Moving Books

Over a year after moving house, we have moved a tall bookcase between rooms and I have taken this opportunity to reorganize its contents. "Aldiss" precedes "Anderson" alphabetically but I have many more volumes by Anderson and have arranged them, before any others, as follows:

Prehistory

History

Alternative Histories

The Time Patrol

Contemporary Fiction

Future Histories

Individual SF Novels

Anderson Collections

Anderson in Anthologies

Non-Fiction

It is going to be easier to find what I am looking for. 

My "B"'s: Blish, Bradbury, Burroughs but the greatest of these is Blish.

Others will come after and still others will be donated to Oxfam.

Why Should An Interstellar Civilization Be Unstable?

 

The Peregrine.

See:

In The Stellar Union Period

I set out to summarize Trevelyan's account of the Stellar Union but found that I had already done it. He says that cross-purposes have clashed and that this has:

"'...meant annihilation.'" (CHAPTER XII, p. 105)

But why? Each home planet of an intelligent species must be economically self-sufficient. Trevelyan states that there are no strong economic ties with colony planets. Apparently he has said somewhere, on- or off-stage:

"'...that there was no reason for interstellar empire...'" (CHAPTER XVIII, p. 159)

- although he then makes a single exception, as a defence against ideological attack.

But surely space is big enough for starfaring races to bypass each other or to communicate, at most, at a distance? What purposes would clash? Let alone seriously enough to mean annihilation? This requires further elucidation.

I think that there would be not one civilization, not many, and that, if one went under, others would not.

Peregrine Trevelyan

 

I became unsure as to whether Trevelyan Micah's departure from the Coordination Service to become a Nomad had been mentioned in a text by Poul Anderson or only in an interstitial passage by Sandra Miesel. The only possible text was Star Ways/The Peregrine. However, the relevant passage, when sought for, is to be found not in the concluding CHAPTER XX but slightly earlier in CHAPTER XIX. 

Trevelyan explains that the Service dislikes the Nomads because:

"'They're a disrupting influence on an already unstable civilization.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Peregrine (New York, 1979), p. 168.

(We will return to the question of why an interstellar civilization should be unstable.)

However, the Nomads are not evil and, having spent time with them, Trevelyan is:

"'...beginning to think that a healthy culture needs such a devil.'" (ibid.)

He thinks that he will become a Nomad, thus Peregrine Trevelyan. Incredibly, he still thinks that the "integrators," Service computers, should "...give a final verdict..." (ibid.) But he believes that he has "...found the way." (ibid.) The way to what? In this context, he can only mean the way to a stabilization of interstellar civilization. If he and other Cordies with their specific abilities are adopted, then:

"They would give Nomad life a direction and a restraint it lacked and needed, quietly, without disrupting its spirit." (pp. 168-169)

Thus, Trevelyan's aim remains the stabilization of the Stellar Union, not (yet) the preservation of knowledge after the dissolution of that Union.

Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon prepares for the Fall of the Galactic Empire.

Anderson's Dominic Flandry prepares for the Long Night after the Fall of the Terran Empire.

Paul and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius, the last King of Ys, preserves what he and others find that they are able to preserve after the inundation of Ys and the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Northern Europe.

Trevelyan does not yet realize that he is at the same historical crossroads as Seldon, Flandry and Gratillonius.

Tachyons

"The Pirate."

A spaceship in the normal mode can be tracked by:

amplified sight;

thermal radiation;

radar;

neutrinos from its powerplant.

- on the tachyon mode by:

"...a weak emission of super-light particles..." (p. 219)

When Trevelyan Micah and Smokesmith in the Genji followed Murdoch Juan and his crew in their Campesino, Murdoch's crew detected the Genji's tachyons while faster-than-light and her neutrinos while slower-than-light.

Tachyons are faster-than-light particles. (Theoretical, as yet.) When in the tachyon mode, a spaceship emits super-light particles/tachyons. But what is the "tachyon mode"? Are the ship and its contents transformed into tachyons? Or, at least, are they endowed with whatever property of tachyons makes them move faster than light?

Have there been two hyperdrives in the Psychotechnic History, the first involving multiple dimensions and discontinuous psi functions, as in "Gypsy," and the second involving tachyons, as in "The Pirate"?

Who can possibly say?

An Existential Conflict And A Creative Tension

In the first part of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, there is an existential conflict between the Un-Men and the "protean enemy" whereas, in the second half of this future history series, the conflict between the order-preserving Coordination Service and the unintegrated Nomads is more like a creative tension. Civilization has advanced to a stabler level. Coordinators and Nomads are a perfect thesis and antithesis and the perfect synthesis is provided when some Cordies join the Nomads, bringing with them knowledge and expertise that will survive through the Third Dark Ages and inform later civilizations. 

