Planha And Eriau

Fantasy and science fiction feature characters speaking languages that are unknown to us:

Tolkien has Elvish, Orcish etc;

CS Lewis tells us a few words of Solar, e.g., hnau and eldil;

some Star Trek fans have invented Klingon;

the kzinti "Hero's Tongue" has unusual consonant combinations like "Kdapt," "kzin" and "sthondat";

Poul Anderson does not tell us any Temporal or Anglic but does impart a few words of Planha and Eriau;

Planha-speaking Ythrians live in choths whose Wyvans can call Oherran;

Olaf Magnusson knows Eriau and two other major Merseian languages;

Max Abrams, introduced to Brechdan Ironrede, responds in fluent, accented Eriau, "'The Hand of the Vach Ynvory is my shield...'" (Young Flandry, p. 94);

when Flandry and Tachwyr meet, Flandry inquires about Tachwyr's wives and children in polite Eriau and Tachwyr must ask whether Flandry is still a bachelor in Anglic because the Eriau equivalent would be an insult.

A Spiritual Spectrum

We encounter not only alternative histories but also alternative metaphysics:

in Poul Anderson's fantasies, gods are real;

in Anderson's hard sf, as in our experience, supernatural beings are believed in by some though not by others and theological issues are addressed;

in SM Stirling's Angrezi Raj, Christian and Hindu theologies are synthesized and offerings are made to a fictional goddess created for a cinema film (so what is the status of "belief"?);

in CS Lewis' uniquely theological sf -

- hnau are rational animals like Terrestrials, three Martian species and Venerians;
eldila are immortal inorganic intelligences inhabiting space, not planets, and resembling beams of light;
Maleldil is a mysterious being who:

created the universe;
commands all eldila except the rebels confined to the Terrestrial atmosphere;
was born as a hnau in Thulcandra (Earth);
speaks to Elwin Ransom when the latter is in Perelandra (Venus).

To summarize:

pagan deities as a fictional premise;
deities believed to exist by some, i.e., our experience;
a fiction-faith blend;
Christianity imaginatively restated.

Getting To Grips With Hell

Poul Anderson wrote an imaginative account of Hell, thus contributing to a long literary tradition. Contemplating "Hell" means both reflecting on moral choices and envisaging a postmortem realm. In my opinion, the summit of this combination is CS Lewis' The Great Divorce. Lewis imaginatively restated Christianity twice, in Narnia and Ransom, and also re-imagined the hereafter.

I have bought but not yet read Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It is the sequel to their, not Dante's, Inferno, described by Poul Anderson as "A dazzling tour de force" whereas Thomas M Disch told me that it was rubbish compared with the original.

Turning from future histories to the supposed future life, by reading Niven & Pournelle's sequel, I expect to learn something about theological speculations and also maybe to make comparisons with works by Anderson, Blish, Heinlein, Gaiman, Lewis etc.

Barrier

I have been comparing Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium History to Poul Anderson's Technic History and to relevant works by Robert Heinlein and James Blish. So far, I have:

reread The Mote In God's Eye (with Larry Niven) although not agreed with Heinlein about it;

enjoyed rereading King David's Spaceship, which is recommended by Anderson;

appreciated the Prologue of The Mercenary and the future politics in the opening chapters.

However, I have encountered a barrier. The narrative suddenly jumps to Falkenberg, now a mercenary, on a colony planet with complicated social problems that I have not been able fully to engage with or get involved in. Pournelle is creating a political conflict so that Falkenberg will be able to apply military force to it. But, as CS Lewis and Brian Aldiss both said in different ways (see here), we do not go to other planets to find "The same old stuff we left behind..."

I remember a previous reading of The Mercenary and have also googled here and here. From these sources, I gather that:

the Falkenberg series has been collected and re-collected and now comprises a single compilation co-written by SM Stirling;

there are Patriotic Wars, Formation Wars, Secession Wars and a sub-series called "War World," which is longer and more complicated than I had realized;

the selling of military services becomes a major part of the interstellar economy;

unemployed populations make unreasonable demands on resources;

the view is expressed that such populations should be left to sink or swim;

Falkenberg orders a massacre.

I believe that the employed in an industrial/technological society can redirect production and resources away from warfare towards welfare which would mean the elimination of poverty whereas "Welfare" has come to mean its perpetuation and institutionalization! I might find myself too out of sync with the assumptions and ethos of Falkenberg and his colleagues to continue reading their history.

A (Short) Literary Detour

I have just been side-tracked onto rereading a work of theology by CS Lewis. However, this is not such a long detour as it may appear.

