Some Environmental Details

World Without Stars, VI.

Day is "days" long, therefore the (very dark) night will be equally long so the men work hard to make camp.

Colours are difficult to identify in the dim light.

As usual on terrestroid planets in Poul Anderson's works, there is an equivalent of grass:

"...those tussocky growths which seemed to correspond to grass..." (p. 36)

There are no seasons because there is little axial tilt. Also:

"Photosynthesis under a red dwarf star can't use chlorophyll." (ibid.)

Scientific knowledge is crucial in sf.

Local wild life lacks certain amino acids, vitamins etc but the men eat packaged supplies, then get their food plant working. This is described in detail and we will return to it this evening when I have returned from a day trip to Blackpool. Chapter V has presented a plausible explanation of why the food plant at least had survived the wreck of the ship and its two ferries. Poul Anderson sets his characters up for several years on this planet.

Survival

World Without Stars, V.

Asked what is to be done, Hugh Valland replies:

"'We survive,'..." (p. 33)

Assessing their situation and their supplies, he judges:

"'We'll live,'..." (p. 35)

Asked whether they can get off the planet where they have crash-landed, he replies:

"'Got to.'" (ibid.)

Well, he says a little more than that:

"'Sure. Got to. Mary O'Meara's waitin' for me." (ibid.)

A more personal motivation has come into play. On our very first reading of this novel, we accept Valland's statement at face value. It is only at the very end of the novel that we question the sanity of his motivation. (We can only read for the first time once!)

Valland And Smeth

World Without Stars, V.

Valland would have made a good counsellor/clergyman for the dying. Smeth's ribs have pierced his lungs and his spine is broken. Valland asks whether he can remove Smeth's suit:

"'I've only had thirty years,' Smeth shrieked. 'Thirty miserable years! You've had three thousand!'

"'Shut up.' Valland's tone stayed soft, but I've heard less crack in a bullwhip. 'You're a man, aren't you?'

"Smeth gasped for seconds before he replied, 'Go ahead, Hugh.'" (p. 33)

Smeth asks Valland to sing and even specifies a song that is very personal to Valland and, after only a very slight hesitation, the latter complies.

What else could have been done? Smeth receives the best possible send-off in the circumstances. Valland is effortlessly good for everyone that he meets.

(The unfortunate Smeth was created - as a fictional character - only so that he could be painfully killed but authors cannot be compassionate towards their characters. Smeth's death is an important occurrence in World Without Stars.)

Hugh Valland's Competence

World Without Stars, V.

The Meteor crash lands:

"We hit." (p. 30)

When Captain Argens regains consciousness and goes to find his men, he meets Valland who:

gives him a full report on the half-flooded ship with two dead, one mortally injured and the survivors in the saloon;

suggests that the captain joins the rest while he himself looks outside before reporting back.

Definitely the kind of man that you want to have with you in a shipwreck or in any other catastrophe. He remarks:

"'I came through fairly well, myself,'..." (p. 31)

He has been coming through fairly well for three thousand years. We can bet on Valland continuing to survive for quite a while yet. 

Usually, we do not see fictional characters' deaths although James Blish felt obliged to show us his antiagathics-user meeting their ends at nothing less than the end of the universe. 

Big Spaceships

World Without Stars, III.

"We were nine aboard the Meteor, specialists whose skills overlapped. That was not many, to rattle around in so huge a hull. But you need room and privacy on a long trip, and of course as a rule we hauled a lot of cargo." (p. 17)

Spacemen need room on long trips. In other words, they need space in space. However, James Blish imagined a spaceship whose spaciousness was not welcome but overwhelming for its crew:

"The very hugeness of the Argo - a ship now manned by three people but built originally for two thousand - made her a creature of silences."

-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER FIVE, p. 51.

Such a large faster-than-light ship is necessary for a sixty thousand light-years round trip for just three men. Blish conveys the eeriness of the cavernous storage areas:

"...like being cast away in a deserted ocean liner..." (p. 52)

And both authors express the difficulties of interstellar travel even at hypothetical super-light speeds.

Experience And Emergency

World Without Stars.

Quick morning post. Probably more later.

