Narrators Who Address Us

I wanted to expand on what I had meant in the previous post about narrators who come across as writers of popular magazine articles. There are several examples in Narrators That Are In There. Two others are:

"Sure we had trouble building Space Station One - but the trouble was people."

-Robert Heinlein, "Delilah and the Space Rigger" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 7-19 AT p. 7.

"This is the story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways - but not the official version.

"You sang his words in school..."

-Robert Heinlein, "The Green Hills of Earth" IN The Green Hills Of Earth, pp. 131-141 AT p. 131.

The text continues to address its readers as if we were living in that era when Space Station One had recently been built and Rhysling's songs were sung in schools. Heinlein gives the future a daily life more solidly than anyone else although Anderson also approaches this same effect in works like "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" and "Lodestar."

Future histories affect each other - and Nicholas van Rijn and "blind Rhysling" both make it into Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix: an ultimate recognition of these two characters.

Future Historical Perspectives

(I have uprooted many weeds around the perimeter of our humble property. I am the unskilled labour. Others know what to plant where and when.)

We are still with the inexhaustible subject of future histories and there is more to be said than can be fitted into this lunch break. As ever on this blog, our focus is on Poul Anderson even if we first refer to the earlier Campbell future historians: Heinlein, Asimov and Blish.

Blish's Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity in Welcome To Mars and has invented the first faster-than-light interstellar drive in "Common Time." These are different achievements. See Gyrogavitics. The discoverer of antigrav and the inventor of FTL need not have been given the same name.

Heinlein's Future History, Volume I, The Man Who Sold The Moon, opens with Heinlein's Time Chart, a PREFACE by the author and an INTRODUCTION by John Campbell. None of these three texts, with the partial exception of the Time Chart, is a fictional introduction written as from a future historical perspective whereas Asimov has Encyclopedia Galactica and Blish has Acreff-Monales, The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits.

In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, a committee, meeting in interludes between the stories, discusses how to teach history and explains to its newest member that teachers must select and interpret facts and raise children to become "'...intellectually trained and emotionally mature...'" (p. 17) adults who can debate interpretations of historical events "'...with pleasure and profit.'" (ibid.)

Early in the second story, "The Rogue," the narrator refers to himself and his readers as "We..." (p. 43) That single pronoun shows that this speaker/author is not the omniscient narrator of most fiction but a counterpart of the narrator in Heinlein's Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, who comes across as the writer of popular magazine articles published during the "Green Hills" period of the Future History.

In haste. Will expand as necessary later.

Green Hills And Flying Mountains

Robert Heinlein's Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, is mainly about people living on the Moon although there is also information about Mars, Venus and life back on Earth. Interstellar travel does not begin until Volume IV.

Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains is a single-volume future history about people living on terraformed asteroids thanks to gyrogravitics, a technology not possessed by Heinlein's characters - who do gain control of gravity in one story set on Earth although this technology is not mentioned subsequently and later interstellar craft are spun to simulate gravity. A technology lost during the Interregnum of Volume III?

Interstellar travel has begun at the beginning of Tales Of The Flying Mountains. Indeed, it is the travellers themselves who review their asteroidal history for their own benefit and, of course, for ours.

There, if you want it, is a partial comparison between Heinlein's Future History and one of Anderson's eight future histories before I turn in for the night, looking forward to a morning of gardening. Good night.

Gyrogravitics

See The Rise and Fall of Gyro-Gravity by John G. Cramer.

It seems that Poul Anderson's gyrogravitics and James Blish's "spindizzy" arise out of the same set of observations and speculations about rotation, gravity and magnetism - and I cannot follow the technicalities. However, Blackett's predictions did not pan out and, even if they had done, they might have led to Anderson's control of gravity but there would have been no reason for them also to lead to Blish's faster-than-light drive. See Flying Mountains And Cities. Blish's They Shall Have Stars presents a keen sense of his characters experiencing conceptual and technological upheavals while anticipating consequent social transformations. However, Blish's prologue or prelude volume could be decoupled from the subsequent flying cities series and might instead presage something more like Anderson's terraformed asteroids. However, in any case, neither of these futures has come to be. Gravity remains uncontrolled.

Jupiter And Longevity

For the reason why James Blish's characters, unlike Poul Anderson's and Clifford Simak's, do not adapt human beings to live on Jupiter, see On Jupiter. And to reiterate:

"'We've sense enough - or humility enough, if you like that better - to know that we can't adapt men to a planet like Jupiter...'"

-James Blish, "Surface Tension" IN Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), pp. 107-180 AT p. 109.

However, in the stories in question, Anderson and Simak had still been thinking of Jupiter merely as a bigger planet with a solid surface whereas Blish was working with the updated idea of a "gas giant," a large planet with a turbulent atmosphere merely densening but never solidifying all the way down to the eventual planetary core.

Sf writers discuss the same questions but give different answers:

Heinlein's Howard Families breed for longevity; 

Blish's characters say that this is impossible but develop antiagathic drugs;

Anderson has antisenescence in the Technic History, anti-aging treatment in the Time Patrol and three different kinds of immortality in other works.

Comparisons And Future Histories

We have compared James Blish's "Bridge":

first, with Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe" because both are about exploration of Jupiter remotely controlled from Jupiter V;

secondly, with "Nothing Succeeds Like Failure," the first story collected in Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, because both are about the discovery of antigravity despite resistance from political bureaucracy.

