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.

The Oneness Of Time

"The Pirate."

In the Dordogne country -

Braganza Diane lives in an internally renovated medieval stone house built against an overhanging cliff;

in front of her house, bushes cover:

"...a site excavated centuries ago, where flint-working reindeer hunters lived for millennia while the glaciers covered North Europe." (p. 212);

every day, the Greenland-Algeria carrier flies overhead;

every night, spaceships visibly lift towards the stars where men now travel.

A future history series shares our past history which can be shown sometimes. In this passage, Poul Anderson lays on multiple layers of time:

"Middle Ages"

"ancientness"

"centuries ago"

"millennia"

"glaciers"

"daily"

"at night"

And to sum all this up:

"In few other parts of the planet could you be more fully in the oneness of time." (ibid.)

That sums up Poul Anderson's works also. 

Two Future Histories

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic and Technic Histories have parallel structures:

Psychotechnic

World War III.

UN world government, then Solar Union.

The Second Dark Ages.

The Stellar Union.

The Third Dark Ages.

Galactic Civilization.

One story about post-War reconstruction.

No stories set during either Dark Ages.

One story (disputed) set in the Galactic Civilization.

Technic

The Chaos.

The Solar Commonwealth.

The Troubles.

The Terran Empire.

The Long Night.

Civilizations in several spiral arms.

One Story about post-Chaos reconstruction.

One each during the Troubles and the Long Night.

One in the civilization of the Commonalty.

A Future History Outline

In recent posts, we have referred to just a few instalments of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History but these few have indicated an interesting future history:

conflicting sovereign nations were a disruptive factor on Earth;

the bulk of the population became technologically redundant;

when the hyperdrive was discovered, there was mass emigration from Earth;

the Traveller became lost in space, searched unsuccessfully for Earth, then settled on Harbor but some of its crew resumed their endless voyage and became the first Nomads;

the Coordination Service served the Stellar Union;

Coordinator Trevelyan Micah intervened in the Good Luck case, then later worked with and joined the Nomads;

the Nomads carried knowledge through the Third Dark Ages and influenced later interstellar civilizations whether or not those civilizations include the Galactic Civilization of "The Chapter Ends."

Anderson later added "The Pirate" because that story fitted into that background but it was the story that counted. "The Pirate" refers to the planet Nerthus which is a common setting and reference point in the series although the stories referring to it are quite dissimilar.

The Case

"The Pirate."

This story is not only about Trevelyan Micah and the other individuals listed on its opening page. (See the above link.) It is also:

"The case of the slain world named Good Luck..." (p. 211)

- which we are told:

"...is typical." (ibid.)

So a world is slain? Someone commits global genocide? And this is typical? Well, no. A planetary population has died from natural causes, has been killed by the radiation from a supernova. (In the Technic History, another planetary population is saved from such a fate.) But the dead must be respected. The physical remains of their civilization must be studied. So the depopulated planet must not be immediately exploited for commercial gain. That is what the young generations so often do not understand.

Guarding The Pact

In the first part of Poul Anderson's Technic History, six stories and two novels were published as the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy which was followed by one Ythrian novel, The People Of The Wind. Then, eight further League instalments and four Ythrian stories were collected as The Earth Book Of Stormgate but this time an extra layer of commentary was contributed by the twelve introductions and one afterward fictitiously written by the Ythrian, Hloch. 

Something similar although on a much smaller scale happened in Anderson's Psychotechnic History. "Gypsy" and The Peregrine are two instalments about the Nomads. The latter also features Trevelyan Micah of the Stellar Union Coordination Service. "The Pirate" is a later written story about Trevelyan set between "Gypsy" and The Peregrine but it also contains an extra layer of commentary contributed by its first person narrator who remains off-stage and speaks from one generation later than the events involving:

"...Trevelyan Micah, Murdoch Juan, Smokesmith, red Faustina, and the rest..."

-Poul Anderson, "The Pirate" IN Anderson, Starship (New York, 1982), pp. 211-251 AT p. 211.

We are partially prepared for the narrative by the enunciation of the names of its main protagonists. The tone is reflective and elegiac. The narrator, a Coordinator (Cordy) begins:

"We guard the great Pact: but the young generations, the folk of the star frontier, so often do not understand." (ibid.)

- and ends:

"But the young generations so often do not understand." (p. 251)

These sentences match Hloch's commentaries. It is as if the unnamed narrator mourns in advance for the end of the Stellar Union which we know will come later in this future history series.