devastate the environment. Because wind, rain, hail, lightning, quake, flood, geyser, fire spout and avalanche threaten to return Nyarr to barbarism, the Reeve and his kin-tree are primarily master engineers with civilization-saving skills and only incidentally priests, magicians, judges or military leaders. Volcanoes, the only known form of fire, are used to smelt water to forge weapons. The domesticated druga species regularly metamorphoses from vegetable to animal.

Theor, a Nyarran male and Reeveling:

hairless;
stub-tailed;
tiger-striped;
four-legged;
three prehensile toes on each foot;
long armed;
four-fingered hands;
blocky torso;
round head;
shrugs by shaking the head;
no nose, external ears or lungs;
rooster-like comb;
six lipped slits on either side of the thorax admit hydrogen which releases energy by reducing vegetable-derived organic compounds;
abdominal vents release methane and ammonia;
golden eyes three times the size of a man's;
chemo-sensor antennae flank the mouth which is only for eating and drinking;
speech generated by vibrating muscle tissue in a pouch under the jaws;
homeothermic;
naked;
stands on the back of a flying/swimming forgar with his feet in stirrups.

Norlak, Theor's demi-father:

short;
slim;
no comb;
longer, acuter anntenae;
gaudily clothed;
wearing a blanket dyed pirell and onsy;
waving a plume-tipped staff;
more excitable but quicker-witted than males.

Although the Nyarran sexes are equal, among an ocean-crossing invasive species, the Ulunt-Khazul, males own females and kill most demi-males at birth. The Nyarran language is three interrelated systems with different underlying premises.

All this information and more is presented in a few pages before the action starts.

The Jovian Environment I

"...that monstrous atmospheric ocean..."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 3, p. 21.

This means either literally that the Jovian atmosphere combines gaseous and liquid properties so that it could equally be described as a monstrous oceanic atmosphere or metaphorically that the atmospheric gases are dense and turbulent like the waves of an ocean. The gases are:

"...mostly hydrogen, much helium, a few percentage points of methane, ammonia vapor, and other gases..." (ibid.)

The mantis-like "forgar" is said to fly - or swim. (p. 23)

There are mile-high red cloud banks with tawny precipices. Sun and moons cannot be seen from the surface but dawn is perceived as a swiftly climbing brightness. Human eyes would see only by "...the frequent great lightning flashes..." (p. 21) but Jovians see in the infrared.

Soil is ice powder intermingled with sodium and ammonium compounds. The real ocean is "...thousands of storm-swept miles of liquid ammonia..." (p. 22)

Much more later.

A Sense Of Adventure

The following works convey a powerful sense of adventure, in my opinion. Obviously this is subjective.

(i) Juvenile sf novels by Robert Heinlein and James Blish.

(ii) The Horse And His Boy by CS Lewis, a very Heinleinian text.

(iii) Much of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, in particular, when Diana Crowfeather runs away from home to avoid Navy school and a safe marriage:

"Meanwhile Tigeries were hunting through hills where wind soughed in waves across forests, and surf burst under three moons upon virgin islands."
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453, AT Chapter One, p. 214.

(iv) The Peshawar Lancers, Conquistador and The Sky People by SM Stirling.

Prince Of Outcasts By SM Stirling

Front cover: see image;
inside front cover: publisher's logo, US and Canadian prices, bar code;
p. I, reviews;
p. II, other titles;
p. III, title page;
p. IV, publishing info;
p. V, dedication;
p. VI, blank;
pp. VII-IX, Acknowledgments;
pp. X-XI, maps;
p. XII, blank;
pp. 1-500, the text of the novel;
inside back cover: author photo and info;
back cover: blurb.

The pagination is as it should be:

Roman numerals before the text;
Arabic numerals for the text.

Publication dates:

hardcover: Sept '16;
paperback: Aug '17.

I have nearly caught up with the Emberverse novels.

How Ganymedean-Jovian Communication Was Established

The research base on Ganymede softlanded instruments on Jupiter.

Because interference distorted maser telemetry, better instruments were designed and sent.

Because transmitted data proved intelligent life on the surface, the communication project began.

Because Terrestrials cannot form all the sounds of Nyarran and Jovians cannot form all the sounds of English, a "common-language" of croaks, grunts, clicks and whistles was devised over two decades.

Specialists inquiring about specific aspects of Jupiter developed only a narrow vocabulary.

