Humor And Observation

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER I.

An alien (demon?) emerges from a spaceship before a crowd in fourteenth century England. As the circular door opens:

"...all stood their ground, being Englishmen, if not simply too terrified to run." (p. 12)

The latter, obviously, but we realize that we are to read a humorous text.

The first person narrator, Brother Parvus, glimpses that there are two doors with a chamber between. An air lock, well spotted.

The first emerging alien thinks that he can with impunity kill a local with a heat beam. Almost immediately, answering arrows have killed four aliens. Heartened by the realization that these beings can be killed, Sir Roger leads the charge up the gangway into the ship. The Englishmen will conquer all before them although I really did not expect Poul Anderson to take his premise quite that far the first time I read the novel.

The High Crusade

As suggested in the previous post, I have started to reread Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (New York, 1968). Knowing, as we do, that there is a framing sequence, we reread the opening page of the text, then the concluding two pages.

The opening passage is generic sf. The captain of a spaceship sits with a port "...open to alien summer night..." (p. 7) and is addressed by a "sociotechnician" - not a "psychotechnician," although they too address society, not just individual psychology. We are to understand that there have been advances in both the spatial and the social sciences. Nothing on p. 7 tells us that these are human beings. A surprise ending might have revealed that they were aliens. However, pp. 159-160 make clear that they are from Earth. In fact, the captain is:

"...Captain Yeshu haLevy, who was a loyal citizen of the Israeli Empire..." (p. 160)

- a likely story but not meant to be taken seriously since it serves only as a joke of sorts.

Implicit here is yet another thousand year future history. However, the main action of the novel has been off Earth and among the first generation of involuntary exiles.

Secrets In Darkness

Because the secret places are part of the darkness within, the two previous posts (see links) are more closely connected than expected. Poul Anderson's Carl, a recent convert from post-nuclear polytheism to ancient monotheism, thinks that the darkness within cries out to the dying gods whereas Julian May's Uncle Rogi, a French-American Catholic, believes that only God can love us despite seeing our secret places. Thus, in both cases, contemplation of human inwardness leads to contemplation of divinity.

The next Poul Anderson volume to be reread might be The High Crusade, with its interstellar medieval Christendom.

Secret Places And Elder Races

"The secret places. All rational beings have them and guard them - not only for their own sakes but for those of others. Who but God would love us if all the secret places of our minds lay exposed?"
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 20, p. 166.

This is the theme of Poul Anderson's "Journeys End."

In May's Galactic Milieu, one species thinks that the elder race has survived from a previous universe, as in Anderson's Tau Zero and The Avatar. Another thinks that they are angelic like CS Lewis eldila or the fallen angels in James Blish's Black Easter.

Darkness Within

Poul Anderson, Vault Of The Ages, Chapter 20, "Twilight of the Gods."

When the High Doctor acknowledges that he had been mistaken to taboo scientific knowledge:

"It was as if a great brooding presence were suddenly gone, as if the wandering night breeze sobbed in a new loneliness." (p. 187)

Pathetic Fallacy: the darkness of ignorance is about to be dispelled; the night breeze sympathizes. Yet again, the wind comments on human actions.

"The gods were doomed - the cruel, old pagan gods of human fear and human ignorance felt their twilight upon them." (ibid.)

Not all pagan gods are cruel. See "Hers are the trees..."

Carl thinks of the doomed gods metaphorically whereas, for Gratillonius, real beings had died. See Gods Dead Or Withdrawn?

"And the darkness which dwells in every mortal heart cried out to the dying gods." (ibid.)

Does something within us regret the passing of those cruel old gods? That darkness within sounds like the old and protean enemy yet again. It also sounds like James Blish's "night shapes." Rediscovered dinosaurs are killed but:

"'The beasts in the valley may die'...' I think they will. The night-shapes are another story entirely. They can never die. The night-shapes aren't animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They're the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They've always lived there. They always will.'"
-James Blish, The Night Shapes (London, 1965), V, p. 125.

Finally, real but temporary things standing for ideas are Platonic.

A Concluding Pathetic Fallacy

Poul Anderson, Vault Of The Ages, Chapter 20.