See also:

Humor

Humor II

Humor III

"Bridge" is part of Blish's major future history series whereas Tales Of The Flying Mountains is in itself one of Anderson's eight future histories, which in turn reminds us of their diversity, e.g.:

the Maurai History, set almost entirely on Earth and linked to past history by time travel;

the Kith History, two versions, the second version a single long novel showing millennia of societal and civilizational change on Earth;

the Rustum History, eight stories focused on a single extrasolar colony planet although one other story about one other such planet is also set in this timeline.

This has given me an idea for a post on James Blish Appreciation. I will link to it from here when it is published.

Later: See Sweeney On Ganymede.

Politicians And Space

Politicians can:

(i) cut government spending on space technology because they want either to save money or to spend it on something else like welfare;

(ii) label all scientific research secret in case it has weapons applications and would benefit an enemy.

Both cuts and secrecy stifle research. (i) happens in Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains and (ii) in James Blish's Cities In Flight. However, in both cases, researchers develop antigravity despite the political restrictions.

Blish's scientific rationale is the little-known Locke Derivation followed by the Blacket-Dirac equations whereas one of Anderson's characters speaks more vaguely about:

"'...equations like those of a rotating force-field.'"

-Poul Anderson, Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1971), p. 28.

When Senator Carter of Virginia expostulates against antigravity and says that he could reach Mars more easily by astral projection, we are reminded that all fiction is one and that Edgar Rice Burroughs preceded Anderson.

Flying Mountains And Cities

Two future history series with similar titles:

Tales Of The Flying Mountains by Poul Anderson

Cities In Flight by James Blish

Anderson's "mountains" are asteroids. In both series, a crackpot theory of gravity leads to antigravity. In ...Mountains, asteroids are terraformed and an inhabited asteroid is launched towards Proxima Centauri. In Cities..., cities are lifted from Earth and launched across space - but they also fly faster than light. The experimenters are:

"...astonished at the accompanying effects: the abolition of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald relationship inside the field, the intolerance of the field itself to matter outside its influence, and so on; not only at their occurring at all - the formula doesn't predict them - but at their order of magnitude."

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars AT Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT BOOK THREE, p. 97.

"...the formula doesn't predict them..." So is it a deus ex machina by Blish when he suggests that the Blackett-Dirac equations could lead to a faster-than-light interstellar drive? Maybe I'll reread ...Mountains and check whether its gravitational theory connects with Blish's.

What better use of an sf blogger's time than to compare future histories by Anderson and Blish?

The Centrality Of Poul Anderson

Sometimes we focus on specific details in a single work by Poul Anderson, e.g., When They Sit Up. At other times, we seem not to focus on Anderson himself because we instead discuss, e.g., future histories in general, as in Narrators And Historians. However, from the perspective of this blog, Anderson is always at the centre. As a future historian, he is:

post-Wellsian and post-Stapledonian;

the fourth Campbell future historian, after Heinlein, Asimov and Blish.

But he also significantly extends all these traditions. Clifford Simak has been mentioned because his Jupiter story, "Desertion," bears some comparison with Jupiter stories by Blish and Anderson and because his City counts as a single-volume future history.

When discussing the future histories of Wells, Stapledon or Heinlein, Anderson is always important as not only succeeding but also surpassing all three! Mary Shelley initiated modern science fiction in 1818 with the question, "Would it be right to create a human being?" in her novel, Frankenstein, and Anderson both updated and re-presented this question in 2001 with his single-volume future history, Genesis. We discuss other authors, on this blog, in terms of their relationships to Anderson.

Following up on Narrators And Historians, a historiographer directly addresses his readers whereas an author who presents a fictionalized third person account of historical events steps aside to make way for the omniscient narrator (ON). Both of these literary processes occur in Anderson's Technic History.

Narrators And Historians

My copy of Clifford Simak's City ordered via eBay has yet to arrive by post although I have meanwhile reread the relevant story, "Desertion," on line. However, City bears another point of interest to which I will return. 

Who writes a future history series? - I mean apart from the author named on the cover. Do we imagine an historian or narrator living in a further future some time after the events recounted in the concluding instalment of the series? - someone who would be more specific than the omniscient narrator (ON) that:

is invisibly present in every third person narrative;

exists at no time or place;

expresses no opinions;

draws no attention to ON-self (there is no appropriate pronoun);

objectively recounts events, including experiences and thoughts of a viewpoint character;

is not to be identified with any character, not even with a hypothetical future historian whose name and other details remain unknown.

Such a historian would have a name, personal characteristics and opinions even if we never found out what they were whereas ON is an omnipresent, completely transparent, fictional device usually unnoticed because the reader's attention is entirely focused on what ON recounts.

So, apart from ON, is there a historical, spatiotemporally specific, narrator of a future history? Sometimes. yes. Sometimes, not. Sandra Miesel provides such a historian for Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History. Hloch of Stormgate Choth compiles and edits The Earth Book Of Stormgate but not the rest of Anderson's Technic History. But there are other historians in that series.

Philip Raven dreams Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come. One of the Last Men telepathically communicates Last And First Men to Olaf Stapledon although Stapledon thinks that he is writing speculative fiction.

The stories in City have individual introductions that bind them together and are written as from a later perspective which it will be interesting to reread so that is all for now, folks.