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.

Forest And Death

 

"The Star Beast."

Like Poul Anderson's The Peregrine and World Without Stars, this is a future when Earth is sparsely populated and:

"...the immense forest...had returned with the end of agriculture." (p. 79)

And death returns as an issue. Avi reflects on what life was like before human bodies could be endlessly duplicated and rejuvenated:

"'A few years, and then age and feebleness and death.' She shuddered. 'Death! Nothingness! Not even the world can exist when one is dead. Not when you've no brain left to know about it. Just - nothing. As if you had never been! Haven't you ever been afraid of the thought?'" (p. 81)

The world does exist when we are dead and when we do not know about it. We do not fear the thoughts either that we did not exist before we were born or that we do not exist in most places now! Surely someone who has been is different from someone who has never been? We are neither fictional characters nor unrealized genetic combinations. Can anyone calculate the number of the latter? We exist where and when we exist. There is nothing to fear about the times and places when/where we do not exist.

But "To be or not to be..." is an ultimate question, the beginning of Hegelian philosophy - and maybe of quantum mechanics? 

The Future History In "The Star Beast"

Poul Anderson, "The Star Beast" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993), pp. 61-102.

See Procyon in:

Wikipedia

Poul Anderson Appreciation (scroll down)

Procyon is 11.46 light-years from Sol. In this fictional future, interstellar spaceships can travel at only half light-speed. The journey between Sol and Procyon takes twenty years.

Nearly nine hundred years ago, human beings colonized the Procyonite System where their long and bitter struggle for survival has involved a centuries-long war of extermination against the Czernigi. During that time, the Procyonites, as they now are, have had no contact either with Earth or with any other extra-solar colonies. However, a warship of mutated human beings from Procyon has just arrived in Earth orbit. Its captain, Felgi, and a squad of blaster-wielding guards descend in an armed boat. Felgi converses with Coordinator Ramacan who constitutes the sole government of an unarmed and undefended Earth. When Ramacan has confirmed Earth's defenselessness, Felgi announces that he and his men are taking over.

What Has Happened On Earth During Nine Hundred Years

Seven or eight centuries ago:

"'The ultrawave was discovered...'" (p. 72)

The ultrawave transmits solar power to the whole Solar System and can also transmit matter. Hence, teleportation. From teleportation, duplication, including duplication of rejuvenated, healthy bodies onto which memories can be electronically superimposed. Duplication and transmission enable individuals to live far apart. Robot ships can transport recorded personalities to extra-solar colonies with which there is no contact except through occasional curious wanderers.

Thus, yet another STL (slower-than-light) future history is summarized in a single short story.

"The Star Beast" And "Son of the Sword"

Poul Anderson's collection, Alight In The Void, also includes "The Star Beast" which we read so long ago that maybe we can now reread it with fresh eyes and a fresh mind while at the same time not repeating anything that we have posted about it before in:

blog search result for "The Star Beast"

- and for Issues In The Star Beast

- but we are not about to do any of that this evening!

The same remark applies to "Son of the Sword," which we discussed in a few posts back in July, 2013.

For now, we wish you all good night at least in this part of the world.

Rugi And Human Beings

"Terminal Quest."

We feel that Rugi deserves to go somewhere but he can't. He exists only in this single short story and dies before it ends. His life is complete, as Aycharaych would say. (This is an esoteric reference to the Dominic Flandry series within Poul Anderson's Technic History. Search this blog for "Aycharaych." More specifically, Reflections On Death.)

Rugi reflects that human beings:

"...felt guilty for what their grandparents had done, as if that could change matters." (p. 24)

It can't. Guilt for what our ancestors did is pointless (bad) or self-indulgent (worse). But something practical could have been done about compensation while even one member of the exterminated species remained alive.

What will the New Terran colonists do now that Rugi has drowned? Will they erect a monument to the last native, especially since his dying act had been to save the life of a human child who had tormented him?

"'...your ancestors...killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.'" (Lk, 11:48)

(A Biblical text can be pertinent even when Anderson does not quote it.)

