Epic Journeys

An epic journey: walking long distance in high gravity carrying heavy survival equipment while threatened by a Walking Forest, hot geysers and Slaughter Machines. And so understated - this is just one incident in Part Two of Poul Anderson's The Star Fox.

Other such epic journeys are:

on Jupiter in Three Worlds To Conquer (see here);

from a colonized planet in the Cloud Universe through interstellar space and a dark nebula to an outpost of human civilization in "Starfog;"

to Jotunheim in The Broken Sword;

in search of Jotunheim in the Last Viking trilogy;

to the icebergs and back in The Man Who Counts;

a long time journey in "Flight To Forever;"

a long space journey in Tau Zero;

a cosmic journey in The Avatar.

No doubt there are others that I have forgotten. Yet another recurring feature that could be analyzed in its own right.

The Rogue

In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984), "The Rogue," the second of the seven stories, describes only the first of the incidents that led to the Asteroid Revolution so it looks like there are more to come. The story contains technical, military, economic and political complexities so I was right to delay reading it until I had started to feel a bit better.

Gyrogravitics, whose role is minimal in this story, is the only technological innovation here. It is a means of gravitational control - the equivalent of Well's Cavorite, Blish's graviton polarity generators ("spindizzies") or the "gravitrons" in another Anderson series. (While we are on the subject of fictional technologies, "3V" is mentioned as a background detail as it was in the last couple of Anderson works that I read.) Apart from the "geegees," or "Emetts" (named after their inventor), all the technology in the story is feasible as of the time of writing, as far as I can tell, not being scientifically educated.

A couple of political issues are mentioned but this is the decisive one for the Revolution:

" 'What the new government wants is something like the eighteenth-century English policy toward America. Keep the colonies as a source of raw materials and as a market for manufactured goods, but don't let them develop a domestic industry.' " (p. 85)

OK. I support the Revolution.

Use of spaceships loaded with dense Jovian atmosphere as a weapon is familiar from Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer and I forgot to mention when discussing that novel that a spaceship functioning like a bathysphere in the Jovian atmosphere was familiar from "Brake" in the Psychotechnic History. This is not to say that Anderson repeats himself ad nauseam. Far from it. Related ideas are put to different good effect in each new work.

The end of "The Rogue" makes us think that its viewpoint character wound up with one of the women in the story whereas, at the end of "Interlude 2," we realize that he wound up with the other one.

Neat Ending

I just finished rereading Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966). The ending is a neat solution to two problems. On Ganymede, a space battleship loyal to an overthrown Terrestrial dictatorship has secretly taken over the colony where its commander plans to manufacture weapons before re-attacking Earth. On Jupiter, Theor, friend of the Ganymedean colonists, leads an army that is about to be overwhelmed by invaders.

How to solve both problems? Mark Fraser, Ganymedean colonist, hijacks an as yet unflown ship designed to land on Jupiter. Chased by a missile, he descends into the Jovian atmosphere and bounces along a denser atmospheric layer that destroys the missile. Then he simply lands on the invaders.

Next, he returns to Ganymede, pretending to surrender, and exits the hijacked ship, having set the autopilot to fly the ship, its hold now full of dense and explosive Jovian atmosphere, straight at the battleship. Solution to second problem and end of novel. As I say, neat.

Ironically, Mark had thought, "Life isn't a story book...There are no happy endings. It just goes on." (p. 136) For the reader, the story does end happily. For Mark, life goes on. He returns to his wife and family while the woman with whom he has shared the Jovian adventure feels it is better that she return to Earth.

Flying Mountains II

I am trying to finish rereading Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer and to start rereading his Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984) but am surrounded by the interruptions of life like helping a friend to move house, venturing into the cold to buy a takeaway meal for my family and watching bizarre events at home and abroad on the television news.

Flying Mountains I really have read only once maybe twenty nine years ago. Looking ahead, I note that it has an elaborate structure with perhaps three layers of narrative. It contains seven stories of which we are informed that four had previously "...appeared, in somewhat different form...in Analog..." (p. 4). This suggests that maybe the remaining three were written for the book? These seven are about asteroid colonization.