(i) Letters To Malcolm is a series of fictional letters, thus a work of fiction. Fictional events concerning Malcolm's family occur in the background.

(ii) Lewis discusses philosophical and cosmological issues.

(iii) He speculates about bodily resurrection and Heaven, thus connecting with several works of fantasy by American sf writers. See here and here.

(iv) This is the same CS Lewis who, as first person narrator, is a minor character in the Ransom Trilogy, which is his reply to the major science fiction works of HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon.

(v) Poul Anderson is a Wellsian and Stapledonian sf writer whereas Lewis is both anti-Wellsian and anti-Stapledonian.

(vi) We need to read both sides of the argument, especially since both sides are written well. Lewis and Anderson share the ability to present sympathetic treatments of characters with whom they disagree morally and philosophically.

Future Historians And Hell

CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy is Lewis' reply to the British future historians, Wells and Stapledon, whereas his The Great Divorce is an imaginative account of Hell. The Trilogy and the ...Divorce are connected because Lewis as first person narrator knows Ransom and dreams the ...Divorce which refers, indirectly, to the Trilogy.

In Lewis' "The Dark Tower," Ransom, Lewis and others view the mysterious "Dark Tower" through a chronoscope. When they discuss whether the tower is in the past or the future, Ransom suggests that it might be in the future for any of them because he thinks that it is in hell. Thus, Lewis links the ideas of future history and of the hereafter as a "'...future life...'"
-CS Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), p. 166.

Here is a linear sequence of American future historians:

Robert Heinlein
James Blish
Poul Anderson
Larry Niven
Jerry Pournelle

- and here is a list of American sf writers who have presented imaginative accounts of Hell:

Heinlein
Blish
Anderson
Niven and Pournelle

I discuss Anderson's Hell here. I am informed that The Great Divorce influenced Niven and Pournelle so I will read their Escape From Hell with interest, having previously read their Inferno.

Cold

In James Blish's Cities In Flight future history, the "Cold Peace" of 2022 means that the Cold War has ceased to be a war because, in this timeline, the US has become a bureaucratic state and has merged with the USSR.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic future history, the "Cold Victory" of 2180 means that a victory has been won but that the contested issues remain unresolved.

In CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy, Volume III, "the cold marriages" occur when Selenities lie with warm, moving images of each other.

In Ian Fleming's Moonraker, when James Bond makes love to three married women with "cold passion," I have no idea what Fleming means by this.

So there you have it. Four authors play with language by inserting the adjective, "cold," where we do not expect it. If there was a Cold War in the twentieth century, can there be a Cold Peace in the twenty first century or a Cold Victory in the twenty second? Maybe time will tell.

In real history, World Wars I and II were followed not by World War III but by nuclear deterrence, therefore Cold War, then by only one super power, therefore War on Terror. War, not Peace, endures - and Blish's "Cold Peace" would be a 1984 nightmare - indeed, "thought police" are mentioned.

Boxed Sets

Two, three or at most four omnibus volumes might be packaged as a boxed set. I envisage:

Two-Volume Sets
Heinlein's Future History
Anderson's Psychotechnic History
Anderson's Time Patrol Series

Three-Volume Sets
Doyle's Holmes
Fleming's Bond
Anderson's Technic History Vols I-III

Four-Volume Sets
Blish's Major Works
Anderson's Technic History Vols IV-VII

James Blish's major works, each to be collected in one volume, are Cities In Flight, The Seedling Stars, the "Haertel Scholium" and After Such Knowledge.

This would be a convenient way to contemplate several comparable or connected works. The Bond series is structurally similar to the Holmes series which connects with the Time Patrol.

History is a major feature of these works. Every novel is set in a particular period. Bond is becoming as dated as Holmes. In the works listed here, Heinlein, Anderson and Blish present fictitious histories. Additionally, Anderson presents historical science fiction in the Time Patrol series and Blish presents historical fiction in Volume I of After Such Knowledge. Both Anderson and Blish wrote historical fiction. Blish's output is much smaller than Anderson's but his single historical novel, Doctor Mirabilis, focuses on Roger Bacon, the founder of scientific method, and thus is a conceptual prequel to Frankenstein, the first science fiction novel.

Other works are also relevant. CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy is a partial precursor of After Such Knowledge and indeed could be collected in one volume with a few shorter works by Lewis: see here. Before Lewis and Blish were the major works of Stapledon and Wells which do not lend themselves as easily to omnibus collection although there was a one-volume edition of Stapledon's two Last Men novels.

