Zero And The Visitors

"Epilogue."

Maybe this is a touch of humour? At the end of section I, Zero attacks three bipeds which had emerged from a "monster" that had descended from the sky and disables their communicators - carried outside their bodies! He runs with one kicking wildly under his arm. Another batters at him with its hands. He ties all three together, stuffs them into his carrier and takes them to his cave to study. End of section.

In section II, Hugh Darkington (viewpoint character), Frederika Ruys and Sam Kuroki descend from their interstellar spaceship to Earth in a space boat... 

So now we know who Zero's three captives were! The change of point of view between sections I and II is staggering. So much in a single short story. 

Miniature Histories

"Epilogue."

Many single novels or even shorter works turn out to be miniature future histories when analysed in detail, e.g.:

"Flight to Forever"

"In Memoriam"

"Requiem"

The Long Way Home

The Time Machine

When travellers from the twentieth century arrive in the far future, they ask: How did it happen? How did Victorian bourgeoisie and proletarians become Eloi and Morlocks? Or: How did beings like Zero come into existence? (It is not just the twentieth century, of course. The Time Traveller was from the nineteenth. Characters contemporary with their readers now set off from the twenty-first.)

In a boat descending from the returned Traveler, Sam Kuroki unwittingly explains. There were many self-maintaining gadgets including solar powered, self-reproducing, mineral-collecting sea rafts. Hugh Darkington adds:

"'There would have been radioactivity everywhere...'" (ibid.)

Radioactivity, mutation and adaptation.

Three Billion Years

"Epilogue." 

Section II confirms that the planet inhabited by Zero, One, Two, Hundred etc is indeed Earth of the future although three billion years is longer than usual. Human beings who had departed the Solar System just before an imminent global conflict return but so much time has elapsed because of a fault in the field drive. Poul Anderson effortlessly invented ways to transport his characters into the further future for story purposes. Reactive thrust rotated through a fourth dimension was applied along the temporal axis. Or a faulty manifold generated a t-acceleration effect. Two characters present different rationales. Either would have sufficed and Anderson could easily have devised a dozen more.

Before they left:

"Tension had mounted so horribly fast..." (p. 190)

Like now. Can people learn to think outside the box instead of always blaming every conflict entirely on the other side? Things will get worse before they get better.

The Milky Way has changed shape. Earth has no polar caps. Continents have shifted. No longer green and brown, they are black and ocher with points of reflection. The atmosphere is nitrogen, not oxygen. There is no chlorophyll or other complex organic compound. The ground is metallic. We have already read the point of view of an inhabitant of this environment.

Two Explorations

"The Saturn Game" and "Starfog" begin and end Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization and also begin and end his collection, Explorations. Anyone reading these two stories only in that collection has no way to know that they are instalments of a single series, let alone that they are the opening and closing instalments of one long future history series. Both stories are about space exploration although on vastly different scales. 

"Starfog" refers back to League, Troubles, Empire and Long Night and thus informs its readers that it has prequels. However, "The Saturn Game" is pre-League. Its only explicit link to the later History is its single reference to the Jerusalem Catholic Church. This is like real history, of course. Most of our present life is lived without making any explicit reference to anything that had happened thousands of years previously.

A single unchanged text has a different significance when it is published and read in a different context. In Explorations, "The Saturn Game" introduces not the Technic History but five other stories about explorations. We can read or reread it and "Starfog" without necessarily reflecting on their relationships to Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn or Dominic Flandry. A literary liberation of sorts.

Organisms And Mechanisms

This post is a response to the questions posed at the end of the preceding post.

Organisms are naturally selected to respond to their environment. Selected responses are genetically transmitted and inherited. In mobile organisms, some such responses become conscious motivations. Thus, adaptations and mutations on the molecular level of combinations of genes generate consciousness on the macroscopic level of organisms with central nervous systems. Thus also, consciousness is an emergent property of some organisms, not an independent substance interacting with organisms. Materialist philosophy is subtle and not reductionist.

Pleasure and pain have survival value but require consciousness. Therefore, sufficiently complex and sensitive organisms tend to become conscious. They pass from lacking sustenance to feeling hungry or from being dangerously hot to feeling uncomfortably hot. Can a mechanism be sufficiently complex and sensitive to become conscious? A mechanism has a power source and replaceable parts on the macroscopic level but is not able to change itself or to transmit information on the molecular level. Therefore, it cannot generate an equivalent of genes. This has to be an obstacle to becoming conscious.

Details Of The Techno World

"Epilogue."

