Marius, Homer And War

It is good to meet an old friend in a new text:

"Marius' mules, he thought. That's what Roman soldiers called themselves. After Gaius Marius reformed the Republic's army about 100 BC, abolishing the cumbersome baggage trains and giving every legionnaire a bone-crushing load. Some things in war never change."
-Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling, The Prince (New York, 2002), p. 771.

I do not need to remind Poul Anderson fans of the significance of Marius in his works.

"Some things in war never change." Yes, especially if the speaker is a character in a book by certain authors!

"'It is war,' she said: the universal answer to almost everything on Poloda."
-Edgar Rice Burroughs, Beyond The Farthest Star (New York, 1964), p. 33.

When CS Lewis heard his first bullet in World War I, he thought:

"'This is war. This is what Homer wrote about.'"
-CS Lewis, Surprised By Joy (London, 1964), p. 158.

(For the blind Homer and his guide, see image.)

Homer not only wrote about war but also initiated European literature and is acknowledged in Anderson's Time Patrol series:

"Far and far away, a sail passed by. It could have been driving the ship of Odysseus."
-Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 326.

I am finding that I prefer books that incorporate war as against those that are about nothing but war. Meanwhile, I am pleased to have brought together in a single post:

Marius
Jerry Pournelle
SM Stirling
Poul Anderson
Edgar Rice Burroughs
CS Lewis
Homer

And I must now visit the realm of Morpheus.

Pride, Pomp, Priesthood And Power

(Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi.)

"...Cyrus the Great King rode past with his chief courtiers Kobold, Croesus, and Harpagus, and the pride and pomp and priesthood of Persia followed."
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 55-112 AT p. 110.

"......the pride and pomp and power of the Mughals was the wonder of the world..."
-SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), Chapter Ten, p. 168.

A phrase in ...Lancers rang a bell although it turns out not to be identical.

Dare I say that I prefer Stirling's description of multi-ethnic Indian street life in ...Lancers to Kipling's in Kim? For page after page, Athelstane King and his companions ride through the outskirts and into the center of Old Delhi where Chandi Chowk, the Square of Silver Moonlight:

"...was a shoving, chattering mass of folk on foot, riders or rickshaws, oxcarts..." (ibid.)

Anderson's description of a multi-species market on an extra-solar planet in The Game Of Empire is comparable.

When Stirling refers to "...the First Men and the Tree of Life...," (p. 164) I think that that is a homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Gods Of Mars?

Perspectives

Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us John Carter who was a Captain in the Army of the Confederate States of America, then a chieftain of Thark, a prince of Helium and Warlord of Mars. We are told that there are some malcontents in the empire of Helium but we know little about them, except that such characters are always dishonest and cowardly...

SM Stirling gives us John Rolfe VI, Captain in the US Army and descendant of Confederates. Is Rolfe an all round admirable character like Carter? Stirling gives us different perspectives. Our other hero Tom calls Rolfe ruthless and the sympathetic character, physicist Ralph Barnes, not only refuses to help Rolfe conquer other universes but also calls him a fascist to his face - a misuse of the term "fascist" but it helps to identify Barnes' social milieu. Despite this defiance, Barnes is allowed to flourish in New Virginia although not, of course, to leave it, and even becomes a friend and adviser of Rolfe's rebellious granddaughter.

Stirling shows us social and psychological complexities that were beyond ERB's horizons.

Designing A Universe

People used to imagine a breathable atmosphere not only on other planets but also between planets. In Karen Anderson's "The Piebald Hippogriff," a boy rides a hippogriff through a blue sky to a cultivable Moon but this is unadulterated fantasy. David D Levine's contribution to Old Mars is sf set in an alternative universe with different laws of physics. Lifted by balloons, Captain Kidd's ship sails through the Terrestrial, interplanetary and Martian atmospheres down to the surface of Mars where the inhabitants, for a change, are not humanoid but crab-like. (We know that we will get Martians but not what they will be like.)

We are not unfamiliar with interplanetary atmospheres. A breathable atmosphere stretches between planets with a common orbit in an ERB work and Larry Niven's Smoke Ring is a torus of breathable gasses encircling a star at a planetary distance. However, Levine's Solar atmosphere requires different laws of gravity. Thus, this story about an alternative Mars also presents an alternative history and cosmology. The cosmology could be the premise of another themed anthology.

