There have been more posts than usual today because this household has again been inflicted by the cold. It is to be hoped that tomorrow will see a return to Christmas preparations and to less blogging. The rest of this evening will be taken up with rereading the "Adventure" that begins when Holmes shakes Watson awake and says, "'The game is afoot.'"
The story does end with an explanation of the strange imperial policy of encouraging, then defeating, rebellions.
This empire, like the Terran Empire in the same author's Technic History, has Nova- and Supernova-class battleships.
On the planet where the rebels conceal their underground Main Base, the wind:
(There are more cover illustrations for "Inside Earth" than we can use.)
We quoted Macbeth.
Now the alien narrator quotes Hamlet:
We have found another description of the Milky Way with something against it:
"Her bow guns were dark shadows against the clotted cold silver of the Milky Way." (in IV.)
There are some good Andersonian descriptions:
"The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling rivers foam through their dales and canyons - it is a big landscape, clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence." (in II.)
Maine fishermen and artisans are:
"...at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the high windy sky." (in III.)
The alien first person narrator is physically so similar to a Terrestrial human being that he can be surgically disguised as one and his mentality is almost indistinguishable. This is one of Poul Anderson's fictional universe where "human beings" somehow already inhabit many planets.
Poul Anderson quotes and matches Shakespeare (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5) on the apparent pointlessness of a brief lifespan. Anderson's text, including the quotation, is as follows:
"He thought of Sol, Sirius, Antares, the great suns and planets of the Galaxy, and could not keep from shuddering. Drabness, deadness, colorlessness, meaninglessness! Life was a brief blind spasm of accident and catastrophe, walled in by its own shortness and the barren environment of a death-doomed cosmos. Too small to achieve any purpose, too limited even to imagine a goal, it flickered and went out into an utter dark.
I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
| L. Trotsky |
Tanith reads like the source of the wind that blows through Poul Anderson's multiverse:
"A wind blew through drifting clouds, and it seemed as if the wind had language too and spoke to the men, if they could but understand it."
Yet another sf rationalization of "immortality": whereas life elsewhere is metastable, on Tanith it arises spontaneously from complex chemistry and human bodies are free from any chemical or colloidal degradation. In Anderson's "What Shall It Profit?," shielding an organism from all radiation made it immortal.
"There was a storm outside; the cottage shook to a fury of wind and was filled with its noise and power."
"The wind roared and boomed, with a hollow voice that seemed to shout words in some unknown tongue..."
"Her voice was very small in the racket of wind."
Langdon "...would go striding through [fire-storms] like a god shouting back at the wind."
Eileen remembers in "...winter storms on Terra... a big wind driving snow against the house."
"The wind yammered, banging on the door."
"There was a new voice in the storm now, a great belling organ was crying to him to come out..."
"The storm sang outside, and he heard music and lure and enchantment."
"The wind called and called."
When Eileen is alone because Langdon has answered the call and gone out in the storm, it seems to her that all the powers of Tanith are against her:
"The wind hooted and whistled, piping down the chimney and skirling under the eaves."
"All the old forgotten powers of night and dark and Hell were abroad, whirling on the wind and slamming against the door and banging their heels on the roof."
"...the wind sang to him. It filled him, the song of the wind, the song of Tanith. He was lost in it..."
This is when he knows that he approaches allness and peace.
He experiences fire, wind, trees, a chant, living forests, dancing hills and an ancient Tanithian flying in the storm while Eileen has a miscarriage. The wind that was exultation to him was devastation to her. They leave Tanith and return to mortality.
An unusual story: I think that everyone just has to read it for themselves.
"...as a man grew older, without loss of physical and mental faculties, he found more and more within himself, an unfolding inward richness..."
I think that that can be true even within an unextended lifespan. Does the remembered younger self not sometimes seem to have been superficial? But "within" and "inner" should not imply introversion: a deepening perception or understanding of both inner and outer.
Langdon wonders whether "...the ancient natives..." had "...simply become extinct..." or "...finally seen the allness of the world and gone - elsewhere?" Like the Chereionites in the Technic History? (Or, at least, what many believed had become of the Chereionites.)
