Gold And Indigo

The Day Of Their Return, 2.

Creusa, one of the Aenean moons:

"...glimmered ever more bright, waxing while it climbed eastward. A pair of wings likewise caught rays from the hidden sun and shone gold against indigo heaven." (p. 77)

Gold against indigo: it sounds as if Aeneas is a good place to go for a walk at night. But Ivar Frederiksen is not out for a walk. He is waiting to ambush and kill Imperials. The contrast between the beauty of nature and the works of men could not be greater. Poul Anderson describes both and leaves his readers to draw their conclusions, if any. 

Nature is indifferent. Moons would wax, wane and shine if no one was there or whatever the intentions of those who are out at night. Ancients and human beings have walked on Aeneas in different eras.

Keening Winds And Aenean Social Complexity

The Day Of Their Return.

Wind keens in Ys and on Aeneas.

Aeneas has to be the most complicated colonial society in Poul Anderson's Technic History:

University (scientists, scholars, support staff);

Landfolk (squires, yeomen, tenants);

Townfolk (ancient corporate bodies, including guilds, but also manufacturers, merchants and managers in the industrial Web);

communities descended from ethnically distinct immigrants (tinerans, Riverfolk, Orcans, Highlanders etc).

Significant individuals:

Chunderban Desai from Ramanujan, appointed by the Terran Empire as High Commissioner of the Virgilian System;

Ivar Frederiksen, heir to the Firstmanship of Ilion, nephew of Kathryn McCormac;

Erannath, an Avalonian Ythrian, spying on Aeneas for both Domain and Empire;

Aycharaych, a Chereionite, fomenting on behalf of Merseia.

Far Away

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Flandry tells McCormac:

"'Go a long way, McCormac, as far as you possibly can. Find a new planet. Found a new society. Never come back.'" (p. 512)

We imagine a new society on a new planet far way. But we need not just imagine it. This is a future history series. "Starfog," set millennia later, shows us a human-descended spaceship crew from a planet far away in another spiral arm of the galaxy. We infer their descent from the exiled Aenean rebels. And there is more to it than that. Later in his career, Flandry will rescue a colony planet called Vixen. And a man not from Vixen but from its colony, New Vixen, will meet that crew from the planet far away, which is called Kirkasant. The Technic History has shown us three planetary sources of wealth, Satan, Mirkheim and Wayland. Kirkasant is located inside a nebula that turns out to be full of planetary sources of wealth. The history continues although, unfortunately, beyond our ken.

Electronic Shadow Show

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

"If [Hugh McCormac] spoke to his wife at all, and not an electronic shadow show..." (p. 504)

Some of us have now seen those shadow shows: computer generated simulations of the appearances and voices of politicians or actors, deepfakes. Will all technology described in sf become real? Not if is theoretically impossible. Will faster than light and time travel remain theoretically impossible? I am fairly certain that, if any of these impossibilities do eventually happen, they will not happen as anyone has imagined them.

The Technic History: The Main Novels

The Man Who Counts: Nicholas van Rijn on Diomedes; his role in life whether the object is massive profits or mere survival.

Satan's World: a new source of vast wealth and an external threat to Technic civilization.

Mirkheim: a newer source of vaster wealth and the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League.

The People Of The Wind: War between the Domain of Ythri and the Terran Empire.

Ensign Flandry: Dominic Flandry on Starkad and Merseia.

A Circus Of Hells: Flandry on Irumclaw, Wayland and Talwin.

The Rebel Worlds: Flandry on Terra, Shalmu, Llynathawr and Dido.

The Day Of Their Return: Chunderban Desai, Aycharaych and Ivar Frederiksen on Aeneas; references to the Flandry novels.

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows: Flandry on Terra, Diomedes, Dennitza and Chereion; his showdown with Aycharaych.

A Stone In Heaven: Flandry on Terra and Ramnu; his liaison with the daughter of his original mentor on Starkad and Merseia.

The Game Of Empire: Flandry's daughter on Imhotep and Daedalus; Starkadians settled on Imhotep.

Abilities And Events

The Rebel Worlds.