Fraser, helping to improve the transceiver system, became interested enough to converse regularly on a wide range of topics with Theor who shared this interest.

Because language involves not only words but also rapport, real communication and comprehension occur only between Fraser and Theor.

The chief of the language research group in Aurora lets Fraser work on developing a mutual code.

By persistence, Fraser and Theor gain clues to each other's personalities despite the differences between human and Jovian minds.

Their recorded conversations enter the data files.

The awesome human-devised speaking machine changes the Reeveship back towards its ancient magical role.

The human-devised image-maker is housed in a shelter that comes to be called the House of the Oracle and to be regarded as a source of prophecies.

Neutrinos To Ganymede

See "Neutrinos To Jupiter II" here.

The receiver is a thick four-inch disc;
Theor inhabits a darkness absolute to human eyes;
he presses a button and replies;
crystals vibrate;
electrons leap;
energy from the disintegrating isotope becomes a broad-wavelengthed radio signal;
this wave, conducted by ground forced into strange allotropes by pressure, cold and material composition, activates a neutrino generator and broadcaster;
pulses reach the relay satellite;
sensitive detectors and powerful amplifiers modulate the radio beam and transmit it to Aurora on Ganymede;
Fraser hears, seven seconds after speaking.

Neutrinos To Jupiter II

Fraser speaks;
electronic waves depart;
a radio transmitter detects them;
the transmitter relays the waves on a beam aimed at a relay satellite in equilateral orbit around Jupiter;
the satellite recodes the waves into pulses;
the pulses become instructions to a specialized accelerator;
bombarded nuclei fluorescing with gamma rays strike isotropically pure crystals bathed in liquid helium;
each atom is oriented by electric and magnetic fields;
surging energized nuclei emit a neutrino burst;
the cone of the burst expands towards Jupiter at just under light speed;
it arrives wider than the equator;
but some neutrinos reach the Jovian surface;
a few of them enter a crystal;
the crystal's nuclei reverse the process that had emitted the beam;
the nuclei, isotopes excited to a high pitch by a radionuclide, jump back to a lower energy state, emitting quanta;
quanta bursts correspond to the pulse code of the beam;
a solid-state device, powered by the built-in radioactivity, amplifies the signal and maps it onto an alternating potential;
a piezoelecrtic sheet vibrates;
Theor hears Fraser.

Neutrinos To Jupiter

Poul Anderson takes a page to tell us how Mark Fraser on Ganymede speaks with Theor on Jupiter so we should take note of the details. Jupiter has:

an enormous magnetic field;
storms of charge and synchrotron radiation;
surging atomic debris;
thunderstorms larger than Earth;
two and a half Terrestrial gavities;
pressure greater than in the Minanao Deep;
two million billion billion tons of ice, metal and solid hydrogen.

No maser beam, however tight or hard-driven, would be able to penetrate the storms of charge and synchrotron radiation. However, Fraser uses neutrinos which pass between and through atoms.

It will soon be visiting time at the Infirmary so further details will have to wait until another post.

Ganymede II

Ganymede is popular:

colonized and being terraformed in Heinlein's Farmer In The Sky;
the setting of Asimov's "Christmas on Ganymede";
colonized and cultivated by Adapted Men in Blish's The Seedling Stars;
colonized and with an underground city in Anderson's The Snows Of Ganymede;
a base for visits to Jupiter in Flandry's period;
colonized thirty years ago, with a small overground town, in Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer;
colonized and being terraformed in the Epilogue of Anderson's Twilight World.

Instead, other Blish and Anderson characters remotely explore the Jovian surface from the safety of Jupiter V.  I am about to be interrupted by a Windows update.

Knowledge And Action

Again, I am rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy for a break from blogging but Larsson's text suggests something relevant.

How often does this happen? We want to understand why someone acted as he did on a particular occasion. We know something that would have motivated his action if he had known of it. Therefore we assume that he did know of it. But could he have known of it at the time of his action?

To be more specific, a while back I contacted an author about an error in one of his novels. I cannot remember the exact details but it was something like this. It seemed both to the reader and to the other characters that character X had died. Then we the readers learned that X was in fact still alive. Then character Y acted on the knowledge that X was still alive. However, at that point in the narrative, Y could not yet have learned that X was still alive and therefore should still have thought that he was dead. The author, Col Buchanan, accepted my point and said that he would try to revise the text for the paperback edition.

