Road Reflections On Features Of Future Histories

While driving, we can remember and reflect but not read - although, of course, someone with an audio-book can listen. However, my reflections of today have merely reproduced the contents of earlier posts about Robert Heinlein's Future History and Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization.

Pyramids
A Heinlein-model future history has a pyramidal structure, i.e., earlier installments generate a base of background information on which the author then constructs his later installments. Thus, Methusaleh's Children, the fourth volume of Heinlein's Future History, refers to quite a lot:

Pinero the Charlatan
Road Cities
DD Harriman
Luna City
the Venerians
"The Green Hills of Earth"
the Prophets
the revolutionary Cabal
the Covenant
Coventry
Andrew Libby
the generation ship, the Vanguard

This novel is effectively the culmination of the History since the fifth and final volume, Orphans Of The Sky, recounting the fate of the lost Vanguard, is merely a coda.

In one story of Anderson's Technic History, Nicholas van Rijn forms his first trade pioneer crew, led by David Falkayn and including the Wodenite, Adzel. However, "before" this story, at least in terms of fictional chronology:

van Rijn had appeared in five stories and one novel;
Falkayn had appeared in two stories, first as an apprentice on Ivanhoe, then as a journeyman in van Rijn's company;
Adzel had appeared in one story;
one story recounted later events on Ivanhoe;
three stories had preceded any of these continuing characters.

Thus, the first trader team story was built on a base of thirteen earlier works. It in turn is followed by four works featuring the team and three set on a planet colonized by Falkayn. Both this planet and the flying species that jointly colonizes it with Falkayn's human beings were introduced in earlier stories. Thus, Anderson constructs a perfect pyramid.

Items About Falkayn

Today was the return journey from Staffordshire to Lancaster so there has been little time or energy for blogging. Tomorrow, there will be a funeral in the morning and afternoon and a small sf group gathering in the evening.

In "The Three-Cornered Wheel," Falkayn alone realizes that a shape other than a circle can be used to move objects, although I still do not fully understand the explanation, but surely some of his colleagues would have realized the same or at least would have understood his interrupted explanation?

In "A Sun Invisible," he ingeniously deduces the location and explanation of a planetary system and also devises a new way to send a message in secret: jumping his ship in and out of hyperspace in League code. In "The Trouble Twisters," he realizes how to contact Muddlehead, his ship's computer, even though he and his colleagues have lost their radio transmitters. In this last case, we have a standard example of an Anderson hero faced with a problem suddenly realizing the solution:

"If we could have called the ship -'
"And then his mind rocked. He stumbled back and sat down on the bed.'"
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 191.

Recognizing the signs, we know what this means: he has suddenly realized how to call the ship. In "A Sun Invisible," the realization was gentler:

"He woke some hours later, and there was his solution. For a while he lay staring at the overhead, awed by his genius."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2010), p. 307.

Usually our hero is fully awake when his genius operates!

A novel is a long prose fiction. My rule of thumb for novel length is 100+ pages. Thus, I would count "The Trouble Twisters," stretching from p. 77 to p. 208 of David Falkayn: Star Trader as a novel. However, it is undeniably shorter than Satan's World (pp. 329-598), which was originally published as a novel.

League training must include guidance in how to function effectively when facing a being whose body can have any size or shape. (For previous discussion of this issue, see here.) In "A Sun Invisible," Falkayn meets a slim, furry tyrannosaur with a large, iridescent dorsal fin and a tapir-snouted, bat-wing-eared humanoid with cilia on his head and tendrils above his eyes. Falkayn walks into an office and converses with these individuals as easily as if they had been human beings. Most of us would just run.

I am rereading the van Rijn story, "Hiding Place," which is based on the idea of diverse body shapes, and will post about it shortly, although it will take some time to list the organisms involved.

More On Ikrananka

"Tidal action has forced one hemisphere of the small, eccentrically orbiting, librating planet Ikrananka to face its red dwarf sun but such slow rotation generates a weak magnetic field so that the planet retains an atmosphere although most of its water has frozen on the cold side making the warm side a slowly deteriorating desert whose inhabitants, struggling for survival in their season-less, rhythm-less environment, regard nature as hostile, believing in demons but not in gods, whereas dwellers on the edge of the Twilight Zone with rain, snow, day, night and constellations, more conventionally believe in an annually dying and rising god and a single devil whose power can be neutralized. The latter are easier to trade with."
-copied from "Unusual Heavenly Bodies" (see here). 

Fr Axor might see evidence for his Universal Incarnation here? 

"Rangakora [in the Twilight Zone] had a perfectly standard polytheistic religion, with gods that wanted sacrifice and flattery but were essentially benevolent. The only major figure of evil was he who had slain Zuriat the Bright, and Zuriat was reborn annually while the other gods kept the bad one at bay."
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 175.

Anderson effortlessly sketches an alien equivalent of familiar Terrestrial myths. The Ikranankans who lack this "...perfectly standard polytheistic religion..." are harder to deal with because their pessimistic belief makes them paranoid, suspicious of each other and certainly of any newcomers. Adzel insists that acceptance of missionaries be included in the trade deal:

"The Katandarans would surely leap at Buddhism, which was infinitely more comfortable than their own demonology. Together with what scientific knowledge trickled down to them, the religion would wean them from their hostility complex. Result: a stable culture with which Nicholas van Rijn could do business." (p. 205)

A result acceptable to Adzel and van Rijn for completely different, indeed opposite, reasons.

Other details: 

Anderson cleverly has the Ikranankans ride not galloping quadrupeds but leaping bipeds;
Falkayn, not yet knowing of the human community on Ikrananka, cannot believe his eyes when he sees a scene from an sf magazine cover - a young woman pursued on zandara-back by a band of lance- and saber-armed beaked natives.

What Is To Be Got From Ikrananka

At least two new intoxicants;
several antibiotics;
potential spices;
spectacular furs;
other goods to be identified;
a civilization to trade with.

Robots brought pictures and samples so the trader team investigates but, of course, must solve problems with the natives first.

On T'Kela, the carnivorous dominant species could not understand charity but could understand profit-making whereas, on Ivanhoe, the idealistic dominant species could not understand mere profit-making and had to be shown that human beings also valued something transcendent. Fortunately, some of the traders celebrate Christmas.

What is the problem on Ikrananka? I am about to reread "The Trouble Twisters" to remind myself.