A Chapter Of Revelation

I am just starting to read a 400+ page novel by John Grisham, which will take a while. Meanwhile, here is a reflection on a work by Poul Anderson. I have Anderson's story, "A Chapter of Revelation," in his collection, Dialogue With Darkness (New York, 1985). The printing history reveals that this story was first published in The Day The Sun Stood Still, edited by Lester del Rey. The attached cover illustration further discloses that this book was an anthology of three original novellas on the common theme of the Sun standing still.

Observations

(i) What an unusual theme for an anthology.

(ii) Anderson's story is in every way realistic apart from its single Sign or Miracle which, of necessity, is unexplained, unless we just say "Divine intervention." Whether there is no explanation or a supernatural explanation, in either case the story is a fantasy, not science fiction as it says on the cover, but its classification is immaterial. What does matter is the story's point, which is the same as that of the film Oh, God!, starring John Denver and George Burns.

(iii) I can and might reread the story and comment in detail. However, the main impact of a story like this is in it's readers' longer term memories of its point and that is the level of my current observations.

(iv) The story's point is that, even if an undeniable miracle definitely occurred, many people would learn neither awe nor humility but instead would use the miracle to further their own agendas. Thus:

a particular man, an ordinary guy, is somehow associated with the miracle;
maybe he is just this guy no different from anyone else or maybe he does have something to say that everyone else should heed;
but ignore that - while the spotlight of publicity is on him, pressurize him in every way to parrot whatever Message we want propagated!

My God!

Anderson might have created a protagonist able to articulate this point more clearly but maybe the fact that our hero does not know what to say is itself part of the point. Why should he have to say anything after everyone has seen the Sun stand still?

The story ends:

"'When will we see that we've always lived in a miracle?'" (p. 80)

References In "Time Heals"

Suspended animation is biological whereas temporal stasis is physical.

In Poul Anderson's "Time Heals" IN Anderson, Dialogue With Darkness (New York, 1985), pp. 165-191, before entering the temporal stasis of "'...a level-entropy field...'" (p. 166), Philip Hart remembers:

"the Seven Sleepers," a Christian and also a Muslim story about a group of religiously persecuted youths in suspended animation in a cave;

Herla, a British king who visited the Otherworld and led the Wild Hunt, then returned two hundred years later after the Anglo-Saxon invasions;

Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor who, according to legend, sleeps and will come again;

Holger Danske, who sleeps until Denmark needs him and is the hero of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions;

Tannhauser, Wagner's opera about a minstrel detained for over a year in the magical mountain of Venusberg.

The irony of "Time Heals" is that Hart remains in stasis until his cancer can be healed but then is unable to fit into the changed society so that he loses his sanity and must be put back into stasis until his insanity can be cured, by which time society will have changed yet again.

Before becoming "...completely catatonic..." (p. 190), Hart, reflecting on social change, remembers:

"...the wistful reminiscences of old men who had grown up in that forever lost world between the Congress of Vienna and the murder at Sarajevo..." (p. 181)

That apparently stable period is visited in Anderson's Time Patrol novel, The Shield Of Time, and the phrase, "...that forever lost world...," recalls the theme of innocence lost that pervades the Time Patrol series.

It is all too easy for the reader to regard the people of 2837 as retarded because of the way they speak:

"'Dis are yaar 2837, du would say.'" (p. 173)

- but Anderson's only point is that language has changed without yet becoming incomprehensible, not that these people are unable to pronounce English correctly.

The year that we call 2837 is by then called 2841 because an intervening theocracy has adjusted the calender to reflect Christ's real birth year. I once told a Religious Education class in a secondary school that, because of a mistake when our calender was formulated, the individual called Jesus was born in the year that we call 4 BC. Some of the pupils were so keen to seize the chance to laugh openly at me for the supposed absurdity of saying that Christ was born before Christ that I honestly think that they were missing the quite simple point. (I got into school teaching by accident and out by design. At present in Britain, 40% of those who enter the profession leave it within five years.)

