Martian Meanings

Late at night, tired, I found it easy to post about the Divine, a pet subject after all. However, meanwhile, I was finding SM Stirling's Martians difficult to read and think about. That is not a complaint! Who wants to read only texts that are easy? However...

One of them thinks:

"...I must keep in mind that death from another's volition is possible at any point on one's personal world-line."

-SM Stirling, In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, March 2008), CHAPTER ONE, p. 40.

He means that he must remember that someone can kill him at any time but why express it like that? Because he is a Martian human being, of course.

What is not acceptable, as Bob Shaw said at an sf event years ago, is to describe incomprehensible speech and actions and then to explain it all by the phrase: "Alien motivations!" But the authors that we discuss here do not see fit to conduct themselves like that. Shaw in particular said that it was a point of honour for him to explain everything.

These Martians make their kind of sense and it is our job as readers to understand it, even if not tonight.

Divine

The Game Of Empire.

Olaf Magnusson accepts the immediate objects of his thoughts:

"...as the aspect of the Divine which was set before him tonight."

-CHAPTER FOUR, p. 250.

The announcement that he is going to:

"...take leadership of the Terran Empire..."

-CHAPTER FIVE, p. 261 -

- ends with:

"'Stand by. The Divine, in whatever form It manifests Itself to you, is with us.'"

-ibid.

A very carefully worded statement that can provide a basis for any response whatsoever to the announcement!

A long time ago, I was impressed with the phrase, "the Divine Ground," in Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy because I wanted to move into mysticism while remaining monotheist. However, "Ground," like "It," is an impersonal term.

Today, I met with another guy called Paul who practices meditation taught by Elan Vital, the former Divine Light Mission, reads Christian mystics and attends the Church of England. Again, a light is not a person although I have just texted Paul to ask whether "Divine Light" implies a personal God.

If I were in the Patrician System to hear that announcement, then I would accept the statement that the Divine - in some sense! - is with us but I would also be wondering how to respond to Magnusson's attempted coup and, of course, I would not yet know what was really behind it. Poul Anderson is always full of surprises.

Alienation

If a human population, originally from Earth, had lived on another planet for tens of thousand of years, then they would by now have become strangely foreign or alien to Terrestrials in psychology, language, behaviour etc - as alien as some of the fictional aliens in works of sf. SM Stirling shows this clearly in In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. 

Decades ago, an sf comic strip set in the future showed a meeting of what looked like standard fictional aliens. However, a footnote explained that these individuals with differently shaped and hued bodies were descendants of human colonists of extrasolar planets, physically changed by their mutually diverse and alien environments.

Sf writers need to make such differences of speech, culture etc, if not yet of body shape, clearer when describing e.g., in Poul Anderson's case, Hermetians, Avalonians and Dennitzans. These are human inhabitants of planets called Hermes, Avalon and Dennitza as opposed to Wodenites, Cynthians or Ythrians who are natives of Woden, Cynthia and Ythri.

On Avalon, jointly colonized by human beings and Ythrians:

Planha pronunciation influences Anglic pronunciation;

when Christopher Holm speaks as Arinnian of Stormgate Choth, his accent diverges even more and he sounds as if he is translating directly from Planha;

Terrans find it difficult to spy on Avalon because they cannot imitate Avalonian human thought, speech or even ways of walking.

But more of these differences need to be evident to readers. On Aeneas, there are noticeable differences in speech patterns between Nords, tinerans and Riverfolk, all human.

Magnusson's Background

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

Admiral Olaf Magnusson:

was born on Kraken whose spacefolk trade as far as Betelgeuse or Merseia;

enlisted young in the Marines;

at Syrax, took command of a crippled ship;

was sent to the Foundry, the Navy officer school in Sector Aldeberan, which is where he was during the civil war;

helped to suppress two later rebellions and to negotiate with the Merseians (we read elsewhere that he speaks three Merseian languages, including Eriau, fluently);

married a Nyanzan heiress.

Regular readers of Poul Anderson's Technic History recognize multiple background details:

Kraken

Betelgeuse

Merseia

Syrax

Sector Aldeberan

the civil war

(Eriau)

Nyanza

- but not the Foundry which is introduced here.

Each instalment of a future history series builds on the foundation provided by earlier instalments and adds more - but we know that by now.

The Mars Of Fiction

How much do we know about it? Certain ideas float to the surface:

humanoid inhabitants

an ancient civilization on a drying planet

canals

sword

airships

a board game 

These features are common to Edgar Rice Burrough's Martian series and to SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation series. Some of the ideas also appear elsewhere. The canals on a dying planet are legendary.

How does Mars come to be inhabited?

(i) There just are native Martians.

(ii) In Michael Moorcock's ERB pastiche, Michael Kane time travels to Mars at a time before Martians had migrated to Earth.

(iii) In Lords Of Creation, technologically superior aliens terraformed Mars and transplanted Terrestrial human beings to it.

(iv) In Poul Anderson's Technic History, extra-solar aliens colonize Mars.

(v) Martians existed but are now extinct.

