Related Reading II

Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller (see here) propose that:

"...the universe is either a chaos or a logos..."
-Would You Baptize An Extraterrestrial? (New York, 2014), p. 226)

Two observations:

(i) In Christian theology, which is their standpoint, the term logos is applied to the divine creative principle. Therefore, I suggest that, within the created universe, the contrast should be between chaos and cosmos.

(ii) However, can statistics and quantum mechanics not synthesize these antitheses? Thus, a single reality would appear to be either chaotic or ordered depending on perspective? In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, quantum chaos underlies causality:

"'To [the Tyrians] the world isn't entirely governed by laws of nature; it's capricious, changeable, magical.'
"And they're fundamentally right, aren't they? The chill struck deeper into Everard." (Time Patrol, p. 254)

Meanwhile, KW Jeter's Morlock Night is readable but more like a work that references The Time Machine than like a sequel. But this has made me think again about comparing The Time Machine and the Time Patrol...

Related Reading

Tacitus' biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, is pure hagiography.

Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller (see here, here and here) rightly say that there are two creation stories in Genesis but also that there is another such story in Maccabees. I am not familiar with the latter. They mention some possible responses to the heat death of the universe but not the two that are posited in later works by Poul Anderson: AI expects to survive by utilizing the energy of particle decay or by - some even more obscure means, which I cannot remember.

SM Stiring's Under The Yoke resolutely refuses to arrive. There is almost a Draka stubbornness about this.

I have bought KW Jeter's Morlock Night, yet another sequel to You Know What. Jeter's text is well written and imaginative with many good qualities but simply not a continuation of Wells' narrative. I suggest that the Morlocks should have been kept out of the title. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, while certainly not a sequel, is an excellent conceptual successor to The Time Machine.

Jeter's book is introduced by Tim Powers, the author of one of the great circular causality novels of the universe. See here.

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).