There are also a Prologue, an Epilogue and six numbered Interludes, making eight shorter passages in addition to the seven stories. In these shorter passages, extrasolar colonists discuss how to teach the history of the asteroid colonies to their children.

In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, the Asteroid Belt, called simply "the Belt," is colonized entirely with technology that could be envisaged when the stories were written, e.g., a hollowed out asteroid is spun to generate centrifugal force in place of gravity. Anderson's extrasolar colonists are still en route at sub-light speed. My point is that Flying Mountains need not have involved any technological innovations, just the application of existing space technology on a larger scale.

However, as I remember it, the asteroids are colonized by using some sort of gravity control involving the artificial generation of terrestroid gravitational fields on asteroidal surfaces. Although not FTL, gravity control is a very big premise indeed. I will reread with interest both Anderson's rationale for "...gyrogravitics..." and his colonists discussions of how to teach history as well as the seven individual stories (p. 29).

A Jovian Epic

In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), the Jovian Theor makes an epic journey. Fleeing from enemies who are of a different species, he climbs a mountain, attaches himself to a parachute-like plant and flies a mile up, above the clouds, not only seeing the sun for the first time ever but also encountering, also for the first time, the legendary Hidden Folk.

Winged, bipedal, beaked, tool-using, dwelling only in the upper atmosphere and absorbing ammonia either from food or from clouds, this very different but also intelligent branch of Jovian evolution with only animalcules as common ancestors has built a town of nests on a vast mass of bubbles that are probably plant bladders.

With linguistic communication impossible, Theor negotiates by signs passage to the top of a volcano in exchange for his knife. The encounter begins and ends in only one of the nineteen chapters of the novel. I have tried to summarise the essential points briefly here in order to convey something of the economy with which Anderson describes this imaginative odyssey. 

Hardware

In science fiction, some items of futuristic technology become taken-for-granted background cliches:

hyperdrives;
flying cars;
hand weapons called "blasters;"
force screens;
three dimensional TV called "3V;"
an interrogation device called either a "hypnoprobe" or "psychoprobe."

(I think this list should be longer but I can't think of any other examples right now.)

Asimov's Galactic Imperials use psychoprobes; Anderson's Terran Imperials use hypno-. Both devises extract the truth and can destroy the mind if misused. Either we are not told exactly how they work or the explanation is fairly low key but we get an idea of what they are from how they are referred to.

Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966) is set in a nearer future and a different timeline than his Terran Empire. Nevertheless, one character says:

" 'They don't have psychoprobe equipment, or I'd never have fooled them. But they do have a couple of tough political officers who know how to, to interrogate.' " (p. 80)

Here, Anderson uses the Asimovian term. This signals to the reader that the character is referring to something much like a hypnoprobe but not in the same timeline as the Terran Empire. There is an underlying assumption that such technology will be developed in future. But, if the interrogators have not brought such equipment with them, then why mention it? Assumptions need to be challenged, especially in sf. The development of background cliches, including even the term "Terran" (not used outside sf) instead of "Terrestrial," contributed to making sf a literary ghetto with regular readers who knew the lingo and occasional or would-be readers maybe repelled by it.

Having said that, I love Anderson's Terran Empire as a fictional setting and the hypnoprobing of Dominic Flandry's son contributes to the dramatic climax of A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows. Anderson is one writer who could usually make cliches work for instead of against him. But he did not need the reference to "psychoprobe" in Three Worlds To Conquer.

Ammonia Glaciers

In Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), after describing oceans of ammonia on Jupiter, Poul Anderson presents some more information about this fictitious Jovian environment but I cannot fully picture what he says:

when air masses are pushed down from the poles, the surface becomes so cold that ammonia freezes;
such glaziers flow quickly in Jovian gravity;
denser than liquid, they break up and sink on reaching the sea;
in shallow ammonia, the broken glazier chunks melt quickly;
therefore, a torrent pours from the fjord where Theor, paddling on flotsam, had hoped to land so he is unable to enter;
however, by lying flat on a smaller piece of flotsam, he manages to mount a wave and surfboard to shore.

