The Writing Of The Technic History

See here for "A Chronology of the Writing of the Technic History."

The earliest items, from 1951 to '63, outline the framework of the History:

van Rijn;
Troubles;
early Empire;
Flandry;
Long Night.

After a gap, Falkayn arrives in '66, appears a second time that year and then again in '67. The Ythrians, a major part of the History, do not appear until 1972 and then all six of their remaining appearances are published in 1973!

Adzel's student days are mentioned in 1971, then described in '74. There are more and longer gaps after '74. The earliest story in terms of the fictitious chronology is published in 1981. The Flandry period is still being expanded in '85. 1951-'85: thirty four years from start to finish; forty three installments and all too short.

Addendum, 3 Nov: The Chronology omits the publication of The Earth Book Of Stormgate in 1978 or '79. This is a further Ythrian contribution since Hloch of Stormgate Choth introduces the stories in the Earth Book.

Sargasso Of Lost Starships

(This does not look like the cover of a Technic History story!)

Basil Donovan is drunk in the Golden Planet - yet another colorful inn visited by a Poul Anderson character.

Donovan is an earl on the planet Ansa.

"In Mirkheim, we learn that Nicholas van Rijn likes onion soup a la Ansa, in "Sargasso of Lost Starships," we see the planet Ansa just after it had been forcibly annexed by the recently founded Terran Empire and, in The People Of The Wind, we learn that an Imperial cruiser is called Ansa."
-copied from Faces Of War.

He sees a well-dressed Terran bossing Ansan workmen clearing wreckage after a space bombardment - a clear sign that Ansa has just been incorporated by the Terran Empire. See also here.

The customers of the inn include some Shalmuans - neighbors as interstellar distances go.

Donovan's companion, Wocha, is a Donarrian.

I hope to demonstrate that this early story is well integrated into Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization.

The Ansa were gods.

Antares II

See here.

I thought that there was at least one other reference to Antares but I did not find it until after I had published the first "Antares" post. The short story, "Esau," mentions a star, called Osman by its discoverer, which is beyond Antares on the remote edge of Polesotechnic League activities in van Rijn's time. Thus, the word "Antares" signifies not just a particular star but an interstellar frontier.

Osman's one inhabited, subjovian planet, Suleiman, produces a plant called bluejack, used as a spice and tonic by hydrogen breathers. Solar Spice & Liquors sells bluejack to the Baburites whose star, Mogul, is about thirty light years from Osman. Thirty years later, Babur seizes Mirkheim and invades Hermes. After the Babur War, Hermes takes over Mirkheim and Babur becomes a Hermetian protectorate.

I think this means that Antares, Osman, Mogul, Maia (Hermes' sun) and sunless Mirkheim are in the same volume of space.

From Hermes:

"Antares burned brightest. Mogul was sufficiently near to rival it, an orange spark..."
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 26.

Diomedean Geography II

See here.

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows presents a little more information about Diomedean geography. Kossara Vymezal and her ychan companion, Trohdwyr, arrived at Thursday Landing for a research project around the Sea of Achan. We already know that Thursday Landing and Achan are separated by the Ocean. We additionally learn that Thursday Landing is on the equator and on the east coast of a continent called Centralia. Originally a Polesotechnic League trading post, Thursday landing is now the seat of the Imperial resident.

Being on the equator, the Thursday Landing area originally had few permanent inhabitants. Instead, migrators annually arrived from north and south and agreed to hunt or harvest in exchange for portable goods. Later, "...a large contingent of [sea-faring] Drak'ho moved to these parts." -Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 431.

The Drak'ho were on the Sea of Achan so they have subsequently crossed the Ocean, having learned of Thursday Landing from van Rijn.

Like van Rijn before her, Kossara spends some time in mountains near the fortified town of Salmenbrok on the island of Lannach which separates the Sea of Achan from the Ocean. Scenes on Diomedes are scattered through A Knight... so a few more data may emerge.

