The Center Of The Cloud Universe

Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794. 

The "Cloud Universe" in Poul Anderson's "Starfog" is simultaneously both a globular cluster and a gaseous nebula. I have tried to convey the richness of Anderson's imagination by summarizing his accounts of this spatial environment but there is always more. The accounts permeate the narrative rather than being confined to an introductory passage.

At the center:

nebular gas and dust are so dense that they present "...a nearly featureless glow..." (p. 772);

the glow is pearl-colored, with rainbows;

the stars are so close that thousands are visible despite the "starfog";

the plasma is actively energetic;

denser clouds conceal hazards - drifts of dust, rogue planets and dead stars;

the hazards, "...more than fog...," are compared to "...shoals, reefs, and riptides" (ibid.);

the two exploratory spacecraft are compared to "...frigates on unknown seas of ancient Earth..." (ibid.), but this sea is not flat and has no horizon;

gas and dust are so gravitationally concentrated that there is an unbelievable rate of star-production;

every time the cluster gathers material from the clouds of the galactic center, there are several supernovae per century for at least a million years;

radiation has sterilized every planet within a fifty light year radius;

atoms have been through a dozen supernova explosions, far more than elsewhere;

giant planets do not have shells of frozen water and smaller ones do not have silicate crusts;

iron, gold, mercury, tungsten, bismuth, uranium and transuranics abound;

some planets will have to be explored only by heavily armored robots;

the planets will be intensively mined for heavy elements rare elsewhere but abundant here;

the discoverers, drawing royalties on millions of the richest mines in the galaxy, will "'...command more resources than many civilizations...'" (p. 791)

Wealth beyond the dreams of Nicholas van Rijn: Satan and Mirkheim were each only one planet. An entire new phase of interstellar history, now spread across several spiral arms, is about to begin as the series ends.

Another Unusual Planet

In Poul Anderson's "Starfog," a subjovian planet had had:

a cloudy hydrohelium and methane atmosphere;
a core surrounded by ice and frozen gases;
an orbit a billion and a half kilometers from its primary, which:

received an abnormal infall of matter;
swelled and cooled;
consumed its inner planets;
blew away atmospheres, boiled oceans, melted ice and unleashed tectonic forces on the outer planets.

Consequently, the former subjovian is now an Earth-sized ball of metal and rock with mountains, cratered plains and an immense blue-red sun. However, a newly formed star, as bright as a thousand Sols, passes close while at the same time the glowing cluster of red, golden, emerald and sapphire stars rises behind the expanded sun.

Events on uninhabited planets become as fascinating as activities on inhabited planets.

Inside The Cloud Universe

Space is never completely empty. In "Starfog," Poul Anderson imagines a volume of space full of gas and dust illuminated by hundreds of thousands of closely packed stars at every stage from condensation to explosion. Gas, condensing into stars, is enriched by novas and renewed when the cluster's eccentric orbit approaches the galactic center.

Standing on the bridge of his spaceship, Daven Laure sees clouds and colors glowing, streaming, eddying, piling into cliffs and darkening into grottoes. He traverses not apparent emptiness but landless cloudscapes, hears sounds, feels vibrations and remembers fire and ice meeting in the Void of Norse mythology.

His computer remarks that the external view is an illusion:

the interstellar medium is not as dense as a planetary atmosphere but appears so because absorption and reflection effects are cumulative over light years;
the swirling appears accelerated because the ship is under hyperdrive;
space does not shine - excited atoms fluoresce;
the sounds heard are from instruments within the ship;
quantum micro-jumping across variable magnetic fields, the ship interacts with them and thus seems to be buffeted by tangible currents.

Jaccavrie II

"Quite a few Rangers were eremetic types... It was normal for them to think of their ships as elaborate tools. Daven Laure, who was young and outgoing, naturally thought of his as a friend."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 714.

The Rangers should know whether their ships are tools or friends. Later, the computer, robot or cybernetic brain controlling Laure's spaceship, Jaccavrie, chuckles. When an artifact chuckles, there are two possibilities:

the artifact has been programmed to simulate human responses including, when appropriate, amusement;

the artifact is conscious and is spontaneously expressing amusement.

If the Rangers have programmed an artifact to simulate human responses, then they know that that artifact is not conscious whereas, if they have constructed an artifact that duplicates brain functions, then they have the same reason to call that artifact conscious as they have to call the possessor of an organic brain conscious so there should be no mystery or ambiguity here.

Anderson projects our questions about artificial intelligence forward to a time when those questions should have been answered.

