Uldwyr And Worlds

A conversation between Chunderban Desai and his Merseian opposite number, Uldwyr, impresses me with its future historical content. However, on searching the blog, I find that I have posted about this passage several times before! See here. I have also (just now) corrected an error. In one post, I had misnamed Uldwyr as "Ydwyr." The latter is a different character.

Maybe there is one additional point to be made. Uldwyr says:

"'So many traditions, works, mysteries - so tiny a lifespan to taste them -'"

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 3, p. 85.

Should "works" have been "worlds"?

Check another edition:

"'So many traditions, works, mysteries...'"

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return (New York, 1975), III, p. 15.

"...works..." again. But surely "worlds" would have made more sense? A very small point - but read the whole book, of course.

Werewolves

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

We are closing down for the night but first:

Holger and his companions have just entered a neighbourhood that is terrorized by a werewolf;

in a later volume, Holger will meet Valeria Matuchek whose father, Steven, is a werewolf;

we - I mean we here at Blog Central; everyone's reading experience is different - have just reread "The Hunt," a Sandman story by Neil Gaiman.

In "The Hunt," an elderly immigrant to the US tells his teenage granddaughter a story. They refer to themselves as of "the People," which means, we learn, that they are werewolves living in New York.

It all feels like one long, broad series especially since the multiverse idea easily explains away any discrepancies.

Just One Word: "Brant"

Brant whirr from rushes. I googled "brant" when I quoted it from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER FIVE, because I was unfamiliar with the word. Today we find Neil Gaiman explaining why he had named a character "Brant":

"He's 'Brant' because it's the name of a wild goose, and I liked the idea of him being a wild thing migrating across America. Also, it's one of those strange, monosyllabic American names."

-Neil Gaiman interviewed in Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 13, p. 247.

Thus, here is another, albeit minor and coincidental, Anderson-Gaiman parallel. The closer we peer, the more there is to be seen. We at Blog Central have not yet reread all the way to the end of Three Hearts... Fortunately, we are out during the day, not back at home reading. Nevertheless, the rereading continues and much of is like reading for the first time.

"Time Travel"

"Time travel" means many things. Decades ago, a guy saw me reading what I told him was a time travel novel and he thought that it must be about a group of people who had travelled into a past period and then encountered some difficulties in returning to their present! (He must have go that from somewhere.) "All" time travel books were like this... I tried to explain the concept of causality violation which apparently he had never heard of. 

Some Kinds of "Time Travel"

(i) There is a curious sub-sub-genre of juvenile fantasy novels by English women writers whose protagonists are transported back and forth between their present and a particular past period. (See The Time Travel Archives.)

(ii) Circular causality paradox narratives, perfected by Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson.

(iii) Narratives about time travelling organizations. The only one that I know of that makes any sense, although it remains extremely paradoxical, is Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series.

(iv) Personal relationships of time travellers:

Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 

(v) Travellers exploring the future:

The Time Machine by HG Wells

"Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson

"Welcome" by Anderson

"Time Heals" by Anderson

(vi) Characters transported into a past period when they either make some changes or fail to:

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp

Bring The Jubilee by Ward Moore

"The Man Who Came Early" by Anderson

"The Little Monster" by Anderson

and a current series -

Make The Darkness Light by SM Stirling

I. To Turn The Tide

II. The Winds Of Fate

III. TBA

Stirling's series title seems to follow from de Camp's novel title. Stirling's characters are time travellers by design, not by accident. They have read the sf. They know what to take with them into the past and how to conduct themselves then - insofar as anyone can. This is not Anderson's Time Patrol. These are travellers who do change history for the better - so far.

Forward march.

The Experience Of Reading

Everyone's experience of reading must be unique. 

A Conversation Half Way Through Secondary School

A Friend: How many books have you read?

Me: How could I possibly know how many books I have read?

Him: I know how many books I have read.

Me: How Many?

Him: Two.

