Our Chaos

Hi, folks. With tiredness setting in, we might not return to Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited this evening.

We imagine that we are living in the Chaos of Anderson's Technic History although without believing that this is going to be followed either by a Solar Commonwealth or by a hyperdrive. But how will we, in our timeline, get through our version of the Chaos? At what point will the two timelines diverge?

Wisdom from Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today:

US politics - everything has already been said about this so now we can only wait and see;

despite all the current escalation, no one wants to start throwing nukes around because of the uncontrollable consequences.

We must hope that that second point, which has held since 1945, remains valid. Of course, Anderson created fictional futures both with and without nuclear wars. For every conceivable option, read Anderson.

Another Medium

We appreciate Poul Anderson's prose fiction and also other media. 

Last night, unable to sleep, I wanted to sit up and read but not to return to the prose text of Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited. I needed a visual medium but not TV, something to see and read on a page, not to see and hear on a screen. The perfect answer was Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid (1988-1989) in three volumes which, fortunately, was easily to hand on a bookshelf.

Gaiman does not write sf but we need a break from sf which I also find in contemporary thrillers by Stieg Larsson. Apart from stunning art by Dave McKean, Gaiman's script gives us the kind of texture that we find in Anderson's prose texts, e.g., skillful deployment of already existing characters and settings:

the "Principle" of a criminal organization turns out to be Mr. Lex Luthor;

a train departs to Gotham City...

After visiting Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today, we will return to Orbit Unlimited this evening.

Orbital Accident

Orbit Unlimited, part three, 1-2.

Sometimes we appreciate a complicated passage in a work by Poul Anderson by summarizing it in a blog post but this passage is extra complicated so please bear with us.

The fleet of spaceships enters planetary orbit at a safe distance from the planet, Rustum. Winged, thermally propelled ferries take some of the crew and all of the colonists to High America, the habitable plateau on Rustum. Some of the crew on the planet refine reaction mass for the return journey while the others help the colonists to get settled. 

To unload cargo, each ship in turn is brought to a lower orbit and therefore spirals down through a radiation belt in the planetary magnetic field. To save time, colonist Jan Svoboda, ferried back up, begins preparing cargo for discharge in the flag ship, the Ranger, while it is still descending. The autopilot gives a few seconds of 5G blast to avoid an approaching meteorite just as Svoboda has unslung an object massing more than a ton. Crashing through a deck and smashing a hole in the engine room wall, the object activates the fail safe system of the nuclear plant, thus stopping fusion reaction. The radiation screen goes off and it becomes immediately necessary to:

"'Abandon ship!'" (p. 71)

Maybe that was easier than I had expected.

Tomorrow, once more: a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. That means hours away from the computer but probably something worth reporting later.

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...