Jaccavrie

"The [computer's] tone was anxious. Laure didn't believe that emotion was put on. He refrained from anthropomorphizing his computer, just as he did those nonhuman sophonts he encountered. At the same time, he didn't go along with the school of thought which claimed that human-sensibility terms were absolutely meaningless in such connections. An alien brain, or a cybernetic one like Jaccavrie's, could think; it was aware; it had conation. Therefore it had analogies to his."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 714.

Analogies to his sensibility terms? I have just googled "conation" and have realized that I had not understood it. I had thought that it was "cognition."

Brains, whether human or non-human, generate consciousness. Computers, including the one on which I am typing and the one on which you are reading, do not generate consciousness. They manipulate symbols according to rules without understanding the meanings of the symbols. Conceivably, some future artifact will not only manipulate symbols but will also generate consciousness and will even be intelligent enough to recognize meanings and understand symbols. Such an artifact might interchangeably be called a "computer" or a "cybernetic brain" in recognition of its different functions.

If, in Laure's time, cybernetic brains are known to be aware, then there should be no school of thought claiming that human-sensibility terms are meaningless. So does Anderson mean that it is only Laure's opinion that cybernetic brains are aware? Laure's conversations with Jaccavrie imply that such brains pass the Turing Test. If any entity passed that test and was then shown to have been merely manipulating symbols, as a modern computer does, then I would have a major philosophical problem.

To pass the Turing Test, i.e., to converse in a way indistinguishable from that of an intelligent being, any entity told a racist joke would have to:

laugh or
not get the joke or
understand the joke but not think that it was funny or
groan at a bad joke or
tell another joke in return or
say, "I don't think that's very funny!" or
say, "That's offensive!" or
threaten legal action or
change the subject or
say nothing or
end the conversation or
respond in some other unpredictable way.

Through Space

Very often in science fiction, interesting events occur on another planet and space is merely the distance that has had to be traveled, or the void that has had to be traversed, in order to reach that planet. If events do occur en route, then they usually occur entirely within the closed environment of the spaceship. It is rare that space itself is presented as an environment where events can occur or where there is the equivalent of a landscape with distinctive features that can be discovered by traveling between them.

As can be expected, Poul Anderson does more than once focus on what space travelers see and fly past outside their ship while they are traveling. In "Starfog," we learn that, millennia earlier, a ship fleeing from a conflict had traversed two spiral arms and passed through a dark nebula before colonizing a planet in a bright opaque cluster. Descendants of those colonists, traveling in an experimental interstellar ship, emerge from their cluster into what is to them the unfamiliar environment of dark space where stars are distant points light years instead of light months apart.

Remembering legendary accounts of space as dark and sighting the distant Dragon's Head nebula, they reason that their ancestors might have passed through such an even darker region in order to evade pursuit so they steer towards and through the nebula. There, on the far side of the nebula, they locate an industrialized colony planet by detecting its neutrino emissions and manage to reach it before running out of fuel. Thus, the journey itself has involved passing through physically different regions and steering by the landmark of the nebula.

In Tau Zero, a spaceship making an interstellar journey but accelerating uncontrollably must fly into the space between clusters of galaxies to attempt repairs but must then fly between clusters of clusters to effect the repairs, steers across a hundred million light years of dark and empty space to the next "clan" (cluster of clusters) but, unable to stop, keeps going between and through clans until the universe contracts at which point the ship orbits around the new monobloc until that explodes into a new universe.

The ship's crew colonizes a planet in the new universe but, obviously, the main point of the story has been how they got there.

Serious Issues

The purpose of this blog was simply to express appreciation of Poul Anderson's fiction. However, like all good novelists, Anderson addressed some serious issues about society and humanity. As well as enjoying the fiction, we can appreciate his discussion of these issues and can engage in the discussion. See in particular my responses to Anderson's excellent political science fiction novel, Mirkheim: "Issues in Mirkheim" (April, '12) and "Something Is Rotten In Technic Culture?" (April '12) (see here).

In "Interstellar Wealth" (April, '12), I meant merely to quote a few passages in which Anderson's readers vicariously enjoy the vast wealth, on an interstellar scale, of characters like Nicholas van Rijn. However, in The Game Of Empire, one character asks this serious question: with technology that could make every living being rich, why fight? In the concluding section of The Boat Of A Million Years, Anderson shows a society where everyone is rich by our standards but other problems arise. (See here.)

In "Starfog," Daven Laure, a Ranger of the Commonalty, says that economic planning is impossible for a continent, let alone a galactic spiral arm. In "The Commonalty" (April, '12), I agree with him about the spiral arm but not about the continent. He also claims that the people of the Commonalty do not get into wars. I think that this makes sense on their vast interstellar scale but, if Anderson had written more in this Technic History future history series, we might have seen otherwise.

