Another Detail Of Life On The Moon

Anderson, Poul, "Escape The Morning" IN Anderson, Space Folk (New York, 1989), pp. 52-63.

Quite often in these posts, I try to communicate the richness of Poul Anderson's texts by summarizing the information that he conveys in his imaginative descriptions of extraterrestrial scenery, futuristic scenarios etc, but it is hard to include everything. When summarizing his accounts of three kinds of Lunar vehicle, I overlooked this important detail:

"...even the best glass is fragile and a poor radiation shield..." (p. 54)

- so Mark Jordan, driving his "turtle," views the surrounding Lunar landscape and skyline not through windows but on TV screens. We soon learn that a space rock hitting the surface scatters shrapnel that makes holes in metal so mere glass would indeed have been too fragile.

I compared this single short story to the several Moon-based stories in Heinlein's Future History. All of these well observed details, like TV screens instead of windows, deserve to re-used in successive installments of a series rather than squandered on a single work. Indeed, any fictional narrative set in the future is potentially an installment of a fictitious history. Probably several near future stories of interplanetary travel could, with minimal editing, be re-presented as sharing a common background comparable to that of Heinlein's Future History. Such a "history" can be constructed either on the basis that only stories which explicitly refer to each other are to be included or on the basis that only stories which explicitly contradict each other are to be excluded. Clarifying which of these criteria was to be applied led to some uncertainty as to the contents of Heinlein's Time Chart in its early days.

The Nature Of The Catastrophe And The Point Of The Story

Anderson, Poul, "Escape The Morning" IN Anderson, Space Folk (New York, 1989), pp. 52-63.

There are three kinds of vehicle on the Lunar surface:

a four-wheeled, egg-shaped Go-Devil can travel at 50 mph;
the more common eight-wheeled, oblong turtle manages 20 mph max;
a lead-armored tank, "...screened by intense magnetic fields..." (p. 61) is necessary in daylight during solar flare periods - at other times, thermostatic suits are sufficient to protect against a temperature at the boiling point of water.

There are no roads, only safe routes marked by luminous stones a kilometer apart. Anderson visually imagines this detail: "...the coal-like mineral crust..." (p. 55) scatters Earthlight so that a vehicle seems to move in a blue spotlight. (Earth is four times the size of the Moon seen from Earth and many times brighter.)

Small meteorite showers on long-period orbits strike unexpectedly. When a rock hits the surface, it scatters material that can wreck a vehicle. When the Zairean Minister of Technology's Go-Devil is wrecked, Mark Jordan rescues him in a turtle but, when the turtle also is wrecked, the Minister must learn how to run on the Moon in order to reach Jordan Station before a lethal sunrise: "Push, glide, come down, check." (p. 62)

Grateful for the rescue, the Minister offers to pay for the Jordans to receive an education and start a career on Earth and now we reach the point of the story, which is is the same as that of Robert Heinlein's Future History short story, "It's Great To Be Back!" Lunar colonists are at home on the Moon. Why would they go to Earth?

Wherever You Are

Poul Anderson, "Wherever You Are" (IN Anderson, Space Folk, New York, 1989, pp. 84-113) is yet another story that I have either never read before or completely forgotten. For me, a fresh new story although combining elements familiar from other works by Anderson:

an interstellar League with a civilizing program, but this one led by Earth in future;
a colonized planet (called New Sythia) with a militechnic service, a clan system and big-boned, powerfully muscled colonials (after generations under one point five gravities);
a planet with dinosauroid natives who have no chairs because they sit on their tails (they also have no doors because these would catch tails);
Anderson's incongruous rendering of aristocratic speech in the mouth of one of the natives;
a shipwrecked man and woman unable to contact the human base on this planet (Lonesome Landing), who will die when they run out of vitamin supplements unless they can persuade the warlike natives to sail them to the base (this sounds like Nicholas van Rijn and his companions trying to reach Thursday Landing in The Man Who Counts).

