Colorful Fictions Continued

The Green Lantern Corps is part of the DC Universe which also includes Superman and Batman. The Trader Team is part of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation which also includes Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry. The DCU is bigger because older and multi-authored. However, the Technic History is impressive as a long narrative by a single author.

When comparing an Anderson character to a Green Lantern, it is appropriate also to mention Larry Niven, like Anderson an American sf writer, future historian and successor of Robert Heinlein.

The Joker from the DCU makes a guest appearance in Larry Niven's Known Space future history (although, when I first read Known Space, I had not yet got back into reading comics so I missed this explicit reference);

Niven wrote an article on Superman and plotted a Green Lantern story;

Niven's psychic detective and protectors have features of superheroes.

In fact, superheroes originated in sf, with Superman's scientifically rationalized extraterrestrial origin, then incorporated both fantasy, with Captain Marvel's supernaturally explained magical origin, and action-adventure fiction, with non-super powered masked avengers and costumed adventurers. The version of Green Lantern that has existed since 1960 defends not a single city, country or planet but an entire space sector and interacts with the GL's of neighboring sectors, all of whom take their orders from immortal Guardians of the Universe, or did the last time I looked although these scenarios can change and change again very quickly. Thus, this superhero series is more sfnal than most and was appropriate material for the application of Larry Niven's cosmic imagination.

Either this cover or another GL crowd scene features a Puppeteer GL. GL's are fearless whereas Niven's Known Space aliens the Puppeteers are cowardly unless insane so a Puppeteer GL must be mad indeed.

See "Comics And Science Fiction" on www.sciencefiction.blogspot.co.uk

Colorful Fiction

Like a lot of people, I enjoy novels, films and comics, thus verbal, audiovisual and visual-verbal fiction. Films and comics have the advantage of full color visuals but prose fiction can be "colorful." First, it generates book covers and each new edition of a text can have a different cover.

Secondly, the writing can be "colorful." Many of Poul Anderson's descriptive passages are multi-sensory. We see, hear and smell a scene.

Chee Lan, a member of Anderson's "Trader Team" is squirrel-like, small with a large tail and white-furred except for a black nose and a dark mask around golden or green eyes. Thus, not only is she described colorfully. She also resembles a member of the DC Comics Green Lantern Corps, pictured lower left.

To complete the resemblance, Chee flies with a gravity harness in "Day Of Burning" and she and her team mates engage flying soldiers in a forest on another planet in Mirkheim. The Trader Team and the Green Lantern Corps, both interstellar multi-species outfits, differ in almost every respect. However, by basing an extraterrestrial on a terrestrial life form, Anderson and a comics script writer have generated visually similar characters.   

How Future Histories Get Written

Preferably, we read the stories and novels of a series in chronological order of fictitious events and not in the order of writing or of publication if this was different, although those who followed the series as it was being  published did not have this option. But it is illuminating to reflect on the order in which the works were written.

Poul Anderson introduced the character of David Falkayn in "Three-Cornered Wheel," (1963) then introduced the team of Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan in "Trader Team" (1965). One more story about Falkayn before he met the others, "A Sun Invisible," was published in 1966.

A three-sided conversation characterizes Falkayn and his colleagues, the dinosaur-like Adzel and the squirrel-like Chee. Adzel affirms his appreciation for other cultures by mentioning that he sang Fafnir while a student on Earth, Chee retorts that he also paraded as a dragon in Chinese New Year and Falkayn, their captain, says that that is enough from both of them. Here, the references to Fafnir and Chinese New Year serve only to show us how these characters interact.

However, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" (1974) shows us Adzel as a student on Earth and recounts how he came to play Fafnir and the Chinese dragon. This story is narrated by a one-off character, Adzel's fellow student, James Ching. Further, although its narrator never recurred as a character, the story was collected in The Earth Book Of Stormgate where it acquired a fictitious introduction informing us that Ching had, as he had hoped, become a spaceman and had eventually settled on the planet Catawrayannis which is known to us from other episodes in Anderson's Technic History.

Thus, the order of Anderson's creativity reaches forwards and backwards through time from Falkayn before he led a trader team to Falkayn leading the team to Adzel and Ching as students on Earth to Ching retiring on Catawrayannis and, of course, there is a lot more in the series than this.

