On Nerthus

"Virgin Planet" locates itself within the Psychotechnic History when a character swears by Cosmos. 

This story follows the two Wilson Pete instalments by divulging more information about the planet Nerthus which is about 300 parsecs from Sol and is a base planet for the Coordination Service. This is the first mention of that Service and we have not yet been told that it is a branch of the Stellar Union. 

"Gypsy" told us about the beginning of the Nomad culture although the interstellar rovers were not yet called "Nomads" then. "The Pirate" will introduce Trevelyan Micah of the Coordination Service. Finally, Trevelyan will meet Nomads in Stellamont on Nerthus in The Peregrine. Multiple narrative strands converge for a climax of the Stellar Union period of the Psychotechnic History.

Man or Monster

"Virgin Planet."

An unflattering description of the first Man that Barbara has seen:

broad shoulders, not unpleasing, but ugly narrow hips;

yellow hair cropped short;

lean face;

too much nose, chin and bone;

too little flesh;

inhumanly deep voice.

"She remembered from the old stories that Monsters had many shapes, but some of them looked like deformed humans." (p. 45)

Deformed!

That this Man or Monster belongs in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is confirmed by the first thing that he says:

"'Holy Cosmos, what's going on here?'" (ibid.)

Barbara then lassoes him and drags him behind her.

The story begins as it will continue. Landing on a planet of women is not necessarily what a man might think.

Wind On Another Planet

"Virgin Planet."

"Tall white clouds walked in a windy sky." (p. 43)

We have learned to look out for descriptions of nature and for references to the wind in Poul Anderson's works. The wind is blowing. Things are happening.

As Barbara Whitley rides her orsper towards a landed spaceship:

"The wind blew in her face, murmuring of the sea and the Ship whence it came." (p. 44)

Despite the juxtaposition of sea and "Ship," this is not a sea ship but the Ship of Father in which, we gather, human beings had arrived on this very terrestroid planet. The sea is always evocative of far places, especially when it is sensed inland. The wind, which had signified motion and action, now comes to meet Barbara as she approaches the newly arrived ship-shaped object which must carry either Men or Monsters although more probably the latter. A new adventure begins with new protagonists on a new planet. Future history continues.

Another Planet

Poul Anderson, "Virgin Planet" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3 (Riverdale, NY, July 2018), pp. 43-112.

With Virgin Planet, the novel, boxed for a house move, I have to reread "Virgin Planet," the shorter version.

This planet has grass and two suns, Ay and Bee. Other heavenly bodies are Minos, a moon called Ariadne and other moons not visible in the opening scene. What is Minos?

The pressing question is whether a spaceship that has just landed has brought the Men or some other intelligent species, Monsters. Either is possible. 

And that is a good place to close for this evening, just in time for some TV news about the US election...

We read future history and live history.

Horror

Poul Anderson's "The Green Thumb" ends on a horror fiction note. Joe, challenged about his origin and intentions, has pulled a gun on Pete and Gunnar and then escaped into the forest. Gunnar deduces that the native Nerthusians, who do exist after all, have remained concealed and have sent Joe as a spy. After all, he has the same colour of fur and number of limbs as the native animals with whom he is in tune. 

The horror is in not knowing what the Nerthusians are really like or what they want. This could have been the prelude to a planet-wide war with the natives mobilizing their ecology against the handful of settlers. That is not to be if only because the rest of the series is not about Nerthus although some later events happen there. The next instalment takes us to another human-colonized planet. It was unusual for these two stories to be about one young boy and his relatives on a single planet. The future history of mankind on many planets continues.

It is confirmed that there is a network of intelligent species with interstellar travel so that it is possible to talk about "the Galaxy" in political terms without meaning by that just human civilization in the Galaxy but we are told almost nothing about the other species. As with the same author's later Technic History, we want to know a lot more.

Psych Training

"The Green Thumb."

Pete imagines his uncle's and aunt's feelings when they see a note that he has left:

"Then he remembered that, in psych training, you were warned against such thoughts..." (p. 35)

We want to know more about psychodynamic training and techniques but are not told much. Would psychodynamicists warn young people against certain thoughts? How can we prevent ourselves from thinking any particular thoughts?

In zazen training, I have heard:

"Can you sit with whatever comes up?"

"Thoughts don't matter. They are just brain excretions. It is our attitude to them that counts."

"There will always be natural thoughts in zazen but don't add to them!"

"Neither trying to think nor trying not to think. Just sitting with no deliberate thought..."

Zen is not a science. It can be taught only to those who are motivated to learn it. It can take a long time to show any results. The results are not of the kind that are imagined in advance! The main requirements are patience and perseverance. I think that practitioners of other spiritual paths will recognize much of this.

(Apart from all that, it is all plain sailing.)

These and other crucial issues are implicit in Poul Anderson's texts. Obviously, I view them from my (hopefully developing) perspective. Other readers do the same.

Gods

See:

Cosmos And Life

Cosmos And Joe

A Christian or a secularist will ask whether Joe believes that his little local gods of life literally exist whereas a modern Pagan will say that it does not matter. The gods can be personifications. When I hear thunder and say that Thor is passing overhead, I know that this statement is mythological and metaphorical, not metaphysical or meteorological.

Christians made an issue of belief, proclaiming a creed, then dividing humanity first into believers and non-believers, then into true believers and heretics.

As philosophical sceptics, we can participate in rituals celebrating the passage of the seasons personified as deities.

Where I disagree with Joe in his counter-position of Cosmos to gods of life. We live in an ecology and in the cosmos! We are living beings and cosmopolites. 

The Unifying Idea

 

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is unified by the idea of an applied science of mankind on both the social and the individual levels. That sounds like two sciences and in practice this seems to be the case.

The idea dominates the pre-FTL period but seems to have been forgotten, at least initially, in the FTL period. However, as we have seen, a single sentence in each of the two Wilson Pete stories and then another in "The Pirate" remind us of the idea. In fact, references to psychodynamics and to integration imply that this science has been applied on Earth although not on the extra-solar planets where the stories are set.

Onward.

Exo-Systems

"The Green Thumb." 

Pete deduces. Joe claims to come from Astan IV which would be the fourth planet of a star called Astan but shouldn't a fourth planet of a GO dwarf be cold, like Mars?

"The systems of similar stars were usually very much alike - especially where it came to the spacing of planets." (p. 33)

I don't think so. I have not followed the reports about exoplanets but I remember hearing about some systems with giant planets in close orbits.

Sf writers used to have only a single example to generalize from. Now so many exoplanets are known that I hope that nearby high tech civilizations will be detected soon. If so, then a conceptual revolution will be just around the corner.

Multiordinal Evaluation

"The Green Thumb."

Pete has been taught multiordinal evaluation which means looking at everything twice, thinking it through for yourself and not taking anyone else's word.

I once supervised a school history lesson. The pupils were given extracts from four documents about a naval engagement won by the Spanish against the English. The exercise was to read and evaluate all four extracts before answering questions, starting with "Why did the Spanish win?" In the first extract, a Spanish admiral boasted of superior seamanship. The remaining extracts made clear that the English fleet was scandalously ill-equipped and under-prepared. One boy read only the first document, then insisted that superior Spanish seamanship was the answer and therefore that he did not have to read any of the remaining extracts! He had so spectacularly missed the entire point of the exercise. I asked him whether, if there was a fight between pupils of his school and those of another, he would uncritically accept an account of the fight from the other side. Of course not.

Pete has to assess whether the alien, Joe, is a threat to humanity. As an Andersonian hero, he is a problem-solver and does not just accept Joe's account of himself.