Post-Maurai Space Travel?

After the Maurai, will there be space travel? (The space travelling Kith who share the title of Poul Anderson's collection Maurai And Kith exist in an alternative future.) Yes, Orion shall rise and yes, there will be Star Masters, although these predictions seem to apply to alternative post-Maurai futures. In one sequel to the Maurai series and in an Author's Note to a second, Anderson adequately accounts for any inconsistencies with the original series.

Several Anderson characters, including some in the Maurai series, express a wish not only to traverse space but even to travel to the stars. Why? Decades ago, I felt embarrassed when an American teacher (a Trekkie?) addressing a World Science Fiction Convention, tried to express optimism about the human condition by proclaiming, "We're going to the stars!" Are we? Not yet. But why should we and what would we do on arrival?

Earth is the only place in the universe where we do not need to be protected from everything outside our own skins. Even here, in most climates, we need clothing, shelter and heating. Of course, we have spread across the globe, changing local environments to suit our needs and also adapting ourselves, even changing skin colour in the Northern Hemisphere. This process will continue and need not be confined to Earth.

On the other hand, a planet on which humanity has not evolved, ie, any planet other than Earth, will not be a new North America or Australia and its inhabitants, if any, are unlikely to be either remotely humanoid or humanly comprehensible. I agree that there are compelling reasons to get some human beings off Earth and out into the Solar System in self-sustaining habitats but that means taking our environment with us, not traversing interstellar distances hoping to find that environment duplicated elsewhere.

We can observe and study the universe from any point within it, from here as well as from there. I agree that we will learn more if we can travel further and that this should be done if possible. What Anderson's characters really mean about going to the stars is that we should accept no physical or mental limits to our activities and I agree with this completely.

Orbit Unlimited

As works of science fiction go, the four story collection, Orbit Unlimited by Poul Anderson, is an extremely restrained account of the colonisation of an extrasolar planet:

at the end of the first story, a slower than light space fleet leaves the Solar System;

the second story describes an incident en route when the option of turning back must be considered;

the third story describes an incident when the fleet is in orbit around the new planet, Rustum;

thus, the colonists are settled on the surface and starting to reproduce there only in the concluding story.

The reader is pleased to learn that there are sequels, including a story in which Rustum must cope with a second wave of colonists from Earth and another story set on a colony in a different planetary system. As in other series, Anderson gradually broadens his narrative perspective.

The opening pages of the first story quickly establish a detailed sociopolitical background of high tech but overpopulated urban decay, with Atomic Wars in the past. Some terminology is familiar from other works but each future society envisaged by Anderson is unique. The (unelected) Guardian Commission of the Federation meets in teleconference:

Premier Selim, before a window opening on palm trees;
Svoboda, Commissioner for Psychologics, in his departmental tower surrounded by airborne filth in a city on an Atlantic coast;
Security Chief Chandra in India at sunrise;
Rathjen, Commissioner for Astronautics;
Novikov of Mines;
Larkin of Pelagiculture;
Dilolo of Agriculture.

That Astronautics is decaying, with a Venerian colony discontinued, is a sure sign that this Federation will not have the author's approval. The Commission discusses Constitutionalism, a philosophy founded by a man called Anker who advocated basing thought patterns on the constitution of (empirical) reality, not on mysticism, although, in North America, despite recent Oriental immigration, the term "Constitution" retains for the English-speaking half of the population another meaning that had even instigated an anti-Federation Rebellion twenty years previously.

Constitutionalism may inspire middle class professionals on whom the Guardians depend to seek political power for their class so Svoboda proposes to close Constitutionalist schools by reviving free compulsory education, though not for the illiterate eighty per cent of the population of course. Thus, in the nine pages of section 1, Anderson sketches an entire society and sets the scene for persecuted Constitutionalists emigrating to Rustum.

Time Travel And Space Travel

HG Wells wrote definitive works on time travel, The Time Machine, and on space travel, The First Men In The Moon. Can these ideas be combined? Time dilation (see Tau Zero by Poul Anderson) comes close but is not time travel because it is only futureward.

It occurred to me years ago that time travelers could travel within a slower than light interstellar spaceship, even a Heinleinian "generation ship" with many generations born and dying in flight. A time traveler whose existence was unknown to the crew but who appeared briefly now and then might be regarded as a ghost, hence a possible title: The Haunted Spaceship.