His wife, Eileen, remembers winter storms on Earth:
"'If it was around Christmas time, we'd be singing the old songs..."
A topical reference.
Outside in the storm, Langdon approaches oneness:
"He knew - in another moment he would know, he would be part of the allness and have peace within him."
Transcendent experiences, which characters can have in any kind of fiction.
Four senses:
curling purple mists and a floating face (sight);
rolling, quivering ground (touch);
rumbling, shifting strata and voices singing in the fog (sounds);
the viewpoint character, Langdon's, sense of direction (kinesthesia).
There are "three hurtling moons." ERB's Mars/Barsoom has two. Langdon is on a planet called Tanith where he sees what is described as a "temporal mirage" of a long dead city with winged inhabitants.
Tanith is an extrasolar colony where men do not age so that Langdon is another "immortal" character. In well-established sf jargon, Earth is referred to as "Terra." We encounter familiar echoes of other genre sf stories.
No doubt all will be made clear but, for me, that will have to be after a lunch break.
On Ivanhoe, the dwellers in the ruined city of Dahia remember that their imperial ancestors had ruled territories that have, for the past five thousand years, been deserts inhabited by nomads. Polesotechnic League merchants build their base within the city where they have access to a large stable work force but negotiate with the nomads of the Black Tents for trade in the valuable adir herb. Will mere nomads become rich while the Dahians who still faithfully serve the gods of an ancient empire remain weak? Never. After many centuries, the Dahians suddenly declare an interest in the deserts. Even if war destroys trade, honour will not be lost. And how can the merchants broker peace? They are powerful but (apparently) motivated only by profit, not by anything sacred - until they celebrate the birth of one who came to Earthlings to speak of peace and of much else. These merchants should have special wisdom during the season of their Prince of Peace.
Although Nicholas van Rijn is not in this story, we recognize his touch. Although he is a master profit-maker, van Rijn has his own sense of sacredness and also knows how to motivate human and non-human beings with very dissimilar value-systems. It is appropriate that, in The Technic Civilization Saga, "How To Be Ethnic In On Easy Lesson," about student James Ching, and "The Season of Forgiveness," about apprentice Juan Hernandez, are collected in a volume entitled The Van Rijn Method.
In two stories, Poul Anderson presents three different Ivanhoan societies and Ivanhoans later join the Supermetals company.
Hibernating Talwinians resemble Ganesh. Ivanhoans resemble Aslan.
It did not take long to read to the end where the last word is "...beginning."
In Lunar gravity, men can float down from a balcony and can also take flying leaps during sword fights like John Carter on Mars. Like ERB's Carter series, "The Temple..." is "sword and science" as against "sword and sorcery." All that happens is several fights until the viewpoint character is on the winning side at least for the time being. A sequel would be "The Return to Earth."
I will try to find out whether there are any more old Poul Anderson stories on line. However, we are grateful that Anderson went on to write about something other than sword fights.
I will not summarize the whole story, especially since everyone can read it online.
Tommic is either a local god or the devil responsible for the Fall.
The ruling faction within the Temple wants to restore science and to unite mankind in freedom as against slavery but:
"'If we fail, as seems all too probable, the long night will descend completely.'"
Staving off the Long Night is an Andersonian quest.
The viewpoint character, Rikard, has now changed sides twice in the corkscrew of Lunar politics. The action moves fast and we do not know where it is going except that it will probably be towards a better future.
See Shadows Lay Thick which outlines three senses on Ivanhoe but I had missed something because the concluding sentence of the immediately preceding paragraph reads:
"Wind, shrill in the lanes, bore sounds of feet, hoofs, groaning cartwheels, an occasional call or the whine of a bone flute." (p. 130)
There were four senses but I was so focused on a single paragraph that I had missed the one before it. This time, we notice first the perennial wind and secondly that those words, "shrill," "groaning" and "whine," exacerbate the unEarthly uneasiness of this extrasolar environment. Poul Anderson's detailed descriptions are inexhaustible. Rereading, we always find more.
Engineers preach sermons about:
sin;
a consequent Fall from Earth where there is green everywhere, great pools of water and enough food for everyone and where you can walk outside without a spacesuit;
a return to Earth at death;
or banishment to Mars for criminals etc.