The Day After Tomorrow

Futuristic sf includes "day after tomorrow" scenarios where everything is as it is now but then one thing changes. CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, published 1945 but set "after the War," is in this category as is Poul Anderson's Brain Wave. HG Wells' Time Traveler tells his dinner guests that that morning he had set off on his Time Machine and passed through "tomorrow." Despite spending several days in the future, he has returned to the day of his departure so that he still has the same "tomorrow."

I mention all this here because today and tomorrow I will be visiting a friend in Birmingham (see image) and will be away from my lap top. Thank you all for over 320 page views so far today with the best part of an hour still to go. I managed to post a lot about Anderson's The People Of The Wind yesterday. A return to that fictitious world, and in such detail, was completely unplanned and unpredicted. Anderson's texts are inexhaustible. All that is exhausted, temporarily, is my ability to focus on new aspects of a particular text.

I do not know what will come next but something will.

Addendum: 330 page views by the end of the day.

We Are Not Alone

A guy I know:

researches local history;

shows tourists around Lancaster Castle (see image);

has read Poul Anderson with pleasure;

specifically mentioned Tau Zero;

was disappointed on rereading Asimov later in life;

also mentioned CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy and DC superhero comics;

knew some people at Lancaster University who, moving a glass between letters on a table, came across the name "Eric Blood-Axe," allegedly for the first time, and were told by the glass that Eric/Eiric is buried in a nearby town whereas Anderson has him lying where he fell at Stainmore.

Just another few facets of an always surprising universe, in the immortal words of Mainwethering of the Time Patrol.

Alien Initiations?

See here.

The two Jesuits ask whether we would accept extraterrestrial baptism or equivalent. What do our representative sf writers say?

CS Lewis' Martians and Venerians live in direct contact with Maleldil (the Solar word for "God"), do not practice initiations and, in any case, have no regular contact with Terrestrials. Blish's Lithians are entirely rational and secular.

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization:

the Ythrian Old Faith is polytheist with practices involving drug use and bloody sacrifices;

in the New Faith, God the Hunter offers not salvation in a hereafter but a good fight at death;

the Merseian deity is entirely transcendent and favors the Race above all other rational species.

Transcendence is indicated by the phrase "the God" as opposed to letting the word for a god become a personal name. Because of his upbringing, Olaf Magnusson is a Merseian ideologically if not biologically. An Avalonian human being who joins a choth might honorably embrace the New Faith although it is incompatible with any Terrestrial religion whereas the Merseian allegience is bad news, a false gospel.

Religion In SF

See here and here.

CS Lewis' aliens are sinless and in touch with God.
James Blish's Lithians are sinless without reference to God.
Poul Anderson's many aliens are sinful; some are religious.

Observations:

(i) These three authors seem to cover all the possibilities?

(ii) Anderson of course presents a more complex picture. Ythrian and Merseian monotheisms differ from each other and also from Terrestrial versions. Physical conditions on much of Ikrananka generate an entirely negative view of supernatural entities. Van Rijn's company will find it easier to trade with those Ikranankans whose environment enables them to formulate more familiar beliefs in death and resurrection and in a deity who is able to overcome a demon. Two Wodenites convert to Terrestrial religions. The one who becomes a Jerusalem Catholic priest seeks not a sinless race but an extraterrestrial Incarnation - and we would like to know more about this quest.

Consolmagno and Mueller, writing not fiction but popular science and theology, will have to consider every possibility or so I imagine, not having read very far into the relevant chapter yet. I think that I am familiar with all the possibilities but will be interested to learn whether they present anything new.

Later: The authors present a wide-ranging discussion and find the right answer to their question. These are the kinds of thoughts that Anderson's Fr Axor would be thinking while traveling among human beings and other aliens.

Yet To Come

See here for the alpha timeline, here for the beta timeline and here for both. I will search the blog again for any other earlier descriptions of these timelines and will also reread the relevant passages in Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time.

Meanwhile, Sean M Brooks has sent me a copy of Guy Consolmagno SJ and Paul Mueller SJ, Would You Baptize An Extraterrestrial? (New York, 2014). This book addresses six cosmological/theological conundra, including the title question. I will read this work for any light that it might throw on the theological issues raised in four works of sf:

The Ransom Trilogy by CS Lewis;
A Case Of Conscience by James Blish;
"The Problem of Pain" by Poul Anderson;
The Game Of Empire by Poul Anderson.