Another implication of this notion is that a time traveler entering the ship on Earth, traveling forward along the ship's world line to emerge at its destination, then returning along the ship's world line back to Earth would be able to report on the outcome of the mission before its departure.

Poul Anderson seems to have hit on the same idea in the concluding chapter of There Will Be Time (New York, 1973) but develops it slightly differently. He imagines not a generation ship crew with invisible time travelers moving among them but simply a ship crewed by time travelers for whom the journey will take only hours or minutes even if the ship itself takes centuries to cross an interstellar distance and he does not mention the obvious implication that the crew would be able to report back to Earth before their departure - although perhaps they would prefer to preserve the freedom of not knowing, a point which is mentioned in the novel.

Finally, a point that I could not have thought of, "...a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light..." means that the fact of time travel might enable physicists to develop an FTL drive. (p. 174)

The End Of There Will Be Time

In the beginning is the end. On the first page of Chapter I of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), the narrator, Dr Robert Anderson, describing the mid-western town of Senlac, where the novel begins and ends, as he saw it in February 1933, remarks:

"The beginning shapes the end..." (p. 9)

and mentions:

"...a darkness which was Morgan Woods." (p. 9)

At the mid-point in Chapter VIII, the central character, Jack Havig, who had been delivered by Dr Anderson in Senlac on that February morning in 1933, enters:

"...a timberlot big enough to gladden Havig with memories of Morgan Woods." (p. 79)

Finally, in October 1971 and in the concluding Chapter XVI, Robert Anderson walks through "...a delirium of color..." to the Morgan Woods creek where he stands on the bridge watching the water, a squirrel and an oak, then returns home to be visited by Havig for the last time. (pp. 170-171)

Thus, Morgan Woods becomes a real place in the course of the novel and the lives of its characters.

Sean M Brooks wrote on this blog (see here) about Anderson's ability to write attention-catching opening paragraphs for novels. Here, I must commend the conclusion of There Will Be Time. A good concluding sentence or paragraph can leave the reader reflecting on the events of the novel or even wanting immediately to reread it. A now out-of-date British novelist, Dornford Yates, often had his first person narrator recapitulate several dramatic scenes in the concluding paragraph. In early secondary school, I read a juvenile adventure novel set in the Middle East. I have forgotten title, author and plot but I do remember that the novel ended with the viewpoint character leaving, looking back, seeing a light and knowing that, in her heart, that light would always shine.

In Chapter XVI, the narrator learns that the time traveling Havig and his wife will, in a distant future, travel between stars and probably not return to Earth. On the very last page, he speculates that, from an even more remote future, newly created time travelers traveled back to spread the time-travel-gene-bearing virus that empowered Havig to travel through time and initiate that future civilization. He concludes:

"I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder." (p. 176)

The Time Patrol And There Will Be Time

(i) Our evolutionary successors, the Danellians, must recruit human beings to the Time Patrol to counteract individual time criminals, groups like the Neldorians and Exaltationists and, ultimately, temporal chaos whereas Jack Havig must recruit fellow time travellers to his group to counteract Caleb Wallis' Eyrie.

(ii) The Patrol Academy, in the American West of the Oligocene period, exists for half a million years on either a greensward or an elevation between large trees and close to hills, woods and "...a great brown river." (1) The Havig group's main base, in North America near where the Eyrie will be but during the Pleistocene, stands on a wooded hill above "...a mighty river..." (2)

(iii) The Patrol transports building materials and equipment instantaneously without transit time in temporal vehicles whereas the Havig group, able to transport only what each individual can carry, must ferry everything piece by piece. For them, this lengthy passage requires resting places, caches en route and special equipment like miniature oxygen tanks for periods when they cannot emerge to breathe because the land is under water or ice.

(iv) When Patrolman Manson Everard discovers that the Danellians not only preserve history but also sometimes meddle to create their own past, he thinks, "It may be a crooked game...but it's the only one in town." (3) The Eyrie is white supremacist so Confucian, Aborigine, Polish, Mesopotamian, African, Mexican and Eskimo time travellers easily accept that, for them, the Havig group is "...the only game in town." (4)

(v) The Patrol must prevent changes to history and may use one paradox, circular causality, but only to prevent another, causality violation, whereas neither the Eyrie nor the Havig group can change history but the Havig group must use circular causality to alter the significance of known events.  

(vi) The Patrol is the stabilising element in a chaotic reality. The Havig group brings forth and participates in the future civilisation of the Star Masters.

