The Masterworks

At the back of my copy of Clifford Simak's City, there is a two-page list of eighty nine (or thereabouts) titles in this SF Masterworks series. Only one, Tau Zero, is by Poul Anderson.

There are:

1 title by Robert Heinlein

1 by Larry Niven

1 by Frank Herbert

1 by Clifford Simak

2 by James Blish

2 by Greg Bear

2 by Michael Moorcock

2 by Kurt Vonnegut

2 by Ursula le Guin

2 by Richard Matheson

3 by Robert Silverberg

3 by Samuel R. Delaney

3 by Brian Aldiss

3 by Olaf Stapledon

3 by Frederik Pohl + 1 by Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth

5 by HG Wells

5 by Arthur C. Clarke

14 by Philip K. Dick

- and thirty other authors are represented by only a single title. (This includes two titles with two authors.) If anyone else has a copy of this edition, please check my numbers. I don't always get the same total when I re-count.

(Blish's two titles are his Tetralogy in a single volume and Volume III of his Trilogy, Volumes I and II being historical fiction and fantasy, respectively.)

Needless to say, I disagree with any scale of values that gives Anderson one volume and Dick fourteen.

Another Problem And The Fate Of Cities

Orbit Unlimited, part three.

This is yet another story built around:

a seemingly insurmountable technical problem;

what I have come to call an Andersonian moment of realization - in this case, one character leaps up, startling another, when he suddenly realizes what the solution must be;

a later disclosure of the solution to the readers;

meanwhile, a human problem that must also be recognized and overcome before the technical solution can be implemented.

However, since, in this case, both the technical problem and its solution are even more complicated than usual, I will not attempt to summarize them here but instead will advise blog readers to read or reread the story - which I always do anyway.

Meanwhile, in parallel reading, in the "FIRST TALE" in Clifford Simak's City, rapid transportation for commuting, replacement of agriculture by hydroponics and new easy building techniques enable populations to move to the countryside, making cities redundant. In Poul Anderson's The Peregrine, a similar situation is described as making the entire Earth a single city.

(If City continues to display such parallels, then I might continue to reread it.)

Who Represents SF?

My copy of Clifford Simak's City (SF Masterworks, Gollancz, London, 2010) has arrived and I am honestly uncertain as to whether I will summon up the motivation to reread it from cover to cover whereas, decades ago, I had rated it highly. I ordered City via eBay because recently on this blog I compared four stories set on Jupiter:

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson

"Bridge" by James Blish

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Of these stories, "Call Me Joe" is alone in not being part of a series - although three different Andersonian series do include Jupiter-related stories. "Bridge" was incorporated into Blish's They Shall Have Stars which I have recently reread with interest. "Desertion," which I was able to reread online, was incorporated into City, hence this purchase. 

The cover quotes Robert Heinlein as saying, "To read science fiction is to read Simak." What? I can think of several more significant names and would substitute Anderson for Simak. Heinlein himself - early Heinlein - is surely more important? Inside, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov and James Gunn write highly of Simak. Asimov tried to imitate his style.

By contrast with this, James Blish, whom I rank with Anderson, did not respect Simak's works.

The Introduction by Gwyneth Jones quotes Heinlein:

"The reader who does not like Simak stories, does not like science fiction at all." (p. v)

Clearly untrue!

Jones informs us that Simak was:

"Never remotely interested in 'technology', or in factual 'science'..." (p. vii)

But science fiction is about the relationship of human beings not only to each other but also to the universe revealed by science including the potentialities of technology. Sf began with Frankenstein: can a scientist create life?

Simak himself is quoted as saying that, disillusioned by World War II and the Atomic Bomb, he wrote the City stories only to create a momentary refuge. When Jones expands on this, I find it difficult to paraphrase and therefore will have to quote at greater length than I would have preferred:

"For a moment, in these tales, a Man sits in his armchair, his loving Dog at his knee, a glass of whisky at his elbow; pondering the lives of small creatures in the quiet woods around his homestead. Asking nothing, demanding no reward or second chance for the failed experiment of human civilization; inventing nothing that isn't already held in this moment, he spins a dream of blameless wonderland." (ibid.)