And my point is that Poul Anderson's many fictional texts are free of this kind of inconsistency. Sean M. Brooks found one prima facie contradiction: Terran Intelligence learned of Aycharaych's telepathy in The Day Of their Return yet later were unaware of it in "Honorable Enemies." However, a friend of Sean's suggested a possible explanation. See here.

"Only For The Duration..."

Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer refers overtly to his short story, "Sam Hall" (see here), and perhaps also to another short story:

"Noble slogans were cheap, and the finest causes could go awry. Even the dictatorship had started as a movement to restore to a beaten United States her sovereignty and her pride. Then somehow one emergency after another cropped up, and those who grumbled began to have problems with the cops...."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 1, p. 9.

This passage accords thematically with the conclusion of the story, "For the Duration" (see here), although I would have to reread that story to check its other details.

Forces And Persons

Fraser pictures a battleship's track:

plunging near the sun, protected by coolers and radiation screens;
swinging around;
applying maximum blast;
adding gravitational potential energy to the jets;
saving reaction mass;
accelerating longer than usual;
turning the eventual orbit into a flatter and swifter hyperbola.

"As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing. Forces and matrices were so much easier to deal with than people."
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 1, p. 8.

Indeed they are but we are people and have to deal with each other! - sometimes in political revolutions.

In the universe described by science and assumed by hard science fiction, forces and matrices preexisted consciousness and persons whereas, in the universe described by mythology and assumed by fantasy, conscious persons came first. James Blish's black magician, Theron Ware explains:

"'...the sciences don't accept that some of the forces of nature are Persons. Well, but some of them are. And without dealing with those Persons I shall never know any of the things I want to know.'"
-James Blish, Black Easter (New York, 1977), VIII, p. 78.

A Catholic astronomer, speaking of the universe, said that most of his colleagues "...do not know that Someone made it." I infer that it is appropriate to capitalize "Someone." I recently quoted this astronomer as claiming that time dilation would work in reverse on a return journey (see here) and have just found his obituary here.

Scene-Setting

The opening pages or paragraphs of a work of futuristic science fiction set the scene by referring to unfamiliar aspects of a future society that we will come to understand as we read further. Thus, in Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer, a space battleship, the USS Vega:

"'...was on patrol near Venus when the revolution broke, and was put to searching for an orbital base the Sam Halls were believed to have somewhere in that sector.'"
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 1, p. 8.

OK. Sf readers catch on fast:

there is regular interplanetary travel;
the United States still exist;
there has just been a revolution;
the revolutionaries were nicknamed the "Sam Halls"?

Yes. In fact, there had been a short story about the Sam Halls' revolution (see here) although I did not learn this until many years later.

Incidentally, my copy of Three Worlds To Conquer is a "Mayflower-Dell Paperback." I am much indebted to Mayflower-Dell because the first James Blish novel that I read was their edition of Earthman, Come Home. For many years, Blish was superior to Anderson in my estimation. I have come to appreciate Anderson considerably more than I did and, of course, his output was much bigger.

Faith Or Agnosticism In SF Authors, Including Poul Anderson

Ketlan is back in Lancaster Infirmary again and visitors had to clear out of the ward for a while so I had an interesting hour exploring the interconnected buildings looking for the Chapel which was closed. However, a long walk along an underground corridor in a place of life and death is an opportunity to contemplate spirituality.

In imagination, although not in shared belief, I accompany CS Lewis through:

the Old Testament (YHWH);
the New Testament (Jesus);
the Ransom Trilogy (Maleldil);
the Narnia Chronicles (Aslan);
The Great Divorce, where I found parallels with SM Stirling's account of a hereafter. See here.

In imagination and shared disbelief, I accompany two American sf authors in their agnostic responses to theological questions:

James Blish in After Such Knowledge;
Poul Anderson in "The Problem of Pain" and The Game Of Empire.

Other authors are relevant, of course:

Lewis replies to Wells and Stapledon;
Blish and Anderson follow Wells, Stapledon and Heinlein.

In Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, the Books of Stormgate are like an Avalonian scripture, recounting the history of a people and their exodus to a new world.

Bushido

"'I do not know what I would do with myself in a time of peace, but it is a worthy dream, Majesty.'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Thirty-Two, p. 832.

What a failure of imagination! There is no limit to what can be done in a time of peace. But generations were trained for war. We read military fiction but must ensure that it reflects our past, not also our future.

