Contemporary Fantasy And Science Fiction

On this blog, I discuss the works of Poul Anderson and of a few other authors, usually relating the latter to the former. While blogging, I have, on the recommendation of correspondent Sean M Brooks, also begun to read the alternative history novels of SM Stirling. However, there remain many current works of fantasy and sf with which I am still unfamiliar. For example, Sean has also mentioned the novels of John C Wright.

I would welcome any comments or contributions along the lines of:

if you like Anderson, you might like X;
X, like Anderson, writes in the tradition of Wells, Stapledon and Heinlein;
X is completely unlike Anderson but worth reading in any case.

Thus, Anderson's comprehensive canon functions as a lens through which to view the entire range of fantasy and sf. Possible lines of inquiry are:

Are any other space operas as substantial as the Dominic Flandry series?
How does Michael Moorcock's Multiverse compare with Anderson's Old Phoenix sequence?
Apart from Audrey Niffeneger's superb The Time Traveler's Wife, do any recent time travel novels match the contributions of Anderson or of Tim Powers?
How many authors write convincing accounts of remote futures of artificial intelligence and abundant wealth?
Who else writes good military sf?
What other trends is Shackley completely unaware of?

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.

Hokas And The End Of Time

Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time are immortal decadents who can create whatever they want with energy stored by their ancestors millions of years previously. Consequently, their time is spent neither working nor learning but playing their chosen roles and, in this at least, they resemble Poul Anderson's and Gordon R Dickson's Hokas. Jherek Carnelian does not find himself falling exclusively in love with a woman who has been brought from the nineteenth century but decides to do so and is then applauded by his contemporaries for original thinking.

When Jherek has returned from a visit to the nineteenth century, it takes him a while to appreciate that no one in Victorian London was playing a role. Each was what s/he seemed to be. Anyone who appeared to be old and poor really was old and poor. This would be difficult for an End of Timer to comprehend. Unlike the Hokas, they encounter no practical limitations to the roles in which they have immersed themselves. Instead, they create and inhabit artificial or illusory landscapes and therefore never encounter any contradictions requiring rationalization.

Thus, superior technology enables End of Timers to take Hoka-type role-playing to a higher level. I think that there remains considerable scope for this idea in sf and also that it can be used to comment on our condition which combines material necessities with enacted fictions and pretenses that can be mistaken for realities.

An even busier weekend looms ahead. I do not expect even to look at a computer any time tomorrow.

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).

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.

Tolkien, Asimov Etc

The Broken Sword, based on Icelandic sagas and both contemporary with and independent of Tolkien, established Poul Anderson as a writer of fantasy in the same year that Brain Wave established him as a writer of science fiction (sf). The Broken Sword was followed by several other fantasy novels by Anderson and influenced Michael Moorcock's Elric series.

Despite all this, Tolkien and Moorcock remain better known names in fantasy than Anderson, just as Heinlein and Asimov are better known in sf. Heinlein's Future History is a major work. Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation is a major, larger scale successor, superior in every way to Asimov's Foundation Series. Like many sf writers, Anderson is a successor of Wells and Heinlein. Like Tolkien, he is a successor of the Edda and saga writers.

Some people reread The Lord Of The Rings repeatedly. I have read it twice, once way back and a second time after seeing the first film. I notice that Tolkien offers no explanation for the origin of the various races. They awoke. That is it. At one stage, the characters fight what sounds like a winged dinosaur, described as left over from an earlier age, as if to make a single concession to Darwin. A former acquaintance who was a critical reader told me that he stopped reading The Fellowship Of The Ring after about 100 pages because it seemed to be a uni-dimensional narrative without any deeper layers of meaning.

I find Anderson endlessly re-readable, also that the more often his texts are read, the more there is to be found in them.

Contrasts

I have gone directly from rereading Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars (1997) to rereading his Three Hearts And Three Lions (1953). The contrast could not be more complete: forty four years back through Anderson's career from late science fiction (sf) to early fantasy. Between the early fifties and the late nineties, there was an earlier period of very different sf.

The Fleet Of Stars is Volume IV of a hard sf tetralogy of imaginative speculation about the future of society, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel and the cosmos. Three Hearts And Three Lions is the first of four more loosely connected fantasy novels about parallel universes where history was different and magic works.

The Harvest Of Stars tetralogy, culminating in The Fleet Of Stars, uses the terms "chaos" and "chaotic" in their modern scientific senses whereas Three Hearts... presents a supernatural/magical cosmic conflict between Law and Chaos that is also to be found in Michael Moorcock's fantasies and, under the names of "Order" and "Chaos," in DC Comics including Neil Gaiman's The Sandman which I have previously compared to Anderson's works. (I have just found a character's name common to Three Hearts... and The Sandman: Alianora.)

Despite all the differences, the reader remains conscious of being in just another part of Anderson's  imagination. We need not worry that, if we enjoy one of the genres in which he works, we will dislike others simply because they are different.