Peter And Poul

I have now read two alternative historical fictitious accounts of the English Civil War. In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Shakespeare was the Great Historian. It follows from this fantastic premise not only that Auberon, Titania, Puck etc existed and that Prospero's magic worked but also that there was knowledge of the Earth's sphericity in Lear's time and that there were clocks in Caesar's time. This early knowledge of science and mechanics led to an industrial revolution in the seventeenth century. The Roundheads had steam trains and balloons.

In Peter Cakebread's The Alchemist's Revenge, there was an alchemical revolution in the seventeenth century. Cavaliers and Roundheads fought each other with magical mechanisms, philosopher's stones and elementals.

In all three seventeenth centuries, ours, Anderson's and Cakebread's, the Roundheads were led by Oliver Cromwell whereas the Cavaliers were led by Charles I and Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Rupert is Anderson's hero but a minor character in Cakebread's novel. All three Ruperts could meet in the Old Phoenix, Anderson's Inn between the parallel universes.

As I have said before on this blog, Anderson's characters meet in many colourful dives and inns, including the Old Phoenix. Cakebread matches these with the Throttled Pig, the most dangerous pub in Oxford, whose landlord is rumoured to be in the pay of cutthroats. I have just started to read The Alchemist's Revenge and will look out for any more parallels of interest to Anderson fans - although, meanwhile, since the novel is also well written, I will enjoy it in any case.

Sitrep

I am full of activities other than blogging at present. I have been rereading passages of The Game Of Empire so I have started to copy earlier posts about environments in the Patrician system to Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments. Then I will add any further environmental notes as appropriate and maybe a bit more on the novel here.

I need to track down other NESFA collections and also Multiverse.

Meanwhile, another sf writer has commented on http://logicoftimetravel.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/stepsons-of-terra-by-robert-silverberg.html 

...and another local author has sold me one of his books and given me another: http://clockworkandchivalry.co.uk/cakebread-walton/

Onward!

Later Volumes Of A Future History

Each new volume of a future history should both advance the narrative and build on earlier installments. The longer the series grows, the richer it should become.

In the opening chapter of Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire, both the viewpoint character, Diana Crowfeather, and the setting, an entire planetary system with two colonized planets, are new but we soon realize which history we are in. Diana sees Tigeries, a Donarrian, Irumclagians and Shalmuans, overhears a Navy man and a marine discussing "Merseian bastards" and meets her first Wodenite.

She, and we, know of this last species if only because of a historical figure, Adzel the Wayfarer. We soon learn that this new Wodenite is researching the Ancients of whom also we have heard much before. Thus, here is an authentic history.

(I have returned from a few days in Scotland. While there, I read part of a time travel novel that compares unfavorably with Anderson's works on this theme.)

Multiple Perspectives II

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is immeasurably enhanced by the many fictitious introductions presenting wider perspectives on the individual works. "The Saturn Game" not only describes a psychological crisis experienced by interplanetary explorers but also intersperses this account with extracts from a later report on the crisis.

The several works originally collected as The Earth Book Of Stormgate are each introduced by the Ythrian Hloch of Stormgate Choth on Avalon. Hloch recounts the sometimes complex ways in which his sources were acquired and adapted for the Earth Book.

The introduction to Trader To The Stars not only quotes, "The world's great age begins anew..." but makes us feel that this is true. The three stories originally collected as The Trouble Twisters each have an "introduction" that is in reality a separate work centering around the mysterious "Noah Arkwright."

When Manuel Argos announces the Terran Empire, we read an introduction written from the much later perspective of a Galactic Archaeological Society and feel that this Society could have done for the Terran Empire and its successor civilizations what Hloch did for the Polesotechnic League.

Multiple Perspectives

Any future history requires multiple perspectives. Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is particularly rich in this respect.

Anderson, like any competent writer, controls narrative point of view. Thus, whereas Dominic Flandry is the viewpoint character of any passage featuring Flandry, except once when he is seen by a native of the planet Talwin, Nicholas van Rijn is only ever described as seen by someone else. In "The Master Key," a one-off first person narrator describes a small social gathering hosted by van Rijn.

Although the host's quivering body-mass is visibly and audibly present, van Rijn listens attentively while two men recall their mysterious experiences on another planet, then solves the mystery. The story has five layers:

the narrator;
the narrator's friend;
the friend's son;
the son's ensign;
the son's and ensign's employer, van Rijn.

Adzel is introduced in a first person narrative by a fellow student on Earth. Although the core of "The Problem of Pain" is a third person account of Peter Berg's ordeal on the planet Gray, the story begins and ends with a first person account by the colleague in whom Berg had confided.

Mirkheim is an excellent political novel not least because its diverse characters express every conceivable political response to the upheavals that they experience. There are aristocrats, democrats, social campaigners, pragmatists, bureaucrats, conservatives, corporatists, entrepreneurs and a sympathetically treated revolutionary.

Ensign Flandry presents the viewpoints of Mark Hauksberg on Terra, Max Abrams on Starkad and Brechdan Ironrede on Merseia before it introduces its title character. When Flandry and the heroine, Djana, are parted on Talwin, we read long passages from Djana's perspective. We also enter the mind of a Talwinian whose consciousness is merely that of a sea-dwelling animal before he recalls his rational personality.

The Rebel Worlds begins and ends with the viewpoint of a Didonian composite consciousness trying to recall the contact with Terrans that occurs in the body of the  novel. A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows begins and ends with a later Dennitzan celebration of Bodin's raid which occurs in the body of the novel. A Stone In Heaven begins with a contemporary Ramnuan perspective.