Inventing nothing? That is not sf! Just before the passage quoted, Jones describes the City stories as having:

"...only the most perfunctory futuristic trappings." (ibid.)

That human civilization will fail, will even destroy itself, is one of the possibilities that has to be faced and is faced by sf writers, including Poul Anderson. Retreat to a homestead in the quiet woods in the present moment and not in any future endeavour is one possible response to this...

However, Jones goes further:

"Perhaps all of science fiction secretly lives in Simak's moment, and is made of the same stuff as City - a paradoxical hybrid of nihilism and wish-fulfilment; tempered by a stoic acceptance of the cold equations." (p. viii)

No, it does not. Acceptance yes but not either nihilism or wish-fulfilment. Poul Anderson takes us to the further reaches of space and time both in mythical worlds and in the physical universe insofar as it was understood at the time of writing.

Meanwhile here and now: for me, today has become very indulgent, staying in a dressing gown and adding to the blog instead of stirring out of the house. The next few days will have to involve a lot of physical exercise and much less computer time.

A Giant Fish

Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited contains perhaps even more Biblical references than usual in a work by Anderson because of its character, Joshua Coffin. However, where do Biblical references end and the rest of the English language begin? Jan Svoboda, travelling in a spaceship seated beside Captain Kivi, hears around them, in their enclosed environment, the murmuring engines, oxygenators and airblowers and:

"...echoes down long resonant passageways. It was like being swallowed alive by some giant fish, he thought, and hearing its metabolism close in. He strangled on the wish to escape." (p. 82)

Again the paradox of travel through infinite space contrasted with enclosure. However, this time, the image is not of a metal coffin but of a giant fish which can only recall Jonah - and Anderson, writing this, must have thought of Jonah?

Jonah refused to travel to the ends of the Earth because he did not accept that the Word of God should be taken to foreigners. Svoboda and his companions have had to travel away from Earth because of the intolerance of its current rulers. Maybe there is some common message there or maybe I just see messages where they aren't?

Conflicting Histories And Corrupted Bureaucracies

Poul Anderson presents fictional futures with or without nuclear wars. See Our Chaos. There can also be alternative histories of how nuclear weapons have been used. I have just reread Grant Morrison's Zenith in which the Allies nuked not Japan but Berlin, thus obliterating the Nazi superhero, Masterman, just as he was killing the English superhero, Maximan. Nothing original there, just a new combination of - can we call them "ficts" (fictional facts)?

But it is time for us to return to Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited which has given me a new insight into the potential depth of state corruption. Jan Svoboda dislikes what a state school is teaching his son so he goes and beats up his son's teacher, Mr. Tse, and is arrested. When Svoboda's fellow philosophical dissident, Theron Wolfe, intervenes, a respectful policeman not only apologizes for the mistake of arresting the son of a Federation Commissioner but also asks Wolfe, a civilian:

"'Do you wish to file any charges against the Tse person?... We'll take care of him, sir.'" (p. 31)

Tse, beaten up for doing his job, might now be "taken care of" by the police! Fortunately, Wolfe wants his friend out of police custody but not to perpetrate any further injustice. But just think of the attitude of that policeman! And then think about how often such an attitude is reproduced on Earth Real.

Svoboda, Wolfe and their fellow Constitutionalists leave Sol.

Our Chaos

Hi, folks. With tiredness setting in, we might not return to Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited this evening.

We imagine that we are living in the Chaos of Anderson's Technic History although without believing that this is going to be followed either by a Solar Commonwealth or by a hyperdrive. But how will we, in our timeline, get through our version of the Chaos? At what point will the two timelines diverge?

Wisdom from Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today:

US politics - everything has already been said about this so now we can only wait and see;

despite all the current escalation, no one wants to start throwing nukes around because of the uncontrollable consequences.

We must hope that that second point, which has held since 1945, remains valid. Of course, Anderson created fictional futures both with and without nuclear wars. For every conceivable option, read Anderson.