The story begins by reversing a cliche:

"The monster laid a taloned hand on the girl's shoulder." (p. 84)

Then the girl yells and threatens; the monster wails and scuttles away. Another reversal is the contrast between the woman warrior Ulrica and the quietly studious Didymus Mudge, who has escaped his mother's influence at the age of thirty. Could Ulrica and Mudge possibly get together before the end of the story? (Maybe not but I will continue to read the story with interest.) (Later: Mudge reverses roles not by confirming his uselessness but by saving the day in an unexpected way.)

Collections And Individual Stories

Space Folk is a collection of which I had read some of its contents though not others. I tend to think of short stories, not collections, as units of an author's work. Thus, Space Folk, as its title suggests, is united by the theme of space travel and could be read through from cover to cover on that basis, the point being to compare how each of the collected stories addresses this common theme.

In fact, the second last item in the volume, "Commentary", is not fiction but is instead a three page article or essay in which the author comments on the immediately preceding and succeeding stories and addresses the real world issue of space exploration.

In some similarly themed collections, like Conquests, though not in others, like Conflict, the author adds before each story a brief introduction that is specific to this volume, although even these short pieces deserve to be preserved somewhere in a Complete Works. Even recognizable installments of well-known series can be re-packaged and re-presented because they represent a particular theme. For example, "A Little Knowledge" from the Technic Civilization History is in The Gods Laughed because it features human contact with superior aliens - and there are several other examples of this.

Despite all this, I never read a collection as a unit. A glance at the contents page tells me which of the stories I have read before. A glance at a story is usually enough to tell me whether I want to read it straightaway. Thus, by a double process of elimination, a few stories to be read immediately are identified, except in The Armies Of Elfland, where they had all been read before.

Reassessing collections in order to blog about them has been a voyage of discovery. First, it has revealed how many of the collected stories I had not read. Some of these have indeed been difficult, but worth reading for that reason. Secondly, I do not know what I am going to find. I had no idea that reading Space Folk would lead to a partial discussion of both the Medea series and the Berserker series. And this can take us right outside the Anderson canon:

comparing an Anderson Jupiter story with a Blish Jupiter story led to a month mainly spent blogging about Blish instead of about Anderson;
getting interested in the berserkers led to rereading Niven's berserker story before returning to Anderson - both of these stories address the important issue of Artificial Intelligence, which I suppose is fundamental to the berserker series.

The 1980's

Larry Niven's Medea story, "Flare Time," and his berserker story, "A Teardrop Falls," are both in his collection, Limits, published by Ballantine Books in 1985.

Poul Anderson's Medea story, "Hunter's Moon," and his berserker story, "Deathwomb," are both in his collection, Space Folk, published by Baen Books in 1989.

The 1980's was the decade of shared universes. Niven's Introduction to Limits also mentions the James Baen-inspired sharing of Niven's own Warlock's Era series.

Fred Saberhagen, creator of the berserker series, asked half a dozen other authors each to write a human-berserker encounter story so that he would then be able to amalgamate them into a novel by deciding on the order of the stories before adding a beginning and an ending. Anderson's story is potentially a turning point for the series because, in it, human beings capture an intact berserker computer - which might enable them to design von Neumann machines programmed to kill berserkers.

If that number of "...half a dozen..." other authors to write berserker stories is accurate (Limits, p. viii), then I have read one third of this novel/sub-series.

As the berserker that is to be captured flies into the trap that has been prepared for it, it:

calculates orbits;
adjusts vectors;
receives cosmic noise;
detects human vessels scrambling from the planets that it is approaching;
tracks them;
considers withdrawal;
computes that its optimum course is to proceed because, at worst, a single unit will perish;
considers dispatching a courier back to base but calculates that the human beings would destroy it and refrains;
decides to seek engagement, to establish orbit and to begin sterilizing the inhabited planet;
sliced by an energy beam, becomes "...blind, deaf, dumb, helpless." (Space Folk, p. 232)

Can all of these calculations, considerations and decisions be unconscious computations? Some of them certainly can. A book on the philosophy of mind suggested that the test of whether an entity is conscious is whether we can fully account for its properties and behavior without attributing consciousness to it. Thus, a child can imagine a conversation between a doll, a toy soldier and a teddy bear but we can fully account for every datum about the toys without attributing consciousness to any of them whereas by far the simplest if not indeed the only way to account for the child's behavior is to assume that s/he is conscious.