There is a lot of fighting, which I will not summarize, in the concluding chapters of Vault Of The Ages. As a result, the invaders are defeated and the taboo on ancient scientific knowledge is lifted. After all that action and violence, this juvenile adventure novel ends with an appropriate Pathetic Fallacy, not a winter storm bringing more war but the exact opposite:

"Carl went softly to the door and opened it and looked out into the summer night. It was dark now, but dawn was not far off." (p. 189)

Again AAAS

As regular readers know, I like to find parallels between alternative future histories or other fictional futures:

They Shall Have Stars is the introductory volume of James Blish's Cities In Flight future history;

Intervention is a "vinculum" between Julian May's Pliocene Exile and her Galactic Milieu;

Poul Anderson's The Byworlder is a one-off novel.

These three works share the AAAS. For the Blish and Anderson works, see the link.

"'...the American Association for the Advancement of Science did finally admit the Parapsychological Association to membership.'"
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 15, pp. 114-115.

Since Intervention, Chapter 15, is set in 1972 whereas the novel is copyright Julian May, 1987, it should follow that the Parapsychological Association indeed exists and is in the AAAS. The Association's website confirms that the organization was established in 1957 and has been an affiliated to the AAAS since 1969 so there was a gap.

Referencing Stapledon Or Tolkien

Poul Anderson does not often refer to other authors in his fiction, certainly not by name. There is an understated reference to HG Wells, not by name, in There Will Be Time. Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous character is mentioned several times, and even appears once, but not Doyle himself. When Anderson says that "...we can only hope for another Stapledon...," (see here) this is in a work of non-fiction.

Two other sf authors do explicitly refer to Stapledon:

"The notion of modifying the human stock genetically to live on the planets as they were found, had been old with Olaf Stapledon; it had been touched upon by many later writers; it went back, in essence, as far as Proteus, and as deep into the human mind as the werewolf, the vampire, the fairy changeling, the transmigrated soul."
-James Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), Book One, 3, p. 50.

Blish covers a lot of territory, going way beyond his immediate theme of "pantropy," artificial adaptation of human beings to other planets. He mentions:

Stapledon;
later writers;
Proteus;
werewolves;
vampires;
changelings;
transmigration.

Which of these additional themes does Anderson address and in which works?

Early in the opening volume of her future history about psychic powers, Julian May summarizes the plot of Stapledon's Odd John when young Rogi, trying to understand his own ESP, reads that novel. That is one way to do it. May's Galactic Milieu and Anderson's Genesis are two successors of Stapledon's future history but one difference is that Genesis does not say so.

In SM Stirling's Emberverse alternative future history, some characters base themselves directly on Tolkien's Middle Earth, even speaking Elvish. Literature resembles one long series whether or not later texts explicitly acknowledge earlier ones.

Some Anderson-May Parallels II

Verse Disguised As Prose
See Leaves Overhead.

Then read this sentence:

"In the night outside the little room in Rogatien Remillard's third-floor flat, the wolf wind was wailing in the doorways, the snow drifted deep along the road, the ice gnomes were marching from their Norways, and the Great White Cold walked abroad."
-Julian May, Magnificat (London, 1996), Epilogue, p. 559.

Some textual rearrangement gives us:

"The wolf wind was wailing in the doorways,
"The snow drifted deep along the road,
"The ice gnomes were marching from their Norways,
"And the Great White Cold walked abroad."

The Dog And The Wolf
"It was twilight - entre chien et loup, as we used to say."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 3, p. 29.

Is the dog the day and the wolf the night?

May's Intervention and Galactic Milieu Trilogy cover the period from 1945 to 2113 so they are a future history although Rogi, born in 1945, is still alive in 2113. In this respect, he resembles Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long and Poul Anderson's Hanno.

Some Anderson-May Parallels

Seen From Space
Poul Anderson describes a moon seen from space as "...a stone in heaven." See A Planet In Space III.

Julian May:

"As Earth appears to be a white-swirled blue marble from space, so Molakar looked like a white-swirled umber marble."
-Julian May, Magnificat (London, 1997), Chapter Thirty-One, pp. 527-528.

"...the planet Okanagon, which hung in the sky like a brilliant azure lantern..."
-op. cit., Chapter Thirty-Three, p. 543.

"The sun shone on [Earth as seen from the Milieu observation vessel] and it was blue and white, suspended like a brilliant agate against the foaming silver breaker of the galactic plane."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 2, p. 26.

That third passage also describes the Milky Way.

More on this later.