James Blish On Poul Anderson IV

See Gadgets and James Blish On Poul Anderson III.

In More Issues...
On pp. 43-44, Blish, discussing sf "energy screens," writes that:

EE Smith thought of the screens "...as stationary wave fronts...," (p. 43), as if light from a star stopped in space and prevented "...outside light of identical frequencies..." (p. 44) from passing;

"Such effects are often seen in wave-guides and in other phenomena of that general field, which is called resonance..."; (ibid.)

either resonance without a resonator or the Standing Wave of gravity theory would generate such effects in space;

Poul Anderson has written at length (?) about the Standing Wave. See here. (Scroll down.)

And, in some works by Blish, the FTL drive is called the Standing Wave. See the above link.

James Blish On Poul Anderson III

See James Blish On Poul Anderson II.

In The Issue...
On pp. 123-130, Blish writes that:

Poul Anderson, as Guest of Honor at the 1959 World SF Con, called for a unitary approach to sf in which all aspects of life would play equal roles;

Anderson's The Man Who Counts exemplifies this approach;

Ace Books "...contemptuously re-entitled..." (p. 123) the novel War Of The Wing-Men;

Anderson's prescription is good for science fiction because it is good for fiction;

novels have to be about something.

Blish's Examples Of Novels That Succeed Because They Are About Something
George Orwell's 1984, about power;
Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, about the Second Industrial Revolution;
Franz Werfel's Star Of The Unborn, about immortality;
Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, about conflict and suffering.

Blish also commends a few other novels without stating what they were about. Having praised The Man Who Counts, he could have added it to his list, thus:

Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts, about Nicholas van Rijn, the man who counts!

James Blish On Poul Anderson II

See James Blish On Poul Anderson.

In The Issue...
On pp. 105-106, Blish writes that:

Jack Vance's "The Dragon Masters" is a far future fantasy with blade weapons, armor, animal mounts and magic;

Poul Anderson had written several works in this vein but with a reasonable rather than a magical tone;

Anderson knew that explanations in terms of modern physics are as mystical as the grimoires;

for example, he explained the unluckiness of fairy gold in terms of a nuclear transformation.

To which of Anderson's works does Blish refer?

On p. 107, Blish lists Anderson as a writer of "...'hard' science fiction, firmly based in technology..."

Napoleon

Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, Chapter Ten, begins:

"A nation, to be successful, should change its tactics every ten years.
"-Napoleon"

We do not need to ask who Napoleon was although we can always google for details. I also googled this quotation but all that I found was Poul Anderson quoting it.

What does Napoleon mean? That a nation engaged in military and imperialist adventures should confuse its enemies by regularly changing its tactics? I think that a nation attempting to do good at home and abroad should pursue beneficial policies for as long as necessary and should change its tactics only when necessary.

I have yet to reread After Doomsday and thus to discover how this quotation is relevant to Chapter Ten.

Pasts And Futures Different From The Present

Poul Anderson celebrates past times and different kinds of future times. In some speculative futures, technology has been lost so that there has been an unavoidable return to earlier survival techniques as shown by a passage in a work by SM Stirling. In Change Year 47/2045 AD:

"All Mongol girls learned to ride and shoot the bow and use the sword and knife and wrestle..."
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER TWO, p. 33.

That sounds physically healthy and maybe wholesome and fulfilling? I prefer the amenities of high civilization and advanced technology, which I am using now. However, we need gyms and exercise to counteract the effects of sedentarism. What would be the optimal life-style, combining physical health with the benefits of electricity and everything else that was lost in the Change? I don't know but I do find that I have asked this question before. See Physical And Mental Activity. This may be one of the basic questions asked by sf. More on such questions soon.

703

703 page views yesterday, which ended five minutes ago. Thank you to:

page viewers;

commentators who, I am sure, increase the number of page views;

Johan Ortiz for contributing an excellent article which is bound to have increased the number of page views today.

We hope soon to receive contributions from two or three other blog readers. I have not yet exhausted what I have to say about the works of Poul Anderson and related authors. For the time being, at least, the blog continues.

James Blish On Poul Anderson

William Atheling Jr., The Issue At Hand, studies in contemporary magazine science fiction, edited and with an introduction by James Blish (Advent: Publishers, Chicago, 1964).

More Issues At Hand (for reference, see Gadgets).