Really ultimate questions emerge in the Harvest of Stars tetralogy and the novel Genesis:

human-AI interaction;

post-human AI (see "Organic and Post-Organic," April '12);

if humanity were extinct, would it be morally right for a higher intelligence to re-create living humanity with all its conflict and suffering?;

can intelligence survive the heat-death of the universe?

Those might be the most ultimate questions that we can think of as yet.

The Commonalty

Daven Laure, a Ranger of the Commonalty, says that economic planning is impossible even for a single continent. (1) I disagree. I think that, in the kind of advanced technological future envisaged by Anderson, an educated population freed from drudgery and possessing, at least potentially, vast social wealth and a refined communications technology would be able to plan production of necessities and to allocate remaining resources for research, recreation and creativity while maintaining the maximum freedom for each individual within a dynamic social and cultural environment. I regard this not as philosophical speculation but as a practical proposition. Of course, its feasibility remains to be determined in practice. As long as such a system does not exist, there will continue to be minority economic control, whether private or bureaucratic, as envisaged by most sf, which projects familiar social relationships onto unfamiliar technological contexts.

I do agree with Laure that economic planning is neither possible nor even desirable on the scale of a galactic spiral arm. Each planet should be self-sufficient. Whatever the arrangements on each planet, an interstellar market would not involve the stockpiling of food or medicine needed elsewhere or sweat shop labor on one planet producing luxury items for another. With many entire planets, with vast distances between them and with a universally distributed high technology, such oppressive features of a market economy would be relegated to a remote and primitive past.

The Commonalty is "...a private, voluntary, mutual-benefit society, open to anyone anywhere who meets the modest standards." (1)

We are not told what the standards are. The Commonalty maintains services like space rescue and is hired by planetary governments. One such government asks the Commonalty Rangers to investigate the newly arrived Kirkasanters who tell an implausible tale and may be a threat to humanity. When Laure accompanies the Kirkasanters back to their home region of space, the "profit," or return on the investment in his ship and training, is the scientific knowledge gained. OK so far. Laure also mentions individual quadrillionaires in the home civilization. That informs us that, on at least some of the planets, the market economy is of the kind known to us in which one of the commodities bought and sold is labor power. I think that alternative arrangements would also be possible on particular planets while planetary populations either bartered or bought and sold knowledge and technology.

Laure also says, "The people of the Commonalty don't get into wars." (2)

This makes sense. The Commonalty is interstellar. If, on that scale, there is no incentive for imperialism - grabbing raw materials, trade routes and markets, then defending them militarily -, then there is no reason for war. On the other hand, the industrially valuable planets Satan and Mirkheim became causes of conflict earlier in the History so could something similar occur with the Kirkasanters' heavy metals rich Cloud Universe? We are glad that Anderson wrote so much and wish that he had written more but he could not have gone on forever. He did show us interplanetary exploration, the Grand Survey, the League, the Troubles, the Empire, the Long Night, the Allied Planets and the Commonalty.

(1) Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, The Long Night, New York, 1983, pp. 242-310 AT p. 291.
(2) ibid., p. 251.

Living in the Galaxy

After five thousand years of interstellar travel, mankind has thinly occupied parts of two or three spiral arms. Old Earth, still called Home, is a half remembered myth in another spiral arm. Daven Laure, from the Fireland mountains on New Vixen, has never seen Earth, has never met anyone who has seen Earth and has no family record of any ancestor who had seen Earth. As a Ranger of the Commonalty, he trained at Starborough near Irontower City on Aladir, travels in a ship with a consciousness level computer and encounters nonhuman sophonts. The Commonalty, a service organisation, not a government, has members on an estimated ten million planets but:

"We know that other branches of humanity have their distinctive ways, and hear rumors of yet stranger ones." (1) 

The colonised planet Serieve, poor in heavy metals, is close to the northern verge of its spiral arm with only the galactic halo of scattered ancient globular clusters and a very thin interstellar medium beyond it. The only concentration of gas and dust in the region, the Dragon's Head Nebula, is in transit. New colonists of an entire planet usually build low but the Serievans have built a high rise industrial city, Pelogard, on an arctic island where they can extract minerals from ocean currents. Flocks of blue, winged, bird-like organisms circle above trees with fronded silver leaves.

Several interlocking narratives of the Technic History conclude in the Commonalty period:

(i) Terrans colonised Aeneas;
Dominic Flandry of Terra exiled Aenean rebels;
the rebels colonised Kirkasant hidden in the "Cloud Universe" globular cluster;
a ship from Kirkasant made an epic journey to the colony planet Serieve.