Another Medium

We appreciate Poul Anderson's prose fiction and also other media. 

Last night, unable to sleep, I wanted to sit up and read but not to return to the prose text of Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited. I needed a visual medium but not TV, something to see and read on a page, not to see and hear on a screen. The perfect answer was Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid (1988-1989) in three volumes which, fortunately, was easily to hand on a bookshelf.

Gaiman does not write sf but we need a break from sf which I also find in contemporary thrillers by Stieg Larsson. Apart from stunning art by Dave McKean, Gaiman's script gives us the kind of texture that we find in Anderson's prose texts, e.g., skillful deployment of already existing characters and settings:

the "Principle" of a criminal organization turns out to be Mr. Lex Luthor;

a train departs to Gotham City...

After visiting Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today, we will return to Orbit Unlimited this evening.

Orbital Accident

Orbit Unlimited, part three, 1-2.

Sometimes we appreciate a complicated passage in a work by Poul Anderson by summarizing it in a blog post but this passage is extra complicated so please bear with us.

The fleet of spaceships enters planetary orbit at a safe distance from the planet, Rustum. Winged, thermally propelled ferries take some of the crew and all of the colonists to High America, the habitable plateau on Rustum. Some of the crew on the planet refine reaction mass for the return journey while the others help the colonists to get settled. 

To unload cargo, each ship in turn is brought to a lower orbit and therefore spirals down through a radiation belt in the planetary magnetic field. To save time, colonist Jan Svoboda, ferried back up, begins preparing cargo for discharge in the flag ship, the Ranger, while it is still descending. The autopilot gives a few seconds of 5G blast to avoid an approaching meteorite just as Svoboda has unslung an object massing more than a ton. Crashing through a deck and smashing a hole in the engine room wall, the object activates the fail safe system of the nuclear plant, thus stopping fusion reaction. The radiation screen goes off and it becomes immediately necessary to:

"'Abandon ship!'" (p. 71)

Maybe that was easier than I had expected.

Tomorrow, once more: a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. That means hours away from the computer but probably something worth reporting later.

North America In Two Timelines

In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the colonized asteroids successfully rebel against North America whereas, in Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, North America has unsuccessfully rebelled against the Federation! Familiar actors exchange roles. We have known more than one Federation in sf.

I apologize for brevity but I am suddenly in a rush. Laterz.

(Meanwhile, think about North Americas and Federations.) 

EVA At STL

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited (New York, 1972).

While a fleet of spaceships crosses the distance between two planetary systems at half light-speed, a spacesuited man leaves his ship, fires a magnetic bolt with a light line unreeling behind it at the nearest ship, tests the line's security, pulls himself across between ships and repeats this exercise until he has reached his target ship.

No! (Would you travel like that?)

The ships expel nine tons for each one ton that they transport and will need months at the target system to refine enough reaction material for the return journey. Most of the passengers are in cold sleep. Will anyone ever expend that much effort, energy, engineering etc to try to colonize a terrestroid extrasolar planet?

"...a cramped, sterile, vacuum-enclosed spaceship, month after month after month, began to affect the human mind rather like bandaged vision when afloat in a tank of warm water. Minds could never have disintegrated as quickly in midocean (sun and moon, wind and rain, the infinite shifting pattern of waves, the hope of catching a fish or seeing an island) as they did between the stars. It was accepted that a spaceman near the end of his year-watch was not quite sane." (part two, 4, p. 64)

Paradox: the freedom of interstellar travel but in a cramped, sterile environment. Well, an interstellar vessel must not be cramped or sterile. In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the spaceship Astra, really a hollowed asteroid, is:

"...a city of clustered domes and turrets and housings and machines..." (p. 226)

Anyone who crosses an interstellar distance at sub-light speeds has to take their environment with them and therefore is not dependent on finding a habitable environment at their destination.

The asterites in Tales... have gravity control but not FTL. In James Blish's Okies series, gravity control unexpectedly generates FTL, a deus ex machina.