Flandry's success in this novel is due in equal measure to his outstanding abilities and to external events panning out exactly in his favour. He and his men are shipwrecked on Dido but the rebels have a single hyperdrive craft at a scientific base on that planet. The vessel is easily hijacked and Flandry uses it to disable the base's communications. Thus, he and his men capture the enemy's computer communication codes long before the enemy can know this and change the codes. The McCormac Rebellion is effectively defeated at this point but Flandry manages to finess matters further by assassinating the governor, returning Kathryn McCormac to her rebel husband and letting the rebels flee, thus preventing further slaughter.

It was emphasized earlier that getting the enemy's codes before they are regularly changed is difficult to the point of impossibility yet Flandry does it almost without noticing even before he has become the Captain Flandry of the originally published pulp magazine series.

With men like this, the Terran Empire is not dead yet.

Teens And Twenties

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Flandry's crew are in their teens and twenties. I had imagined them as older. But we remember that Flandry was nineteen on Starkad and is still only twenty-five.

How young to be sent to fight in space and on other planets! If I could address my younger self, then I would say, "Do not express any opinions about anything until you are at least fifty." But that is my considered assessment of my younger self, not a judgement on anyone who is younger than me now. Quite the contrary. We have discussed generation gaps before.

Our personalities form before we have any say in the matter. Is a definite personality from an early age evidence for rebirth? No. It happens because a complex, sensitive psychophysical organism with a specific genetic combination must, right from the start, adopt some way of responding to environmental inputs. We can spend a lifetime coping with the problems caused by how we started. Or we might be the kind of person who never reflects on any of that.

Van Rijn, Falkayn and Flandry look outward at how to advance in the world as they find it.

The Wind And Josip III

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER TWELVE.

Meanwhile, what is happening on Dido? The wind is heard at a dramatic moment but we have posted about this twice before. See here. We are casually informed that Emperor Josip is the third of that name. We have already incorporated this datum into our information about the Terran Emperors. It has become slightly easier for me to remember "Josip III" because we have, comparatively recently, entered the reign of Charles III. Think how much history is incorporated in the names, Elizabeth and Charles, and fictitiously, Josip and Manuel.

Flandry will ensure that there is no Hugh I but later will serve the usurper, Hans. Like van Rijn and Falkayn before him, Flandry lives at a historical turning point.

The Volumes Of The SAGA

 

A day spent in other activities can afford time for thinking about Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization.

The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, The Van Rijn Method, collects no less than eleven of the forty-three instalments of the Technic History, only one instalment less than the earlier collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate. Furthermore, these two collections overlap by seven instalments and the seven include the Nicholas van Rijn novel, The Man Who Counts. The two collections represent successive stages in the book publication of the Technic History with the Saga comprising the complete edition.

Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader, collects seven instalments which can be classified as:

2 van Rijn;

2 trader team;

2 both;

1 other -

- all set within the Polesotechnic League period which begins in Volume I and ends in Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire, the latter setting the stage for subsequent volumes with the Empire not ending until Volume VII, Flandry's Legacy.

The volumes collect disproportionate numbers of instalments -

I: 11

II: 7

III: 6

IV: 3

V: 6

VI: 4

VII: 6

- because the instalments vary considerably in length.

I find these heuristic devices helpful for thinking about the series while lacking access to copies of the books.

Poul Anderson's Future Historical Writing

Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-238.

My favourite single volume of future history is The Earth Book Of Stormgate. My favourite single chapter of a future historical novel is The Day Of Their Return., 3. This chapter:

introduces Chunderban Desai and Aycharaych;

presents another human-Merseian friendship, Desai with Uldwyr;

presents a detailed architectural and sociological description of Nova Roma and its surrounding terrain on Aeneas;

refers to four previous Technic History novels.

The People Of The Wind

Uldwyr: Merseia has had better relations with the Domian of Ythri than has Terra.

Ensign Flandry

Uldwyr refers to Starkad

A Circus Of Hells.

Terran Intelligence has benefitted from the joint commission on Talwin.

The Rebel Worlds

The brilliant Terran defeat of the rebels in Sector Alpha Crucis also ended the conflict at Jihannath.

Regular readers know of Dominic Flandry's involvements in Starkad, Talwin and Sector Alpha Crucis.