If Poul Anderson had contributed to such an anthology, then I would expect his story to outline the alternative laws of physics enabling the Solar gravitational field to hold a breathable atmosphere enclosing the particular planetary atmospheres. Anderson might also have presented a natural philosopher speculating about an alternative universe where the planets were instead separated by the Lucretian void. Anderson's vast corpus of works enables us to speculate about how he might have contributed to later trends in sf.

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.

Martian Series

Innumerable works of science fiction feature Mars, Martians or both but how many Martian series are there? If a series comprises a minimum of two installments, then Poul Anderson has a Martian series. See here.

I ask this question because I had wrongly described Old Mars as presenting fifteen original versions of Mars. In fact:

SM Stirling's "Swords of Zar-tu-Kan" is a prequel to the same author's Mars novel;

Matthew Hughes' "The Ugly Duckling" is a sequel to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which is itself a series;

there might be similar surprises in store in the remaining contents of the anthology.

Edwin Arnold's Lieut. Gulliver Jones, a possible source for ERB's A Princess Of Mars, ends, like Wells' The First Men In The Moon, in a way that rules out a sequel. The magic rug returns Jones to Earth, then disappears forever. However, A Princess... became a series that inspired further, imitative, series by both Otis Adelbert Kline and Michael Moorcock.

So we have identified Martian series by Anderson, Stirling, Bradbury, Burroughs, Kline and Moorcock. There are other such series on the periphery of my awareness. Poul Anderson is much better known for his many other kinds of writing but it is good to see that, with just two short stories, he does make it onto the list of authors of Martian series.

Crimson Kings: Conclusion

I have read to the end of SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, 2008) but confess to some confusion. Gates have opened to other worlds. How and why? Before that, I could not really engage with the unpleasant conflict for the Martian Imperial succession.

When an author makes a new contribution to an old theme, in this case the idea of an inhabited Mars, he should make us feel that his narrative is the true account whereas earlier stories or novels were at best approximations. Stirling does this. His characters must find their way through dark passages under a Martian city. On ERB's Barsoom, such passages were prowled by banths, the many-legged Martian equivalents of lions - although the banths too closely resembled African lions in one comic strip adaptation. Stirling's underground passages are inhabited by quite horrible and physically disgusting predatory life forms that I do not want to describe here and we feel that they have evolved as integral parts of the planetary ecology, unlike the unaccountable banths.

ERB, I think through a mere failure of imagination, did not indicate the presence of any children when describing Barsoomian society whereas Stirling can rationalize a Martian society with fewer children: Martians are long-lived, have dwindling resources and can control their fertility. The first two of these three points also applied to Barsoomians although ERB did not derive any conclusions from such premises. On the one hand, Barsoomians lived indefinitely without aging unless killed by accident or violence. On the other hand, they had a lot of violence all the time so they would have needed to keep replacing their population.

The Ruby Throne contains "...protein computers..." (p. 296). Protein, not electronic. Thus, maybe capable of duplicating, not merely simulating, brain functions? It would appear so. The Throne stores the conscious memories of previous Emperors. In fact, not mere memories: personalities that can converse with each other and with the current living ruler(s) in a virtual environment. Jeremy, the Terrestrial consort of the new Emperor, thinks:

"The people in front of him didn't exist, really. They thought they existed, and they had all the subjective experience of being alive; but all they really were was, as she'd said, memories - stored in the vast protein computers that were part of the Ruby Throne. One day he'd be nothing but memories here himself - or he'd be immortal, depending on whether you thought a perfect copy of something was the something or wasn't. He supposed it depended on the soul and that sort of thing. Most Emperors apparently died in communion with the Throne, and didn't experience any discontinuity; they went unconscious there and 'woke up' here, wherever here really was..." (p. 296)

Multiple issues here:

(i) Immortal? How long will the Ruby Throne last? Will its stored memories then be transferred somewhere else?

(ii) For a conscious being to think that it exists is for that being to exist, at least as a conscious being. Otherwise, it would not be able to think anything. When Jeremy thinks that they do not really exist, what he means is that their material basis is a protein computer, not a psychophysical organism. So they exist in a different way.

(iii) To have a subjective experience is to be a subject of consciousness and thus to exist as such a subject. "...alive..." is ambiguous. They no longer live as biological entities in the Martian environment although they are inside something composed of proteins. But "...being alive..." also means experiencing human life, i.e., seeing, hearing and interacting with other people. They are still doing this.