Anderson introduced Merseians as opponents of the Terran Empire in "Honorable Enemies" (1951) but then informed us, in the second "trader team" story, "Day Of Burning," (1967) that it was Falkayn and his team who had enabled the Merseians to become opponents of Terra. Ythri is mentioned as a rival imperium in "Honorable Enemies" (1951). First contact is made with the winged Ythrians on their home planet in "Wings Of Victory" (1972). Remarkably, four further short stories and two novels all featuring Ythrians were all published in 1973 even though their fictitious dates in the Chronology of Technic Civilization range from 2150 to 3028 (thus all earlier than "Honorable Enemies," set, we are told, in 3033). Although human-Ythrian contact is spread across the History, it occupied only the 1972-'73 period in Anderson's writing career and this becomes evident only when the reader studies the dates as given in the Chronology/bibliography.

The Terran Empire first appeared in "Tiger By The Tail" (January, 1951) and "Honorable Enemies" (May, 1951) but had been founded centuries earlier in "The Star Plunderer" (September, 1952). For many years, the History had started with faster than light interstellar travel in 2150 ("Wings Of Victory," 1972) but later Anderson told us something of how Earth had recovered from global unrest with the help of interplanetary exploration around 2055 ("The Saturn Game," 1981). Thus, this first story in the Chronology was written much later than the last, "Starfog," (1967) which, the Chronology tells us, occurs in 7100.

Thus, we appreciate not only the long narrative of the History but also the creative skill with which it was all put together.

Colourful Ambiguous Symbolism

The concluding sentence of Mirkheim:

"Above the cliffs, a few eastern clouds turned red." (1)

This is mixed symbolism. Red is a colour of sunsets. Something is ending. But these are eastern clouds. This is a morning. Something is beginning. Yet again, red in the morning is a warning...

The entire novel, particularly in its last few pages, has shown us endings. The Polesotechnic League, hailed with the phrase "...the world's great age begins anew..." in an earlier volume, is now in terminal decline. (2) The old team had been reassembled but not as before:

"And so we fare forth again, we three and our ship, like our young days come back...except that this time our mission is not into the hopeful yonder." (3)

The main characters comment on the end of an era.

Adzel: "...those were good years. Were they not? I will miss my partners." (4)

Chee: "We can't go home to what we left when we were young; it may still be, but we aren't, nor is the rest of the cosmos...We enjoyed the trader game as long as that lasted." (5)

Van Rijn: "...maybe we will lead a little expedition quite outside of known space, for whatever we may find...A universe where all roads lead to roaming. Life never fails us. We fail it, unless we reach out." (6)

Falkayn: "...I can look for a place to begin afresh." (7)

And that fresh beginning is in the following story where Falkayn's grandson grows up with winged Ythrians in Falkayn's colony of Avalon.

(1) Anderson, Poul, Mirkheim, London, 1978, 218.
(2) Anderson, Poul, Trader To The Stars, St Albans, Herts, 1975, p. 7.
(3) Mirkheim, p. 34.
(4) ibid., p. 216.
(5) ibid., pp. 217-218.
(6) ibid., p. 215.
(7) ibid., p. 212.

A Non-Linear Sub-Series

The "Trader Team" sub-series in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization comprises just five works. In the first, "Trader Team"/"The Trouble Twisters," Nicholas van Rijn explains his trade pioneer crew idea to David Falkayn:

robot probes will investigate as yet unexplored planetary systems that have been bypassed by the frontier of known space;
a crew comprising a Master Merchant, a planetologist and a xenobiologist of different species will visit any that seem promising.

In this story, Falkayn leads his team on their first mission and coins a term for their new profession, "trouble twister." (1)

It might be expected that the remaining four works would describe four more missions but they don't. On the one hand, we are to understand that Falkayn's and other teams enrich van Rijn by continuing to pioneer for several decades. On the other hand, the remaining works present different kinds of events that are turning points for the team, for their civilization or for both.

In the second work, "Day Of Burning," the team is not pioneering but is on a rescue mission simply because theirs was the nearest League ship to the planet Merseia when a threat to all life on that planet was detected. Falkayn claims to have seen planets devastated by all-out nuclear strikes. That must have happened between stories and would not have been on a pioneer crew mission. This story is a turning point for Technic civilization because the Merseians later become the main adversaries of the Polesotechnic League's successor, the Terran Empire.

 In the third work, Satan's World, the team is on yet another kind of mission, investigating a data processing company based in the Solar System where, because of exploits that we have not read about, Falkayn is known to be:

"Right-hand man and roving troubletwister for Old Nick." (2)

(Falkayn's coinage has become a single word.)

