Series And Non-Series Stories

It makes a difference whether an sf story is part of a series. In Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe," background details include a Psionics Corporation and a Federation Science Authority. These organizations do not need to be referred to or to be taken into account in any other work by Anderson since "Call Me Joe" is a one-off/non-series story. By contrast, James Blish's corresponding story of Jovian exploration, "Bridge," was specifically written to explain the discovery of the antigravity that is central to Blish's Cities In Flight future history. Antigravity becomes possible following experiments conducted in the higher gravitational field of Jupiter. In this respect, "Bridge" parallels "The Saturn Game," the opening story in Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization. This story also recounts exploration in the outer Solar System before the commencement of interstellar travel and introduces a minor detail that gains significance later. There is a strong inclination on this blog to return to unravelling the intricacies of the Technic History. However, the current agenda remains to continue rereading "Call Me Joe" and "Bridge" which now will have to be some time tomorrow.

Clifford Simak's Jupiter, Part II

(Today, we have just seen a partial solar eclipse which seemed to me an anticlimax.)

We have reread to the end of Clifford Simak's "Desertion." Thus, of the four Jupiter narratives that were to be discussed, only those by Poul Anderson and James Blish remain to be reread to the end.

Like Anderson and Blish, Simak describes the Jovian environment as a perpetual maelstrom where the prevalent liquid is not water but ammonia. Like Anderson, Simak concludes his narrative with human minds in Jovian bodies happy to live on Jupiter. Unlike Anderson and Blish, Simak proposes not ice as a construction material but metal with increased electronic tension enclosed in tough quartz to protect it from the ammonia rain. 

Simak's characters possess  a technology that enables them to "convert" a human body into an organism able to live on another planet, then to re-convert that body back into human form! - so why are human explorers confined inside domes on the Jovian surface when they sound as if they are already Lords of Creation? Well, their conquest of Jupiter is delayed by the fact that those who are converted and released find their new existence so paradisal that they do not want to  return and do not even communicate this information to anyone else so that it seems to those back in the dome that the "converted" have been sent to their deaths. (In CS Lewis' "Forms of Things Unknown," several men in succession are sent to the Moon and do not return but, in that case, the reason is deadly.)

Anderson's character on Jupiter has to struggle to survive. He does not find himself in a paradise. But Anderson and Simak are a hard and a soft sf writer, respectively. (Lewis also "soft.")

Blish And Anderson On Jupiter V, Part II

See Blish And Anderson On Jupiter V.

Poul Anderson's Edward Anglesey:

"He looked around, blinking. After the Jovian surface, it was always a little unreal to find himself here again, in the clean, quiet orderliness of the control room."

-"Call Me Joe," p. 11.

James Blish's Robert Helmuth:

"Helmuth did not reply for a moment. The abrupt transition from the storm-ravaged deck of the Bridge to the quiet, placid air of the operations shack on Jupiter's fifth moon was always a shock. He had never been able to anticipate it, let alone become accustomed to it; it was worse each time, not better."

-They Shall Have Stars, CHAPTER FOUR, p. 47.

Simak's characters do not return to their dome.

Anderson's Jovian gravity is 3 Terrestrial whereas Blish's is 2.5. On both versions of Jupiter, ice is a strong building material. Blish adds that, in Jovian conditions, steel is powder and aluminum "...splits at a tap." (p. 30) Thirty miles below the surface of the Bridge, there is a "...raging sea of liquid hydrogen..." (p. 32) There are few "permanent" land-masses with a question mark about their permanence. (p. 49)

Blish accurately describes a gas giant planet, having coined the term.

Blish And Anderson On Jupiter V

Poul Anderson, Call Me Joe; James Blish, They Shall Have Stars. (Both here.)

Blish: Helmuth controls machines on Jupiter by waldos.

Anderson: Anglesey controls an organic body by psionics.

Blish: Helmuth works for the US which is still in the Cold War with the USSR.

Anderson: Anglesey works for the Psionics Corporation which is contracted by the Federation Science Authority.

Anderson's team on Jupiter V is all male.