If "The Chapter Ends" is to be believed, then the next level of thesis and antithesis is between human and Hulduvian ways of controlling cosmic energy and this conflict is resolved by agreeing to divide the galaxy between oxygen- and hydrogen-breathers. 

The Slain Race

"The Pirate."

Poul Anderson devotes six pages to what Trevelyan learns about the slain race from their architecture, art, pictorial record and decayed technology. They had not used automobiles, had avoided pollution and had clearly thought ahead about such problems. It pays to reread these pages carefully. Trevelyan and the readers want to know what it had been like to be those people but the whole point of the story is that this entire race is not discovered until it is extinct so its legacy must be preserved:

"We guard the great Pact, which is the heart of civilization, of society, and ultimately of life itself: the unspoken Pact between the living, the dead, and the unborn, that to the best of our poor mortal abilities they shall all be kept one in the oneness of time. Without it, nothing would have meaning and it may be that nothing would survive. But the young generations so often do not understand." (p. 251)

In another Andersonian universe, Time Patrollers have an even closer experience of the oneness of time.

Sheila is at choir and I am about to go to Zen. Next week, Monday to Friday, we will be in a hotel in Wales and I will be without my laptop.

Two Kinds Of FTL And One Of Time Travel?

 

In "Gypsy":

"The principles of the hyperdrive are difficult enough, involving as they do the concept of multiple dimensions and of discontinuous psi functions." (p. 20)

But, in "The Pirate":

"...once [another spaceship] went over to the tachyon mode, only a weak emission of super-light particles was available." (p. 219)

- "available" for tracking purposes.

Sound like two completely different means of faster than light travel although in the same future history series?

Elsewhere in space and time:

"'...discontinuity is entirely possible.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 10.

This speaker replies to someone who, he says, insists on:

"'...only continuous functions.'" (ibid.)

He is talking about time travel but it sounds like the "Gypsy" account of FTL.

All of this is inside Poul Anderson's multiverse, however.

I Have Found That Passage

 

Worth quoting in full:

"'The Narodna Voyska has been a, a basic part of our society, ever since the Troubles. Squadron and regimental honors, rights, chapels, ceremonies - I'd stand formation on my unit's parade ground at sunset - us together, bugle calls, volley, pipes and drums, and while the flag came down, the litany for those of our dead we remembered that day - and often tears would run over my cheeks, even in winter when they froze.'

"Flandry smiled lopsidedly. 'Yes, I was a cadet once.'"

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT V, p. 409.

Not glorification of the military as in Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

No way am I militaristic but Dennitzans would have had to defend their planet during the Troubles and, in Kossara's time, they are on the marches facing the Merseian Roidhunate. Fortunately, Anderson also shows us peaceful inter-species interactions. In the Technic History, human beings and Ythrians amicably share Avalon. In the Psychotechnic History, human beings and Hulduvians amicably share the Galaxy.

Have I said before that Poul Anderson covers every option?

Farewells

We recently posted about the elegiac tone of Poul Anderson's "The Pirate" and quoted from the opening pages but missed a sentence that straddles two pages:

"'You don't have to go, not yet,' Braganza Diane said, a little desperately because she cared for him and our trumpeter blows too many Farewells each year." (pp. 212-213)

How could we have forgotten that? Well, we do remember tones but misremember details. And this reminds us of a passage in Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows where Flandry and Kossara, as members of their respective armed forces, speak of remembering their dead... (Can anyone out there locate this passage?)

There are other details to notice in the opening pages of "The Pirate." The Dordogne country is not only:

"...in the fullness of time..." (p. 212)

- but also:

"...steep, green, altogether beautiful..." (ibid.)

As in The Peregrine, written earlier but set later, Trevelyan is summoned by a "machine" (p. 212) but this time he updates his terminology, referring to his summoner neither as a computing machine nor an integrator but as a "computer"! (p. 213) (We still use the archaic phrase, "time machine," because of Wells.)

After all this build-up, all that remains is to reread the story and to re-accompany Trevelyan and Smokesmith on their mission to the planet called Good Luck.

Time Passing

See the previous post. 

The theme of time passing, past and to come continues on the following page. Diane asks Trevelyan to add the rest of this leave to his next and to spend it with her but he avoids a promise.

"...he...phoned good-bye to some neighbors - landholders, friendly folk whose ancestors had dwelt here for generations beyond counting." (p. 213)

Then Diane flies Trevelyan to Aerogare Bordeaux. I thought that "Aerogare" sounded futuristic but it is just French for "Air terminal."

When he flies to Port Nevada:

"His timing was good. Sunset was slanting across western North America and turning the mountains purple when he arrived." (ibid.)

Slanting sunset, endlessly evocative, fits the elegiac tone of a story about actual and anticipated endings.