This novel is a turning point for Technic civilization because it shows that the Polesotechnic League could be vulnerable to external threats which, in turn, is a prelude to recognition of internal threats to the League's continued prosperity and stability. The novel is a potential ending for the series: the team has to be split up and might not survive, as indeed Technic civilization might not. When, at the very end, they have defeated their enemies and are embarking on a new pioneering mission, things have changed. They have passed a turning point. Their share in Satan's World has made them rich for life. They now pioneer because they want to, not because they have to. In that sense, the first phase of their troubletwisting career has ended.

And this sub-series could have ended there. However, Anderson next wrote "Lodestar," based on an idea suggested by his editor John W Campbell, for a John W Campbell Memorial Anthology. The team visits an established League base. Thereafter, the story follows van Rijn and his granddaughter, Coya, who finally discover that Falkayn and his team have secretly worked against van Rijn's business interests in order to help the poorer rational species whose needs are ignored by the League. This is a turning point for the League, for the relationship between van Rijn and Falkayn and, we later learn, for the relationship between Coya and Falkayn who have married and started a family by the time of the fifth and last work in this sub-series, Mirkheim.

Arguably, the sub-series proper ends with "Lodestar." That is the last time we see Falkayn's team during that period of their employment by van Rijn. Mirkheim, set many years later, is a sequel in which, during many other epochal events, van Rijn reassembles the long dispersed original team but for a different kind of mission and in very different circumstances. We learn that Coya had married Falkayn and joined the team for five years but stopped pioneering when they started a family and that that had ended the team, with its members going their separate ways. Thus, there is another entire period, of Coya on the team, which is not covered by any of the stories.

As part of a longer history, the sub-series is also rich in both prequels and sequels that tell us what van Rijn and some of the team members did both before and after this period. But my point here is that Anderson, having defined the role of a trade pioneer crew, does not present merely a linear series about successive exploits of such a team. Taking it as given that they had such exploits, he instead paints a broader picture by spacing his stories out through time to show us what happened to the League throughout an entire historical period.

For what it is worth, I now think that the entire Technic History could best be collected as:

The Polesotechnic League (9 works);
Star Traders (9);
League And Empire (6);
Young Flandry (3);
Flandry And Empire (9);
Children Of Empire (3);
Long Night And Dawn (4).

It is possible to rethink this issue endlessly and to keep arriving at different conclusions. The problems are where to divide the omnibus volumes and what to call them. Van Rijn dominates his period, appearing not only in six works of his own but also in four of the five "Trader Team" works. Thus, the proposed Star Traders volume would, with the exception of "Day Of Burning," be an extended van Rijn series but with a pluralized title, Star Traders, not Star Trader, in order to acknowledge that this volume covers Falkayn and the team as well as Old Nick.

Again, Mirkheim's status as really a sequel to the Trader Team sequence could be acknowledged by placing it at the beginning of the following volume which would therefore be called League And Empire, not Avalon And Empire. Near the end of Mirkheim, Coya bears Nicholas Falkayn who addresses his son in the very next story set in the Falkayns' colony on the planet Avalon and this omnibus volume ends with Avalon resisting the Empire. Thus, League And Empire would be an appropriate title as showing not interaction (they do not coexist) but transition between the Polesotechnic League, beginning its decline in "Lodestar" and Mirkheim, and the Terran Empire, becoming territorially aggressive in The People Of The Wind.

(1) Anderson, Poul, David Falkayn: Star Trader (compiled by Hank Davis), New York, 2010, p. 206.
(2) ibid., p. 332.

"Orion Shall Rise"?

Half way through Orion Shall Rise, the slogan has been repeated but we have not yet been told what "Orion" is. However, there have been several clues:

it is a technology prohibited by the Maurai but developed secretly by the Norrmen in a remote mountainous region;

it requires nuclear energy but is not a nuclear weapon;

it will "rise";

when it is tested, there is volcano-like sound and vapour followed by a bright light in the sky and a ship crew expects to be busy;

this is a novel by Poul Anderson and it is not difficult to think of a technology that he would want his characters to develop.

Meanwhile, however, the narrative continues. By (slightly contrived?) means, Anderson has brought two characters from the Federation, two from the Union and two from the Domain together in a Mong wilderness where they will have to cooperate to survive. Thus,we now embark on a passage with further character interaction and some information about survival techniques.

In The Beginning, Were The Sites...

Let me explain the rationale behind this blog. Blog posts vary from very brief notes to long, substantial articles. Both kinds are here but the latter are earlier and there is a reason why. I have two websites: www.paulshackley.co.uk and www.jamesblishappreciation.co.uk.