(iv) Since they are experiencing and responding to a present moment, they are not merely remembering past moments so they are not just memories - except insofar as each of us already is little more than the sum total of our conscious and recallable memories. To suffer complete and perpetually renewed amnesia would be to cease to be a conscious individual.

(v) Is a copy of something the something? A copy of Hamlet is Hamlet but not the original manuscript. If a dead Emperor had a soul, then that soul has entered the hereafter while his conscious memories have been recorded in the protein computer. But, if the existence of consciousness entails the existence of a soul, then a second soul has been generated in the computer just as the living Emperor's soul was generated in his body some time between its conception and its birth.

(vi) If an Emperor dies while away from the Throne, then there is discontinuity. He is revived with his memories until the moment when he left the Throne and has to be told what he did after that and how he died. Duplicates diverge, as Poul Anderson demonstrates in Genesis.

Next: NESFA Vol 4 has been ordered. Does anyone know how many such volumes there are?

...Or Jupiter

After Mars and Venus, Jupiter must be the most frequently fictionalized of planets:

ERB's John Carter and one of Clifford Simak's dogs wind up on Jupiter;

the exploration of Jupiter is described in a short story by Arthur C Clarke (title?) and in another by James Blish, the latter incorporated into Blish's Cities In Flight future history.

However, the master of Jovian fiction must be Poul Anderson:

in Three Worlds To Conquer, Jupiter is inhabited by three rational species, two separated by an ammonia ocean, the third living so high in the atmosphere that it is rarely glimpsed and regarded as supernatural;

in "Call Me Joe," Jupiter is colonized by intelligent artificial organisms;

in the History of Technic Civilization, Jupiter, visited by Dominic Flandry, is colonized by extrasolars;

in the Flying Mountains future history, asteroid colonists mine the Jovian atmosphere;

in the Psychotechnic History, a disabled spaceship floats in the Jovian atmosphere.

The reader notices that some of these fictional Jupiters have a solid surface whereas others do not. A very observant reader might notice that one of Anderson's Jovians and one of his Martians have the same name.

Let's Go To Venus

Venus gets less fictional coverage than Mars but more than any other planet. The fiction of Venus is probably adequately covered or summarized in Farewell, Fantastic Venus.

(i) Venus and Mars are the nearest planets apart from the Moon.

(ii) Mythologically, Venus and Mars are linked as opposites: goddess of love; god of war.

(iii) CS Lewis wrote a Mars-Venus-Earth Trilogy whereas SM Stirling wrote a Venus-Mars diptych.

(iv) HG Wells' Martians attacked Venus after Earth but Wells does not show us events on the Venerian surface.

(v) Olaf Stapledon's Terrestrials colonized Venus, exterminated the Venerians (after being attacked by them), adapted to Venus and became Venerians.

(vi) Otis Adelbert Kline competed with ERB's Mars books by writing both Mars and Venus books so ERB retaliated with Venus books.

(vii) Ray Bradbury, famous for his Mars, has a rainy Venus in one story in The Illustrated Man.

(viii) Robert Heinlein has a swampy Venus with frog-like natives both in a Future History short story and in a Scribner juvenile novel.

(ix) Poul Anderson has a desert Venus in a Psychotechnic History story, an oceanic Venus in an independent story and an incompletely terraformed Venus off-stage in his Technic History.

(x) Larry Niven's Known Space future history opens with short stories about exploration of Solar planets, including Venus.

(xi) Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr juvenile novels are set on successive Solar planets, including Venus.

(xii) Dan Dare's first interplanetary voyage was to Venus where he encountered his recurring enemy, the Mekon.

"At The Arizona Cave"

Although Poul Anderson wrote several pulp short stories of "sword and science" action-adventure fiction, he did not explicitly refer to the master of that genre, Edgar Rice Burroughs, as SM Stirling does in his two "Lords of Creation" novels.

Although Burroughs' Martian series grew to a total of eleven volumes, the opening novel, A Princess Of Mars, presents several never explained mysteries. When John Carter returned to Earth after ten years on Mars, he found, at the back of the Arizona cave where his Terrestrial body had lain for those ten years, a mummified old woman leaning over a copper vessel containing green powder above a small charcoal burner, the woman's dead hand still holding a thong connected to a hanging row of human skeletons that rustled like dead leaves when Carter touched the thong.