So a torrent prevents him from paddling to shore but a wave carries him there? This sounds contradictory to me but maybe some surfboarders among Anderson fans can explain how it works?

Sea Ammonia

This is the sort of detail that we read Poul Anderson for. Sea water contains too much salt for us to drink it but, in Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), "...the mineral content of sea ammonia..." is too little to prevent Jovians from drinking it. (p. 72)

In fact, there is even a little nourishment in sea ammonia, although not enough to live on. In the upper atmosphere, sunlight irradiates methane and ammonia, forming amino acids and other organic materials which descend to below the level where ultraviolet radiation would break them down. Some even enter the sea where they support microbes that Jovians can digest.

Incredible. Anderson casually tells us this after describing a battle in which our Jovian viewpoint character, by striking with a pike, kills one of the great sea beasts commanded by his enemies. Anyone dismissing Anderson as merely a blood and thunder man is missing the scientific content permeating his action-adventure fiction.

Three Worlds

I feel obliged to post again because page views today are already 80, twice as many as yesterday. However, I have not much to add at present. Today, I have revised Latin, performed chores, walked, meditated, eaten, watched a Smallville TV episode and reread to the mid point of Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966).

Human beings fight on Ganymede while Jovians fight on Jupiter. Anderson always describes combat well. There is one big surprise: a Jovian defensive fleet learns in battle that the invaders of a different species command large sea beasts which attack, destroy ships and slaughter those trying to swim to shore. Imagine what that would look like on screen.

The three worlds of the title must be Earth, Ganymede and Jupiter. The battle on Ganymede may settle whether a counterrevolution will succeed on Earth.

The Jovian Theor conversing with the Ganymedean Mark through a communicator hanging from his neck is like someone whose lucky charm really does give him access to another world. Theor is a Reeveling whose people are free and need not heed him. Hearing that the government on Earth had been overthrown, he asks:

" 'How could a leadership maintain itself in the first instance when not to the benefit of the people?' " (p. 39)

- and does not understand when he is told that some Terrestrials value security higher than freedom. Like Jonathan Swift, who imagined fantastic islands rather than other planets, Anderson uses an alien perspective to comment on human affairs.

Addendum, just after midnight: 85 page views yesterday and one already today. Thank you for all the interest.

12.30: 17 page views in half an hour. I need to turn in.

Theor POV

Chapter 5 of Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966) is narrated from the point of view of the Jovian, Theor:

"Theor looked across long gray waves to the shore." (p. 36)

However, some of what he sees is directly described by the omniscient narrator to a Terrestrial reader. We are informed that the baggage animals, "kanniks," are "...vaguely like six-legged, squamous tapirs..." (p. 36) Obviously, this is not Theor's description of them.

How do Theor's Jupiter and the real Jupiter differ from Earth? Earth has an oxygen atmosphere, a solid surface much of it covered by liquid water and a dense molten core. Theor's Jupiter has a "...monstrous atmospheric ocean - mostly hydrogen..." in which he rides a beast that flies or swims, turbulent elements, a "...queasy...surface..." much of it covered by liquid ammonia, and, presumably, a dense core of some kind. (pp. 21, 36)

My layman's impression of current scientific understanding is that Jupiter comprises turbulent gasses increasing in density all the way down to a very dense core but without any solid surface on which masses of liquid could congregate? Thus, life, if there is any, would float, fly or swim through the "atmospheric ocean" but would not have legs with which to walk on a (nonexistent) surface?

Jovians

How alien are the Jovians in Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966)?

(i) Beneath the hydrogen-helium atmosphere, the only humanly visible illumination is frequent lightning flashes revealing mile-high cloud banks but Jovian eyes, three times as wide as a man's, see by infrared and the longest red wavelengths.