The real history, known to few, is of a war that destroyed civilization on Earth and left the Lunar colonies isolated.
On the Moon, machines wore out, "wise men" died, cities fought with swords and spears:
"'...and finally the long night of ignorance fell on us. And that is the true story of the Fall."
And that is also the first Long Night in Poul Anderson's works. We return to roots.
On the Lunar surface, an airlock in a guarded, armoured dome leads to a tunnel down to a farm cavern with walls too far away to be seen. Overseen peasants tend green food plants in long rows of tanks. Slaves feed cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry near a slaughterhouse.
A winding ramp leads up past:
doorless lower-class compartments;
factories for the manufacture of weapons, tools, clothes etc plus ore-smelting and refining;
(the air factory, controlled by the Chief Engineer, is further up in the Temple);
a park, with grass, trees and roses, frequented by noble-class warriors, administrators and Engineers;
a level of spacious upper-class apartments with slaves and guards but gentlefolk in litters;
the richly furnished prince's home which has a high, muralled wall, spear-wielding sentries, a footman and a window high up in a larger surface dome.
Quite a place.
In which other works does Anderson show this kind of barbarism in a vacuum?
We read yet another description of the Milky Way:
"...the ghostly glory of the Milky Way..."
We will read this 1953 story to the end, not knowing what to expect, but maybe not this evening. So far, we have read to that point in the narrative where the viewpoint character has just been captured by his enemies.
It has become rare to find an as yet unread Anderson story but maybe there are others like this online.
David Falkayn's "significant adventure" on Ivanhoe was:
in a previous volume;
before he worked for Nicholas van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors;
while he was still apprenticed to Martin Schuster.
The previous "glimpse into a major human faith" was:
earlier in the Earth Book;
did not feature any continuing characters;
was set on the planet Avalon (not yet named);
involved a conflict of practice between Christianity and the Ythrian New Faith;
and involved a Christian character from the planet, Aeneas, which appears later in the Technic History.
When I find a passage in Conan Doyle that is almost word for word as we would have read it in Poul Anderson, I wonder whether Anderson had picked up this way of writing from Conan Doyle.
First, the scene setting:
"Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat fiercely against the windows." (p. 233)
But that wind goes further and seems to comment on the dialogue. While the young detective, Stanley Hopkins, recounts his baffling murder case to Holmes and Watson:
"...three massive manuscript volumes...," containing Holmes' and Watson's work for 1894, include:
"...the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker." (ibid.);
"...an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow." (ibid.);
"The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case..." (ibid.);
"...the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin..." (ibid.);
"...the episode of Yoxley Old Place..." (ibid.)
Although "Each of these would furnish a narrative...," (ibid.) Watson recounts only the sixth of these listed cases. Poul Anderson recounts the second and locates it accurately in 1894. We appreciate two intersecting series.
Poul Anderson, "The Season of Forgiveness" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), pp. 126-139.
In the combox for The Solutions And A Culmination, I explained why I place so much emphasis on Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate. This omnibus collection includes the first appearances of Sandra Tamarin, Coya Conyon, Merseians and Baburites. These two women and two extrasolar species are important elements in the culminating Polesotechnic League novel, Mirkheim. The Earth Book really is a concentrated essence of the Technic History.The Earth Book also collects "The Season of Forgiveness," which reuses the planet Ivanhoe, first introduced in the first David Falkayn story in The Trouble Twisters. Since "The Season..." is Anderson's Christmas story, it will be appropriate to reread it next but there is no hurry.
The opening paragraphs present a good overview of how the Polesotechnic League operates over long interstellar distances. Ivanhoe is:
"...the chill planet of a red dwarf star, away off in the Pleiades region, where half a dozen humans laired in the ruins of a city which had been great five thousand years ago, and everywhere else reached wilderness." (p. 127)
The planet:
"...had had no more than a supply depot for possible distressed spacecraft." (p. 128)
We read about that in the Falkayn story. Since then, an investigator has found the valuable herb adir in deserts on another continent. Master Trader Thomas Overbeck's team must persuade Ivanhoans to harvest adir in exchange for trade goods, like the deal on Suleiman in the previous story where the Baburites had intervened. Human traders will not come to a permanent base without their families and will not stay long if the families become unhappy so Apprentice Juan Hernandez's plan to welcome children with a Christmas party will make a good start. We read about the by now familiar League but not about any familiar characters. Known space is big.