Blish's Helmuth has an uneasy interaction with a woman colleague and is also in ham radio contact with men on other Jovian moons.

No doubt there is more but, here in Lancaster on Earth, the sun and other responsibilities beckon.

We will catch up with Clifford Simak's Jupiter later. (Too many texts to juggle at once.) (Simak's characters work for the Jovian Survey Commission.)

Finishing On Jupiter For This Evening

We are surprised to find some adventure, imagination and characterization in the concluding chapters of ERB's "Skeleton Men of Jupiter." There is also a hastily written ending to what had been meant to be the opening instalment of a short series to fill a volume. Carter is only just about to be reunited with Dejah Thoris but they have neither returned to Mars nor prevented the threatened invasion of that planet. It is as if ERB knew that there would be no more and tried to convey a sense of a conclusion even though the action remained unresolved.

Meanwhile (in my reading order), Poul Anderson's Edward Anglesey, on his version of Jupiter, sees lightning and hears thunder as flame erupts and a hillside falls in a sodium explosion. He enters his dugout of frozen and compressed water ventilated by a tiny smoke hole and lit by an oil lamp. This sounds more like Earth than (what we now know of) Jupiter. 

He eats a dead dekapod raw and drinks liquid methane. This does not sound like Earth. But the methane comes from a jug, which does. He has to make his own tools with teeth, claws, icicles and fragments of a spaceship and it will take him years to live comfortably. When he lies down to sleep on Jupiter, he takes off his helmet on Jupiter V, a man with two bodies.

James Blish's Helmuth controls machines, not an organic body, from Jupiter V. Similarities but also differences. Simak's characters become the bodies in which they explore Jupiter. Another difference.

Clifford Simak's Jupiter

Four men, two by two, had gone into the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter and had not returned. They had walked into the keening gale—or rather, they had loped, bellies low against the ground, wet sides gleaming in the rain. 

For they did not go in the shape of men. 

Now the fifth man stood before the desk of Kent Fowler, head of Dome No. 3. Jovian Survey Commission. 

Under Fowler’s desk, old Towser scratched a flea, then settled down to sleep again.

-copied from clifford_d._simak_desertion.pdf

Although we await a copy of Clifford Simak's City ordered via eBay, we find the text online. You may read its opening paragraphs above.

Poul Anderson: "...wind...whooping...driving...ammonia dust..."

James Blish: "A screeching tornado..." (for both, see here)

Simak contributes: "...the howling maelstrom...," "...keening gale...," a ground and rain (above)

We notice:

similar descriptions in different words;

Simak's characters are not on Jupiter V but in a dome on the Jovian surface;

Simak's characters, like Anderson's Anglesey, venture onto the planetary surface "...not...in the shape of men";

Simak's characters include a dog - who will be important.

Is that enough for this evening? I need to do something different. 

Music is audible from somewhere out our back. Good night.

Current Issues: Time Travel And Jupiter

See Jim Al Khalili on time travel here (I hope).

A very enjoyable afternoon with Andrea overlooking Morecambe Bay, as ever. We watched Jim Al Khalili's very clear discussion of issues around time travel. (For Al Khalili on this blog, see here.) (Scroll down.) There are many parallels between this discussion and Poul Anderson's works. Can causality be circular and/or would a Time Patrol be necessary?

Meanwhile, on another current issue, see also the immediately preceding post, Anglesey And Helmuth. If such posts encourage some blog readers to read or reread the works discussed, then they will have achieved one purpose. I had said that I would concurrently reread four Jupiter narratives and have subsequently read to the half way point of ERB's "Skeleton Men of Jupiter." There were warlike green men and more civilized red men on Mars and there are warlike "skeleton men" and more civilized purple men on Jupiter! 

The rapid axial spin of Jupiter generates centrifugal force that counteracts its stronger gravity. There is a breathable oxygen atmosphere beneath the poisonous gases in the upper atmosphere which alone are visible to Terrestrial telescopes. The surface is both heated and lit by many volcanoes! ("Gods of all stars!," to quote James Blish's Okies.)