The first has sections, including "Science Fiction." I focus on certain sf writers: British (Wells, Stapledon, Lewis and Aldiss) and American (the interconnected group of Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Anderson and Niven). "Time Travel", CS Lewis, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson grew to become independent sections.

It is my hope that any information placed on the Internet will remain indefinitely accessible. However, sites cease to exist as soon as they stop being paid for. My IT adviser, Ketlan, informed me that blogs are free and can be expected to remain in existence as long as Google does. Consequently, the entire contents of both sites have been copied to seven linked blogs, including this one.

I had written articles on entire series by Anderson, e.g., the Technic History and the Time Patrol, or, within the former, the Flandry series and the Long Night. Currently, I am rereading separate works and blogging while rereading. Thus, the length and nature of the entries has changed. I hope both that the current posts may be of interest, sometimes highlighting details that other readers might have forgotten or overlooked, and also that those interested in Anderson's works will scroll back to earlier entries.

Parallel Narratives

In a hospital waiting room, one porter showed another a tabloid headline. The second smiled at the story, whatever it was, then asked, "Wha'? In real life or int' soap?" In other words, the story applied either to an actor or to that actor's character in a TV serial. First, the porter appreciated the story. Then, he checked which of our two parallel narratives it belonged to, news or fiction.

My daughter, overhearing her parents discussing the then current Mayor of our City, asked a question about a former ruler of Narnia - "while we were on the subject," as her mother commented.

My rereading of Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise has been interrupted by a weekend spent learning something about current economic problems and political conflicts in several European and Middle Eastern countries. Returning to the novel, I again appreciate Anderson's ability to present his fictitious world with plausible complexity and density.

Centuries in our future, the Northwest Union, defeated in war by the Maurai Federation, must accept, but successfully misleads, Maurai Inspectors checking wilderness areas for prohibited technology. Meanwhile, both Union and Federation spies are present in the Domain of Skyholm when one viewpoint character, a Gaean, stages a coup with Espaynian support while his opponent, another viewpoint character otherwise expected to be the next Captain of Skyholm, evades arrest, becoming a fugitive. For a second time in this series, Anderson makes us think that a Maurai spy has telepathy, then presents yet another explanation for the phenomenon. And so far I have reread only to page 177 of 468.

Episodic blogging provides an excellent opportunity to record an appreciation of a long novel in the course of rereading it, effectively presenting snapshots of the text rather then waiting to comment on the entire reading.

Andersonian Paragraphing II by Sean M Brooks

I think it would be a good idea to continue my discussion of how skillfully Poul Anderson crafted opening paragraphs for his stories and novels. I also want to comment a bit on his literary style.

From Part One of ORBIT UNLIMITED (Gregg Press, 1978), page 7:

"Svoboda was about sixty years old. He did not know his exact age. The Lowlevel seldom counted such, and his earliest memory was of weeping in an alley while rain fell past an overhead beltway that roared. Afterward his mother died and someone who claimed to be his father but probably wasn't sold him to Inky the thiefmaster."

Even from an author who composed many striking opening paragraphs, this one has stayed in my mind. An effective paragraph arouses many thoughts and questions. Why did living in the "Lowlevel" make an accurate counting of age and other forms of record keeping unlikely? What exactly was this "Lowlevel"?

How did the child Svoboda end up weeping in an alley and then being sold as a slave after his mother died? What kind of society was this?

The next example I'll quote from and comment on is from A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. More accurately I'll quote the opening paragraphs of the preface and the first chapter.

From the preface of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS:

"How shall we tell it, brothers, the tale of Bodin's raid? Whence can we draw the words of wrath and sorrow, the words of valor and vengeance? Who today is a poet such as Andrei Simich, singer of heroes?"

As was so often the case this paragraph was designed to elicit questions from readers. Who was Bodin and what was his raid? Where and against whom was this raid? I also note how the unnamed narrator compared himself unfavorably to a poet named Andrei Simich.

The first paragraph of Chapter I of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS (Gregg Press, 1979) is an example of a short two sentences paragraph which goes:

"Every planet in the story is cold--even Terra, though Flandry came home on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit."

Brief though it was this paragraph stimulates both questions and evokes a mood. Where are these "cold" planets? Why does coming home on a pleasant summer evening brings a chill to the spirit? It makes the reader feel an ominous sense of foreboding and anxiety. In other words, evocative!

A few questions also come to mind about how Anderson writes. That is, what is his natural voice or style of writing? A few comments from other writers or editors suggests some answers.