In The Issue...
On pp. 71-74, in a review written in Autumn, 1953, Atheling/Blish discusses Poul Anderson's "The Immortal Game" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February, 1954). Apparently, the editorial blurb by Boucher and McComas described the story as:

science fiction;
"The Chess Game Story";
as having "incomparable romantic sweep";
a "tragic epic." (p. 71)

Blish denies all these descriptions and adds that "...several more negative judgments..." (ibid.) could be applied. He argues that, in a chess game story:

the game should be a good one;

there should be an evident relationship between the moves and the story;

the story should come first;

a story that follows the game to its detriment satisfies neither chess fans nor fiction readers;

the game should "...be original with the writer..."; (p. 72)

it should be "...a part of the creative act..." (ibid.), serving the story like any other background condition;

Through The Looking Glass satisfies all these criteria whereas "The Immortal Game" does not.

Blish continues that, in "The Immortal Game":

the game, not original with the author, is a straitjacket imposed on the story;

the chessmen are clumsily personified;

there is a parenthetical attempt to explain the personifications by reference to computers;

there is a small amount of "...fan-fiction irony..."; (ibid.)

the plot is nothing but the sequence of moves;

the name-keys and typographical tricks have no advantage over using the right names for the elements of the game;

translating the nomenclature back into chessboard terminology leads the reader our of, not into, the story;

the writing is in Anderson's Planet Stories vein which is like "...writing in his sleep..."; (ibid.)

this is not "tragic epic" or "romantic sweep" but "romanticist-manque"; (ibid.)

the text is full of "...duplicate or incantatory statement[s]..." which are "...signs of automatic writing..."; (p. 73) (Blish quotes: "'Good! Oh, good, my Queen!'" (ibid.) etc)

Finally, Blish presents "Danish Gambit" by Carl Gentile as a very good chess story which Boucher and McComas should reprint "...to take the taste of the Anderson out of the mouths of chess lovers and fiction readers alike..." (p. 74)

Blish quotes Anderson as replying that his story was allegorical and made a "...childishly obvious..." point (p. 72) that "...seems to have escaped Mr. Atheling." (ibid). Blish responds that:

the point still escapes him;
a real game is too specific "...to support an allegory." (ibid.)

We feel that giants have clashed.

Gadgets

The post, "Weapons Technology in the Technic Civilization Stories" by Johan Ortiz, was published today but its date of publication has been changed to 15 January so that it will stay at the top of the blog for a week with newer posts like this one appearing below it. Thus, I refer to Johan's article "before" its arrival but blog readers can cope with temporal displacements which are one of the things that we talk about.

Johan's article reminded me of:

James Blish (writing as William Atheling , Jr.), "THINGS STILL TO COME: Gadgetry and Prediction [1964]" IN William Atheling Jr., More Issues at Hand, critical studies in contemporary science fiction, edited and with an introduction by James Blish (Advent: Publishers, Inc., Chicago, 1970), pp. 41-50.

Atheling/Blish lists gadgets that had been in sf, had not been realized yet and indeed had almost disappeared from the stories:

the field drive;
anti-gravity;
the energy screen as a sub-species of the first two;
rays as a natural step from screens (here Blish refers to Poul Anderson as I will detail in a subsequent post);
thus, weapons including sidearms including blasters but also -

protein-coagulating rays,
electric shock rays,
poison rays,
insanity-inducing rays,
convulsion-inducing rays,
melting rays,
heat rays (which had come as laser guns)
heterodyning rays, also counting as one kind of disintegrator;

tractor beams;
pressor beams;
flying belts;
invisibility.

It will be seen that the subject matter of Blish's article overlaps with that of Johan's.

Jacobsen

Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, Chapter Nine, begins with eight lines of verse attributed merely to "Jacobsen":

"Waken, all of King Volmer's men!" etc

I infer that this means Rolf Jacobsen, Norwegian poet, although I have not deduced which of Jacobsen's works the lines are quoted from.

Leland

Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, Chapter Eight, begins with eleven lines of verse attributed merely to "Leland" -

"Mit shout and crash and sabre flash..." etc

The lines are taken from Hans Breitmann's Ballads by Charles Godfrey Leland whose Aradia was a source for Neopaganism. The goddess Aradia taught peasants witchcraft to enable them to oppose Catholicism, like the sibyl who proclaimed that Thor had challenged Christ to single combat. See here.

Without the Internet, I would have had to go to the Public Library to find out about Leland and then would not have been able to communicate about him like this.