(ii) Terrans colonised Hermes and Vixen;
David Falkayn of Hermes discovered the industrially valuable planet Mirkheim and initiated the Supermetals company to exploit it;
Henry Kittredge of Vixen was the Supermetals ground operations chief on Mirkheim;
the Vixenite share in Supermetals bought badly needed weather stations;
Flandry and Catherine Kittredge of the Vixenite weather engineering department successfully resisted alien invasion of Vixen, at one stage hiding in a weather station.

(iii) Helen Kitteridge of Vixen, Terran Space Navy energy weapons controller, joined Olaf Magnusson's revolt;
intelligence gathered by Flandry's daughter brought down Magnusson.

(iv) Vixenites colonised New Vixen;
Daven Laure of New Vixen integrated Kirkasanters into interstellar civilisation after a ship from Kirkasant had reached Serieve.

These interlocking narratives touch on the histories of several planets and highlight eight individuals: three Vixenite Kittredges, three major figures - Falkayn, Flandry and Magnusson - and two others, Flandry's daughter and Daven Laure. As with the history of the Ythrians (see here), we would like to know more but this was all that Anderson had space to tell us.

Beyond the Dragon's Head is unexplored space. Directly behind this Nebula is the "Cloud Universe" globular cluster. A globular cluster comprises old, red, metal-poor stars in a nearly perfect vacuum. However, the Cloud Universe's eccentric orbit passes through dense clouds of gas and dust near the galactic centre. The cluster gravitationally gathers gas which makes it opaque and condenses into new stars. Periodic ingestion of new matter causes several supernovae per century for at least a million years. Stars are unstable and radiation levels prevent any life in the centre of the cluster. From within the Cloud Universe, space appears as neither dark nor empty but as bright and star-filled. Stars are light months apart.

A fleet fled from the Terran Empire. One ship fled as far as possible, a quarter way round the galaxy through two spiral arms, and hid as well as possible, on Kirkasant in the Cloud Universe. Such a long trip in an early vessel required frequent repair, resupply and refilling of nuclear converters. On arrival, the ship needed a rebuild but the Kirkasanters, as they now were, needed five millennia to build the industrial capacity for interplanetary travel. High radiation and a harsh environment speeded evolution. The first generation mined and forged metal. The second supported a literate class. When scientific method was rediscovered, relativity theory, based on observations from within the Cloud Universe, implied a universe two or three hundred light years across with space tightly curved by the concentrated mass. The Kirkasanters progressed from moon rockets to hyperdrive in a single lifetime. They knew it was possible and were guided by old texts and the hulk of the ancestral ship.

The first interstellar ships visited stars visible from home. The Makt crew went further, believing that they would be able to steer home by already charted stars. However, because of the haze and shine in the Cloud Universe, absolute magnitudes and therefore relative distances had not been calculated accurately. Bypassing home space, the ship became lost in the Cloud until it exited the cluster. Theory implied that they had made a dimensional crossing into another universe, even though each universe was visible from the other. Legendary references to space as dark suggested that the ancestors had come from here. When they had re-entered the cluster three times to no avail, telescopes revealed a distant black cloud (the Dragon's Head). Reasoning that the ancestors, fleeing an enemy, might have passed through such a cloud, the Makt crew approached and traversed the Nebula. Then they used neutrino detectors to find the nuclear power plants of an advanced civilisation and, nearly out of fuel, reached Serieve.

Entering the Cloud Universe, Jaccavrie (Laure's ship) and Makt could not find Kirkasant and were in danger from radiation, hidden bodies and unpredictable stellar processes. Laure explored several planets both to confirm that they were rich in heavy metals and to establish a claim of ownership for himself and the Makt crew. When miners swarm into the cluster, the Kirkasanters will be rich and the miners' beacons will enable them to map the cluster and find their planet: a neat solution to a technical problem.

That the Kirkasanters were descended from the Aeneans is a reasonable inference given that Anderson did not write anything further to contradict it. It is certainly unlikely that any other human group fled that far that early.

Thus, Anderson constructed an sf story about:

vast interstellar distances albeit traversed by hyperdrive;
unusual celestial bodies and processes;
human communities isolated for millennia in different environments, thus becoming distinct species;
no nonhuman intelligences in this story although they are mentioned once;
no interstellar empires although they had existed earlier in this fictitious history;
a new form of interstellar organisation meriting further discussion.

Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, The Long Night, New York, 1983, pp. 242-310, AT p. 248.