Verbals And Visuals

We read descriptions of Valles Marineris in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, would see the Valles in a film adaptation of The Fleet Of Stars and do see it in Alan Moore's Watchmen.

This post revisits the three story-telling media. A story can be narrated, enacted or depicted. We still value narrative, whether heard or read, although it is the one of these three media that is not visual. Of course, most writers and readers have some visual imagination which I lack, being auditory digital, according to a Neuro-Linguistic Programming trainer. (You get that kind of input if you work in certain kinds of jobs.)

It is getting to that time of the evening when I turn from blogging to "other reading," in this case from Anderson's Harvest The Fire to Moore's Watchmen. And tomorrow will be a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop which means that I will be very well informed about the state of the world although not posting about it until later in the day.

Knife Thrust

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 9.

We like secret organizations in fiction and the Scaine Croi is a good one. We think of SPECTRE but I find that I have already made that comparison.

When a bribed pilot delivers a hijacked plane to SPECTRE, he receives a stiletto through his chin, mouth and brain and experiences momentary surprise, pain and light. Then he ceases to be the viewpoint character and the omniscient narrator describes his murder's subsequent actions. We remember this when we read that Falaire's affection for Nicol, prospective space pilot hijacker for the Scaine Croi:

"...meant he could hope to get his pay in money, not a bullet or a knife thrust." (p. 138)

Indeed.

To give Nicol more positive motivation, Falaire immerses him in a "dreambox" simulation of the Lunarian colony planet, Proserpina, so far away that the sun is only the brightest star.

Antiagathics And FTL

The premises of James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy are that both an indefinitely prolonged lifespan and faster than light (FTL) space travel are necessary for interstellar travel. Both have been achieved:

by the end of Cities In Flight, Volume I;

by the end of Robert Heinlein's Future History, Volume IV;

before the beginning of Poul Anderson's World Without Stars;

before the beginning of Anderson's For Love And Glory.

Many sf characters have FTL without immortality and the characters in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years have immortality with STL.

There needs to be a very long novel or series about what immortality would be like over a very long period of time. As we count our age not in months but in years, immortals would come to count theirs in decades, then in centuries, then in millennia... Knowing that they had endless time in which to perform any given task, they might never get around to doing it. 

Procastination is the thief of endless time? How else might their psychology change?

Addendum: John Amalfi briefly considers the psychological effects of longevity somewhere near the end of Cities In Flight but I can't find the passage right now.

Time And The Ship

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 9.

This chapter opens:

"Time and the ship passed onward through space." (p. 137)

The ship moved through space over a period of time. Motion is change of the spatial relationship called position. Without change, there would be no time. Time does not move anywhere. It is the relationship between states changed from and states changed to. States include spatial relationships.

However, "Time..." in the opening sentence refers to the succession of experiences of a viewpoint character and the second sentence identifies the viewpoint character of this chapter:

"Nicol's waking hours went almost entirely to preparing himself." (ibid.)

It is his experience of preparation that moves through space with the ship. The third and fourth sentences take us as readers further into Nicol's experience and into a particular personal relationship:

"Sometimes, though, nature demanded he take a few of them off.

"He lay with Falaire in her cabin." (ibid.)

Nicol and Falaire are enclosed not by bare bulkheads but by a moving 3D forest with a night sky and a breeze bearing spicy odours. Lunarians' lives are spent entirely within artificial but nevertheless spacious and colourful environments.

They All Meet

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 6.

Continuing characters converge when Venator (download), a brain in a box hidden in a concealed cupboard, spies on Falaire (Lunarian) and Nicol (Terran) meeting Lirion (Lunarian), Seyant (Lunarian) and Hench (Intellect) to discuss the Lunarian heist of Federation anti-matter. Big one! (Lunarians and Intellects are two kinds of metamorphs.) Since, immediately after this clandestine meeting, Lirion apprehends Venator, the latter is unable to report the conspiracy. Nice one!

The only other item that I want to record this evening is Falaire's apartment in CHAPTER 5 but that is already here.

Harvest The Fire is a compact short narrative contrasting sharply with the three other Harvest Of Stars volumes. As far as I can remember, Nicol is destined not only to pilot the ship used for the hijack but also to write epics about Proserpina and the edge of interstellar space. Humanity triumphs.

Alternative Fiction

Alternative history fiction is a kind of science fiction written by HG Wells, Poul Anderson, SM Stirling, Harry Turtledove and others. Imagine that a familiar event happened differently and has been remembered that way by fictional characters. In a BBC TV series, a character who was a TV script writer had agreed to write a series set during what to him and his contemporaries was the historical 1940's when the Germans invaded and conquered Britain after the death of Churchill. Asked how he would handle it, he replied, "Well, I can't rewrite history," whereas, of course, history has already been rewritten to bring such a character and his entire social context into (fictional) existence.

Anderson's main alternative historical speculations are in "The House of Sorrows," "Eutopia" and some installments of his Time Patrol series. More fanciful alternative histories feature not just events happening differently but also alternative laws of physics allowing magic to work. But, even here, historical events, Einstein originating relativity and Planck originating quantum mechanics, are given an alternative twist: Einstein and Planck cooperated in originating "rheatics," which led to the degaussing of cold iron and thus to practical magic.

See:

Magic And Goetics

Imagining Alternative Histories

Characters in that alternative timeline imagine ours.