These contrasting narratives are just two of Anderson's four major works on time travel. The alert reader might notice that a villain in the Time Patrol series and another in The Corridors Of Time have almost identical physical descriptions.   

(1) Anderson, Poul, Time Patrol, New York, 2006, p. 6; The Shield Of Time, New York, 1990, p. 129.
(2) Anderson, Poul, There Will Be Time, New York, 1973, p. 157.
(3) Time Patrol, p. 171.
(4) There Will Be Time, p. 156.

Maurai In There Will Be Time

 I think that the best reading order for Poul Anderson's Maurai series is:

(i) the three short stories which are collected in Maurai And Kith but should now be a single volume, just Maurai;

(ii) the long (486 pages) novel, Orion Shall Rise;

(iii) the much shorter time travel novel, There Will Be Time.

In each volume, in fact in each individual work, the perspective broadens, first geopolitically, the historically. The Maurai rule in the Southern Hemisphere. Then we learn progressively more about the Northern Hemisphere: the Northwest Union; Uropa. Finally, the entire Maurai period is placed in a longer historical context. Jack Havig, born 1933, visits, among other eras, Constantinople in 1204, the Maurai Federation and the further future of the Star Masters.

I was surprised to realize that, despite my preferred reading order, Orion is copyright 1983 whereas Time is 1973. Thus, only the first three stories informed Time. (Addendum: Only the first two. See combox.) In fact, Orion acquired the surname of a character, Terai Lohannaso, and that of a country, the Northwest Union, from Time. The Domain of Skyholm did not exist until Orion.

Time both informs us that Poul Anderson invented the name "Maurai" for a future civilization visited by Havig and continues to use that fictional name so there is a real history that we are not being told. In one of the three stories, Poul predicted something that Havig discovered later but he "...guessed wrong more often than right." p. 129.

Havig comments:

"If anybody who knows the future should chance to read this, it'll look at most like one of science fiction's occasional close-to-target hits...Which are made on the shotgun principle...These stories never had wide circulation. They soon dropped into complete obscurity." (p.129)

Let us hope not.

Politics In There Will be Time

In American political terms and as far as I know, Poul Anderson was liberal when he wrote "Un-Man" but had become conservative by the time he wrote There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), although the narrator of the latter work, Robert Anderson, is liberal. The central character, Jack Havig, spends time as a radical in 1970, then parodies left/liberal misuse of words like "fascist" and "racist" (pp. 27-32).

It is unfortunate that such words were misused. Fascists are indeed pro-capitalist but are also anti-democratic, violent and, when there is a racial minority that can be scapegoated, racist in the real meaning of the word. It is therefore inaccurate and inadvisable to apply the term "fascist" simply to anyone who is pro-capitalist, ie, to most people most of the time! Margaret Thatcher won three General Elections and did not close down Parliament. She was not fascist.

(I have an Italian friend who says that he is a democratic fascist, parting company with Mussolini only at the point when the latter, with a majority in a Parliament from which all other Parties withdrew, then proclaimed himself Il Duce of a one-party state. However, everyone else means by "fascism" an anti-democratic movement.)

While Havig parodied misuses of these words, it it to be hoped that he remembered their real meanings and indeed he opposes racism later in the novel (see pp. 135-136).

There Will Be Time III

In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), the time traveler Jack Havig tells Robert Anderson that the Mong will invade North America across the Bering Straits which will be frozen when the War of Judgement fills the atmosphere with dust.

If we have read Anderson's Maurai series, then we already know of this invasion. Characters in future histories often refer to an event that has occurred either in an earlier episode of the fictitious history or, as in this case, simply between our time and theirs. Here is yet another perspective. Havig refers to an invasion that occurs not in his and Anderson's shared past but in a future that he has traveled through.

We have, in earlier works, encountered individuals from whose perspective the Mong invaded several centuries previously. Or have we? From the perspective of There Will be Time, the Maurai series is a fictional narrative based on accounts received by Poul Anderson indirectly, via Robert Anderson, from Jack Havig.

Willingly suspending disbelief while reading Orion Shall Rise, we accept at face value accounts of the Maurai Federation, the Northwest Union and the Domain of Skyholm. Willingly suspending disbelief while reading There Will Be Time, we accept that there is a future civilization that Poul, not Robert or Jack, has called "Maurai" and that Poul's accounts of it are fictions incorporating some elements of veracity. Simultaneously, we know that both texts are equally works of fiction. Complicated but creative.

The Time Machine And There Will Be Time

Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time bears comparison with Wells' The Time Machine - and, of course, acknowledges it with a reference to Wells.

