Some Details On Roland

"The Queen of Air and Darkness."

The opening passage describes a boy and a girl, then informs us that:

"Their age was about sixteen, but they did not know this, considering themselves Outlings and thus indifferent to time, remembering little or nothing of how they had once dwelt in the lands of men." (p. 3)

They did not know this... As in several passages written by Stieg Larsson, this sentence in a Poul Anderson narrative does not present the point of view of either of these two newly introduced characters. Instead, the omniscient narrator directly - and unusually - informs us, the readers, of a fact about the characters that they themselves did not know. 

(Most readers neither notice nor reflect on this, of course!)

They are on Roland, a planet that is so terrestroid that human beings can not only breathe the air but also eat the food and drink the water. (p. 11) How plausible is that?

One "outwayer" farmer hopes to harvest:

yerba hay;

bathyrhiza wood;

pericoup;

glycophyllon;

chalcanthemum to be sold by city florists;

rover pelts for the furriers. (p. 26)

Every fictional Andersonian planet has a rich and detailed ecology. 

And, like nearly every other Andersonian environment, this one also includes loud wind and roaring rain:

"...outside, wind hooted, lightning flared, rain crashed on roof and walls and roared down to swirl among the courtyard cobblestones." (ibid.)

As ever, that wind punctuates conversations and emphasizes dramatic pauses in the characters' dialogue. When the farmer has spoken intensely and his family has grown still:

"Wind hooted beyond the walls and rattled the storm shutters." (p. 27)

With this backup, the farmer repeats his entreaty to Barbro Cullen not to venture into forbidden territory:

"'Don't you.'" (ibid.)

1000 Parsecs

Poul Anderson, "Time Lag" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness (New York, December 1973), pp. 115-149.

A constellation seen from a colonized extra-solar planet:

"Sedes Regis was an L scrawled across heaven. Tradition claimed Old Sol lay in that direction, a thousand parsecs away. But no one on Chertkoi was certain any longer. Golyev shrugged. Who cared?" (p. 119)

For other extra-solar constellations, see Armies Of Stars and links from it.

One parsec is about 3.26 light-years. People have travelled at sub-light speeds from Earth to Chertkoi and other extra-solar planets where they have built civilizations, which must have taken a long time. However, Golyev's only source for the figure of a thousand parsecs is tradition. A sequel could be written in which that tradition was shown to be inaccurate. Maybe "a thousand parsecs" was just someone's expression for a long distance? How much of the information in a work of fiction is in the minds of the characters and could be overturned in a sequel?

Stories, Sequels And Series

I don't think that I could get into any sf author who just wrote a large number of short stories with no sequels or series. A completely new fictional background for every short narrative? No ideas or characters developed beyond just one story? (I realize that I might be describing Harlan Ellison and someone who is more familiar with his works might want to respond?)

When I first read Poul Anderson's "The Game of Glory," I saw of course that this story was about a character named Dominic Flandry but did not yet know either that there was a Dominic Flandry series or that this series covered one period of a future history series - one of several such series by the same author. I learned that Flandry's enemies, the Merseians, had existed in the period of the Polesotechnic League when I read a reader's letter in an sf mag. Imagine if the only work ever to have been set in the Technic History timeline had been the first Flandry short story!

In Planets And Timelines, we refer to:

Poul Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" and "Time Lag";

James Blish's "A Case of Conscience," A Case Of Conscience, "Seeding Program" and "Watershed."

We have seen how the two Anderson stories connect with others of his works.

"A Case of Conscience" was incorporated into A Case Of Conscience which is Volume III of After Such Knowledge and one volume of the Haertel Scholium. "Seeding Program" and "Watershed" are Books One and Four of The Seedling Stars. All of these works are bettered by becoming part of something bigger.

POVs In Anderson And Larsson

Because Poul Anderson controls narrative points of view so well, I want to contrast him with another author who is equally effective but who sometimes takes a different approach.

"Neither [Blomkvist] nor Berger had ever heard of Nils Bjurman, so neither of them were aware of him being there."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 2, p. 35.

"[Wu] slipped out of the entrance door on Lundagatan less than five minutes before Blomkvist parked outside and rang her doorbell."

-ibid., CHAPTER 20, p. 331.

"[Salander] noted the names Hans Faste and Curt Anderson, but she missed Jerker Holberg altogether as his name was not mentioned in any of the articles."

-ibid., CHAPTER 21, p. 359. 