So is the berserker like one of the toys or like the child? Earlier in the story there is a conversation between a human being and a berserker. At one point, the human being says:

"'Were ye human - were ye e'en alive, conscious, insultable, ye metal abomination - I'd ask ye to stop playing games wi' me.'" (p. 205)

"'Afterward think...Ah, but ye do no' really think, do ye?'" (p. 206)

- so Mary accepts that she is not conversing with a conscious being even though she speaks exactly as if she were. This strains credibility. Ability to conduct a conversation is the criterion for the Turing Test.

When she tells the berserker that "'...a red dwarf star...has a life-bearing planet...," the omniscient narrator comments:

"An organic being would have registered surprise." (p. 213)

- whereas "The machine...said merely: 'That is not believed possible.'" (ibid.)

So here we are being made aware of some difference between two kinds of conversation: that between two conscious beings and that between a conscious being and an unconscious computer.

Consistently with her remarks about the berserker's lack of consciousness and of real thought, Mary thinks of its computer as a "...pseudo-brain...," not as an artificial brain. (p. 214)

Hunter's Moon

(This is the 100th post for the current month. Now I will definitely take a break from blogging. I must do some other things and get more exercise.)

(Friday 30 August: From Sunday 1 September, posts will resume at the rate of one per day for a while.)

"We do not perceive reality, we conceive it. To suppose otherwise is to invite catastrophic surprises. The tragic nature of history stems in large part from this endlessly recurrent mistake."

-Oskar Haeml, Betrachtungen uber die menschliche Verlegenheit

This quotation is at the head Poul Anderson's "Hunter's Moon" (Space Folk, New York, 1989, p. 147).

What is reality? We cannot perceive and necessarily conceive the microcosm described by chemistry and physics: molecules, atoms and their constituents. Believers in a supernatural reality cannot perceive that and must conceive it in terms of "God", "spirit" etc.

I argue that we do perceive our immediate environment, which is also real, although perception involves application of concepts. I not only feel hot (sensation) but also see the sun (perception) but the latter mental act involves application of the concept "sun" which can be analyzed as "round," "bright," "yellow," "hot," "above" etc. So perception combines sensation and conception. Someone who thinks about the sun while not seeing it is, of course, conceiving it.

What are the "catastrophic surprises" and the "tragic nature of history"? Many people treat their conception of reality as if it were a common perception. Thus, our shared certainty that the sun is above us is taken to be a model for what it is thought should be an equally shared certainty that God is above us. This does indeed lead to catastrophe and tragedy. 

Horse Trader II

Terminology gets recycled among so many stories. Men are addressed as "Freeman" in Poul Anderson's "Horse Trader" (Space Folk, New York, 1989) as they are in the Polesotechnic League period of his Technic Civilization History. As the phrases "Polesotechnic" and "Horse Trader" suggest, both the individual story and the series deal with trade - although they are very different kinds of trade for different kinds of goods.

Anderson uses the name "Almerik" which I think is a planet in a fantasy series? 

I found "Horse Trader" somewhat anticlimactic - an amazing premise:

"'...something great is in embryo among the stars, a whole new thing, a...a civilization of civilizations. These technical exchanges are just the beginning.'" (p. 277)

- but all we get is a few of the technical exchanges and a detective story, albeit a reasonably neat one. We should have been able to identify the data thief from among the story's assembled cast.

I commented in an earlier post that, in "Horse Trader," Anderson mentions but does not describe the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri A III, leaving us free to imagine that they are the large humanoid warrior women of "Captive of the Centaurianess," although I could not be sure that the author had intended us to make that connection. Well, he does describe the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri A II and they are large humanoid warrior men so I think it is indeed probable that Anderson was remembering "Captive" when he wrote "Horse Trader."

A being from Epsilon Indi is referred to as an "Epsilonian" although there is a temptation to coin the term "Indian."

I just do not buy a succession of aliens that resemble, respectively, a duck, a walrus-mustached centaur, a demon (who sits on his tail like a Merseian) and a Viking. Either the ET's are not out there or they are nothing that we could imagine, which is why Arthur C Clarke kept them off-screen in 2001.

