A Cosmic Accident Or A Large Satellite

Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories (New York, December 1973), pp. 3-49.

"...man exists because a cosmic accident blew away most of the gas that a body its size ought to have kept, as Venus has done." (p. 11)

Sf readers read then-current scientific ideas in sf stories. This story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1971.

Ideas that I have read elsewhere are that:

Lunar gravity thinned the Terrestrial atmosphere (this is crucial to Larry Niven's "Wrong Way Street");

tides, also of course caused by Lunar gravity, facilitated the evolution of amphibians and the transition of life from sea to land;

the Moon maintains the Earth's magnetic field (see here).

The Earth-Moon system is a double planet and the Moon almost certainly has other effects. 

A Moment Of Realization On Sibylla

Poul Anderson, "The Alien Enemy" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories (New York, December 1973), pp. 68-85.

We are reviewing the stories in the sequence that we loosely label as the Directorate future history. Rereading "The Alien Enemy," I am struck by an example of what I have called an Andersonian moment of realization:

"...at once, like a blow to the guts...I saw the face of the alien enemy." (p. 81)

The first person narrator has been told and shown evidence that alien spaceships, maybe with an FTL drive, had attacked the human colony on the inhospitable planet, Sibylla, and had nuked its only city. But no one knows who these aliens were and they have not been seen or heard of since. How can the narrator suddenly realize who they were? He can't. They don't exist. He can and does suddenly realize that an elaborate hoax has been perpetrated. But we have posted quite a lot about Sibylla before! 

It is time for me to meditate in good time before going out to the Gregson Institute this evening.

"Time Lag": Conclusion

Having reread to the end of "Time Lag," we have to check how much we have already posted about it. Quite a lot:

Resistance

The Decisive Battle

Dare And "Time Lag"

Interstellar Diversity

This single story is a miniature future history in its own right whether or not we think that we can connect it with other interstellar stories by Poul Anderson.

Anderson imagines humanity out in the universe and we want to read more. Future history will not all be as violent as this conflict between Vaynamo and Chertkoi but Anderson wrote good military sf and this story is one example.

Where to next?

AI

See:

SpaceX

What Elon Musk Said

Again, the news of the day on the blog - a once-in-a-blue moon event. AI can be beneficial or dangerous, utopian or dystopian, so why has it not been programmed with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? This is one sf theme on which Asimov was way ahead of everyone else - although Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History shows us technological unemployment including even the unemployment of the first humanoid robot! (A self-driving car does not need a humanoid driver etc.)

Themes From Previous SF Authors Addressed In Anderson's First Future History Series

Robert Heinlein

a future history series

a future revolution

longevity

a generation ship

Isaac Asimov

a predictive science of society

robots

Synthesis

the predictive science of society applied within the generation ship.

We are living in the twenty-first century, the future, with a potential threat from AI, Asimov's Frankenstein Complex.

Natives Of Extra-Solar Planets

Rustum has no natives.

On Roland, the natives conceal themselves and manipulate human colonists telepathically.

On Mithras, human colonists would eventually have displaced the natives but the colony is prevented.

On Vaynamo, the most intellectually developed of the Alfavala:

"...had chosen to serve man in a doglike fashion rather than keep to the forests [and] could only speak a few words and handle the simplest tools."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Lag" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories (New York, December 1973), pp. 115-149 AT 522 Anno Coloniae Conditae, p. 117.

Human beings had colonized Nerthus before they discovered that it was inhabited.

Five planets.

Rustum and Roland are in the Rustum History.

Mithras and Vaynamo are in the Directorate History. (We think.)

Nerthus is in the Psychotechnic History.

Someone will remind me of other examples. 

Two Questions

"Home." 

For more about the planet Mithras, see:

More Details On Mithras

Mithrans

This story poses two questions:

(i) Can a planet with a large and growing urban population afford a space program?

(ii) Should human beings colonize an already inhabited planet?

To answer (ii), Captain Yakov Kahn cites past human conflicts:

Amerinds;

Jews;

Arabs;

Moslems and Hindus;

Europeans and Africans;

a single country bringing forth Bach, Goethe and Hitler.

We can turn directly from one sentence in Kahn's speech to the morning news.

Within the story, Kahn settles his questions by force. However, the questions remain with the readers.

An Emergent Future History

See:

The Chertkoian Directorate

3260 light years

A.C.C.

The Directorate Future History

In 569 A.C.C.