This is an astronomical, not a geographical, datum but it is of interest to note that the two moons of Diomedes are twice the apparent size of Luna. Further, one is swift, the other slow, as on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars/Barsoom and Anderson's Aeneas.

The Man Who Counts

Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts spells out its message right at the end. The Man Who Counts is not the engineer but the man who motivates the engineer and everyone else involved by doing whatever is necessary to ensure that the job gets done: paying salaries; chivvying; coordinating; organizing; negotiating, bribing, even cheating at dice to gain money to bribe with, etc. Van Rijn even manipulates his opponents into doing what he wants them to do.

Sandra Tamarin explains most of this to Eric Wace, then, when Wace begins to reply:

"'...we played our parts too...Without us, he...,'"

she interrupts:

"'I think, without us, he would have found some other way to come home...But we without him, no.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 511.

Here, I think that she goes too far towards almost deifying van Rijn. I grant that Sandra and Wace would not have gone home without van Rijn whereas he, even if stranded alone without any human companions, would have done his damnedest to reorganize Diomedean society for his own ends. We see him doing this. But success is never guaranteed and would have been even harder without Wace's engineering skills. In that sense, everyone counts. Human labor is effective because it is collective.

Van Rijn succeeds where many would have failed. By sheer luck, he was not one of those who died when his skycruiser was sabotaged. He could have been knifed in one of the fights. Here is an idea for an sf/detective story: van Rijn, stranded on another barely habitable planet where a fellow Master Merchant has made many right moves but has finally succumbed to hostile conditions and adverse circumstances, must reconstruct his dead colleague's actions in order to determine what went wrong and to find out how it might be possible for a second group led by van Rijn to survive.

The point about not doing everything yourself but motivating those who can perform particular tasks to do them is amply illustrated in Anderson's Tau Zero. The crew of the Bussard ramjet hurtling at near light speed between galaxies needs to gather astronomical data from the relativistically distorted galaxies. One man on board has the knowledge and skills for this task but is completely demoralized so the practical problem becomes not how to observe the galaxies but how to re-motivate the man who can.

Diomedean Evolution II

Intelligence requires a long childhood during which behavior is learned. Therefore, both parents must protect helpless infants and ignorant children. Diomedean adults are kept together not by permanent sexuality but by the need to cooperate to survive migration. The prolonged effort of migration concentrates sex hormones so that arrival in the tropics triggers indiscriminate mating. Children must all be born at about the same time if they and the mothers are to survive the long migration. The family is not a couple and their children but a matrilineal clan. However, Diomedeans living at sea near the equator have continual labor and sexuality and therefore also patriarchal monogamy. Migrators and sea-dwellers see each other as perverse.

A long childhood is our glory and our tragedy. Helpless, ignorant children can be:

educated or indoctrinated;
encouraged or intimidated;
taught how to think or told what to think.

The conflict between these two kinds of upbringing will decide the future of humanity. My upbringing: I was given good advice, which I ignored, and taught nonsense, which I took on board. No good, either way. I should have started zazen twenty years earlier. However, my daughter, now grown up, was not indoctrinated.

A human organism, as soon as it has been activated by social/linguistic interaction, has a unique and distinctive personality from an early age but I think that this comes from genes and environment, not from rebirth as many of my fellow meditators believe. The personality then responds to inputs which, however, can have contrary effects, as suggested above.

A possible future form of the conflict: Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic Institute began well, applying psychology, not imposing an ideology, but went wrong, doing too much too fast and taking disastrous short cuts, thus provoking a "Humanist" backlash. But that is in another future history.

Diomedean Evolution

A small arboreal carnivorous glider inhabited a large forested tropical island far from the extreme polar seasonal changes. Rapid geological changes on the low density planet deflected ocean and air currents which, because of the great axial tilt and large fluid masses, bear considerable heat and cold. Drought reduced the forest to woods scattered across pampas.