(ii) Reeves are primarily not priests, magicians, judges or generals but master engineers protecting civilisation from wind, rain, hail, lightning, quake, flood, geyser, firespout and stone-crush.

(iii) The Reeveling Theor stands on the back of a flying/swimming, mantis-like forgar, his four feet held by stirrups.

(iv) Theor, male, is fifty inches high, naked, hairless, red, tailed, striped, three-toed, four-fingered, with a comb, a mouth for eating and drinking, a pouch of vibrating muscles for speech, slits for breathing hydrogen and chemo-sensor antennae.

(v) A demimale has physical differences and wears gaudy clothes.

(vi) The three sexes are equal in Nyarr but not among the Ulunt-Khazul.

(vii) Increased genetic diversity compensates for lower irradiation.

(viii) A Jovian ocean is thousands of miles of storm-swept liquid ammonia.

(ix) Jovians can see neither their moons nor the sun.

(x) Houses are pits with thin inner walls that will not crush dwellers during quakes, with roofs of living plants dense enough to resist weather but yielding to wind and "...lit by phosphorescent blossoms..." (p. 27)

Ganymede And Jupiter

In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966):

"Someday we'll warm [Ganymedean] rock with nuclear energy, and crush it into soil, and blanket it with atmosphere, and turn this whole world green." (p. 13)

So terraforming is still in the future for Anderson's colonists whereas Heinlein's, in Farmer In The Sky, can be farmers because they are also terraformers.

When probes to the Jovian surface establish that there is intelligent life, further devices are sent to:

"...start with arithmetic sums in beeps and end with a verbal language." (p. 18)

Carl Sagan in Contact makes it seem easy to start with arithmetic - transmit:

a single beep;
an arbitrary symbol;
a second single beep;
a second arbitrary symbol;
two beeps.

Having thus taught someone your symbols for "plus" and "equals," you can then transmit the rest of mathematics, followed by engineering instructions but how quickly can you proceed to "...an Esperanto for the two races..."? (p. 18) The fact that Terrestrials and Jovians cannot pronounce each others' speech is the least of the problems. I think that conceptual differences would be more problematic. However, Mark Fraser  and Theor of Nyarr converse as easily as two human beings.

Remembering that Theor had said (something like):

" 'Two different breeds of thinking animal have met.' " (p. 19)

- I had envisaged independent evolutions on different Jovian continents. However, the truth was less spectacular. Fraser " '...suspect[s] you're of the same genus.' " (p. 19)

It scarcely matters that this novel is "confined," so to say, to the Solar System because these Jovians are at least as imaginative as any of the same author's extrasolar species. Having said that, all that I can specifically remember after all this time is that they are tri-sexual: female must be impregnated by demi-male soon after male. Jovian society has parallels with Terrestrial: receiving the communication device -

" '...changed the nature of the Reeveship, back toward the ancient function of conductor in magical rites...'" (p. 19)

Chapters 1 and 2 are narrated from Mark Fraser's point of view but I am about to reread Chapter 3 which is Theor pov.

Social Complexity

It is illuminating to read some history in parallel with science fiction. For example, reading about the liberation of Italy in World War II shows that the complexity of society is reflected in the complexity of any struggle for its future.

How many factions:

collaborated with the Nazis;
cooperated with the Allies;
advocated merely awaiting the arrival of the Allies;
worked for national liberation independently of the Allies?

How many conflicts were there between all these groups? There were not simply two sides in the conflict.

Next, we need to reflect that a similar complexity would necessarily exist in any fictitious future society where similar struggles are shown to occur. Early in Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966), we are told that an Army of Liberation led by a group called the "Sam Halls" has overthrown a dictatorship in the United States back on Earth. (Our perspective is that of the colonists on Ganymede, at least one of whom had supported the dictatorship although most had gone there to get away from it.)

How many other groups were involved in the conflict on Earth and with what conflicting aims?