And the story leaves us with a question, although scarcely with a cosmic one: what might "amphitronics" mean?

Horse Trader

I have argued in previous posts that the genres written by Poul Anderson include "historical science fiction." This is further exemplified by the italicized opening passage of his short story, "Horse Trader." (Space Folk, New York, 1989)

The first paragraph, dated AD 250, informs us of a turbine in the temple of Alexandria and of propellers on ships on an Earth-like planet elsewhere in the universe.

In the second paragraph, dated AD 1495, Leonardo da Vinci has made an airplane model but has no way to power it while beings on a planet of another star have built internal-combustion engines but have not thought of flying.

Next, in AD 1942, the Allies need to be able to detect submarines but are unable to develop ultrasonics while the people of Sumanor on Urish know about ultrasonics but "...had never heard of submarines." (p. 262)

Thus, each of these paragraphs presents a historical period with a science fictional perspective.

The action of the story starts in AD 2275 when, thanks to the null-null drive (we have met this before), interstellar journeys can be made at near light speed so that it becomes possible for rational species from different planetary systems to meet and to trade knowledge. No one can do everything well. Those who have developed science and technology in certain directions have not developed them in other directions but now all the discoveries can be exchanged and the first species to travel between stars in this volume of space, humanity, is able to profit by arranging the exchanges.

By coincidence, I had read Anderson's much earlier and very different story, "Captive of the Centaurianess," immediately before starting to read "Horse Trader." I therefore noticed that the Centaurianess is from Alpha Centauri A III and also that the new director of the Bureau of Intercultural Exchange, Technical Division, the "horse traders," was appointed because of his experience with the native civilization of Alpha Centauri A III. In the latter story, Anderson, perhaps deliberately, does not describe this Centaurian race, leaving us free to imagine that they are the large warrior women of the earlier story although this is extremely unlikely.

The Gods Laughed

I am switching from Space Folk to The Gods Laughed (New York, 1982) because I think that the latter includes a story that is the obverse of "Backwardness," in other words a story about first contact with an alien race that is more intelligent than humanity - but I will find out. If the story that I am thinking of is not in this collection, then it must be in another.

Meanwhile, The Gods Laughed collects nine stories on the theme of human-alien contact, including:

"Peek! I See You!" and "Details," both discussed recently because reread in other collections;

"A Little Knowledge," part of Anderson's Technic Civilization History;

"Captive of the Centaurianess," which I think connects with "A Bicycle Built for Brew";

"Soldier From the Stars" - I remember the theme of this story, how to conquer Earth without destroying any of it, but I will reread it to appreciate the details;

"The Word to Space," in which a Jesuit descended from Moriarty confuses some aliens by questioning their religious dogmatism.

That leaves three stories:

"The Martyr"
"Nightpiece"
"When Half Gods Go"

- and, having glanced through the book, I am no longer sure that any of them is the one I thought, but they will be worth reading in any case.

Space And Stars

Space Folk and Starfarers are two similar Poul Anderson titles. (A third evocative title was Star Ways but that had to be changed for republication to avoid apparent plagiarism of Star Wars.) However, Starfarers is a novel incorporating two of the three Kith short stories whereas Space Folk is a collection of twelve short stories, including:

the prequel to Tau Zero;
the sequel to The High Crusade;
a story set against the background of Anderson's Psychotechnic future history although not fully consistent with that series;
the, to me problematic, "Murphy's Hall," which is in other collections and which I discussed recently.

That leaves eight stories in Space Folk that I will read or reread for posting purposes.

Meanwhile:

the remaining Kith story, "The Horn of Time the Hunter," should be published as an Epilogue to future editions of Starfarers;
"Pride" should be published as a Prologue to future editions of Tau Zero;
"Quest" has rightly been published as an Epilogue in a later edition of The High Crusade.

Space Folk (New York, 1989) seems to be remarkably free of the duplication of contents that plagues Anderson collections. Glancing ahead, I have found, in the opening sentence of "Horse Trader", one of Anderson's characteristically unfamiliar terms, "...aeolipile..." (p. 261).

Regular blog readers might like to google this before I do?