The concluding chapters reminded me of James Blish's The Star Dwellers in which teenagers make a treaty between Earth and powerful aliens. Young protagonists interact with other species in some of Poul Anderson's Technic History instalments.
The wind plays tricks which remind us of its frequent role in Anderson's works:
Poul Anderson wrote a sequel to both, A Midsummer Tempest, and quoted:
Alexei Panshin distinguishes:
"...between extrapolation and speculation." (VII., p. 160)
- by which he means:
"In Twilight World, the remnants of the United States and Canada merge as the North American Union..."
Both Rapid Technological Advances And Geopolitics and Alaric Wayne II refer to that same North American Union.
In North American Future History, the US and Canada amalgamate as the North American Federation.
In The Maurai Period, there is a North West Union.
In Pun And Gun, a North American Intelligence officer interrogates a rebel asterite.
In Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, the North American Union is one part of Earth which is the leading planet in the Federated Community of Civilizations, usually referred to as the Federation.
Again, we find terminologies common to different fictional futures.
While searching for the North America in Tales Of The Flying Mountains, we find yet another description of the Milky Way:
The issue recurs in Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, where the hero of a series of juvenile novels and of a TV puppet show:
In Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, aliens stay in special suites at Hotel Universal on Earth and one of them is entertained by a juggler at the Club Cosmic.
It is after midnight on this part of Earth and I am trying to get to bed here but I keep reading a bit more and finding yet another parallel between fictional futures but this will have to be the last one until some time tomorrow. I mean later today.
Until then, go with God, as they say in James Blish's The Triumph Of Time, or at least with His sense of humour.
It seems that an omniscient narrator recounts the course and consequences of the Council of Hiawatha on pp. 138-143 of Chapter IX in:
Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March, 2011), pp. 1-291.
The account is not part of the dialogue of any of the characters and there is no indication within the text that the information is imparted from any particular perspective within subsequent history. It is as objectively factual as the author can make it - I think. On the other hand, there is an element of interpretation and commentary as well as of fictional "fact." When Home Companies magnates gain political power within the Solar Commonwealth, the narrator states that the Commonwealth has become:
"...the corporate state." (p. 142)
- a phrase that has connotations as well as denotations!
But it would be hard to eliminate that level of commentary. In any case, it is not van Rijn or any other actor in the plot of the novel that tells readers about Hiawatha. The passage is an extended interruption to a conversation between van Rijn and Bayard Story.
There might be more purely impersonal and factual narration in the opening passage of the Prologue which describes a supernova 500,000 years ago, long before any human social interactions? However, in this case, a plural first person pronoun comes on-stage:
"There may have been lesser worlds and moons as well; we cannot now say. We simply know that the giant stars rarely have attendants..." (p. 1)
This narrator is not omniscient and acknowledges some limits to his knowledge but is a scientifically informed individual living within Technic civilization and addressing some of his own contemporaries.
Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast has a narrator who not only recounts the points of view of different individual characters but also informs us of the fact that an extrasolar crustacean species as yet unknown to humanity will be long dead eleven thousand years hence when Terrestrials eventually reach that planet: an unprecedented degree of prescience in any narrator!
Adzel is described in every story where he appears. With Jim Ching as narrator, the description is perhaps more telegrammic than usual:
"...four hoofed legs supporting a spike-backed, green-scaled, golden-bellied body and tail; torso, with arms in proportion, rising two meters to a crocodilian face, fangs, rubbery lips, bony ears, wistful brown eyes -" (p. 64)
In Senses And Scenes, we paraphrased Alexei Panshin by writing:
"Vance, Bradbury and Anderson were sensual; Heinlein was functional."
