Desai Interacts With An AI And And An Alien

The Day Of Their Return, 3.

"'Send him in, please.' (By extending verbal courtesy even to a subunit of a computer, the High Commissioner helped maintain an amicable atmosphere. Perhaps.)" (p. 88)

I think that it was Kevin in the Gregson the other night who said that internet companies want users now not to waste time or energy on politeness to AI's. We really have come a long way technologically.

Desai asks for the alien, Aycharaych, to be sent in without the slightest idea of what he looks like and catches his breath when he sees him. Not to be xenophobic or anything but would you be happy to have an alien coming in without knowing what to expect? Of course, human beings have had a lot of contact with a lot of different kinds of aliens by Desai's time. But still.

The receptionist computer is programmed to mimic languages instantly and accurately which:

"...gratified visitors, especially nonhumans." (ibid.)

- although we can rely on Aycharaych not to give a damn. (Except that this is our first sight of him if we are reading the Technic History in chronological order.) 

Tempora Mutantur

It means "Times change."

I remember my father's widowed mother and her sister and brother-in-law, then contemplate my daughter and granddaughter. The change in beliefs, values and life-styles is complete. Five generations. To my parents and grandparents, the difference between Catholic and Protestant was enormously important. My daughter has always understood that she lives among Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and secularists.

Fran once reflected, "The people with whom I do not speak the same language! Like my mother to whom it matters enormously whether I am a Catholic or a Protestant... And I am either a Catholic or a Protestant... or else an atheist... or else something very strange!" (I did not think that Fran was going to pop up here but he sure helps.)

Science fiction future histories and time travel stories should show such social changes and Poul Anderson does in the generation gap between Nicholas van Rijn and Coya Conyon and in a future doctor's comments on Carl Farness' sexual mores.

Anderson does it.

Details On Aeneas

Extrasolar terrestroid planets colonized by human beings in Poul Anderson's Technic History - there are a few:

Hermes

Avalon

Dennitza

Aeneas

Nyanza

Altai

Unan Besar

Vixen

Imhotep

Daedalus

Some are realized in minute detail. Frex, in Nova Roma on Aeneas:

"...the gray ashlars bore a veneer of carefully chosen and integrated slabs, marble, agate, chalcedony, jasper, nephrite, materials more exotic than that; and often there were carvings besides, friezes, armorial bearings, grotesques; and erosion had mellowed it all, to make the old part of town one subtle harmony."

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-240 AT 3, p. 87.

There is much more - statues and plants among fishponds and fountains in vitryl-roofed courts, cramped and twisted streets where countryfolk ride horses or stathas - but I don't want to quote lengthy paragraphs. As I always say, read Anderson.

Buffer Zone

Any future history series has an indefinite number of potential spin-off series. Star Trek has become a future history because it covers more than one generation. Years ago, in Waterstones Bookshop, I came across a paperback novel, title and author's name long forgotten, which was the opening volume of a series about a Klingon Bird of Prey Commander. Does anyone know whether this Bird of Prey still flies?

One sentence in Poul Anderson's Technic History suggests a comparable spin-off:

"Desai had worked in regions that faced Betelgeuse and, across an unclaimed and ill-explored buffer zone, the Roidhunate of Merseia."

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 3, p. 82.

OK. A Terran Navy special forces team works in the buffer zone where it explores, establishes advance bases, covertly contacts any natives that have not yet been contacted by Merseia and spies on any that have been. The Merseians maintain a similar force, not necessarily all of their own species, although we know that they have no Chereionites to spare.

What would it be like for intelligent species to live in such a zone? Such a series could have legs.

Two More From Suetonius

We can get used to reading history in parallel with historical fiction.

"Some of Domitian's campaigns, that against the Chatti for instance, were quite unjustified by military necessity; but not so that against the Sarmatians, who had massacred a legion and killed its commander."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 299.

This is the kind of remark that interests and amuses us when we have just read a novel like SM Stirling's To Turn The Tide whose characters include a Sarmatian former gladiatrix who is a skilled fighter and bodyguard.

"Only an amazing stroke of luck checked the rebellion which Lucius Antonius, the governor of Upper Germany, raised during Domitian's absence from Rome; the Rhine thawed in the nick of time, preventing the German barbarians in Antonius' pay for crossing the ice to join him, and the troops who remained loyal were able to disarm the rebels."

-ibid.

This supports the much-discussed "history is a series of accidents" theory. Sf readers imagine an alternative history in which the Rhine remained frozen and Lucius Antonius overthrew Domitian. This might also happen in the Time Patrol timeline:

time criminals could deploy a weather-control potential distributor from the Cold Centuries;

a quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy could keep the Rhine frozen for longer.

