North America In Two Timelines

In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the colonized asteroids successfully rebel against North America whereas, in Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, North America has unsuccessfully rebelled against the Federation! Familiar actors exchange roles. We have known more than one Federation in sf.

I apologize for brevity but I am suddenly in a rush. Laterz.

(Meanwhile, think about North Americas and Federations.) 

EVA At STL

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited (New York, 1972).

While a fleet of spaceships crosses the distance between two planetary systems at half light-speed, a spacesuited man leaves his ship, fires a magnetic bolt with a light line unreeling behind it at the nearest ship, tests the line's security, pulls himself across between ships and repeats this exercise until he has reached his target ship.

No! (Would you travel like that?)

The ships expel nine tons for each one ton that they transport and will need months at the target system to refine enough reaction material for the return journey. Most of the passengers are in cold sleep. Will anyone ever expend that much effort, energy, engineering etc to try to colonize a terrestroid extrasolar planet?

"...a cramped, sterile, vacuum-enclosed spaceship, month after month after month, began to affect the human mind rather like bandaged vision when afloat in a tank of warm water. Minds could never have disintegrated as quickly in midocean (sun and moon, wind and rain, the infinite shifting pattern of waves, the hope of catching a fish or seeing an island) as they did between the stars. It was accepted that a spaceman near the end of his year-watch was not quite sane." (part two, 4, p. 64)

Paradox: the freedom of interstellar travel but in a cramped, sterile environment. Well, an interstellar vessel must not be cramped or sterile. In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the spaceship Astra, really a hollowed asteroid, is:

"...a city of clustered domes and turrets and housings and machines..." (p. 226)

Anyone who crosses an interstellar distance at sub-light speeds has to take their environment with them and therefore is not dependent on finding a habitable environment at their destination.

The asterites in Tales... have gravity control but not FTL. In James Blish's Okies series, gravity control unexpectedly generates FTL, a deus ex machina.

How Must-Read Writers Change

In my teens, I read everything that I could find that had been written by:

Isaac Asimov

James Blish

Robert Heinlein

Clifford Simak

CS Lewis (not just sf)

I think that that was the complete list.

Observations 

(i) I knew of Poul Anderson but he was not yet on the list. 

(ii) I knew of Ray Bradbury but he was not hard sf and was not on the list.

(iii) Larry Niven and SM Stirling were not around yet.

(iv) Heinlein had not gone down the tubes yet.

(v) I caught up with Simak with The Goblin Reservation (1968) and then stopped reading his novels as they were published, also feeling that he had become repetitive and self-parodying.

(vi) Now Poul Anderson is to be not only read but also endlessly reread.

There has been delay in me acquiring a copy of Simak's City. A friend who read contemporary fiction and no sf read at least some parts of City and wondered why I thought that it was any good. Rereading it now, I might agree with him.

The best sf is very good but. (I know that it is grammatically wrong to end a sentence with "...but." instead of with "but..." but occasionally it feels appropriate.)

Interstellar Spaceships And Idols

Slower-than-light interstellar travel is not an easy matter.

In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the spaceship Astra has only just set out towards Alpha Centauri.

In Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, there are four parts:

at the end of part one, it has been decided that a dissident group will be exiled to an extra-solar planet, Rustum;

in part two, the group is in interstellar space and must decide whether to turn back;

in part three, they are in orbit around Rustum;

in part four, they are finally settling the surface of Rustum.

In later volumes, there are four more stories set on Rustum and a ninth set on a second extra-solar planet, Roland, in the same timeline.

A spaceman returns to Earth to find an idol where a church had been. To him, the idol is an abomination. To some of us, the church and the idol are alternative approaches to the eternal.

I read about a Hindu religious leader, name forgotten, who, as a child, was taken to a Shiva temple where he saw a mouse eating food offered to the deity. He thought, "This god cannot even protect his offering from a mouse," and became an iconoclast, like the Hebrew prophets, whereas the normative Hindu vision is of God in the idol, the food, the mouse and the congregation.

See:

"The Divine Is With Us"

Two Moments Of Realization In One Story

Tales Of The Flying Mountains. 

Breakfast post before real world activities.

There is a technical problem in the not-yet-launched interstellar spaceship, Astra.

While his friend is in mid-sentence, the first person narrator, Winston Sanders, starts:

"The drink leaped from my hand and splashed across my lap." (p. 244)

Sanders' first moment of realization: the problem might be not technical but human, indeed criminal.

Second moment:

"An answer hit me, hard as the original solution had done. I sat straight in my chair and barked a delighted oath.