Another Mattercaster

I am checking out conceptually related stories to see whether they form a series but, in this case, they don't. Like Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars and its sequel, "The Ways of Love," "Elementary Mistake" in Anderson's Space Folk (New York, 1989), has the idea of spaceship crews crossing interstellar distances at relativistic speeds but then constructing mattercasters so that instantaneous teleportation between the Solar System and each new extra-solar colony becomes possible.

The problem in this story is that a new planet defies expectations by lacking the necessary construction materials in sufficient quantities so that the crew seem to be stranded and, not having read to the end of the story yet, I do not know how the problem is going to be either explained or resolved.

However, enough information has been given so far to place this story in a fictitious future different from that of The Enemy Stars. Apart from the facts that the home regime is a World Federation, not a Protectorate, and that the null-null drive, like the zero-zero drive in Starfarers, does not have to accelerate to get to just under light speed:

"...the [mattercaster] does have to have a strong gravitational field to work. Got to be on a planet." (p. 116)

The mattercasters in The Enemy Stars are in the slowly accelerating ships so that fuel can be teleported to them and successive generations of astronauts can spend short periods in the ships before returning instantaneously to the Solar System. As I have said before, Anderson seems to develop every possible application of an idea.

After a couple of digressions, I must get back to rereading The Enemy Stars.

Cosmic Dust

What Poul Anderson in "Pride" (Space Folk, New York, 1989) calls a "brown dwarf" (p. 8) and describes as a "half-star" (p. 1) or "sub-sun" (p. 20), James Blish in Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980) calls a "grey ghost" and describes as "a dwarf semi-star." (p. 92)

Anderson describes space travelers exploring new environments, therefore encountering as yet unexplained phenomena like:

" 'Those white clouds blanketing most of the surface [of the brown dwarf]...What are they?'" (Space Folk, p. 16)

When a pilot sets off on a solitary mission, it is entirely to be expected that something will disable her spacecraft. When a second pilot sets off to rescue her and to complete her mission, it is even more to be expected that he will succeed. These are the kinds of things that happen in this kind of story. What is of interest is the nature of the obstacle that she had encountered:

" 'The whitish material in the atmosphere and in the plume she encountered, it's dust...mostly fine silicate particles...cosmic dust that the Solar System condensed out of.' " (p. 23)

This solid material was incorporated into the bodies of smaller planets and the cores of gas giants and was vaporized in the Sun but the heat of the brown dwarf kept it suspended in the lower atmosphere from where it is cast into space whenever the dwarf temporarily ignites.

Thus, the space explorers are encountering that primordial dust from which their planetary system was formed. What more dramatic discovery could they have made two light years from home on the fringe of the Solar System?

"Pride"

Early references to spacemen of different nationalities speaking Swedish, to Stockholm as their capital city and to the Control Authority keeping world peace establish that Poul Anderson's "Pride" (IN Anderson, Space Folk, New York, 1989, pp. 1-28) is set in the same future timeline as his Tau Zero. Otherwise, "Pride" would have been simply an independent story of space exploration. I suppose that any number of stories set in space could be linked into a radial series if their texts were to incorporate such common background references.

The spaceship Anna Lovinda has two purposes:

to test the Bussard drive that might be used for interstellar journeys - and is in Tau Zero;

to investigate "Nemesis, long-unseen companion of Sol..." (p. 5), a "brown dwarf" (intermediate in mass between a star and a planet), and even to land smaller craft on some of its planet-sized satellites.

Nemesis is so called because it is the body whose passage through the Oort cloud disturbs the comets so that some fall towards Sol with catastrophic consequences if they hit the inhabited inner planet. James Blish's unfinished novel King Log features Beta Solis, the long unseen white dwarf companion of Sol, and its planets, including one that is inhabited.

My Anderson agenda has become:

to finish rereading "Pride" because of its connection to Tau Zero and because it is interesting in itself;

to return to rereading the fascinating World Without Stars, which is a companion volume to Tau Zero since both are transgalactic in scope;

to reread "Call Me Joe" because it is a further Anderson work set on Jupiter;

maybe to reread "A Bicycle Built For Brew" and one or two other early works with common backgrounds.

Rereading just became more complicated.