The member of staff in charge of academic development become concerned that not enough general reading was being done so he required that each pupil submit a monthly report on a book that they had read that month. Some of us enjoyed writing a summary of a book that we had enjoyed reading not necessarily that month - I submitted a second or third draft - whereas others had to find a book to read, asked teachers for advice and disliked whatever book they "had to" write about. Ye gods!

Most of my leisure reading was sf. Trying to reread some of those books now, I realize that what I wanted then was the sf trappings. It was sufficient for me if a novel was about people travelling through space and colonizing other planets and so on. Now that would be nowhere near enough. I have been unable to reread some of those old books to their conclusions.

CS Lewis, who became a Professor of Literature, wrote somewhere that it was possible to read all the way through English literature - not every work, of course, but nevertheless all the major poems, plays and novels. I am nowhere near doing that and would not want to try. Apparently, Neil Gaiman read everything in the juvenile section of his local Public Library, then started reading through everything, starting from A, in the adult section - but preferred fantasy. In his place, I would have sought out the fantasy, not read everything starting from A.

The morals of this story:

I still read continually but now also blog about it;

I do a lot of rereading of certain favoured authors;

Poul Anderson gives us all that sf stuff - space travel, extraterrestrial colonization etc - but also a lot more than that and that makes him endlessly rereadable.

(Back from the meeting with enough time to add one more post.)

OROSZLANSZIV And Reading

Apparently "Oroszlansziv" means "Lionheart" which makes it an inaccurate translation of "Three Hearts and Three Lions." (I think.) But it is an interesting alternative cover.

I am drafting a slightly longer post on the experience of reading in general and on how this relates to Poul Anderson in particular. However, having returned home from the gym, I must now go out to a meeting so that post will probably be deferred until tomorrow.

There is no end in sight. 

I also must catch up with recent novels by SM Stirling whom this blog recognizes as a worthy successor of Poul Anderson as well as a writer in his own right. But that is one of a number of other stories.

Good evening or good night.

Trois Coeurs, Trois Lions; Trzy serca i tryz lwy; Tre cuori e tre leoni; Tres Corazones Y Tres Leones; Tri srdce, tri lvi

It is late here so let's just appreciate some translated titles and their covers.

How Much Rationalization?

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWELVE.

(An inaccurate cover illustration, unless the dwarf gets a donkey later in the novel. (I post as I reread and can't remember everything.))

A giant cannot just be a very big man with normal human bodily proportions:

"...the creature was humanoid, though grotesquely squat and short-legged in proportion to height. Well, [Holger's] thought flashed, even if the law of proportion doesn't work quite the same here as at home, he needs enough cross section to bear his weight." (pp. 73-74)

More scientific rationalization. 

See:

Rules, Riddles And Radioactivity

If all the fantasy ideas are scientifically rationalized, then the narrative becomes sf. But there are some genuinely supernatural agencies in the Carolingian. Holger thinks so. He converts to Catholicism. Does the force that unites the multiverse have a personal aspect in some universes but an impersonal one in others? 

Sunlight

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWELVE.

If I post about some obvious point in a text by Poul Anderson, then there is a good chance that I have posted about it before. However, there remain many unobvious points. Some legendary supernatural beings are vulnerable to sunlight so what would it feel like for them to be caught in it?

"As the first beams touched him, Balamorg screamed. Holger had never heard such agony before... He writhed and changed, gruesomely." (p. 79)

CS Lewis dreams:

"'The morning! The morning!' I cried, 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.' But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head."

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), pp. 117-118.

Then he woke up.

(Those were imaginative accounts of the fates of a giant and a ghost.)

Coventry

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWELVE.

Alianora:

"'As evil waxes, the very man who stand for good will in their fear use ever worse means o' fighting, and therefore give evil a free beachhead.'

"Holger thought of his own world, where Coventry had been avenged upon Cologne, and nodded." (pp. 71-72)

But people can create symbols for completely contradictory circumstances. St Paul's Cathedral surviving the Blitz boosted morale and symbolized proud resistance whereas Coventry Cathedral destroyed but later rebuilt came to symbolize peace and reconciliation. In Britain, the Dunkirk evacuation symbolizes not defeat and retreat but rescue and survival - waxing evil transfigured.