These discoveries explain sounds heard, an odor smelled and a vapor noticed before Carter's departure as well as the fear of his Apache pursuers who had looked into the cave while he was paralyzed but had then fled in terror. But who was the woman? Why the skeletons? What was the powder? Why did the vapor paralyze Carter? How was he able to leave his body not as a wraith but in another equally physical body? How was that second body drawn across space to Mars, the planet with which Carter as a soldier had always felt an affinity and which turns out to be inhabited by several warlike races? Why does Carter not remember any childhood? How can he be regarded as related to Burroughs if his own antecedents are unknown?

Stirling compounds the mystery by informing us that the hero of his Martian novel had  found an Arizona cave with exactly the same macabre contents even though the Mars to which he has traveled by spaceship is not ERB's Barsoom. Will Stirling explain this further or is it just included as an ERBian allusion? Philip Jose Farmer expanded on ERB's works, although mainly Tarzan. If Poul Anderson had written even one sequel to ERB's Martian series, then he would have been equal to the task of tying up all these loose ends and also of placing them in a vaster but rational context.

ERB And SM Stirling

In his two "Lords of Creation" novels, SM Stirling follows his ERBian model to the letter.

Premise: both Mars and Venus are humanly habitable and inhabited.

Rationale (ERB did not need one): they were terraformed.

So far, so good. But Stirling goes further. The heroes of both his novels marry native princesses! This is at least possible if, as premised, the natives are not merely humanoid but fully human.

Stirling takes another step. He must combine his premise that the terraformed Mars was seeded from Earth with the tradition that Mars is an older planet. Simple:

"Although Mars was sterile until terraformed by the ancients two hundred million years ago, life on the Red Planet is, in a very real sense, 'older' than on Earth. It lacks the catastrophic mass extinction that followed the Yucatan asteroid impact of 65,000,000 mya..." (...Crimson Kings, p. 153)

Neat. I should not have to use that word but I am reduced to it.

"As a result of the uninterrupted evolutionary history, apart from a few subsequently introduced mammals, the lineages of most Martian species run back without interruption to the most successful of the late-Cretaceous introductions, birds, and the closely related therapod dinosaurs." (ibid.)

So they are older.

Poul Anderson occupies an intermediate stage: more scientifically oriented and accurate than ERB but not retro-ing like Stirling.

Marses II

We might as well discuss fictional versions of Mars and Martians in general but that is an enormous topic. This blog has already, in diverse posts, addressed Poul Anderson's several Martian races which seem to be sui generis, except that Anderson borrowed Wells' title with just a slight variation. See here.

I think that the main writers about fictional Martians are:

British
Wells
Stapledon
Lewis

American
Burroughs
Heinlein
Bradbury

The Brits form a perfect triad:

Wells writes separately both a future history and a novel about a Martian invasion of Earth;
Stapledon describes Martian invasions of Earth among many other events in a future history text book;
Lewis, disagreeing with Wellsian and Stapledonian visions of the future, locates evil only on Earth and tells us that Wells' Martians are very unlike the real Martians!

However, there are many other writers about Mars:

relevant to Burroughs
Edwin Arnold
Otis Adelbert Kline
Michael Moorcock

authors of composite Marses
Larry Niven
Alan Moore

James Blish incorporated Mars into his Haertel histories by putting the seminal character, Adolph Haertel, on Mars. Professor Quatermass thought that one group of alien invaders had come from Mars and Quatermass' successor on British television, Doctor Who, has his version of Martians, the Ice Warriors.

And that is as comprehensive as I feel like getting at present.

The Atmosphere Plant

One short phrase links:

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars;
SM Stirling's Mars;
several extrasolar planets described by Poul Anderson.

I have commented on this blog that Anderson often describes the equivalent of grass on habitable planets. Stirling does the same for his Mars:

"'...the atmosphere plant'...That low-growing, waxy-leaved plant was the Martian equivalent of grass..."
-SM Stirling, In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, 2008), p. 63.

However, it is more:

"...and also, ecologically, of oceanic plankton; it kept the oxygen content of the air. It had a fantastically efficient version of photosynthesis, flourished nearly everywhere, and stood at the bottom of nearly every food chain. An area too hostile for it was likely to be bleak indeed, even by this dying planet's standards." (ibid.)

Maintaining the oxygen supply, this plant must have been designed by the terraformers of Mars. Also, the current inhabitants use organic technology so maybe they too are partly responsible for the atmosphere plant's fantastic photosynthesis.

ERB's Mars, Barsoom, would already be dead if the red Martians did not artificially maintain its atmosphere with a factory called - the atmosphere plant!