Fictitious introductions add yet another dimension of extra perspectives. (To be continued.)

A Stone In Heaven

In A Circus Of Hells and The Rebel Worlds, the young Dominic Flandry achieves his aims, both personal and political, by practicing elaborate deceptions. By contrast, his last novel as central character, A Stone In Heaven, is refreshingly simple and consequently more plausible.

The Duke of Hermes is suspected of planning a coup. Miriam/Banner's Ramnuan oath-sister, Yewwl, enters the commercial center, Dukeston, on a pretext and transmits what she sees: secret production of military equipment and uniforms and of more palladium than necessary for a civilian economy - maybe also military rations and fissionable isotopes. Yewwl does not leave Dukeston alive but Flandry, acting on what she has seen, attacks from space, destroying first a particular building in Dukeston, then the military base on the outer moon. That is enough. The Duke, already in space, seeking Flandry, flees and his movement collapses, crews either surrendering or disappearing. If only it were always that simple.

Flandry refers to his last expedition and we really do expect that he and Chives will die in space at the end. They dispatched Miriam to Terra in the Hooligan while they manually flew the warheads towards their final target but she returns to rescue them. Thus, Flandry reviews his life but happily it does not end yet. In fact, he and Miriam begin a partnership that continues in the next novel.

The Meaning Of Sentience

"If sentience did not abate the accidents of a blind universe, what meaning had sentience itself?"
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 161.

In another Poul Anderson series, abatement of cosmic accidents is the purpose and meaning of the Time Patrol, not fully revealed until the very end of the long novel, The Shield Of Time.

Blindness is a defect in sighted organisms. The universe is not a sighted organism. Therefore, it is not "blind."

But what is the universe? Although not a single organism, it is a single reality and is self-conscious through psycho-physical organisms so, in this sense also, it is not blind:

One Energy
With many changing forms
Builds complicated, ordered patterns of itself
On different psycho-physical levels
And spatiotemporal scales
And becomes conscious of itself
Whose body is the universe
Whose sense-organs are living beings...

Comedy Or Tragedy?

"Flandry sat down and laughed. Why not? The gods, if any, did. I sometimes think we were created because the gods wanted to be entertained one evening by a farce - but no, that can't be. We are high comedy at least."
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 143.

(The Gods Laughed is the title of a collection of Poul Anderson's short stories.)

Are we comedy? As mentioned before, I recently attended a celebration of the life of local teacher and writer, Julian Holt. A harrowing farewell statement by Julian was read. He had concluded that human life is a tragedy that is more accurately expressed by the novels of Thomas Hardy than by those of Charles Dickens with their cheerful endings.

Julian recalled atrocities committed by the armed forces of Great Powers during the twentieth century and also his own son's death at the age of twenty. Impersonal forces beyond our control...

However, Julian also valued the responses of irony, absurdity and laughter. And Dominic Flandry is keenly aware of the suffering caused by technological warfare.

Edwin Cairncross's Ambitions

Imagine wielding so much power that you and you alone were able to initiate great and good works and projects on an interstellar scale! Edwin Cairncross has achieved much as Grand Duke of Hermes and aims to do more as Emperor of Terra. (He just needs to overthrow the incumbent first.)

One of his most cherished achievements is his estate at Lythe in the center of the single Hermetian continent of Greatland: an eyrie with ornamental battlements on an extinct volcano above a formerly arid steppe now transformed by canals, imported plants, birds and game animals and a town made prosperous by commerce. From Lythe, Cairncross governs the globe and beyond, receiving electronic reports from a dozen elite secret agents, bypassing their nominal superiors.

He enlarged the industrial operation in the Ramnuan system and held successive political posts before forcing his half-brother's abdication and his own election. Then, as Duke, he implemented popular public works. Now, half the Hermetian adolescents are Cairncross Pioneers for sports, outdoormanship and patriotism focused on him.

As Emperor, he will:

organize research to extend instantaneous communication beyond its current limit of one light year, thus "...rous[ing] enterprise again in the human race" -Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 132;
reverse the glaciation on Ramnu, thus gaining the reverence of an entire race "...for as long as their sun endures" (p. 134);
do much more than this, thus possibly being "...remembered through the lifetime of the universe." (p. 134)

Hey, steady on there, old chap! Can any one person possibly be remembered through the lifetime of the universe? He only stops short of imagining that he will be "renowned throughout the cosmos." I read this last phrase decades ago in a comic book loc (letter of comment). The loccer commented that Kal-El is renowned throughout the cosmos whereas the Green Lantern is known only in his own space sector.

I think that only the combination of antithanatics and instantaneous space jumps in Anderson's World Without Stars would give anyone the slightest possibility of being renowned throughout the cosmos. And, even then, he would be famous in some places but not in others as a man working for Babur tells the celebrity David Falkayn in Mirkheim.

Another Country And Another Blog

OK. Tomorrow, we travel to Scotland and I will not be blogging again until the weekend. Meanwhile, I am drafting a new post for the Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments blog, which does not receive as many page views!

I like the idea of a parallel blog and also of a blog that gathers together all the environmental information. Anderson's many-sided universes warrant more than a single linear commentary.

No matter how often I have reread A Stone In Heaven, I had never retained the details of the Ramnuan system until I had made the extra effort to study and summarize Anderson's account. By doing this, I reconstruct the background work that the author had to do in order to envisage this planetary system before recounting a narrative set among Ramnu and its moons, although the reader is then free to skip past the background and simply follow the story.

The next novel, The Game of Empire, is set in the fascinating Patrician system, which also deserves closer attention.