For example, this is what Tom Easton wrote for the preface in Volume 3 of THE COLLECTED SHORT WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON: THE SATURN GAME (NESFA Press, 2010):

"His style, though it could wax poetic in "The Saturn Game" (1981), was always easy, conversational, and accessible; and it dealt with topics dear to the heart of every science fiction fan. In fact, he introduced us to some of those topics."

Broadly speaking, what kind of stories did Poul Anderson write? In the prefatory essay he contributed to ADMIRALTY (NESFA Press, 2011), David G. Hartwell made some very telling remarks on page 10. He wrote:

"His heroes are heroic and strong in the slightly tragic vein of 19th century Romanticism--often they have suffered some earlier emotional wound--but blended in is a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge that is a hallmark of hard science fiction characters, that Heinlein and Campbell tradition referred to above. You know a fair amount about what they are feeling, but what really matters is what they do, regardless of how they feel."

What Hartwell said about Anderson's heroes having "...a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge" applies at least as strongly to his fantasies as to his hard SF. One example of this being THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, whose hero is a 20th century engineer who more than once used his scientific knowledge to solve problems in an alternate universe where the Carolingian legends were literally true.

To again quote Hartwell (page 10 of ADMIRALTY): Anderson "...most often wrote about strong men and women pitted against the challenge of survival in the face of the natural universe. Some of them die. But Anderson was optimist enough to see beyond the dark times into both a landscape, sometimes a starscape, and a future of wonders--for the survivors. Anderson's future is not for the lazy or the stay-at-homes. He was fairly gloomy about current social trends, big government, repression of the individual, so he catapulted his characters into a future of new frontiers, making them face love and death in vividly imagined and depicted environments far from home."

Hartwell cited as examples stories like "Kyrie" and novels such as THE MAN WHO COUNTS. Many, many others could be listed.

So much more could be said and quoted about Anderson's skill in writing opening paragraphs and as a literary stylist. I have, however, written enough for the purposes of this essay.

The Maurai In Orion Shall Rise

In Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise, the Maurai Federation comes on-stage in Chapter Two, still powerful enough to enforce on nearby nations its policies of ecological balance and no nuclear power, now engaging in a series of wars (a Whale War, a Power War) with the Northwest Union, to the north of the Mericans, where government is minimal and society is mainly organized around Lodges (Wolf, Fish Hawk, Polaris):

"A local Lodgemaster could field a regiment overnight, and disperse it to anonymity when its mission was completed." (1)

It seems that the Mong are still in North America (maybe that is one of the inconsistencies mentioned in the Author's Note?) and we learn that their ancestors had crossed from "Sberya" over a channel frozen for several months each year because

"...nuclear detonations had filled the upper air with dust." (1)

I think the idea of the nuclear winter is that radioactive dust would fill the entire upper atmosphere causing endless winter and night everywhere on Earth?

Again, Anderson presents a detailed account of how different countries might recover from a limited nuclear exchange and of how they would understandably and plausibly disagree about international policies for centuries afterwards.

"...mostly, those who survived kept going by creating new versions of savagery or barbarism. Few of them have yet climbed any further back. Few, if any, ever will, unless-" (2)

But some have climbed further, in different directions from different starting points, and we are bound to reflect that even savagery and barbarism are preferable to extinction. The world is in nowhere near as bad a state as it might have been. The Maurai impose their policies but are nevertheless benign, not imperialistic. A qualitatively different culture has emerged from the lessons taught by the War of Judgement.

We learn that the Maurai pantheon of Tanaroa the Creator with Lesu Haristi the Saviour on his right and shark-toothed Nan the Destroyer on his left is called the Triad. In the Prologue and Chapter One, we had learned that:

European peasants call the Aerogens "saints" and believe that they are endlessly reborn in Skyholm;

many believed that Deu Himself placed Skyholm in heaven to prevent a new Judgement;

Aerogens believe that the present generation carry their "ancestral anims";

 
the agnostic Iern attends services as a Clansman but shrugs at the blessing "Zhesu ward you";

there is a new philosophy called Gaeanism;

the name of the Aerogens' First Captain, "Great Charles," can be used as an oath.

Thus, almost subliminally, we are taught more than we might realize about European and Maurai religion.

Finally, a Maurai visiting the Northwest Union hears without understanding a defiant slogan cried by a child:

"Orion shall rise!" (3)

1. Anderson, Poul, Orion Shall Rise, London, 1988, p. 38.
2. ibid., p. 34.
3. ibid., p. 41.