What Panshin wrote, more precisely, was that Heinlein tells us not what men or machines look like but what they do, not how a monster appears to human beings but whether it attacks them. Lummox in The Star Beast lumbers or gallops on eight legs and gobbles a Buick and a mastiff but we get our idea of what his whole body looks like only from cover images or from the interior illustrations in the Scribner edition. We are not given any visual description like Anderson's repeated accounts of Wodenites, Cynthians, Ythrians, Merseians etc.
In Poul Anderson's "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," Jim Ching, friend of the alien student, Adzel, flies his own aircar and spends time with Betty Riefenstahl.
In Robert Heinlein's The Star Beast, John Thomas Stuart, owner of the alien pet, Lummox, flies with a harness copter and spends time with Betty Sorensen.
Minor coincidences aside, both stories occupy the same territory - the daily life of the future: personal flight; a friend or a pet from off-planet.
Jim sits tests for the Academy, hoping to become a spaceman. John Thomas and his Betty disagree about whether he should attend Western Tech or State U. with her.
I will shortly be driven in a groundcar to a meeting in Morecambe but thought that, before departing, it was worth recording this Heinlein-Anderson textual parallel. More will come.
Regular inter-species contact due to FTL travel begins very early in Poul Anderson's Technic History. The first collection in this future history series was entitled Trader To The Stars. The third story to be collected in his The Earth Book Of Stormgate features a giant quadrupedal Wodenite studying planetology on Earth.
Some of Heinlein's Scribner Juveniles do show routine interstellar inter-species relations, most notably perhaps The Star Beast which begins with the narrative point of view of a large intelligent extraterrestrial that is being kept as a pet in a backyard on Earth. This organism, Lummox, resembles Anderson's Wodenite, Adzel, but with more legs and eyes.
Since starting to write this post, I have checked among a few Heinlein titles on a bookshelf upstairs and have been somewhat astonished to find a copy of The Star Beast. Do I want to reread this juvenile novel after all these years to make a comparison with Poul Anderson? I am reluctant to reread any sf from that long ago. Damon Knight gave The Star Beast the highest praise by saying that it was worth rereading but added a damning comment on much sf:
When Jim and Betty visit Adzel, their problems are almost over. John Riefenstahl calls on Adzel's holvid phone to inform his daughter that the Festival of Man board has vetoed all his most recent proposals. When Adzel moves into scanner range, Riefenstahl is startled because, as he puts it, he had been thinking of Wagner and now sees Fafner. Jim and Betty, who have just been realizing that Adzel resembles a Chinese dragon, make eye contact and yell. Everything has come together. That was the moment of realization. All that remains is the execution, which requires two and a half more pages. This is an extremely compact problem story, Heinleinian in theme? - problem-solving young protagonists aiming for the interstellar frontier. The title character of Starman Jones makes it to the stars and so does Jim Ching.
I will quote Panshin quoting Heinlein, then relate this to Anderson.
Points made by Heinlein and accepted as largely true by Panshin:
sf is the most difficult kind of prose to write because it requires both a body of knowledge and an amount of directed imagination;
therefore, most sf is not good as literature and is not even entertaining;
but it is important because it addresses the future;
and, because sf deals with change, it is the only fiction that can interpret the world that we live in.
Relevance to Poul Anderson:
Anderson had a vast body of knowledge and a great deal of directed imagination;
his sf is good as literature and highly entertaining;
he addressed the future and change and interpreted social changes.
Thus, Heinlein identified the obstacles to good sf but Anderson overcame them.
Alexei Panshin refers to a Poul Anderson novel by its title alone without naming the author. He, Panshin, is discussing the difference between romantic and realistic fiction, which I do not want to get into here. For this post alone, let us just note that Panshin characterizes "Romance" as "life-not-as-experienced" and "Realism" as "life-as-experienced" (p. 136) and, on this basis, says that speculative fiction is romantic and only relatively realistic. He then lists three pairs of titles, saying that regular sf readers will see some difference between the two works in each pair whereas non-readers of sf will not. The pairs are:
The Dragon In The Sea and The Weapon Shops Of Isher;
"The Cold Equations" and Captain Future;
The Enemy Stars and The Dying Earth.
We on this blog recognize an Anderson title. We also recognize that, in each pair, the first item is "realistic" whereas the second is "romantic." This is a very obscure reference to Anderson and I spotted it only when looking for something else.
