Revisiting "Son of the Sword"

Poul Anderson," "Son of the Sword" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993), pp. 103-160.

After Pharaoh's burial, his widow stands in what had been their bedroom and wonders how long she has to live. She thinks:

"He has not come..." (p. 103)

Does she expect an apparition of the dead? No. The text clarifies that she has sent for someone living who has not yet responded - also that her husband was Tutankhamen.

A breeze enters the room - winds or breezes are constant companions of Poul Anderson's characters - and she thinks:

"I am afraid to die..." (ibid.)

- echoing a sentiment expressed in "The Star Beast," which we have just reread.

This widow might have become superfluous now that her husband is dead. Someone enters the room.

OK. The scene is set. That is the first page of the text. Let's take a break and do something else before proceeding any further.

For more on this story, see also:

Alight In The Void

Forwards And Backwards In Time

In Poul Anderson's Alight In The Void:

on p. 102, a man who has been transformed into a tiger confronts a woman, many centuries in our future;

on p. 103, "They had buried Pharaoh..."

p. 102 concludes an sf story whereas p. 103 opens a historical fiction story. In a Poul Anderson collection, we can jump forwards or backwards by many centuries just by concluding one narrative and commencing another. The next story after these two, "Flight to Forever," is again sf and is about time travel, which enables the characters themselves to traverse centuries and millennia. Anything is possible.

See:

Son Of The Sword Spoilers

Street Life

History And Monotheism

The Past

Past And Future

- as preparation for another rereading of "Son of the Sword," the story that begins just after Pharaoh's burial.

Onwards (and sometimes pastwards).

Two Texts Worth Rereading

We regarded "Terminal Quest" and "The Star Beast" as unpromising texts but reread them anyway. There is always more to be found in any Poul Anderson work.

In "Terminal Quest": Psychology

The dispossessed of Earth became exterminators on New Terra. (Parallels in Terrestrial history?)

Rugi:

is not human;

was orphaned when very young;

is ignorant of his own cultural heritage;

has been deprived and persecuted;

displays less resentment and hostility than we would usually expect from a human being - although our species varies considerably;

has become the last of his species;

dies saving the life of a human child that had tormented and wonders why he is doing it.

Will New Terrans respect Rugi after his death or deliberately forget him?

"The Star Beast": Psychology

Two cultures: militaristic and leisured.

Two attitudes to death: fear and acceptance.

The militaristic Procyonites are defeated by their own contempt for decadent Terrestrials. The Terrestrial Coordinator, Ramacan, easily disarms and stuns his single careless guard. This is yet another Andersonian "escape" sequence but a plausible one.

Military Virtues

 

"The Star Beast."

Responding to the Procyonites, Ramacan reflects that:

nations that have known only war glorify military virtues;

a militaristic state avoids peace, leisure and prosperity but instead controls its population and maintains its rule by further conquests;

the Procyonites, now capable only of fighting, have become beasts of prey.

My reflection is that it is not only militaristic states that control their populations by directing their attention outward against an external enemy!

Conflicts against external enemies are reflected in popular fiction. James Bond must fight SMERSH, SPECTRE, Blofeld as an individual, then the KGB. Full circle. There would have been no shortage of new villains if the series had continued after the Cold War although Bond himself was approaching retirement age. Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner and Alan Moore in V For Vendetta turned their attention towards enemies that were not external, an idea that would have been both incomprehensible and antithetical to a regime like that of the Procyonites.

Cold And Gloom

"The Star Beast."

Bombardment from space has destroyed the advanced technology that had sustained a leisured global civilization and has instantly reduced Terrestrials to savagery:

"Avi's feet were bleeding. Her shoes had finally given out, and rocks and twigs tore at her feet. The snow was dappled with blood.

"Weariness clawed at her, she couldn't keep going - but she had to, she was afraid to stop in the wilderness." (p. 99)

"...the machines were dead, there was only cold and gloom..." (ibid.)

Could that be us soon? Ecological, economic, military, cybernetic or cosmic forces could stop our machines. Will a near-future sf dystopia be actualized in our lifetimes?

(By "cosmic forces," I have in mind a comet on a collision course as long as we have no adequate laser defense system.) 

Memories And Time

"The Star Beast."

There is a lot more in this story than we had realized on a first reading.

The Procyonite, Felgi, quizzes Ramacan about some practical aspects of immortality:

"'Don't you have trouble keeping your memories straight?'" (p. 76)

This question is discussed at greater length in some later novels by Anderson. Ramacan and some later characters have their memories edited but it has been suggested in our combox that a brain might just forget chunks of its memories naturally.

