Multi-Sensory Overload

Poul Anderson, "My Own, My Native Land" IN Anderson, New America (New York, December 1982), pp. 9-50.

An Andersonian technique is to appeal to at least three of the senses in a descriptive passage so how does the following passage, set in the Rustumite lowlands, grab us?

"The air hung windless, hot and heavy. It was full of odors, pungent, sweet, rank, bitter, none recalling home. Sounds came loud - a background of trills, whispers, buzzes, rustles, purling water; footfalls..." (p. 29)

We notice:

windlessness instead of Anderson's usual wind;

heat, odours and sounds - indeed three;

furthermore, an overload especially of the second and third;

"home" is not Earth but the colonized High America plateau above the permanent cloud cover, effectively a different ecology.

We know that all of these sensations will be having a very unpleasant effect on Danny Coffin who has never recovered from a terrifying experience in the lowlands when he was young although we also expect that this story will be a turning point. Something significant usually happens or changes in a short story. In Anderson's "Rescue on Avalon," Jack Birnham overcomes his antipathy to Ythrians. See Reconciliations.

See also The Rustumite Lowlands.

More About Other Reading

I do not think that it is irrelevant to mention other reading now and again. Presumably we all read something other than Poul Anderson - and not just other sf? In fact, no two people will have read exactly the same collection of titles and everything that we read finds its place in the context of everything else that we have read. Thus, anything either historical or scientific can shed light on Andersonian themes and settings.

Having just reread Barbara Vine's A Fatal Inversion with enjoyment, I might well launch back into Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (my equivalent of The Lord Of The Rings). How good it can be sometimes to get away from aliens and spaceships for a while although always remembering that the stellar universe still surrounds us whether or not contemporary novelists mention it much. When there are permanent Lunar bases, then contemporary novelists will refer to them. In fact, modern knowledge of exo-planets is not science fictional but factual and therefore is also able to provide subject-matter to be mentioned or discussed in contemporary fiction.

My next task blog-wise is to reread more of Anderson's Rustum History but first comes satisfying the inner man, by meditating and eating.

Ayres And Eyre

Lady Varvara, widow of the Imperial resident on Nyanza, is an:

"'...Ayres [scroll down] of Antarctica.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 303-339 AT II, p. 310.

Our daughter's partner, Mike, is a Eyre of Birmingham.

Ayres and Eyre sound similar despite their two spelling differences.

The multiracial, multicultural British city, Birmingham, prefigures Poul Anderson's multispecies Terran Empire - although I now suspect that multispecies civilizations are in the realm of fantasy rather than of hard sf.

Merseians and Ythrians are akin to trolls and elves.

Got to finish second coffee and move.

Rescue Followed By Recuperation On Both Rustum And Avalon

Joshua Coffin and Jan Svoboda have rescued Danny Coffin from the hostile Rustumite lowlands. Svoboda recuperates:

"Sunshine came through crisp white curtains, reflected off a bowl of water, and made waves on the opposite wall. A cool gust followed into the bedroom. Outside, the lawn was still green but the gimtrees had turned color, scarlet streaked with gold, and the Hercules Mountains were blue and dim through a haze not unlike Earth's Indian summer."

-Orbit Unlimited, part four, 9, p. 153.

After a sickroom visit by the mayor:

"Svoboda didn't return to his book at once. He lay for a while gazing out the window, toward the horizon where the snowpeaks of Hercules upheld the sky.

"THE END." (p. 158)

Appropriately during recuperation, there is a cool gust, not a cold blast.

Jack Birnam has rescued Ayan, Wyvan of Stormgate, who was injured during an Avalonian storm. In the Ythrian ward of the hospital:

"Ayan lay in one of the frames designed for his race. He was alone in his room. Its window stood open to a lawn and tall trees - Avalonian king's crown, Ythrian windnest, Earthly oak - and a distant view of snowpeaks. Light spilled from heaven. The air sang. Ayan looked wistfully outward."

-Poul Anderson, "Rescue on Avalon" IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 307-322 At p. 321.

(Ythrians are fliers. When recovered, Ayan will fly through heaven towards those distant snowpeaks.)

Air sings; it does not shout or roar. Again, appropriate.

Sequel

I do not know the circumstances behind the publication of Roger Elwood's Continuum anthologies. Was Poul Anderson asked to continue an already existing series or just to contribute four new stories in which case it was he who decided that these contributions would constitute four additional Rustum History instalments, thus doubling the length of this series?

In any case, the first story in New America is a logical sequel to the fourth and concluding story in Orbit Unlimited:

Danny Coffin is no longer a small boy but a teenager;

Danny had a harrowing experience in the Rustumite lowlands so does not want to return there;

however, unlike most Rustumites, he is able to live comfortably in lowland conditions, therefore he is in demand there!;

thus, a human problem in an sf setting.

I certainly appreciate both the setting and the problem but would not have been able to create a story based on them whereas Poul Anderson was. Our next step here is to reread this fifth Rustum History instalment maybe some time this weekend.

Computer And Continuum

Hi. My current computer problem is that I cannot publish comments in the combox but can publish posts like this one (I hope). This is a quick post before going out again in half an hour.