The gliders:

developed wings to fly between woods;
grew in size to prey on large grass-eaters;
spread into different environments;
but, because of mobility, remained a single species;
developed intelligence to cope with environmental diversity;
flew north and south from the home continent;
found good hunting territories but could not survive the polar winters;
therefore, returned to the tropics where, however, they could not survive indefinitely;
consequently, learned to migrate regularly.

(To be continued.)

Natural Selection Of Fictional Characters

Nicholas van Rijn has persuaded leaders of Flock and Fleet that they can agree. Only the Fleet Admiral resists but he is an absolute monarch. How does van Rijn solve this problem? Flamboyantly, of course, but how specifically?

First, he deliberately provokes the Admiral. An aggressive man severely provoked will punch or kick whereas a carnivorous Diomedean similarly provoked tends to bite, especially since van Rijn obligingly offers a tempting target: standing directly in front of the Admiral but turning his back to bow to the audience. Van Rijn reasons: Diomedean food poisons human beings so the reverse should be true. Further: as soon as the Admiral sickens, his more reasonable and amenable prime minister, "Chief Executive Officer," will be able to seize control. Problem solved.

Thus, van Rijn has survived sabotage, shipwreck, capture, rescue, long journeys, defeat in a land battle, a stalemated sea battle, starvation, hostile negotiations and a personal assault. Is this possible? Yes. We must remember that many Master Merchants of the Polesotechnic League would have succumbed at one of the listed stages. That last hurdle could have been the fatal one. He might not have survived the personal assault. Thus, by a process of natural selection and in a galaxy littered with the corpses of unsuccessful merchants, van Rijn has survived to become the hero of an sf novel by Poul Anderson.

Saints And Science

Neolithic Diomedeans refer to gods, although they may not still take them seriously. Two of the Polesotechnic League merchants refer to saints, which they do seem to take seriously. Meanwhile, educated Diomedeans know that there is only the Lodestar and van Rijn believes in many saints but one God. Thus, there is more potential agreement than might have been expected. Even secularist merchants will at least understand theistic concepts.

As for a scientific world view, the Flock has some idea of evolution and the Fleet understands astronomy. Van Rijn is able to explain to both sides that they are a single species despite their shockingly different lifestyles. Neither is bestial or demonic so agreement should be possible.

Elsewhere in known space, there are greater religious disagreements, between human beings and Ythrians or most Ikranankans, but no irreconcilable conflicts between species as such. It is the Wilwidh culture, not the Merseian species, that is unable to recognize others as equals. And the hydrogen-breathing Ymirites are so different that there can be no ground for conflict between them and any oxygen-breathers.

Two Reasons To Deduce That Eric Wace Is A Catholic

Two Reasons To Deduce That Eric Wace Is A Catholic

(i) Wace and van Rijn discuss which saint to invoke before a battle. They mention the soldier saints: George, Michael and Olaf (see also here) but also Dismas and Nicholas. (Wace mentions that Nicholas is the patron of highwaymen, just as van Rijn tells us elsewhere that Mercury is the god of thieves. See here.)

Of course, such a discussion could be merely academic. We all know that Mars is the god of war without believing in literal Olympians. A traveler may carry a St Christopher medal without believing in literal saints. However, we know that van Rijn at least is devoutly Catholic and both characters seem to take the discussion equally seriously.

(ii) Wace, sailing into danger, inwardly addresses an absent friend thus:

"Pray for my soul, beloved, while you wait to follow me. Pray for my soul."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 483.

Prayer for the dead is a specifically Catholic practice - maybe also Orthodox? - but not Protestant. (We do not see any Protestantism in the Technic History, although there is something called "Christian variant.")

On a purely personal note, my mother was unsure whether to have a Mass said for her deceased mother-in-law. I suggested asking for prayers to be said in my grandmother's church but my mother replied that they (Congregationalists) did not believe in praying for the dead. I did not then know what to say but now would suggest that we respect other people's ways to God or Truth. See here.

Addendum, 19 February 2018: I have changed "Baptist" to "Congregationalist." It was my grandmother's neighbors who were Baptists.