Human Martians

Most fictional Martians are not human beings. Indeed, how could they be? In fact, there are three exceptions. Poul Anderson's six or more Martian races are of course all aliens but Anderson's sf was preceded by, among others, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first Martians encountered by ERB's John Carter - green, twelve foot, hairless, tusked, six limbed and egg-laying - sound more like giant insects. However, in any ERBian universe, the hero has to marry a Martian princess. Therefore, without any explanation or rationale, Carter soon encounters humanoid Martians. He not only marries the Princess of Helium but even gets her pregnant even though her metabolism is so different that, instead of giving live birth, she lays a large egg that will hatch their son. ERB's Mars, with its canals and thin but breathable atmosphere, was based on contemporary astronomical observations but his ideas about Martian life were off the wall.

Michael Moorcock pastiched ERB and rationalized human beings on Mars. His hero, Michael Kane, accessed Mars not by ERBian astral projection but by time travel into the far past. Thus, his Mars still had oceans, an atmosphere and a human race that had not yet migrated to Earth.

Thirdly, in SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, 2008), mysterious beings with a higher technology have terraformed Mars and seeded (?) it with humanity originating on Earth. Thus, these tall, thin, dry humanoids are not products of extraterrestrial evolution but are related to us. I have started Chapter Two. So far, I am finding the text less accessible than that of the previous volume, The Sky People, because several passages are presented from the point of view of an unsympathetic Martian character whose historical and political context have not yet been fully explained.

A book on imagining extraterrestrials made the point that we have to imagine an organism that has originated and evolved elsewhere. Thus, a tall, thin, large-chested humanoid is not a Martian but a Terrestrial adapted to Mars. However, that is precisely what Stirling describes:

"...Highlanders even more eerily elongated than the standard Martians and barrel-chested..." (p. 53).

Chessmen Of Four Worlds

On Earth, when a red chess piece is moved onto a square already occupied by a white piece, the white piece is "taken," i.e. removed from the board.

On Wayland, in Poul Anderson's A Circus Of Hells, when an intelligent computer plays chess against itself, the large, robotic pieces fight for possession of squares.

On Barsoom, in ERB's The Chessmen Of Mars, jetan pieces (with 100, not 64, squares) take each other, except when the game is played with armed men who fight to the death.

On Zho'da, in SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings, dice determine which atanj piece wins the fight for a square.

Thus, atanj combines skill with chance. Players can agree to throw dice on whether a Coercive piece will defect but we are also told that not exercising Coercives increases the odds of their defection - as if they had a mind of their own? Atanj also seems to include some role play. Three threes on the dice give the paratroops in a Flier Transport time to emerge and capture the Chief Coercive whose square they have invaded. Three ones mean that the paratroops have persuaded the Chief Coercive to turn against his Despot.

By moving together to another square, the Flier Transport and the defected Chief Coercive confront the Despot who must therefore either restore Sh'u Maz or abdicate. In the game described, he abdicates. Thus, the other Despot has proved his superior fitness both to perpetuate his lineage and to establish Sustained Harmony. Atanj pieces include Coercives, Clandestines, Blockade, Boycott, Flier Transport and Despot.

Barsoom and Zho'da are two fictional versions of Mars.

ERBian Allusion

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

Unfamiliar Words
"...remuda..." (p. 59)
"...fetor..." (p. 64)

ERBian Reference
Marc has adopted a greatwolf pup and suggests calling it "Nobs." When the Englishman seems not to understand the reference, Marc reflects:

"Surely everyone read Burroughs now?" (p. 62)

I have read ERB, including the relevant work (see image and here), but did not get the reference! However, it is good to be able to google it immediately.

Furthermore, this prompts another observation. ERB was a prolific though not a great writer who bequeathed to us a fictional Solar System containing:

Carson Napiers' Venus;
the Moon Maid and the Moon Men;
John Carter's Barsoom;
an inhabited Martian moon;
Skeleton Men of Jupiter;
Pellucidar;
Tarzan's Africa;
Caspak -

- and yet another inhabited planetary system.

I would like to see this colorful cosmos developed by writers of the caliber of Poul Anderson (of course, no longer possible) or of his successors like SM Stirling. ERBdom has been adapted into comics and films but a few novels better written than ERB's could also be added to the canon.