(i) Wells creatively imagined what has come to be called a "time machine," which is rather archaic terminology. We no longer speak of "flying machines" although I remember a friend's grandfather doing so. Anderson creatively imagined time travel as a psychic power not needing a machine.

(ii) Wells' Time Traveler demonstrates "time traveling" by making a model time machine disappear in front of his dinner guests. Anderson's Jack Havig demonstrates his own chronokinesis by disappearing and reappearing in front of Robert Anderson.

(iii) The Time Traveler colorfully describes day and night passing like the flapping of a wing, the Sun as a ring of fire across the sky, trees shooting up like green rockets etc. Havig describes a shadow world with a flickering for day and night.

(iv) Both characters try to account for their experiences in terms of their current scientific understanding.

(v) Both give an account of the future of mankind, with concern about immediate prospects followed by longer term perspectives:

devolution into Morlocks and Eloi, then the Further Vision;
a peaceful and pastoral but high tech future with "Star Masters" visiting Earth and time travelers moving forwards, then backwards, along the world lines of slower then light interstellar craft.

(vi) Anderson adds a historical dimension which The Time Machine lacks, although, of course, Wells also wrote The Outline Of History.

(vii) Anderson surpasses Wells by describing a community of time travelers, instead of just a single "Time Traveler," and by elaborating the paradoxes at which Wells merely hints.

This one work of Anderson's is a considerable achievement. I also regard his, very different, Time Patrol series as a direct successor to The Time Machine because the Patrol's timecycles are like high tech descendants of Wells' elaborate nineteenth century contraption and because the evolution into Danellians parallels and contrasts with the devolution into Morlocks and Eloi.

The Time Machine and There Will Be Time are two short novels whereas the Time Patrol series is two long volumes. Uniform editions of these four volumes would make a good "Introduction to Time Travel."

Senlac II

By page 10 of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), the text has not yet informed the reader that this will be a time travel novel. We have probably read the blurb but, apart from this, we have not yet been told that in this narrative historical events will have a double significance. Not only do they affect human lives both immediately and later but also a time traveller can decide whether to revisit or shun them.

However, Anderson which here can mean either the author Poul or the narrator Robert, prepares us for what is to come by carefully delineating the historical period of the early 1930's when the time traveller Jack Havig is born:

a worldwide depression;
the Japanese conquest of Manchuria;
a bonus march on Washington;
the Lindbergh kidnapping;
Hitler Chancellor of Germany;
a new US President due to take office;
Prohibition about to be ended;
for local colour, "...springtime in these parts is as lovely as our autumn." (p. 10)

A different era, although Havig can revisit it - but will he want to? If this novel were written by Jack Finney, then there would be no doubt. The protagonist would be strongly motivated by nostalgia for this or an earlier period. Anderson's characters differ from Finney's and from each other. In a very different time travel scenario, one Time Patrolman says, of Victorian London:

"I'd like to have lived here..." (1)

- and, when his colleague asks:

"Yeah? With their medicine and dentistry?" (1)

defiantly replies:

"And no bombs falling." (1)

(This character's fiancee had died in an air raid in 1944.)

Much later, both in history and in the characters' lives, the colleague thinks, of his own birth period:

 "The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return." (2)

But why not return sometimes? I would.

Back to Havig's birthplace:

"Senlac is a commercial center for an agricultural area..." (p. 10)

with "...some light industry..." and a big Rotary Club. Robert and Kate Anderson's friends are her father (a local banker), the public librarian, professors and their wives from Holberg College forty miles away and New Englanders Tom and Eleanor Havig who attend the local church as the only way to keep Tom's high school science teaching job which pays so little that he must supplement his income with a summer job in creamery quality control. A teacher needing a summer job? Again, a different era (I hope).

Robert drives his Marmon down Union St to Elm to visit Eleanor who has panicked because Jack disappeared when she dropped him in surprise at hearing, then seeing, another baby crying in his crib. The baby in the crib is indeed Jack so she must have hallucinated...

The reader who has skipped the blurb might begin to suspect time travel and circular causality. When dropped into the crib, the baby time travelled a few minutes into the past and screamed, thus causing his mother to carry him into the bedroom and drop him in surprise. The novel will present several intricate elaborations of this paradox.

(1) Anderson, Poul, Time Patrol, New York, 2006, p. 28.
(2) Anderson, Poul, The Shield Of Time, New York, 1990, p. 178.