We sometimes draw attention to works by other authors in which ideas discussed here have been taken further or developed differently. Thus, our familiar fictional narratives might have taken alternative directions. Superman, as written by Alan Moore, experiences a scenario in which Krypton did not explode. A heckler interrupts a political speech by Jor-El, asking which catastrophe is coming now, the planet blowing up again or just floods and plagues this time. Jor-El laments the passing away of a noble and proud Krypton - the Krypton of the old comics! In Moore's Watchmen, superheroes in the real world caused comic books to switch from superheroes to pirates. A news vendor remembers that there used to be SUPER-MAN and FLASH-MAN...

Imaginative writers take us out of our reality and back into it.

Backtrack

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

Let's backtrack. In Production Of Anti-Matter, we summarized a conversation between Venator and Lirion but missed one part. 

Lirion says that, without more energy from anti-matter, the Lunarians at Proserpina will be imprisoned in sameness. Venator asks whether they have:

"'...no inner resources.'" (p. 69)

Lirion scoffs. Machine intelligence admires its own:

"'Abstractions, mental constructs...'" (ibid.)

- but that is not:

"'...for living creatures...'" (ibid.)

Like passivity versus violence, this is another false dichotomy. Organic intelligence encompasses pure mathematics and its application to the empirical universe and everything else: emotions, social interactions, artistic creativity, spirituality, whatever else we might think of. Stop splitting up the truth and fighting over the parts!

A parable told by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

The Devil's friend saw a man picking up a small piece of the truth. The Devil said, "It doesn't matter. He is only going to organize and systematize it."

From The Pacific To The Moon

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 4.

Jesse Nicol had spent time on a shiptown of the Lahui Kuikawa. It was there that he decried unoriginal art.

There was a sunset:

"The sun, become a red-gold shield, was on the horizon. Glade blazed from it across the waters." (p. 84)

Some Lahui:

"'...swim down the sunset road with the Keiki.'" (ibid.)

During a silence after a fight:

"The sun dropped from sight, the sea-road faded into darkness." (p. 88)

Nicol saw the Moon above the deckhouse and wondered whether he should seek employment by the Lunarians there, which is where we have already seen him. CHAPTER 5 will return us to Nicol with Falaire on the Moon but not tonight, folks. The sun has long set here as well.

From An Odyssey To An Elegy

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 4.

Sometimes an sf writer presents a list, for example of familiar names or events, but then continues that list into the future. Thus, Poul Anderson's Jesse Nicol asks:

"'What's the sense in producing an imitation Odyssey, The Trojan Women, Hamlet, The Waste Land, Elegy at Jupiter?" (p. 83)

We know four of these titles. Nicol knows them and the fifth. He tells us what all five have in common:

"'Those spoke about love, strife, triumph, grief, terror, mystery, in the language of the people and their gods, or people who'd lost their gods but were gaining a universe.'" (ibid.)

Nicol's problem is that, for centuries, all writing, music, art and science has been nothing but variations on old forms and themes, trying to revivify:

"'...something...that was worn-out before their grandparents were born.'" (ibid.)

It is appropriate that his list ends with an elegy.

Production Of Anti-Matter

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

The Federation stops production of anti-matter on Mercury because it has stockpiled enough for foreseeable contingencies in its stable economy. 

Unlike in other fictional futures, including some by Poul Anderson, no living being has been on Mercury, only specialized armoured machines. Installations on the surface and in orbit captured and focused solar energy. Photons striking nucleons caused quantum convulsions that generated new positive and negative particles which magnetic lines of force conducted to separate destinations, thus creating masses of anti-matter. 

Lunarians took anti-matter to Proserpina but their supply has become low and they have no way to generate any more whereas "...a single large consignment..." (p. 68) from the Federation would enable them to:

"'...build a fusion-powered factory to make more...'" (pp. 68-69)

Proserpina's iron core is rich and a source of industrial wealth but difficult to hollow out for habitations so more energy is needed.

Venator, representing the Federation, is appalling:

"'Do you feel we owe you access?...Your folk chose to go live on the fringe of deep space because they wanted no part of our civilization.'" (p. 68)

Sure. Having been made different, the Lunarians wanted to live differently. Is that a reason not to help them? Is their request not an opportunity for rapprochement?

Even worse:

"'Have you then concluded that altruism is, after all, a virtue?'" (ibid.)

Well, it is, isn't it? In the following volume, a representative of the cybercosm compares that entity to Jesus and the Buddha. (The cybercosm dominates the Federation despite Venator's denial.)

Venator continues:

"'You want this Federation that you loathe to supply you, when you have nothing to exchange that we need.'" (ibid.)

The Federation supplies its own needs and can afford to give, whether "loathed" or not. (Surely beside the point?)

Venator again:

"'I ask you again, why should we? You're not dying of hunger or cold.'" (p. 69)

Is that the only time when the Federation would help them? Indeed, would it help them even then?

Lirion's reply is that the Federation would gain a new and strange society shaking it out of its stagnation. Anderson's readers think, "Yes!" Venator thinks:

"Yes...that is exactly what we fear." (ibid.)

It has to be made clear to readers why this is feared. Lirion remarks that the cybercosm has:

"'...its own ends, which are not remotely human.'" (p. 72)

Venator thinks:

"How could they be?" (ibid.)

What are they then?