There are other examples but they carry the same message. A passage narrated from either Blomkvist's or Berger's point of view (pov) could not have told us that they were not aware of Bjurman. It could only have told us what they did notice. Neither Wu nor Blomkvist knows that they missed each other by less than five minutes. The omniscient narrator informs us of this directly, unmediated by either of these characters' povs. That Salander noted Faste's and Anderson's names can be narrated from her pov but that she missed Holberg cannot. Again, the omniscient narrator must inform us of this directly. I find this interesting which is why I comment on it.

Planets And Timelines

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.

Poul Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" is definitely the ninth and last instalment in his Rustum future history series whereas the same author's "Time Lag" is much more tentatively and speculatively - although I might be alone in suggesting this - the concluding instalment of a considerably shorter and diffuser "Directorate" future history series. What these two stories have in common is that each is set in a future period when enough time has elapsed that human beings, travelling in slower-than-light spaceships, have colonized several extra-solar planets and there is also some travel between the colonies although there is no longer any contact with Earth. In "Time Lag," at least in the volume of space where the action occurs, Earth is simply too far, a thousand parsecs, away whereas, in "The Queen...":

"Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns." (p. 10)

That fits with what we are told in the Rustum stories. 

One of the reasons why people had left Earth was to preserve:

"...constitutional government..." (p. 6)

We remember the Constitutionalists on Rustum.

Eric Sherrinford says that birds big enough to carry a small child a short distance:

"'...do exist on Beowulf - and on Rustum, I've read.'" (p. 15)

This confirms that Roland and Rustum exist in the same timeline although, having said that, a fictional planet can, like Earth, Mars etc, exist in alternative timelines:

in James Blish's "A Case of Conscience," later adapted and expanded as A Case Of Conscience, Book One, the planet Lithia exists in 2049;

in Blish's "Seeding Program," near future events on Earth differ from those recounted in "A Case of Conscience" and Lithia is not mentioned;

in Blish's "Watershed," set millennia after "Seeding Program," Lithia exists;

in A Case Of Conscience, Book Two, Lithia is destroyed in 2050.

I think that this makes sense. Lithia plays a major role in A Case... and a minor role in "Watershed" and, in each case, its fate, whether imminent destruction or longer term survival, is appropriate to that narrative.

In any case, Rustum and Roland exist in a single timeline.  

Mystery

"The Queen of Air and Darkness."

Has the story been told in the wrong order? A child has been abducted. The child's mother had never believed the stories about Outlings stealing children but now is not so sure. As an alternative, she suggests a secret human cult living in the wilderness...

There are too many cases of lost children to be explained by accident and there are also:

"'...frightened stories about reappearances...'" (p. 9)

(We need to be told more.)

The police play down her story but she thinks that they too are afraid because they are recruited from country folk and their town:

"'...lies near the edge of the unknown.'" (ibid.)

An intriguing mystery - except that the opening passage has already shown us two of the Outlings and a pook carrying the stolen child! Like a Columbo episode where we see the murder before Columbo investigates and, of course, solves it.

FSF

Poul Anderson wrote fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction and detective fiction. Therefore, we do not necessarily know in advance which of these genres any particular short story will belong to. One clue is what kind of magazine, anthology or collection has the story been published in? "The Queen of Air and Darkness" was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and therefore could have been either. It begins ambiguously: a pook steals a human child (fantasy?); there are two moons in the sky (an extra-solar planet? Sf?)

The apparently magical or supernatural can be scientifically rationalized. A story set in a historical or prehistorical period might turn out to involve supernatural beings, extraterrestrial visitors, mutants, immortals or time travellers.

The sky is the limit.

Laterz.

Eric Sherrinford

"The Queen of Air and Darkness."

I will quote a character called Eric Sherrinford although I will also rearrange his words into a list rather than leaving them in the continuous prose of Poul Anderson's text. Sherrinford, addressing his client, Barbro Cullen, claims:

"'...I know just a few obvious facts, such as...

"'...your being widowed rather than divorced...

"'...and you're the daughter of outwayers in Olga Ivanoff Land...

"'...who, nevertheless, kept in close telecommunication with Christmas Landing;...

"'...and you're trained in one of the biological professions;...

"'...and you had several years' hiatus in field work...

"'...until recently you started again.'" (p. 6)

Barbro gapes and asks how in cosmos he knows that. (Of course.)

Who does Sherrinford sound like?

Does he say enough to back up his claimed knowledge?

Is this just an introductory flourish or does Sherrinford maintain the same level of deductive skill throughout the story?

I am not going to answer all these questions now!

For who Sherrinford sounds like, see:

Eddies: The Private Enquiry Agent

Good night. For me, back from the Gregson, Stieg Larsson, who also quotes that private enquiry agent, then bed.

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.