Differences From "Welcome"
A world population of half a billion, not fifteen billion!
The person propelled into the future experiences not greatly reduced duration but zero duration, thus nothing.
We are told exactly where he is, inside a totally reflecting, self-maintaining cubical field six or seven feet on a side, stored in a casket in a vault and penetrable only by a neutralizing field.

Time is a fourth dimension, therefore rigid, not flowing. The arrow of time is the increase of entropy. Therefore, the level-entropy field has no internal time, thus also no time in which to decay.

Language
"'...ruwm duurs...'" (p. 178) means "your room;"
"'...goal nos...'" (p. 186) means "our goal;"
as in "Welcome," the Russian word for "comrade" is in general use.

Future History
Rule by the Church of the Second Coming.
Asian invasion of America.
Mechaniolatry of Australian Reformers.
Martian colonials' invasion of Luna.
Scientific State, eugenic modifications for interplanetary colonization.
Overthrow.
Retirement of the Dissenters.
Evolution of the family groups.

Politics And Economics in 2837/2841
colonists of Venus, Mars, outer planets and other systems now radically different from Terrestrials;
one rule of Earth and Lunar cave-cities;
personal life, relationships and work no longer governed by chance but entirely guided by psychometry and preventive psychiatry - you can be told whom you will happily marry and for how long.

The Communicators II

(Thank you all for 315 page views yesterday, a record and the first time over 300.)

By the end of Poul Anderson's "The Communicators" (Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985), we have a probable, an almost certain, answer to the question:

why does human mentality seem to be unique at least within the local interstellar communication network?

Subsidiary questions:

Why do extra-Solar intelligences not seem to understand requests for biological data, including pictures of life forms?
Why do those intelligences send mathematical and technical information but nothing artistic or psychological?
How is it that a spaceship is now en route to the Solar System at one sixth of C although, at that speed, radiation would destroy any organisms aboard?

Probable answer: in those planetary systems, artificial intelligence has replaced organic intelligence.

So is the approaching spaceship a berserker, programmed to destroy all organic life? That is not the story's implication although it is an outside possibility. There are fifty eight years until ETA, so that is fifty eight years for humanity to learn vigilance and unity.

As in the preceding story, "Dialogue," Anderson applies historical knowledge to futuristic fiction. Colonel Duna of the Domination of Baikal, an imperial power, appears at first to be the villain of the piece but we must reassess him before the end. He and his kind study history in order not to repeat it. He thinks that the Roman Empire stopped expanding too soon whereas the British Empire spread itself too thin. He hopes that Baikul will endure and learn - including from the aliens when they arrive.

Living millennia in our future, Duna and his compatriots have correspondingly more history to learn from: there has been a Great Asia (which featured in the story, "SOS"), an Empire of the Americas, a Midafrican civil war and a militant Martian religion. Duna ends the story with the perceptive remark that, without eternally returning night, there can be no sunrises.

The Communicators

I mentioned that the titles of the concluding three works collected in Poul Anderson's Dialogue With Darkness (New York, 1985) present the theme of conversation/dialogue/communication. I could also have mentioned that the title of the fourth last work is a message, "SOS."

The last story, "The Communicators," is, like "SOS," set in a Lunar Farside Station and it could even be the same Station - with a radio telescope but most of it underground - millennia later, after civilization has fallen and risen a few times.

Radio communication with half a dozen nearby extra-solar civilizations is a task for decades that become centuries so it is plausible that the Foundation for Extraterrestrial Communications has evolved into the transnational, quasi-religious Order of Communicators, able to survive wars and outlast empires.

"The Order endured, in its quest for understanding, because ultimately that quest was religious. Whatever name a communicator must give to God, including Void, his search across the cosmos was a search into the spirit." (p. 280)

Right. In addition, there is a hint of a theme from Golden Age Campbellian sf:

"...the difficulties [of communication] looked curiously similar - as if the human mentality differed radically from some galactic norm." (p. 292)

Astounding/Analog Editor John W Campbell espoused human superiority. However, a senior Communicator suggests that interstellar communication requires machine civilization which in turn presupposes order, rationality and universal logic in relation to which "[w]e are infants," not yet having experienced millennia of peace and sanity. (p. 292)

As ever, I must read on to learn what conclusion is reached.