"'What now?' Furlow's calm was the least bit rattled.

"It had cause to be." (pp. 248-249)

The corrupt engineer, Furlow, is boasting that he can get away with his not-yet-admitted crimes but Sanders has suddenly realized how he can nail the guy.

As ever, a problem followed by a neat solution. End of story, followed by Epilogue.

What next? First, finish drinking a second mug of coffee.

The Astra And The Per Aspera

(i) Ad astra per aspera.

(ii) "We the people of the spaceship Astra..."

-Tales Of The Flying Mountains, Prologue, p. 11.

(iii) "...this ship, the Per Aspera..."

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT p. 108.

Poul Anderson has a spaceship named the Astra. James Blish has a spaceship named the Per Aspera. 

That might not look like much of a post but a certain amount of research went into it. I remembered (so I thought) recently rereading a Blish text about the Per Aspera so I spent quite a while looking through The Seedling Stars before I thought instead to look in They Shall Have Stars and there it was.

Stars and Mars are the two commonest words in sf titles, I think. I have somewhere listed the Anderson and Blish titles with Stars in them but tonight I leave that as an exercise for blog readers or you could google their bibliographies.

I will be elsewhere for a while early tomorrow.  

War And After

Tales Of The Flying Mountains.

(Mostly) different characters in each story; a team of continuing characters in the Prologue, six Interludes and Epilogue. 

"Say It With Flowers" is set during the war of asterite independence.

"Ramble With A Gamblin' Man" recounts one remaining territorial adjustment after the war.

"Sunjammer" shows that (i) resentments persist after a war but also that (ii) people move on and can view events from different perspectives. Not all Earthmen are North Americans... And so on.

Only one more story and the Epilogue to reread. There is no sequel about extrasolar colonization but there are other works by Poul Anderson on that theme.

The usual range of extracurricular activities looms ahead this coming week. Rereading continues in the gaps...

Another Problem And Solution

Tales Of The Flying Mountains.

"Sunjammer," like "Que Donn'rez Vous?" before it, is a highly technical story. The single sf premise, apart from the gyrogravitics which are basic to the entire series, is isonitrate. 

Several characters race against time to prevent a disaster. By now, we know in advance that it is only a matter of time before one of these characters has an Andersonian moment of realization and devises a quicker and more economical solution. Sure enough, Golescu stops speaking in mid-sentence:

"Golescu's words cut off. He stared before him, into the icy light of Jupiter, until its after-image danced through his vision.

"All the stars danced.

"'What's eating you now?' Storrs growled." (p. 212)

Something like that had to happen. We have learned to expect it. But we still have to wait to be told what the more practicable solution is. For some details on that, follow the "isonitrate" link above.

I also am racing against time here. Laterz.

Brobdingnagian

(A single word in an Andersonian text can inspire a blog post as I will now demonstrate.)

Fictions refer to earlier fictions. References accumulate. Many works are remembered although many more are forgotten. We all know Sherlock Holmes but not Cyril Saunders. (In fact, we recognize Holmes even when he appears unnamed in Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol.")

Here is a beautiful literary reference:

"The sail now nearly bisected the sky. Seven kilometers wide, the foam-filled members that stiffened it marching across the field of view like Brobdingnagian spokes with its slow rotation, that disk massed close to a hundred tons."

-Tales Of The Flying Mountains, p. 205.

I had intended to compare this passage with one by CS Lewis but find that I have already compared that Lewis passage with one by SM Stirling here. For other uses of the adjective, "Brobdingnagain," see here. (Scroll down.)

I must satisfy the inner man in two senses: first, eat; then, meditate.

Birds And Future Histories

There was a birds of prey display at the Southport Flower Show today as there has been in the past at Muncaster. Was I alone in Southport in thinking of Poul Anderson's intelligent flying carnivores, the Ythrians? They always come to mind on sight of peregrines etc.

Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, which features Ythrians, is what Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune series should have been: a detailed history of interstellar civilizations with a vast cast covering multiple periods. What matters is the details of personal lives in planetary environments, not political manipulations by powerful cliques. James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume III, Earthman, Come Home, shows us the Mayor and City Manager but not the population of New-York-in-flight but Blish - partly - made up for this in the later-written Volume II, A Life For The Stars.

Cities In Flight, like Robert Heinlein's Future History, would have matched the Technic History if lengthened whereas the Foundation series and the Dune series would have needed total rewrites. Thus, this blog ranks sf works.

Blish's major disadvantage vis a vis Anderson is a much smaller output.