After a space jump, the Meteor is not in orbit above the ecliptic of a planetary system but falling towards a planet. The wrong coordinates have been given. Captain Argens freezes but gunner Valland, the more experienced man, shouts orders which Argens then relays to the crew. Experience and authority cooperate in an emergency as they should do. 

I wanted to record that but now must get out to the bank. I should have time to post this evening.

Poul Anderson's Wars

 

Attached is the back cover blurb of my edition of Poul Anderson's World Without Stars. It summarizes the premises and some of the plot and ends with a reference to "...a world-wide war." We remember Brian Aldiss saying that Anderson tells us a dozen ways to get to another planet but then we find the same kinds of things happening when we get there.

See:

Aldiss, Amis, Anderson, Asimov, Lewis

The crew of the Meteor become involved in the war between Pack and Herd on the planet between galaxies.

Nicholas van Rijn becomes involved in the war between Flock and Fleet on Diomedes.

The crew of the USS Benjamin Franklin become involved in the war between Vorlak and Kandemir in the local civilization-cluster.

So, yes, there was something to what Aldiss said. But Anderson's wars are better than many others. 

Accidents

World Without Stars, V.

We know that, barring accidents, we will die in our beds comparatively soon. I am 77 and a Romany palm-reader told me that I would live to 95. Of course, she might be wrong. I might have a lot less than another 18 years still ahead of me.

Felipe Argens and his crew know something very different:

"...our immortality isn't absolute, because sooner or later some chance combination of circumstances is bound to kill you." (p. 27)

They know that they will die by accident and they have no idea how soon. Their deaths are very different from ours and that makes their lives also very different from ours. 

It is the attempt to imagine what it would be like that makes Poul Anderson's accounts of his characters, Hanno, Argens, Manse Everard, Jack Havig etc, so interesting.

I will retire to Inspector Morse and then to bed.

Immortal Employees

World Without Stars.

"Immortal" spacemen live for centuries or even millennia and spend all that time in paid employment in the same kind of work. Can't they save, invest and retire either to leisure activities or to retraining for other kinds of work? It seems an odd kind of existence. Even odder, they preserve their sanity by periodically editing their memories so that they only ever consciously remember a much shorter period, maybe only a few decades, like the equivalent of what used to be a normal working life. Their previous lives and work are recorded somewhere but not in their own conscious memories. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, recalls his youth, his most recent few years of work and only a few other selected details. He speaks of revisiting old places and visiting new places but even most of the old places will be experienced anew. And, in any case, there is an infinity of new places because the space jump gives access to every galaxy. This has to be the strangest fictional future ever.

In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the small group of mutant immortals have had to solve the memory accumulation problem for themselves and are able to traverse interstellar space at only sub-light speeds so their situation is very different. They propose to part and to reconvene in another million years which I should think is impossible. Will Hugh Valland survive for a million years? Statistically unlikely. But we would have liked to have read some sequels.

In James Blish's Okie cities, unaging policemen, and men in other professions, simply stay in those roles for centuries.

Things That Change Everything

Fiction based on modern scientific cosmology assumes much about the past, e.g., cosmic and biological evolution, even if this is not made explicit, although Poul Anderson's works very often do make this explicit.

Past Events That Changed Everything

The first self-replicating molecule.

Multicellularity.

Central nervous systems.

The first immediate sensation.

Emergence of life from sea onto land.

Manipulation.

The evolution of intelligence.

The agricultural revolution.

Writing.

Printing.

The scientific revolution.

The Industrial Revolution.

Darwinism.

The automobile.

Telegraph and radio.

The discovery of other galaxies and of cosmic expansion. 

Automation.

Modern information and computer technology.

Now imagine that list extended into an indefinite future.

"'Between them, immortality and star travel changed everything. Not necessarily for the worse. I pass no judgments on anybody.'"

-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), IV, p. 26.

Thus speaks a three-thousand-year-old man, Hugh Valland. By "star travel," Valland means instantaneous jumps to other galaxies! By "judgments," he alludes to different lifestyles. His lifestyle remains simultaneously monogamous and celibate. You have to read the novel right to its punchline.

A PC Wren character remains celibate because the one woman that he would have married has married someone else. When I read that in my teens, I thought that it made sense. It certainly takes all sorts.

Ad astra.