(vi) In works by Anderson and others, Terrestrials colonize Mars and become the "Martians."

(vii) There are even versions of Mars that were never inhabited!

Senses And Silence

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

Silence falls often. (Scroll down.)

Diana and Targovi converse privately in a crow's nest:

"Wind swirled in shrouds, bore iodine odors. The ship creaked and whooshed. A low sun threw a bridge over the waters. Forsaking this quest for another world would not be quite easy." (p. 242)

Four senses but I have said that before. (See also here.) That last sentence above reflects the fact that these characters can leave this planet and travel to another.

When there is a dramatic pause in the dialogue:

"Silence fell, save for wind, sea, and ship." (p. 245)

This is silence of speech but not of the sea setting and we have become used to the perennial wind. Completing our appreciation of the setting, Diana:

"...stared out beyond the sunset." (p. 247)

She looks beyond her immediately sensed scene of sun, sea and sky but we can meanwhile pause to appreciate it.

ERBianism

Poul Anderson did not write any Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches unless we count that single recently referenced passage. See:

Two Virtual Realities

- although it would have been well within his abilities to do so. 

The ingredients are present for all to see. The most basic is that another planet must harbour both a fully human race into which our hero can marry and also savage beast-men whom he must fight. A second ingredient is a gallimaufry of dangerous wild animals including, in the Land that Time Forgot and the Earth's Core and on SM Stirling's Venus, dinosaurs coexisting with human beings. Stirling has done what Anderson could have done, including a scientific rationalization for the retro-Solar System.

At the end of The Sky People, there is a two-tier transition to the alternative Mars which we will reread next.

Any ERBian cast of characters includes an obvious villain/traitor/saboteur etc. Stirling, like Anderson, is considerably subtler in his characterization. (Not difficult.) Marc dislikes the pompous British guy, Blair, so we expect a major conflict between them but that does not happen but something does happen about Blair...

Introducing the wheelbarrow works as well on this Venus as it does in ancient Rome.

Dissent And Denial

Imagine, for the sake of argument, an alternative future history in which the Merseians, having got ahead of us in terms of faster-than-light interstellar travel, have, in the mid-twenty-first century, occupied the Northern Hemisphere of Earth and are committing genocide in the South. Would the entire human race unite against the invaders? Yes? No? Might some Northern Terrestrials claim that incorporation into a technologically advanced interstellar civilization was the salvation of humanity and deny that the genocide was happening? We do not know any other intelligent species but we do know our own species!

Sf writers can use fictional aliens to comment on humanity and on contemporary issues. One Star Trek episode referred to the Vietnam War. IIRC, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was not shown in Britain because it mentioned the date of the British withdrawal from Norther Ireland. Futuristic sf is relevant.

Controversial almost to the point of civil war? Certainly. Appropriate subject-matter for sf? Definitely. Like Wells' prediction, then denunciation, of the use of aircraft to bomb cities.

There are at least two kinds of aliens in sf:

those that are used as commentaries (see above);

those that are dramatized scientific speculations about extraterrestrial biology.

Needless to say, Poul Anderson gives us both, e.g., 

the Merseian Roidhunate as an approximate analog of the Soviet Union;

Ythrian biology, psychology, sociology and theology.

In the case of the Merseians, it is the Roidhunate, not the entire species, that is hostile, as Anderson brilliantly shows in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

Can I praise the Technic History highly enough? No.

Forest, Sea And People

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

On Imhotep, a single green and gold forest with silver rivers and lakes covers a continent. The Crystal River flows into Dawnside Bay where Tigeries evacuated from Starkad have built the new town of Toborkozan. Out at sea, a slow but powerful wind fills the sails of the Tigery ship, Firefish, which is followed by flying snakes, while the high Imhotepan gravity gives speed and force to the green-crested, purple-troughed waves which shimmer, rush, boom and fling bitter spindrift.

Targovi lands his flying van on its pontoons beside the ship, secures a towline and flies across on a gravity impeller to be greeted by Diana Crowfeather and also to meet Axor. His clandestine plan is to persuade the young woman and the Wodenite to accompany him to Daedalus where they will provide unwitting cover for his continued spying operation, his targets being not agents of a foreign power but the local authorities whom he suspects of treason. He could have just obeyed his immediate superior's orders and stayed quiet. (With the fate of the Empire at stake, of course.)

Alienness

Sure, we enjoy reading about other intelligent species interacting with human beings and even with each other but much of what they do is what human beings would have done in any case, as CS Lewis complained.

As cited in the immediately preceding post on this blog:

a Cynthian runs an inn;

a Merseian prisoner of war asleep in a bed is shaken awake by a Tigery whose sole mundane aim is to gather military intelligence;

and so on.

However, Poul Anderson also presents genuinely alien psychologies:

Ythrian attitudes to death in "The Problem of Pain" and to sex in The People Of The Wind;

an Ythrian population can debate and decide planetary policy in six hours and human beings can be incorporated into this fully democratic "Khruath" system;

Chee Lan, descended from predators who hunted alone or in small groups, is loyal only to kin and close friends and cannot conceive of universal altruism.