Hundred is wise because of his age but slow-thinking because of irreversible polarization. Self-conscious motiles are called persons. Each had a creator and ancestors stretching back to a great-grandcreator and beyond. On an "ancient day":

"...some forgotten savage genius made the first crude spark gap and electricity was tamed." (p. 183)

- like Prometheus taming fire but what the persons do not know is that that "savage genius" was organic.

Lure accumulators emit signals that make small motiles enter their grinders. Obviously, self-maintaining mechanisms left to their own devices have evolved to compete and survive but how did they become conscious? Naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation but can that same qualitative transformation occur in mechanistic sensitivity? Can a camera become an eye or a microphone become an ear?

Radio Hams And Hackers

"Epilogue."

Zero communicates by radio both with One who dwells in the same cave and with Two who is forty miles away although we must never forget that "Two" is only:

"...the person who might as well be called Two..." (p. 180)

When Zero sees something large descend and land, he transmits an alarm which is answered by Two, Hundred and many others. Two has noticed something peculiar in Zero's direction and asks what the matter is. Hundred, the oldest, who has had half a dozen bodies and presides in councils, calls for silence and orders Zero to report. Suddenly, an entire society is revealed to us.

I used to like the idea of radio hams conversing without meeting. Now we have email and other social media. The radio conversation between Zero, Two and Hundred in "Epilogue" reminds me of the email dialogue between the members of Hacker Republic in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Wasp is in hospital and under arrest but her friends smuggle in her hand-held so that she can converse with her fellow citizens who could probably sabotage the Swedish government if she gave the ok: science fiction if it had been published forty years earlier.

Hunter Zero

"Epilogue."

Because communication is by radio, Zero overhears a conversation a hundred miles away.

Spoor is broken earthcrystals, slabs cut from boles and "...a trace of lubricant." (p. 178) 

Zero strides whereas his prey will be on treads. Checking himself, he finds that his parts are in order. His body has a swivelling lattice, a head and four hands. In the night sky, he sees stars with his optical sensors and hears radio internally.

The forest through which he strides is alloy, silicate, radiation-absorber plates, trunks, girders and jointed rods. Zero taps lubricant from a cylinder growth, thins his acid by drinking water and pauses to allow polarization in his energy cells to clear away. 

Something mysterious comes from above. We guess that a spaceship approaches and that Zero is about to meet organic intelligences.

Zero And One II

"Epilogue."

The characters whom the omniscient narrator labels "Zero" and "One" communicate with each other and with others of their kind by radio pulses, not by air vibrations. Thus, they have no idea that anyone else refers to them by uttered sounds or corresponding printed symbols. Zero is so designated:

"...because he, like any consciousness, was the center of his own coordinate system..." (p. 177)

- and One because she is:

"...the most important dweller in Zero's universe..." (ibid.)

Thus, in this case, "Zero" and "One" mean little more than "I" and "you." Each of us says "I" as the centre of his or her own coordinate system. Obviously the terms would have been reversed if section I had been narrated from the point of view of the character who is regarded as female because "she" remains in their cave "creating" (ibid.) while Zero goes out to hunt game. This game is not animals with edible flesh and potable blood but "motiles" with concentrated energy and reusable parts.

One helps Zero to fasten a carrier rack on his shoulders. He has shoulders. We still do not know whether he is wheeled, winged, bipedal, quadrupedal etc. He also carries weapons. Motiles beware. We need an explanation of this techno-ecology (techology) but that will come. We have just made it onto the second page of the text.

Zero And One

"Epilogue."

Zero and his significant other, whom the omniscient narrator designates "One" and "she," dwell in a cave where:

"Energy reserves were low..." (p. 177)

In our experience, a human couple dwell in a house or apartment where energy, as gas and/or electricity, is supplied from outside and stored food might run low. Of course, food is another kind of energy but a very different kind. We put food but not electricity directly into our bodies. Anything requiring electrical input is neither conscious nor even organic. However, Zero and One seem to consume electricity not just domestically but bodily. One needs to be recharged and Zero:

"...also felt a dwindling potential." (ibid.)

They have two sources of charge: growing accumulator cells and moving "motiles." The latter are preferable because:

their energy is more concentrated;

their charge is more easily assimilable;

they are more highly organized;

One can use many parts of motiles with little reshaping;

she would need to process a lot of accumulator cells while "...creating." (ibid.) (Pregnant?)

That charge is to them what food is to us is confirmed when the change from accumulators to motiles is described as "...a change of diet." (ibid.)

If Zero and One are self-maintaining, self-repairing artefacts, then how have they become conscious?