A Coincidence

In the previous post, I quoted, having just read, a description of a sunset and also copied a stanza from "For the Fallen." Continuing to read The Desert And The Blade, I find:

"'Those who met death met it gladly, falling with their faces to the enemy...'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Thirty-Two, p. 808.

And in "For the Fallen":

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
-copied from here. 

Sunset And Morning

Over breakfast, I read about a sunset:

"Her eyes rose to the sunset, lurid copper and jade-green and midnight blue in the west."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Thirty-Two, p. 808.

How many sunsets have we had? See here.

Poul Anderson describes a sunrise here:

"The sun stood up in a shout of light.
"High is heaven and holy." (13)

- and mixes the symbolisms of sunset and sunrise here:

The novel ends: "Above the cliffs, a few eastern clouds turned red." (11)

This is mixed symbolism. Red is the color of sunsets. Something is ending. But these are eastern clouds. This is a morning. Something is beginning. We will see what when we turn to the next work in the History.
- both extracts copied from here.

Houses have been built between our back yards and back alley and the railway line. The sun rises at our front but this morning it was reflected from a window of a house at the back.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
-copied from here.

Kinds Of Character Interactions

I don't know what language that is but I have worked out that the title means Midsummer Tempest.

Characters from different genres meet in the Old Phoenix. Analogously, real and fictional characters can meet in fiction although not in reality:

fictional characters, including time travelers, meet historical characters (see Anderson's Time Patrol);

Jack Havig knows Robert Anderson who knows Poul Anderson;

Ian Fleming's G. is fictional but his superior, Serov, who phones for an update, is real;

CS Lewis meets Elwin Ransom;

Mikael Blomkvist meets Paolo Roberto.

I am rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy for a rest from late night blogging but reading about Blomkvist phoning Roberto prompts reflections on kinds of character interactions.

Addendum: Alan Moore claims to have seen his fictional character, John Constantine, in reality, as, I believe, have one or two other writers of the character.

A Conceptual Chasm

There is a conceptual chasm between works of fantasy about mythological beings like Lilith and hard sf in which a moonship returns to Ganymede. Poul Anderson wrote on both sides of that chasm - not specifically about Lilith but certainly about gods, elves etc. There is also a spectrum of imaginative fiction that partially bridges the chasm:

hard sf (Heinlein, Anderson, Niven etc);
soft sf (Bradbury, Simak, Lewis);
Lewis' combination of interplanetary travel and supernatural beings in a single narrative;
Anderson's Old Phoenix Inn where van Rijn from a hard sf series can meet fantasy characters;
fantasy.

Thus, maybe three intermediate categories. Poul Anderson wrote hard sf, the Old Phoenix and fantasy and, in some of his hard sf works, addressed the same theological issues as Lewis. Anderson did not touch soft sf - except maybe in some early pulp mag stories, e.g., "Witch of the Demon Seas." See here.

Lilith II

Please check out the megamultiverse speculations. Inspired by Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series and Old Phoenix sequence and by James Blish's mini-multiverse, I tried to identify those mysterious characters of literature who might just possibly have traveled between universes in order to observe or intervene at crucial moments while keeping themselves in the background. For example, why do the Time Traveler's dinner guests include the Silent Man? Is he a futurian time traveler who wanted to be present at this pivotal conversation but who also kept quiet in order not to risk altering the course of the dialogue as recorded by the outer narrator?

We have found another candidate intercosmic traveler. Lilith interacts with Adam and demons, manages to keep herself (mostly) out of the Bible and yet looms large in Jewish mythology and some modern fantasy. She is mysterious and interacts with powerful beings in more than one time and place - the perfect suspect.

Lilit

A Jewish man describes an evil place as:

"'An abode of Lilit.'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Thirty-One, p. 798.

Is "Lilit" the same as "Lilith"?

We have encountered Lilith on:

this blog here (scroll down);
Personal And Literary Reflections here;
Comics Appreciation here.

Lilith is not big in the Bible but she gets around.

A Meal In A Tent in A Desert

The Crown Princess of Montival and the Empress of Japan find a Jewish community in the desert.

They eat:

chicken soup with dumplings;

grilled lamb and emu with garlic and chilies on steamed semolina;

round risen wheat loaves, dipped in spicy and ground chickpea sauces;

mesquite bean flour, maize-meal and beans with caramelized onions and herbs;

sweet peeled prickly-pear fruit;

small honey-sweetened cakes with dates and pinon nuts -

- and drink:

herb tea;
cooled water;
sweet fruit liqueur.

SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Thirty-One, pp. 787-788.

Stirling always gives us food for thought.

Stochasticism, Not Scholasticism

The blogging process is stochastic. I have no more idea of what is to come than anyone else. (Stochasticism is a philosophical school in James Blish's The Triumph Of Time.)

While swimming here, I got what I thought were Two Good Ideas for posts. I eventually published these two posts, Class Warriors and Self-Reference, although only after thirteen other posts about Poul Anderson's Starfarers. (And, in fact, there had been an earlier Class Warrior.)

After "Self-Reference," there were, among other posts, five more about Starfarers. The fifth, "Jehovah And The Storm Goddess" (see here), compared metaphors in Starfarers and Three Worlds To Conquer, thus leading to, so far, two posts about Three Worlds..., Ganymede and Choice. And I will probably (not definitely) reread Three Worlds..., thus generating a few more posts.

And all this goes back to swimming one morning.

Choice

This back cover blurb summarizes a dramatic moment in Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer so I decided to share it before turning in. Fraser is one of those many Anderson heroes that appear just once in a single novel. Someone could compile a list of their names? I had forgotten Fraser's until I reread it.

Who are the heroes of:

Tau Zero;
After Doomsday;
The Corridors Of Time;
The Byworlder;
Twilight World;
Vault Of The Ages;
The Winter Of The World;
etc?

There is always more to learn or remember about Anderson's works.

Ganymede

Mountains like teeth;

craters like fortress walls;

long crater shadows on blue-gray plains;

the John Glenn range;

Berkeley Ice Field, sheening amber;

Mare Navium;

Dante Chasm;

the Red Mountains;

the green beacon at Aurora;

rock and ice;

Jupiter above;

unblinking stars in a black sky.

This is how the colonized Ganymede looks to the pilot of a returning moonship on pp. 7-9 of Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer. He thinks of it as home but I would not like to live there.

Jehovah And The Storm Goddess

In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer, when an Admiral addresses Ganymedean insurrectionists through the main transmitter at full amplitude, his dialogue is capitalized:

"'ATTENTION, INSURRECTIONISTS!'"
-Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 7, p. 54.

He goes on like that. This is described as "...the Jehovah voice..." (op. cit., p. 55)

In Anderson's Starfarers, when Nivala speaks through an amplifier:

"Her voice rang as loud as the voice of some ancient storm goddess."
-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), Chapter 21, p. 199.

I am certainly alone in being reminded of the Jehovah voice by the voice of the storm goddess but this coincidence has refocused my attention on Three Worlds To Conquer which might be a good book to reread. I said here that I had not found the cover of my edition on google but now I have. See image. A search of the blog shows how often I have posted about this novel before, e.g., Hardware and Echoes Of Heinlein. Or: search for the name of the Jovian character, Theor. However, there is always more to be said.

Investigators

Poul Anderson has three "Sword" titles:

a detective novel;
a historical novel;
a heroic fantasy.

How many kinds of people investigate murders? -

private consulting detectives;
police;
amateur detectives;
investigative journalists.

Poul Anderson has perhaps four private detectives, three of them science fictional, and also cameos the Great Detective in the first Time Patrol story;

Asimov's Elijah Bailey and Niven's Gil Hamilton are police;

Asimov's Wendell Urth and Black Widowers are amateurs;

Stieg Larsson's Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist whose investigation parallels that of the police.

Thus, Anderson contributes to detective fiction but (I think) to only one of the four kinds of investigators.

The Future Of Judaism

Dominic Flandry's mentor, Max Abrams, is Jewish - from the planet Dayan.

Moishe Feldman, a Montivallan merchant, is Jewish.

(Regular readers know which future histories Flandry and Montival exist in.)

In another fictional future (see here), Lazarus wanders...

In the Dune future history, we learn of "Secret Israel," concealing its existence...

In ERB's The Moon Men, the Kalkars oppress a Jewish man - and everyone else on Earth.

Any more?

The Future Of Music II

See here the Atomic Rockets website, addressing space travel issues relevant to Poul Anderson's works. David Birr informed me of this website in the combox here.

In The Future Of Music here, I mentioned Spock's musical instrument. For an image of the Vulcan lyre, see "Future Music" on Atomic Rockets here.

For a quote of my post on Anderson's "The Battle Of Brandobar," scroll down "Future Music."

One or two coincidences there, I think.