Dialogue II

Poul Anderson's "Dialogue" (Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985) describes three successive stages of interstellar contact:

suspended animation and lasers;
tachyon communication;
FTL, thanks to tachyonically contacted aliens.

But these stages merely provide the background for the political machinations necessary to ensure that one particular man is the first human being to make an FTL crossing from Earth to Arcadia, thus solving the problem mentioned in the previous post.

The aliens, not the main focus of this short story, remain off-stage but are once described as "...three-eyed green-plumed..." (p. 264) - but I am not sure whether I like that description. Maybe it would have been better to leave them undescribed?

Anderson not only wrote historical fiction but also applied historical knowledge to futuristic science fiction. Thus:

in "Marius," a future revolutionary leader is compared to the Roman General Marius, who was good at warfare but made a hash of politics;
in the Technic Civilization History, the Solar Commonwealth and the Terran Empire repeat a recurrent historical pattern of growth and decay;
in "Dialogue," two men trying to contact a higher civilization discuss whether humanity might suffer the same fate as various "savages" who had died out when contacted by Terrestrial civilizations.

Anderson, through one of his characters, reminds or informs his readers that, when the savages did die out, which was not always, it was because those who were civilized had:

pushed them onto land where they could only starve;
forbidden hunters to hunt;
or exterminated them outright.

A more advanced race is not expected to behave like that and humanity is also expected to be able to retain its identity "...within a larger society, while contributing to it, as the Jews did within Christendom and Islam. (p. 256)

We do not see whether this is what happens because "Dialogue" is a short story which, despite its interstellar background, focuses on a single human relationship. However, the story's narrator makes a good start on inter-species diplomacy and the narrative framework implies that human society still flourishes five hundred years later.

Dialogue

Words can generate spurious unities. I knew two "Christians," an Evangelical and an Existentialist. But we are here to talk about books. HG Wells' The War Of the Worlds and The War In The Air can be published in uniform editions with scenes of technological warfare on the covers but they are separate stories, not volumes of a single War series. That suggests a whole 'nother scenario.

Poul Anderson's collection Dialogue With Darkness is aptly named because its concluding three stories are:

"Conversation in Arcady";
"Dialogue," about communication with the planet Arcadia;
"The Communicators" -

- but these are distinct stories.

In "Dialogue," a man and a woman eleven light years apart communicate tachyonically but want to meet physically. The man compares them to Heloise and Abelard, thus, for Anderson readers, evoking one of the Old Phoenix stories. "Dialogue" becomes an extended discussion of the problems of interstellar communication and contact, all because of this one couple.

And I have not finished reading it so I do not yet know how their problem is resolved.

Going For Infinity

I have yet to read "Dialogue" and "The Communicators," the concluding two stories in Poul Anderson's collection, Dialogue With Darkness, but meanwhile I have started to read that capstone volume, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002). Poul Anderson died in 2001. I wrote then, "Our thoughts accompany Poul on the Wild Hunt," so I hope it is appropriate to repeat those words here.

In his Introduction to Going For Infinity, Poul Anderson summarizes his antecedents and early life, thus showing several major influences:

the sea;
Scandinavian history and culture;
"a solid and  loving home life" (p. 13);
Danish-English bilingualism;
from boyhood experience on a farm, "such themes...as countryside, cold, storm, animals, and men and women who make their livings by their hands" (p. 14);
science fiction magazines featuring "...the creations of Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and the other gods" (ibid.);
a degree in physics, mathematics and chemistry;
the Minneapolis Fantasy Society.

Anderson went straight from University to a long career as a full time writer. How many of his books feature the sea? (I will not write another of my long lists.) From Scandinavia, we get his Viking novels and Hrolf Kraki's Saga. The "themes" listed on p. 14 appear in many works, including the King of Ys Tetralogy, co-written by Karen Anderson. The influence of Robert Heinlein's Future History gives us Anderson's major and minor future histories. The influence of de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall is seen in the Time Patrol, which also gives us "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth." From Anderson's scientific knowledge and training come all the background details of many fictitious planets and other celestial bodies.