Learning To Appreciate Collections

I am beginning to appreciate short story collections as something more than just arbitrary and overlapping groupings of stories. "Terminal Quest" belongs in a collection of pulp magazine short stories, Alight In The Void, and also in a collection mostly about time travel, Past Times. "The Saturn Game" and "Starfog" are the opening and concluding instalments of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization and also, appropriately, the opening and closing stories in a collection entitled Explorations. Anyone reading only Explorations would be unable to tell that these two stories belonged in a single series but nevertheless both are about space exploration. 

See also:

Collections

Collections II

Alternative Collections

Further Research On Poul Anderson Collections

Collections And Individual Stories

We could get out all the collections and go through them all again but I think that we have done quite enough already!

Some Fictional History

"Terminal Quest."

There are very few future historical "facts" in this story but let us gather together any that we can find:

the colonized planet has been named neither New Earth nor Terra Nova but New Terra;

it is in the Tau Cetian system;

the voyage from Earth took forty years;

those who left Earth were among the poor and disinherited and were prepared to die in the ship so that their children could live in a new world;

the colonists have exterminated the natives;

the viewpoint character, Rugi, is the very last native and the concluding paragraph of the story is set immediately after his death;

Rugi's people had had a great non-technical civilization and had built the Temple of Otheii;

however, Rugi, orphaned in childhood, has inherited none of his people's culture and has to ask a human being what the Temple is.

Rugi's Thoughts

"Terminal Quest." 

Rugi's inner thoughts as human children and their dogs torment him:

"Night and rain and the west wind crying in high trees, a cool wet softness of grass and the wavering little fire, the grave eyes of my father and the dear lost face of my mother - Out of the night and the rainy wind and the forest they hewed down, out of the years and the blurring memories and the shadowland of dreams, come to me, mother, come and take me in your arms and carry me home." (p. 12)

Points To Note

(i) Two references to wind.

(ii) "...grass...," not pseudo-grass etc on another planet, as in many later texts.

(iii) Dreams are a shadowland. Rugi does not know the difference between "I dreamed about my mother last night" and "My mother came back last night."

(iv) He prays to his dead mother.

(v) Anderson writes in the introduction that:

"Times change, you can't go home again..." (p. xiii)

See also this theme in earlier posts.

Some evenings, I want to write one last post before reading about the Spanish Civil War, rereading Stieg Larsson and flaking. Tomorrow, another public talk of local interest.

Pulps

Poul Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993):

Acknowledgments, p. v

Contents, p. vii

Introduction: "Tell Me a Story" pp. ix-xiii

OK. I got confused but then got straightened out by googling.

According to the Acknowledgments:

"Terminal Quest" (1951)

"Earthman, Beware!" (1951)

"The Star Beast" (1950)

"Flight to Forever" (1950)

- were published in Super Science Stories and:

"Son of the Sword" (1951)

- was published in Adventure Magazine.

The Introduction names several pulp magazines:

Thrilling Western Stories

Black Mask Detective Stories

Astounding Stories of Super-Science

- and informs us that this volume collects some of Poul Anderson's contributions to pulp magazines.

My confusion became: what is the relationship between -

Super Science Stories

Astounding Stories of Super-Science

John W. Campbell's Astounding/Analog?

The answers are that:

in January, 1930, Astounding Stories of Super-Science began publication;

in February, 1931, the name was shortened to Astounding Stories;

in March, 1938, John W. Campbell, Jr., became editor and changed the name to Astounding Stories of Science-Fiction;

between January and October, 1960, Campbell changed the name to Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction;

Super Science Stories was a different and unrelated magazine.

See also the relevant Wikipedia articles:

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Super Science Stories

I did not know that this was going to become that complicated.

Death And Tau Ceti

In the recent post on Death, we should have added that, in Plato's Phaedo, Socrates says that dreamless sleep is the greatest happiness (?) and that, if there is no hereafter, then eternity is a single night (Yes!).

Not to be confused: Tau Zero is a novel by Poul Anderson whereas Tau Ceti is a star.

Tau Ceti on:

Wikipedia

Poul Anderson Appreciation

James Blish Appreciation

- and in Anderson's "Terminal Quest," it took human beings forty years to travel to Tau Ceti which is twelve light-years away so this story is set in an Andersonian STL (slower than light) future like at least three others that we have discussed recently.

(Lessons in Lancaster history continue: there was a controversial murder trial in the family of a local Councillor just over a hundred years ago.)