Robert Heinlein shows some of this complexity in Revolt In 2100. When the Cabal has overthrown the Angels of the Lord, the Onward Christian Soldiers express their disagreement with the timing of the Revolution and the Federation, which does not automatically recognise the new regime, will not authorise the use of nuclear weapons to settle a civil war. Willingly suspending disbelief, we are able to imagine that we are reading some real history.

Echoes Of Heinlein II

See Echoes Of Heinlein.

In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966):

" 'If the Sam Halls really can establish the kind of cooperative peace authority they promise, why, that solves the whole problem...' " (p. 11)

A cooperative peace authority preventing nuclear war would be the equivalent of the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein's "The Long Watch," part of his Future History, and Space Cadet, part of his Juvenile Future History.

The Histories share:

the Patrol and its hero, John Ezra Dahlquist;
Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways, author of "The Green Hills of Earth";
a lunar family called Stone;
frog-like Venerians;
contemplative Martians.

The concern about how to prevent nuclear war was an issue when these works were written. (Since then, the issue has become how to prevent Iran or North Korea from following the example of the Great Powers by acquiring nuclear weapons.) In these works, sf writers were addressing the issue of already existing nuclear weapons and thus were not, on this occasion, extrapolating future technology. However, both Wells and Heinlein had projected nuclear weaponry before it existed. In "Solution Unsatisfactory," not part of any series, Heinlein predicted a nuclear stand-off and could offer no solution to it. Maybe it is significant that this story did not have a sequel.

Echoes Of Heinlein

Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966) features a colony on Ganymede like Robert Heinlein's Farmer In The Sky and a successful revolution against an American dictatorship like Heinlein's Revolt In 2100.

After twelve years on Ganymede, Anderson's Mark Fraser considers returning to Earth but then is unsure because:

"...if Ganymede's rock and ice were hard to strike roots in, they gripped those roots all the more tightly." (pp. 8-9)

This echoes Heinlein's story, "It's Great To Be Back!" A young couple reach the end of their contracted time in the lunar colony and thankfully return to Earth only to find that they are no longer at home there so, at the end of the story, they are back on the Moon, saying, "It's great to be back!"

Having as yet reread Three Worlds To Conquer only as far as p. 11, I will now watch out for any other Heinlein parallels. Another such could be that there are Jovians, inhabitants of Jupiter, both in this Anderson novel and in Heinlein's Future History. However, Anderson's Jovians are major characters whereas the Future History Jovians are merely mentioned.

"It's Great to be Back!" and Revolt In 2100 belong to the Future History whereas Farmer In The Sky belongs to Heinlein's alternative or juvenile Future History along with Red Planet, Space Cadet, The Rolling Stones and Time For The Stars. As I remarked previously, Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation parallels the Future History but on a vaster spatiotemporal scale.

Three Worlds To Conquer

I am starting to reread Three Worlds To Conquer (London, 1966) by Poul Anderson. My copy is a Mayflower-Dell paperback that cost three shillings and six pence. I have not found its cover on the Internet.

p. 1, an extract;
p. 2, titles of two other Mayflower-Dell paperbacks by Anderson;
p. 3, title page;
p. 4, publishing details;
p. 5, dedication to Gordon Dickson;
p. 6, blank;
pp. 7-142, the novel;
pp. 143-144, other books published by Mayflower-Dell.

Page 7 establishes that the novel features interplanetary but not interstellar travel. Glimpsing the stars while approaching Ganymede, the viewpoint character thinks:

"...I'd like to know what's out yonder. But he wouldn't live that long. And it didn't matter. There was sufficient mystery in the Solar System for a lot of human lifetimes yet..." (p. 7)
 
It is also soon established that a dictatorship has just been overthrown back in the United States so that Anderson's characters are in a similar situation to Robert Heinlein's at the end of his Revolt In 2100. We are about to read about the effects of Terrestrial politics in the Outer Solar System. Since I have previously read this novel perhaps once decades ago, I must read on to learn more...