Joining the Minneapolis Fantasy Society must have seemed like coming home.

SOS II-III

I was mistaken in the previous post to say that Poul Anderson's "SOS," section II, (IN Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985, p. 205) presents an Asian viewpoint character. It describes Pitar Cheng, commander of the fleet that has captured the Farside station, but he is seen from the viewpoint of our already established central character, Ing Jans.

The title's significance emerges. From the station, Asian missiles will destroy the Westrealm space navy when it lands on Nearside soon. The problem for Jans becomes how to get an SOS message out of the station just as Dominic Flandry needs to smuggle a Mayday message from a colony planet in the similarly entitled "Mayday Orbit."

"SOS" presents three conflicts:

ideological - the collectivist and egalitarian Autarchism of Great Asia as against what a critic calls the "...neofeudal timocracy..." of the Westrealm (p. 195);

ecological - which system can respond more effectively to the imminent terrestrial magnetic field reversal which is expected to cause extinctions and mutations?;

personal: which system does Jans really support?

All this and the Lunar setting are a lot to convey in a few pages.

As in several of Anderson's puzzle stories, there comes a moment when our hero suddenly realizes what he must do:

"He stopped dead. A shudder went through his body, a shout through his brain." (p. 210)

- but the reader must not be told till later, when the battle has been won. Indeed, Jans must lie in order to conceal his realization from his captors.

But there is a twist in the tale. The Asians are defeated but meanwhile the terrestrial magnetic field has nosedived again and will last for another year at most... Jans' less alarmist approach to this issue was mistaken.

SOS

Poul Anderson's short story, "SOS" (Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985), first published in 1970, begins with two quotations. The first, dated 1 June, 1966, is presumably the scientific report predicting a magnetic field reversal 2000 years hence that it looks like. The second, dated 13 Heros 4127 and attributed to the Archives of the Astromilitary Institue, is, of course, science fiction.

From the quotations, we go straight to viewpoint character Ing Jans climbing Mount Einstein on Lunar Farside. Googling discloses that there is a Mount Einstein in Alaska but I could not find one on the Moon. The Russians photographed Farside in 1959, bestowing place names like the Sea of Moscow. Anderson must have imagined a further round of naming or renaming by the Western power, the Westrealm, which, in 4127, has built a station on Farside.

Jans sees clearly in the light of the crowded stars, the Milky Way, the nebulae, Jupiter and Saturn, the two outer planets bright enough to cast shadows. I would not have expected that but I trust Anderson. There is nothing artificial on Farside but the station, the road to it and the microwave relay towers by the road. The station, mostly underground, has a radio telescope, an optical observatory and a particle beam. There are busier centers on Nearside. Jans observes and/or reflects on all this, then sees landing spaceships bearing the Sun and Man emblem of Great Asia. The Asians have been described as "Autarchists" but is there also a Mithraist element in their emblem (although no Bull)?

Jans had earlier reflected on an ironical parallel between the rival social systems:

"In Great Asia they allocate spaceship passages by official assignment, in the Westrealm they do it by letting the price of the ticket soar beyond reach of whoever had not the backing of a Kinhouse. For both, the effect is the same." (p. 196)

I have read only to the end of section I (of III) and see that section II presents an Asian viewpoint character. However, my reading of this story has been interrupted by the arrival from the US of my copy of Anderson's Going For Infinity. Although most of the story titles are familiar, I gather that they are accompanied by substantial autobiographical introductions and commentaries so it might be a while before I return to the stories in Dialogue with Darkness.

A Chapter Of Revelation

I am reading or rereading short stories in Poul Anderson's collection Dialogue With Darkness (New York, 1985). The first story is "A Chapter Of Revelation." I have read this one before and it was a little depressing so I am not immediately about to reread it. However, the basic premise is straightforward and can be discussed simply as an idea without necessarily remembering the details of this particular story.

I am astonished to discover that the story was originally published in The Day The Sun Stood Still, three original science fiction novellas by Poul Anderson, Gordon R Dickson and Robert Silverberg, edited by Lester del Rey. So it seems that del Rey asked these three authors each to write a novella on the same premise? This has been done before, of course:

Four For The Future by Aldiss, Anderson, Blish and Harrison, edited by Harrison;
Three For Tomorrow by Silverberg, Zelazny and Blish, edited by Clarke.