Poul Anderson is to be appreciated both in his own right and in relation to other such sf writers. Both the Ransom Trilogy, Volume III, and Anderson's The Shield Of Time refer to Frederick Barbarossa (Fred Red Beard) (see image).

Literary Accounts Of War

My preferred reading is not war fiction but imaginative fiction, ancient myths or modern sf. However, imaginative fictioneers also describe wars. European literature starts with Homer. A long passage in the Iliad describes the fighting back and forth in front of Troy. CS Lewis wrote of his World War I experience:

"One imaginative moment seems now to matter more than the realities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard - so far from me that it 'whined' like a journalist's or a peacetime poet's bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, 'This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.'"
-CS Lewis, Surprised By Joy (London, 1964), pp. 157-158)

And in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, Krishna teaches Arjuna in a chariot between two armies before the slaughter begins.

In Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind and Ensign Flandry, I thoroughly enjoyed the accounts of battles in space. Now that I am reading Marching Through Georgia by SM Stirling, it is enjoyable to read about Draka forces attacking Germans though not about the Draka napalming noncombatants and shooting prisoners. However, we are not being asked to approve of the latter. We are simply learning what the Draka are like.

We, or at least I, also hope that such large scale slaughter and destruction can be prevented from recurring in future.

Miniaturization

I have made two interesting discoveries about Time Patrol timecycles. First, they use post-Arabic numerals on their time settings. Secondly, on arrival, a timecycle has zero dimensions but expands rapidly to its destination volume, displacing air molecules and small objects, settling beside a big object or above ground if it had been aimed at a basement that no longer exists. So could a cycle be programmed to stop at a smaller destination volume, thus achieving the sf concept of miniaturization?

There are miniature superheroes, including Ant-Man;
 
James Blish's character, Gordon Arpe, leads an expedition to the microcosm;

Isaac Asimov novelized the film Fantastic Voyage, about a submarine in a blood-stream, then wrote an original novel on the same theme;

CS Lewis, having learned about travel by size change from "scientifictionists," used it as his means of traveling from the city of Hell to the foothills of Heaven in The Great Divorce. (Lewis' point is that Heaven is as vast as God and creation whereas Hell is as small as the introverted soul.)

In his description of a timecycle's arrival, Anderson briefly hints at an idea that could have been another novel.

The Wind II

CS Lewis' spiritual autobiography, Surprised By Joy (London, 1964), has this quotation from Wordsworth on its title page:

"Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind."

(That second clause puts rather a different meaning on the line.)

Poul Anderson's "The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth" begins:

"Wind gusted out of twilight as the door opened." (Time Patrol, p. 333)

Carl's dealings with his fourth century Goths end thus:

"He strode through the shadows, out the door, into the rain and the wind." (p. 459)

Earlier, Carl had made a full sensory recording of his meeting with the historical figure, Ulfilas. When he views the recording, he thinks:

"Was it really me looming over him, lean, gray, cloaked, doomed and resigned to foreknowledge - yon figure out of darkness and the wind?" (p. 403)

I think that, in these three passages, the wind signifies the hostile elements of Northern Europe, also human survival despite their hostility. The Wanderer strides through the darkness, rain and wind; they do not overcome him.

However, when he offers to help the Goths against the Vandals but adds that, "'...it must be in my own way...'" (p. 368):

"Nobody cheered. A sound like the wind passed down the shadowy length of the hall." (ibid.)

There is no human response. Instead, something wordless and non-human passes through the hall. The Goths experience the presence of Wodan.

Fine-Tuning Mars Fiction

Recently, I divided science fiction about Mars into three periods:

Old or pre-Mariner;
New or post-Mariner;
retro -

- and stated that Poul Anderson's fictional versions of Mars were New. But the dates do not bear this out. However, I now think that Old Mars had two phases:

the earliest, ERBian, idea of a humanly habitable and inhabited Mars, usually the setting for sword fights although Ray Bradbury and CS Lewis changed that;

a later recognition that Mars is not humanly habitable combined with the idea that it may nevertheless be inhabited.

Anderson's Mars fiction is not New but Old, later phase. Post-Mariner versions of Mars are less likely to be inhabited although Larry Niven's Martians are concealed under the sand. James Blish's Welcome To Mars, published as Mariner IV approached Mars, correctly predicted craters and explained "canals" as impact marks radiating from the craters.

The two retro-Mars volumes that I know are In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings by SM Stirling and Old Mars edited by GRR Martin and Gardner Dozois although another possible candidate for retro status is Michael Moorcock's Mars trilogy which uses time travel to place its hero on an ERB-inspired Mars.