On this blog, we frequently appreciate Poul Anderson's descriptions of weather and scenery. Here is an extract from ERB's Foreword to "Skeleton Men...":

"Occasionally I also have to inject a little weather and scenery in my deathless classics, two further examples of literary racketeering that I especially deplore in the writings of others. Yet there is something to be said in extenuation of weather and scenery, which, together with adjectives, do much to lighten the burdens of authors and run up their word count."

-Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter Of Mars (London, 1968), p. 71.

OK. ERB's tone is frivolous so our response should not be serious. It is interesting that he picked on this one of the many points that we admire in Anderson.

If Venus and Mars had turned out to be as described in SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation Trilogy, then would ERB have become more literarily respectable, as he does in the Trilogy? I doubt it and I question whether this can be a serious suggestion by Stirling?

ERB's politics: there are good rulers and bad rulers and that's it. The bad rulers are arrogant and cruel. Contrast Poul Anderson's sympathetic treatment of some of his characters that he would have disagreed with politically:

a Communist in The Devil's Game and another in Murder Bound;

the dying moments of the leader of the Hermetian revolution in Mirkheim.

In ERB's The Land That Time Forgot, a villainous character says, "I am an IWW. I hate all American's..." (memory)

(The IWW still exists. One of its official showed up to represent some employees in Lancaster!)

We welcome the glimpses of John Carter's and Dejah Thoris's later lives in the later volumes.

I do not think that we have anything further to say about ERB although I will dutifully persevere until the end of "Skeleton Men..."

Anglesey And Helmuth

"The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.

"He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil..."

-Poul Anderson, "Call Me Joe" IN Anderson, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 1, Call Me Joe (NESFA Press, Framingham, MA, 2009), pp. 11-36 AT p. 11.

Anglesey stands on a ground composed of some kind of soil and, a few sentences later, is hit by an uprooted tree.

"A screeching tornado was rocking the Bridge when the alarm sounded; the whole structure shuddered and swayed. That was normal, and Robert Helmuth on Jupiter V barely noticed it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge. The whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes and worse."

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CHAPTER TWO, pp. 28-29.

We soon learn that these texts are set on very different versions of Jupiter. Helmuth's Jupiter has neither trees nor even a single fixed surface. We notice that Anglesey is physically present in the wind and dust whereas Helmuth watches from a Jovian moon. However, we are soon to learn that both men are on Jupiter V, each with his heads enclosed in a remote control helmet.

The comparison continues.

The Jupiter Project

We have been at Windermere for most of today and I will be with Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for most of tomorrow.

This evening, I have revised and improved Comparing ERB. My new project is to reread and discuss the Jupiter stories by Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, James Blish and ERB listed in that post. 

"Call Me Joe" by Anderson is the title story of Volume 1 of the NESFA The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson series. I have a copy.

"Desertion" by Simak is in his future history volume, City. I shed my copy when downsizing but have ordered a replacement on eBay.

"Bridge" by Blish was incorporated into his Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, as the five evenly numbered chapters and the concluding eleventh chapter. I have this novel as a separate volume and in the Cities In Flight omnibus edition.

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by ERB is in John Carter Of Mars and I have a copy.

Anderson's and Blish's characters experience Jupiter remotely from Jupiter V. Anderson's and Simak's characters decide to live on Jupiter. Sometimes story ideas in sf overlap.

See also:

On Jupiter And Jupiter V

Three On Jupiter

The End Is A Beginning

The Lords Of Creation.

OK. A local war is resolved but the whole rest of the Dyson sphere remains to be explored so what happens next? Volume IV? Trilogy 2, Volume I? As an early Star Trek film poster proclaimed, "The Adventure Continues..." - or at least should continue. This cannot be the end. The end of the trilogy is only a beginning. Will the same characters return to the Sphere or will we be introduced to what would become a fourth set of characters in the series? The original "Lords" can remain off-stage indefinitely, I think. How far is the Sphere from the Solar System? Instantaneous interstellar transition is a neat trick, not to say implausible. Such things can be made to seem easy in sf - but they would benefit from some kind of explanation.

Even in retro-sf, we are always looking forward to what is going to happen next.