Pterosaurs

SM Stirling, The Sky People (New York, 2006).

On Venus, pterosaurs (see image) - not pterodactyls - attack the Vepaja. How many sf writers present dinosaurs surviving into the present? For example, James Blish wrote The Night Shapes. Poul Anderson has characters encountering dinosaurs but that is because they have time traveled, in "Wildcat" and "The Nest."

Marc keeps noticing oddities about the Englishman but does not draw conclusions from them. The reader has been informed that the supposed Englishman is in fact a French spy. Was the author right to inform us of this or should he instead have left us to draw conclusions from the oddities? Or is he preparing us for some other surprise? I am unwise to speculate while still reading.

Words That I Either Have Not Encountered Before Or At Least Was Unsure Of Their Meanings
tumpline (p. 138)
abatis (p. 180)
Ainu (p. 185)

A Clever Invented Word
Venus grows sham bamboo, thus shamboo.

Literature In Alternative History
Marc has often reread At The Earth's Core and A Princess Of Mars (p. 180). So have some of us but the point here is that many more people would do so if it turned out that ERB's fictional Solar System was closer to the truth.

I noticed some perhaps unintended parallels between Anderson's Aeneas and ERB's Barsoom. See here.

A New Eon V

Greg Bear, Eon (London, 2002).

While reading Greg Bear's Eon, I learn that it is the opening volume of a trilogy. While exploring inside the Stone, the characters in Eon learn that this mysterious artifact's seventh chamber extends indefinitely beyond its external length. These experiences are curiously parallel.

The explorers of the Stone find records indicating that a nuclear war will start very soon on Earth. This puts them in a position similar to that of some time travelers in Poul Anderson's short story, "Wildcat." The difference is that the Wildcatters have reason to believe that they inhabit a single immutable timeline whereas the records in the Stone come from a future in which no Stone had entered the Solar System! If the Stone originated in timeline 1 but arrived in timeline 2, then the war is not inevitable in timeline 2.

POV shift: a guard looks towards Olmy who, however, is sure that his camouflage remains effective (thus, Olmy's POV); investigating more closely and glancing at the papers which Olmy had disturbed, the guard sees symbols "...reminiscent of the matrix symbols he had studied in flight school..." (p. 120) (thus, the guard's POV). I usually notice POV shifts because there is general agreement that each continuous narrative passage, e.g., at least each chapter or, sometimes, chapter section, should be written from a single POV. A narrative that jumps between POV's does not describe anything that could have happened. Any sequence of events is experienced in its entirety by each participant from his point of view but no POV moves back and forth between the participants.

The Freedom Of The Will

"'...we have free will. The fixed-time concept need not, logically, produce fatalism...man's will is itself one of the links in the causal chain.'"
- Poul Anderson, "Wildcat" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 7-57 AT p. 32.

I agree so far although, since the speaker is a chaplain, he and I would probably disagree if we discussed free will further.

Determinism is the belief that every event is caused. Fatalism is the belief that every human effort is futile. (Futilism?) I can only know whether my efforts are futile by making an effort and making an effort makes a difference. It may be that some people are caused to make an effort and that others are not but those who do make an effort do make a difference. Otherwise, we would not have a civilization.

Determinism and "...fixed-time..." are not necessarily identical. We explain an event in three ways. It is:

(i) caused, an effect of an earlier event;
(ii) uncaused or random;
(iii) a free act.

However, I suggest that "free" means "unconstrained" but not "uncaused." And, if a free act were uncaused, then it could be classified as random. Thus, (i) and (ii) are sufficient to explain all events, including free acts.

War And Time Travel

Imagine:

you know as a historical fact that there will be a global nuclear exchange a year from now;

you can time travel.

You will not die when everyone else does because you will travel far enough into the past that you will have died of old age long before World War III. However, everyone will be dead a year from now.

I think that this would make an effective film or TV sf series: someone develops time travel, explores the future, learns of the war, returns to the present, investigates ways of preventing the war, learns that this is impossible and, at the outbreak of war, escapes into the past. Subsequent installments would show the protagonist surviving in an earlier period and exploring the last days a few more times but always returning to their new home era before the end.

I mention this idea first because I have thought of it before in relation to one of the Terminator films and secondly because the hero of Poul Anderson's "Wildcat" learns, while in the Jurassic, that, back home, the Cold War will go nuclear about a year after the current twentieth-century base date. If we knew for certain that this was going to happen, then we would at least be able to prepare inwardly for it. And time travel would help.

Transoco

HG Wells, the seminal sf writer, presents only one single solitary individual time traveler, the Time Traveler, who sets off into the future on his newly invented Time Machine. The title characters of Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" and "The Little Monster" are also individual time travelers but each is propelled into the past by an accident.

However, the first accident is an extremely rare natural occurrence whereas the second is a mishap involving regularly used time travel technology. Thus, the inventor of the Time Machine is conceptually intermediate between "The Man Who Came Early," with no time travel technology, and "The Little Monster" growing up in a civilization where the use of such technology has become routinized.

Such a civilization ought to generate organizations of time travelers. In previous posts, I have observed that Poul Anderson's time traveling characters include:

a gang of brigands;
a police force;
two sets of warring armies.

I should also have mentioned the Transtemporal Oil Company (Transoco) whose crude oil, extracted in the Jurassic, is sucked from the small temporal unit by the main projector in the twentieth century.

"Project Mastodon" by Clifford Simak is about trade between the sovereign nation of Mastodonia, established by time travelers in the Pleistocene, and the United States.

Wellsian premises; science fictional developments; Andersonian culminations.

Wildcat

I have discussed some aspects of Poul Anderson's "Wildcat," IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 7-57, previously but not recently.

Scientific knowledge includes knowledge of dinosaurs. Therefore, science fiction includes imaginative accounts of encounters with dinosaurs that are to be found in the most ingenious of locations:

a lost World;
a Land that Time Forgot;
the center of the Earth;
a Dinosaur Island;
an African valley;
other planets;
a Jurassic Park;
the Jurassic Period.

Explorers in jungles, in the Pacific, within the Earth, on other planets and in time encounter dinosaurs. Once, according to the Brigadier in Doctor Who:

"Large prehistoric reptiles began to appear in the center of London. Needless to say, there was a certain amount of panic and some loss of life. The criminal element took advantage of the situation. We have contained the criminals and the reptiles within a five mile radius of the center."

(Or words to that effect.)

Anderson's wildcatters encounter brontosaurs, tyrannosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterodactyls because they travel to the Jurassic Period just as his Time Patrolmen meet Sherlock Holmes because they travel to the Victorian period. However, the dinosaurs, although dangerous, are essentially just part of the Jurassic scenery. What mainly happens is that the wildcatters interact economically and politically with the Cold War period of the twentieth century:

"...there would not be such a shortage of oil up in the future if Transoco had not gone back and drained it in the past. A self-causing future -" (pp. 16-17)

"Hoyle's idea seemed to be right, [oil] had not been formed by rotting dinosaurs but was present from the beginning. It was the stuff which had stuck the planets together." (p. 17)

Fred Hoyle? I thought that oil was formed by rotting vegetation?