This is another of those posts where I did not know in advance where I was going to wind up.

Comparing Empires

 

Poul Anderson's Terran Empire reminds us of both the British and the Roman Empires.

British when Flandry drawls:

"'Abominably poor manners, but that's policy for you, what?...

"'See here, d'you mind if I bore for a few ticks? Mean to say, I'd like to diagram the situation as I see it. You correct me where I'm wrong, fill in any gaps, that kind of thing, eh?'"

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 239-426 AT VII, p. 308.

- and when Lady Varvara asks Flandry:

"'Do you know what it's like, Captain, to associate with no one but an inferior class? It rubs off on you. Your soul gets greasy.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 303-339 AT II, p. 312.

Roman when Chunderban Desai is sent to take over as High Commissioner of a planet that has recently spearheaded a rebellion and where post-Imperial sentiment is increasingly transcendentalist with potential for a new religion to spread across known space.

More From Rome

This is indirectly relevant. We have discussed Romans in fiction by:

Poul Anderson

Neil Gaiman

L. Sprague de Camp

SM Stirling

Alan Moore 

Lew Wallace

In 1989, DC Comics refused to publish "Morning of the Magician" by Rick Veitch, a Swamp Thing story in which the time travelling title character meets Jesus who is a powerful white magician. This month, that story has been very belatedly published. Last night, at the Gregson, John the farmer lent me a copy. Among its surprises are the revelations, so to say, that the DC character, the Golden Gladiator, who claims to have been a galley slave in the Roman navy, was a customer of Mary Magdelene and was also the Roman captain who said, "...truly...this man was the Son of God."

Authors insert their fictional characters into historical events.

A Pivotal Technic History Story

I will shortly depart for the Gregson Institute.

If we read Poul Anderson's Technic History in chronological order of fictional events, then, by the time we reach "The Master Key," we know that Nicholas van Rijn has initiated his first trade pioneer crew led by David Falkayn although those characters are not mentioned here whereas other employees of van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors company are. This is the last Technic History instalment in which we see van Rijn unaccompanied by the members of that first trader team and it is also the last instalment before the no less than four instalments showing increasing problems for the Polesotechnic League:

Satan's World

"A Little Knowledge"

"Lodestar"

Mirkheim

Reading history and historical fiction reminds us that we can also read sf future histories which, in some cases and to some extent, match the complexity of real history - or at least have fun trying.

Again Suetonius

We read Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars hoping to learn about the Northern revolt which was the background of Poul Anderson's "Star of the Sea." However, Suetonius focuses on events that were significant to him or that he thought that his Roman readers needed to be informed about. We do learn - or at least I did - that, after the overthrow of Nero, the "four Emperors" in quick succession were Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian and that the fourth of these was succeeded by his two sons, first Titus, then Domitian. Thus, in this briefest possible summary, we have listed no less than seven of Suetonius' "twelve Caesars." The first of the twelve is Julius who is not counted as an Emperor but was assassinated to prevent him from becoming something like one. 

"With Nero, the line of the Caesars became extinct."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 242.

Thereafter, "Caesar" continued not as a family name but as a title although the Romans do not seem to have differentiated names and titles the way we do.

This is all important background information for certain works of historical fiction and time travel fiction and makes us wonder how societal attitudes will differ in another two thousand years assuming that there is going to be any society in another two thousand years. Poul Anderson's "The Master Key" makes us feel what it would be like to be in the same room as a merchant prince of the Polesotechnic League. It is fitting to bow to him. And another man attends dinner bearing a much-used holstered blaster...

Endings And New Beginnings

To Turn The Tide.

The novel climaxes with vastatio (devastation) and slaughter to be followed, according to Marcus Aurelius, by:

"'Peace...'" 

-CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO, p. 439 -

- hopefully a permanent positive peace, not merely a post-vastatio wasteland.

The novel ends with the good news that, although an illness has arrived on schedule from the east, it is not measles but smallpox which can be and is being treated.

Nowhere to go but up? Or will there be unexpected obstacles in Volume II which is en route to me via eBay?

Artorius is a new Noah. The Biblical creation had been the separation of the waters above from the waters below and the moving aside of the waters below so that the dry land appeared. The Flood had been the undoing of that Creation. The withdrawal of the waters was the creation of a new Earth to be populated by Noah's, the new Adam's, descendants. Artorius and his team escape the destruction of an old Earth and remake their new Earth. A Biblical theme.