- or just search this blog for Directorate.

We get the impression that an unexpected and understated future history series emerges from a few stories which should therefore be collected in a single volume.

Some Details In NEW AMERICA

In "Our Many Roads to the Stars," Poul Anderson refers to:

"...voyages to Avalon and Cibola..."

-New America, p. 263.

I have no memory of reading about Cibola before but now can easily google it. The name, "Avalon," is very important in Anderson's Technic History.

In "Home," a brown-furred native Mithran resembles a long-armed, bird-headed kangaroo. Is this an acceptable account of an extraterrestrial? A human being who has grown up on Mithras does not have to think of them like that but that does not change the fact that we do. The name, "Mithras," is very important in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy. (When a planet is named after a god, e.g., Woden, we soon forget the original meaning.)

That interstellar travel might be terminated on the ground that an Earth with an ever-increasing population can no longer afford it makes "Home" sound very like the Rustum stories. These narratives belong together in a themed collection if not also in a linear series.

Fiction And Non-Fiction

Fiction and non-fiction are two such different kinds of writing. This blog focuses on Poul Anderson but let's get Isaac Asimov out of the way first. Asimov progressed from science fiction reader to science fiction writer to science writer, then back to science fiction writer, producing his later Robots and Empire novels which are nowhere near as effective as Poul Anderson's Technic History. In fact, Asimov almost shows us how not to write a future history series. If we were to be shown the younger Hari Seldon, then we should have seen him as a mathematics student on his home planet with no thought as yet of a science to be called psychohistory just as Anderson shows us Adzel as a student on Earth with no preliminary hint that this, so far, junior character is to become the planetologist in Solar Spice & Liquors' first trade pioneer crew. No text should blatantly present itself as primarily a "prequel" to a previously published work. In The Early Asimov, Asimov's earliest published stories alternate with lengthy autobiographical passages that are more interesting than the stories. (Fran Cobden enthusiastically agreed - "Exactly!" - when I said this.)

Maybe the two kinds of writing could be brought together in a collection of alternating stories and articles with the stories dramatizing the issues raised in the articles and the articles discussing the issues raised in the stories? Dramatization and discussion are the main distinguishing features. (Greek drama originated by the addition of extra speakers, then of actions, to ritual narrations.) A non-fiction writer directly addresses his readers whereas fiction is mediated through an omniscient narrator and one or more viewpoint characters.

There can also sometimes be an apparently unbridgeable gap between fiction and non-fiction. Thus, Anderson dramatized the effects of time dilation on a spaceship crew in his novel, Tau Zero, then later discussed time dilation in the essay, "Our Many Roads to the Stars," which - maybe only for reasons of space? - did not refer to the novel. It was as if there was an unwritten rule that Anderson as science popularizer must not refer to Anderson as sf writer. Of course this is not the case. The essay begins by referring to sf in general and also mentions Frederik Pohl's "starbow."

Anderson wrote:

non-fiction about thermonuclear war and several works of fiction set during the aftermaths of nuclear wars;

both fiction and non-fiction about space travel and extraterrestrial intelligence.

Sagittarius And Light-Years

Poul Anderson, "Home" IN Anderson, New America (New York, December 1982), pp. 231-259.

See Orbit (anthology series)

Thirty-three light-years from Sol, as his ferry leaves its mother ship and descends from orbit, Yakov Kahn sees:

"...the sprawl of Sagittarius." (p. 233)

- and reflects that the galactic centre lies beyond those dust clouds.

Poul Anderson's readers remember:

"'...the Sagittarian frontier of the Stellar Union...'"

-Poul Anderson, The Peregrine (New York, July 1979), CHAPTER IV, p. 23.

- and:

"'Civilization - the civilization of man and his non-human allies - has moved inward, toward the great star-clusters of Galactic center. This part of space means nothing to us any more; it's almost a desert. You haven't seen star-light till you've been by Sagittarius.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Chapter Ends" IN Anderson, Starship (New York, June 1982), pp. 253-281 AT p. 262.

It is all one universe in different works of fiction.

Kahn reflects on his eventual return to Earth:

"Almost seventy years will have passed since we started out. And even then I was an anachronism, too many missions to too many stars..." (p. 234)

This relativistic interstellar travel reminds us of the extra-solar explorer, Joshua Coffin, in the first Rustum story. So far these stories could be set in the same future timeline. But there will be more tomorrow or the day after.