Fictions Within Fictions

Adventure fiction sometimes refers to adventure fiction. There are two ways to do this:

(i) one fictional character referring to another, e.g., James Bond saying that he likes Nero Wolfe (Bond does say this);

(ii) fictions within the fiction.

(i) Usually, when a fictional character refers to, e.g., Sherlock Holmes, we understand that Holmes is as fictional to the character referring to him as he is to us. There are exceptions. For example, Holmes is real in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series and in CS Lewis' Narnia Chronicles.

In SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson King, an archaeologist is unhappy when his exploits on Mars begin to resemble those of a certain whip-wielding cinematic archaeologist and, when held captive, he reflects that adventure fiction heroes locked in dungeons always escaped instead of having to be rescued...

(ii) Fictional characters can also refer to fictions that exist in their world but not in ours. Flandry says:

"'...an undertaking such as [Magnusson's] would be the most audacious ever chronicled outside of cloak-and-blaster fiction.'" -Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 450-451.

In a completer History of Technic Civilization, we would like to read:

one of their cloak-and-blaster novels;
media coverage of the Mirkheim crisis;
one of Andrei Simich's poems about a hero of Dennitza;
and a lot more.

Shakespeare presents more than one "play within the play." In Alan Moore's Watchmen, a comic about superheroes, a boy reads a pirate comic and we read it over his shoulder, becoming as involved with the fiction within the fiction as we are with the fiction. In our world, i.e., on Earth Real, Watchmen was dramatized as a feature film and the comic within the comic was dramatized as a short animated film. Following these Shakespearean and Moorean precedents, Anderson might have presented a cloak-and-blaster novel to be derided by Flandry for its inaccuracies and implausibilities.

Busy long weekend starting tomorrow so maybe less posts.

CS Lewis And Poul Anderson

I am very impressed with the way CS Lewis, literary scholar and friend of JRR Tolkien, put himself on the map of science fiction. In any discussion of interplanetary or philosophical fiction, he is up there with Wells etc. See recent posts.

But how many authors have in any way followed after Lewis? I can think of three:

James Blish, post-Lewis fantasy and sf in After Such Knowledge;
Philip Pullman, anti-Lewis juvenile fantasy, His Dark Materials;
Poul Anderson, characters pondering the Problem of Pain and the Universal Incarnation in hard sf contexts.

However, it is the hard sf contexts that make the difference. Lewis' projection of anti-Darwinian Biblical fundamentalism onto Venus is impossible! If and when we detect extraterrestrial organisms, we expect them to be composed of energized complex molecules that had changed randomly until one of them became self-replicating. Thus, we expect life in any part of the universe to be another instance of temporary and local negative entropy, neither immortal nor Paradisal.

Lewis' Ransom Trilogy confines sin and error to this side of the lunar orbit. Of course, that is fiction but Lewis did believe that any extrasolar races would not necessarily be Fallen and therefore could be like the perfect and immortal Venerians in his Perelandra. Like hard sf writers in general and Anderson in particular, I expect extrasolar intelligences to be either nonexistent or in a state that Lewis would regard as "Fallen."

Some day someone is going to comment that I repeat myself on this blog. However, it happens over a period of time and these statements always feel fresh to me when I articulate them. The blog does go somewhere even if in a cosmic circle.

Addendum: See "God and Alien in Anderson's Technic Civilization" by Sean M Books here.

The Martian Canals

The Martian canals were bound to appear in sf. As ever, when I start to compile a list, I remember other items for it in the process and also know that page viewers might draw attention to some that I have missed.

Gulliver Jones sails on a Martian river but before that had mentioned "...a labyrinth of canals..."
-Edwin L Arnold, Gulliver Of Mars (New York, undated), p. 27.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and SM Stirling all have canals on Mars. Both Heinlein and Stirling even have a Grand Canal.

On CS Lewis' Malacandra/Mars, large inhabited river valleys appear as canali to Terrestrial astronomers. Lewis wrote that he probably knew, when writing Out Of The Silent Planet, that the "canals" were not real but included them as part of the mythology.

In James Blish's works, the canals are variously:

impact marks radiating from craters;
the work of extinct Canal Masons;
a Diagram of Power;
an after-effect of the force used by the Martians to destroy the asteroidal planet.

Why do I list works by seven other authors on Poul Anderson Appreciation? Because I wonder whether "canals" are referenced in any of Anderson's fictional versions of Mars? Although many of the names mentioned above are better known than Anderson's, his several works dealing with Mars or Martians are major contributions to the fiction of Mars.