Silence And Sounds

"The universe is mostly silence."
-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (Panther Books, Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1975), CHAPTER ONE, p. 7.

Although there is the cosmic hiss. Meanwhile, Anderson lists the noises of murdered Earth:

the rumble and bellow of crust shaking, mountains opening and volcanoes erupting;

the seethe and hiss of boiled oceans now cooling;

the shriek and skirl of winds scouring recently molten continents, now bare black stone;

cracking, booming lightning.

The description continues:

ash;
smoke;
acid rain;
sulphurous clouds;
upthrust crags;
cities engulfed;
ships sunk;
trees, grass, deer, whales and human beings dissolved in lava.

This beginning is an ending.

Eating And Ending

(Genghis Khan, the Ancestor.)

Two authors whom we compare with Poul Anderson we now briefly compare with each other, with a guest appearance by CS Lewis.

"I just saw the Ancestor's emissaries devour a man's soul."
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 332.

"'The thing that called itself Screwtape let slip to Lewis that demons do eat souls.'"
-James Blish, The Day After Judgement IN Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), pp. 427-522 AT p. 432.

At the end of The Sky-Blue Wolves, Orlaith says that the ending is a beginning whereas Reiko replies that both are illusions and that there is only life, unchanged by the Change.

"'Every end,' Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, 'is a new beginning.'"
-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CODA, p. 129.

"Creation began."
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Cities In Flight, pp. 467-596 AT CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 596.

For a Lewis-Stirling comparison, see Visions Of Heaven.

Bond, Targovi And Orlaith

James Bond makes a night-time sea crossing to reach Doctor No's island and, in a later political period, climbs a high wall with pitons to enter Blofeld's Castle of Death. (And see here.)

Targovi scales a high wall to enter what he discovers to be a secret Merseian base on Zacharia Island on the planet, Daedalus.

In SM Stirling's The Sky-Blue Wolves, the main Korean fort, protected by mountain-high walls with no openings, is entered by easily defended tunnels from many well-guarded subsidiary forts. Since physical attack on the main fort is impossible, Orlaith plans a psychic assault. Read on.

Time Travel And Families

How might time travel affect the successive generations of a single family? In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol, not at all - because Patrol members are prevented from learning anything about their personal futures.

In other time travel scenarios, things are different. When the title character of Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife encounters a group of school children, a ten year old girl addresses him as "Daddy." When the girl's teacher, naming her "Alba," reminds her that her father is dead, the girl replies, "My daddy is a time traveler. He is not dead all the time." Thus, he learns the name of his as yet unborn daughter. Later, Alba's parents see her playing in their garden with - Alba.

In SM Stirling's The Sky-Blue Wolves, Orlaith meets her as yet unborn daughter who names herself "Darya," adding that she was named after her father's mother. Later, when Orlaith is alone with Prince Dzhambul, he mentions that his Russian mother was called Darya Nikolaevna Rodchenko...

"..." is meant to be suggestive...

Robert Heinlein's Temporal Bureau agent is both his own parents.

Privacy

"Cubs, calves, and chicks, too small for education, bumbled about like the pet animals they were. Units that must be too aged or ill for daily toil waited quietly near the middle of the house. It was all one enormous room. Privacy was surely an idea which Didonians were literally incapable of entertaining. But what ideas did they have that were forever beyond human reach?"
-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 367-520 AT CHAPTER NINE, p. 459.

Sometimes we can formulate a question but never answer it. Other collective intelligences, like Anderson's Baburites or merging sophotects, must also live entirely without privacy.

Sometimes also, human beings, who do know what privacy is, are acutely aware of the lack of it:

"If you were the heir to a throne at least three people and a brace of bodyguards knew when you were so much as going off to empty your bladder and probably discussed it among themselves afterwards.
"You didn't have any privacy at all if you didn't have close-mouthed, loyal and skillful friends ready to run interference for you."
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 306.

See also Palatial Privacy, Lack Of. 

"We Are The Kings Who Die..."

The High Queen of Montival tells the Empress of Japan:

"'We are the kings who die that their blood may safeguard their folk, the sacrifice that goes consenting, walking to their fate with open eyes.'"
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 291.

References to blood turn me off. If they die in battle, then it is at least clear how their deaths have safeguarded their people whereas ritual sacrifices of blood and a sacramental sacrifice of consecrated wine are less obviously beneficial.

The Empress replies that:

she prefers victory;
she has post-war plans that require her presence;
moments that may be their last are savored more keenly (see the above link).

Bodhisattvas

The Mongol Prince Dzhambul:

"...believed in the Tengri and the Bodhisattvas - the Buddhist side of his people's inherited religion had been less prominent since the Change - and performed rites and sacrifices."
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, p. 281.

Bodhisattvas are mythological enlightened beings who return to Samsara to help everyone else to realize Nirvana. They are not based on historical figures and it is not necessary to believe that they literally exist. Poul and Karen Anderson's Ysans had a philosophical understanding of Myth.

Cosmic Dark

See Cosmic Dawn.

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero and "Flight to Forever" have become outmoded because cosmic expansion is accelerating so that the cosmos is not cyclical. All other galaxies will recede until they become undetectable.

Dark matter, 27% of the universe, causing galactic condensation, and dark energy, 68%, causing cosmic expansion, call for new sf novels by modern successors of Olaf Stapledon and Poul Anderson and maybe these novels are now being written without my knowledge since I have not kept up with post-Anderson cosmological sf? But that is what the combox is for.

The Technic History And After Doomsday

Similarities
Many intelligent species.
FTL interstellar travel.

Differences
A finite volume of known space as against an unknown number of civilization clusters.
A human-dominated Terran Empire as against a very few human survivors.

I will shortly reread After Doomsday. Several Christmas and birthday present books have taken priority and are still being read.

Disagreeing With James Blish

"Any sane writer would work in this field only now and then, for kicks, because he has an idea that he just can't resist. But that's not how much of us behave. We go on and on, year after year, churning out science fiction..."
- William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish), The Issue At Hand (Chicago, 1964), p. 123.

Sf is good for something more than "kicks." Certain authors have made significant contributions to imaginative and speculative literature in its modern form of science fiction. Just a few examples:

Robert Heinlein's Future History followed by Poul Anderson's eight future histories;

Blish's branching future histories;

alternative histories by SM Stirling and others.

Anderson makes us aware that we live both in history and in the universe. Such contributions could not have been made by authors working in the field now and then for kicks.