But The Day The Sun Stood Still, as its title indicates, has a very specific and bizarre premise. In the Anderson story, the Sun, or rather the Earth, stands still after a lot of people have prayed that it will. No other explanation is given so I suppose that we should say that the astronomical miracle is supernatural in origin and that therefore the story is fantasy, not sf. However, apart from that one miracle, the rest of the story is narrated realistically. 

Anderson's story makes two serious points: (i) philosophical and scientific; (ii) moral and political.

(i) Might the Sun stand still if enough people prayed for this "sign"? Scientifically, we might reply, "Of course not. How could it? Why should it?" and I think that this answer is alright as far as it goes. However, it does not quite go all the way. The scientific approach is always to wait and see whether new data confirm or disconfirm our expectations. That many people have not all prayed for the same thing ever before. If they did pray for it and if it did then happen, then that would be a new datum to add to any existing body of evidence about the efficacy or otherwise of prayer. Scientists will not organize such a prayer campaign and it is unlikely that anyone else will either so the question does not become a practical one. However, we do not need to dogmatize about what would or would not happen in other circumstances.

(ii) This is the main point of the story. Even if there were such a sign, people would not change their ways. (This is where it gets depressing.) The media identify the central character as the originator of the prayer campaign although he is not even sure that it was he who had started it. They ask him for his Message. All that he needs to say is: "I have no Message but have we all not been given enough of a sign?" Even worse, interest groups lobby and pressurize him to present their message as the Message. Fortunately, he refuses to do this. But how presumptuous are they? The sign is forgotten. Instead, a man who is no different from any other is emphasized. And there is no real interest in what he has to say.

The story ends when another character asks:

"'When will we see that we've always lived in a miracle?'" (p. 80)

The Life Of Your Time

In "Common Time" by James Blish, the test pilot of a faster than light interstellar drive experiences an unexpected discrepancy between subjective and objective durations. He subjectively experiences hours while his body physically endures and ages for mere seconds, then the discrepancy reverses. The first half of this discrepancy recurs for interstellar travelers in Poul Anderson's "The Life Of Your Time" (Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985).

Anderson sketches a background for this single short story:

there is an American Hegemony on Earth;

the Solar System and Alpha Centauri have been explored;

interstellar travel is by relativistic ramjets, fueled by interstellar hydrogen, as in his novel, Tau Zero;

radio messages have been received from Tau Ceti;

a ship crewed by four couples departs for Tau Ceti, accelerating to near light speed;

the crew learns the hard way that time dilation affects bodies, not minds, so that, as ship velocity increases, they experience hours for every bodily second;

one listens to speeded-up Beethoven;

with less external distractions, a crew member's telepathic potential increases;

thus, she both senses the temporarily continued existence of the space-time pattern that is the mind of another woman who has attempted suicide and awakens the telepathic potential in the other crew members;

there is time to revive the body that would otherwise have bled to death;

the crew will spend their subjectively long journey exploring this newly discovered mental realm.

Time dilation affecting bodies but not minds is an awesomely imaginative idea that was worth exploring in at least one short story. Fortunately, dilation did not work like that in Tau Zero where the crew of the relativistically accelerating ramjet were able to survive both physically and mentally into the next cosmic cycle.

In "The Life Of Your Time," the growing discrepancy between mental experience and bodily activity raises the philosophical question of the mind-body relationship. A musical pattern is communicable on paper or as sounds and can be played on different instruments or by different orchestras but cannot exist independently of any physical manifestation. It makes sense to speculate that mental patterns are similar.

I would add that, although someone who reads musical notation imagines sounds, there is no audible music. Similarly, if a mental pattern could be described in symbols, then someone able to understand the symbols would imagine the mind or personality described although the latter would not thereby become conscious. It would be like reading about a fictitious character.

Lastly, is the telepathic potential enabling the crew to cope with their predicament a deus ex machina?