The Martian Atmosphere

A fictional Mars has a breathable atmosphere if:

(i) the story was written so long ago that such an atmosphere was still considered possible (Edgar Rice Burroughs);

(ii) the story was written in an intermediate period when scientific knowledge had advanced but the literary convention of breathable atmospheres on Solar planets persisted (some short stories in The Early Asimov);

(iii) the author was unconcerned about scientific accuracy (Ray Bradbury, CS Lewis);

(iv) the story is set in a remote past before Mars lost its atmosphere (Michael Moorcock);

(v) the story is set in a future when colonists from Earth have made a breathable atmosphere (Kim Stanley Robinson, also Poul Anderson in "The Corkscrew of Space," which I am currently reading).

(This is another of those lists that grew in the writing.)

(ii) and (iii) overlap. Lewis commented that, when he wrote Out Of The Silent Planet, he probably knew that the Martian "canals" were not real but included them as part of the mythology.

This post is occasioned by reading the Anderson story which will have to be discussed in a subsequent post and, since today is my granddaughter's twenty first birthday, that next post might be delayed for a while.

War-Maid Of Mars

Right now I am accessing an ebook that is enabling me to read for the first time "War-Maid of Mars" by AA Craig (Poul Anderson), than which there could not be a more ERBian title. (Compare Burroughs' Warlord Of Mars and Thuvia, Maid Of Mars.)

The ERBianism of the title leads the reader to expect Sword and Science, the sf equivalent of the fantasy sub-genre, Sword and Sorcery. However, the story so far is more like Anderson's Shield. Our hero, with an artifact embodying a dangerous new technology in his possession, is on the run from totalitarian conspirators and security men on a future Earth which has world government, regular rocket flights, interplanetary travel and routine contact with natives of Mars and Venus. This sounds familiar: Golden Age sf, though not ERBian. I still do not see where the Maid is coming from.

However, I really must read more of this pulp story before I post any more about it. I will also be reading and posting about a few other uncollected works by Anderson, which will make a change from revisiting his History of Technic History, although the latter as ever is far from exhausted. In fact, I have yet to finish rereading "Hunters of the Sky Cave."

(Also still reading The Scar by China Mieville. Bizarre. Some well thought out consequences of familiar ideas. One detail that I do not remember noticing anywhere else - this fantasy world's moon has moons.)

Aeneas And Barsoom

Poul Anderson's fictional planet, Aeneas, has some features in common with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom:

a breathable atmosphere, even though Barsoom is the ERBian Mars;
dead sea bottoms;
thus, a wharf now on dry land;
military traditions, defensive on Aeneas but barbaric on Barsoom;
buildings of an ancient race used by a current race;
custodians (therns, Companions) of a mystery (the Valley Dor, the Ancients);
knowledge of the next Sunward planet (Barsoomians observe Earth, Aeneans study Didonians);
a visibly moving moon;
six-legged green draft animals, although the Aenean stathas are imports.

When I seek parallels, I find more than I expect. However, the differences are greater. No one in his right mind would think that Aeneas was a copy of Barsoom - although Anderson could have written a good Barsoom novel (Sword and Science), just as he contributed to the Conan series (Sword and Sorcery), but I do not think that the Burroughs Estate commissions continuations?

Tharks, Treens, Martians, Merseians, Vulcanians, Chereionites And Ferrans

I said three posts back (here) that hostile green aliens were a Golden Age sf cliche and, in fact, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Green Martians of the Thark, Warhoon and lesser hordes are both green-skinned and warlike. (The one good thing about the John Carter film is its accurate depiction of ERBian Green Martians. Computer-aided graphics get that much right.) Further, Dan Dare's Venus-based Treens were also green and warlike. Thus, Poul Anderson's green, warlike, extra-solar Merseians are part of a grand tradition.

Anderson's The Rebel Worlds parallels other sf works. When Dominic Flandry commands the escort destroyer, HMS Asieneuve, his executive officer is a Ferran who does not share human morality just as, when James T Kirk commands the starship, USS Enterprise, his exec is a Vulcan who does not share human emotions. However, Rovian of Ferra is fanged, has four arms of which the lower pair can double as legs and goes naked except for weapons and insignia. In all of this, he resembles the ERBian Greens although his black fur and tail differentiate him from them. Tharks etc are bald.

Kirk's friend, a Vulcan, has pointed ears and can telepathically "mind-meld." Flandry's opponent, a Chereionite, has pointed ears and is a universal telepath. But lastly, of course, Poul Anderson's sf is of a far higher imaginative and literary quality than that of ERB, Dan Dare or Star Trek.