"'How about the apparent acceleration of time with age?'" (ibid.)

We usually give our age in years and do not specify additional months, e.g., "I am 76," not "I am 76 and 9 months." Some Asimov characters living well into their second century say, e.g., "I am in my twelfth decade," and leave it at that. To someone who lives for millennia, even the passing centuries would come to seem unimportant. However, Ramacan's reply is unexpected and interesting:

"'That was bad after the first couple of centuries but then it seemed to flatten out, the nervous system adapted to it.'" (ibid.)

- which seems plausible. Nevertheless, the immortals procastinate and feel that:

"'...a day seems too short a time to get anything done.'" (ibid.)

Sf writers anticipate what life might be like in future. 

A Last Word On Death?

"The Star Beast."

Only the last man or woman on or off Earth will have the last word on anything but we can each have our own last word. Moments before his death, Ramacan thinks:

"As for him, he had had many centuries of life, and he realized now what a deep inward weariness there had been in him. Death, he thought, death is the longest voyage of all. Without death there is no evolution, no real meaning to life, the ultimate adventure has been snatched away." (pp. 98-99)

Without death, we would eventually forget our earlier lives and effectively become different people in any case. This is the unique and unexamined predicament of Edgar Rice Burroughs' character, John Carter.

Meanwhile, Avi, whom we quoted before, remains in denial:

"...was this a dream, a sudden madness of horror and death?

"Death - no, no, no, she couldn't die, she was one of the immortals, she mustn't die!" (p. 99)

And what occurs in the very next sentence after Avi has thought this? Poul Anderson readers should be able to anticipate it:

"The wind blew and blew." (ibid.)

By blowing while she thinks and then continuing to blow, this wind expresses the indifference of nature to any organism that thinks that it should live forever. Death waits faithfully whether we are Ramacan or Avi which is why I disagree with Dylan Thomas who wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-copied from here.

Chapter Titles

A convention of pulp magazine publishing seems to have been that even a narrative much shorter than a novel (my rule of thumb: 100+ pages) could be divided into chapters with dramatically worded titles which can be omitted when the works are republished in collections or anthologies. Poul Anderson's collection, Alight In The Void, preserves the following examples.

"The Star Beast"

Chapter I Therapy for Paradise

Chapter II "Tiger, Tiger!"

Chapter III Dark Victory

"Son of the Sword"

Chapters I-III (unentitled)

"Flight to Forever"

Chapter I No Return

Chapter II Belgotai of Syrtis

Chapter III Trapped In The Time-Stream

Chapter IV End of Empire

Chapter V Attack of the Anvardi

Chapter VI Flight Without End

"Flight to Forever" is about futureward time travel through many periods including that of a Galactic Empire as its chapter titles partly indicate. In fact, should we reread this work shortly, remembering that it is a precursor of Anderson's Time Patrol series?

A Timeline And A Forest

Four stories collected in Poul Anderson's Alight In The Void could be set in a single timeline:

"Son of the Sword" is set in the past;

"Earthman, Beware!" is set in the present with aliens using the ultrawave;

"Terminal Quest" is set in the future with slower-than-light interstellar travel and extra-solar colonization;

"The Star Beast," as in "Terminal Quest" but with people on Earth now using the ultrawave.

(British sf author, Bob Shaw, once told another fan, "Paul sees order where it isn't.")

In "The Star Beast," when Harol has become a tiger:

green mystery;

sunlight and shadow;

rioting ferns and flowers;

huge, old trees;

tinkling brooks;

mossy banks;

leaping fish;

wind in grass;

dimmed eyesight;

humming, chirring insects;

rustling leaves;

warm breeze;

owl's wings;

small scurryings;

fragrant grass;

pungent decay;

wild fur;

spilled blood;

quivering whiskers;

strong muscles;

cold moonlight;

luminescence;

damp earth;

etc.

Star Beasts

After many years, we are rereading Poul Anderson's "The Star Beast." There are others. See the attached image and here. 

Despite its being a pulp magazine short story, Anderson's "The Star Beast" is proving to be more complicated a text than I want to continue rereading this late into the evening. An extended passage without dialogue recounts the experience of a man who has become a forest-dwelling tiger through a summer and into a winter. Then the matter of an attempted military conquest of Earth has to be addressed. And finally the story will culminate not in a conventional victory but in an unresolved dilemma... This is not just "pulp" fiction and will be returned to with refreshed attention at a later date. 

Regular blog readers know by now what else I read in the evenings that I do not have to blog about and, of course, it is also advisable to catch up with the madness of Earth Real on the TV news.

Every fictional future had a turbulent twenty-first century in its past and we will have a future, hopefully.