Poul Anderson stories first published in anthologies of original stories edited by Roger Elwood:

Technic History

"Wingless" (1973)

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" (1974)

time travel, non-series

"the Little Monster" (1974)

Rustum History

"My Own, My Native Land" (1974)

"Passing the Love of Women" (1974)

"A Fair Exchange" (1974)

"To Promote the General Welfare" (1975)

The four Rustum stories were first published in Continuum I-IV, respectively, and are collected in Poul Anderson, New America.

Ad astra.

An Unwilling Hero

Orbit Unlimited, part four, 9.

On Rustum, Mayor Theron Wolfe explains to Jan Svoboda why he, Wolfe, has pressured Svoboda into becoming a hero:

"'Now that the initial struggle to survive is past, each family has retreated more and more into its own selfish concerns. We can't have that. Man can't live alone. The lost, the sick, the weak, and poor have got to be helped, or how can we depend on their help when our own luck runs out?'" (p. 157)

Too right. Those who believe that morality is a list of divine commands ask secularists where we get our morality from. I reply that we have been naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and that we experience this latter motivation as moral obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like if it is expressed in purely evolutionary terms as I have just done. But there is also a countervailing tendency towards narrow self-interest and Wolfe schemes to shame Rustumites out of this!

(If you see children suffering, do you think, "This must not happen to any children?" or "This must not happen to my children?" The latter can entail that whatever it is must continue happening to someone else's children.)

Wolfe's manipulativeness matches that of Mayor John Amalfi in James Blish's Cities In Flight.

Malevolence?

Orbit Unlimited, part four, 8.

We have read about Joshua Coffin praying that God's will be done. But there is another way to look at it.

Coffin's companion, Jan Svoboda:

"Defeat rose in Svoboda's throat like vomit. He told the knowledge over and over, a kind of litany to the malevolent God who had arranged matters in precisely this way." (p. 150)

SM Stirling has argued in earlier comboxes on this blog that we have been naturally selected to discern motives in each other - one man approaches with a smile, another with a frown - and, as an extension of this, we also attribute motives to non-human phenomena. Our ancestors tried to placate gods of the weather. 

Many of us now think, on scientific and philosophical grounds, that the causes of natural events do not include any "will," whether benevolent, malevolent or inscrutable.

Coffin and Svoboda can, if they want, argue the matter after the event. 

Forgotten Details

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

How many details do we remember out of all the books that we have read? For example, how did Danny Coffin wind up in a spearfowl's nest? Did the spearfowl grab him and carry him up there?

No. When a tusked animal chased Danny, he ran to a crag and climbed up it, causing a landslide that frightened away the animal but made it impossible for Danny to climb back down again. Fortunately, the spearfowl was away from home when Danny fell asleep in its nest. When the bird did return, Danny's would-be rescuers, his father and Jan Svoboda, were close enough so that it had to check on them before landing.

Svoboda gets close, although not close enough, with climbing equipment and an exploding piton wakens Danny. How the two men do rescue him is described in Rescue On Rustum. All the details fit together. It is just a matter of rereading them. 

The Forever Wind

Orbit Unlimited, part four, 7.

Joshua Coffin and Jan Svoboda continue their search for Coffin's lost son, Danny, and the wind continues to punctuate Poul Anderson's account of their activities. 

(i) When Svoboda strikes a cigarette and Coffin wishes that this good fellow would not poison himself:

"The wind ruffled Svoboda's hair, as it did the leaves at their backs and the grasses beneath." (p. 140)

An unthreatening wind on this occasion. Indeed, it ruffles that good fellow's hair! 

(ii) While their conversation continues:

"The wind blew the sweat out of [Coffin's] clothes so fast that he was soon chilled. The forest roared with wind. Its velocity was not great, but the pressure made it a near gale.

"Windpower would be valuable when men were finally able to move down off the plateaus." (ibid.)

Back to threatening but also a hope for the future. (The future has a future.)

(iii) When they argue, Svoboda, striking the ground to master himself, says:

"'Have it your way.' The wind harried his words." (p. 142)

Sure. The wind joins in the argument! 

(iv) When Coffin stands up to attack Svoboda:

"The wind pushed at his back, he must lean into it, the wind hooted and tried to push him southward along the canyon, which resounded with its noise." (ibid.)

Man and wind rise together.

(v) As they fight, Coffin wonders:

"Was it the wind that shouted in his ears, or was he about to faint?" (p. 143)

We suspect both.

(vi) After fighting and pulling apart, they check how each other is:

"'Are you all right?' Coffin whispered.

"His words could not have crossed through the wind, but Svoboda must have understood. 'Yes. I think so. But you.'" (ibid.)

(vii) The wind even helps:

"Svoboda started south... This direction was a slightly better bet than northward. Danny would have preferred the wind at his back..." (p. 144)

(viii) - but remains unsympathetic:

"[Coffin's] consciousness withdrew from pain and thirst and hunger and the mockery of the wind." (ibid.)

I did not know how many wind references I would find in this section but Poul Anderson's texts never let us down.