On The Moon

A large part of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set on the Moon:

"Requiem"

"The Long Watch"

"Gentlemen, Be Seated"

"The Black Pits of Luna"

"It's Great To Be Back"

"The Menace from Earth"

"Searchlight"

"Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon"

We remember these stories when we read Poul Anderson's Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 2, set on the Moon. A Lunarian woman lopes on the surface, her outspread solar collectors and cooling surfaces resembling dragonfly wings, her silver, mostly bionic, spacesuit fitting her like a second skin. A Lunarian man leads his vacuum-adapted moonwolf on a leash. Jess Nicol remembers the phrase, "Magnificent desolation..." (p. 44)

Anderson's vision continues and completes Heinlein's.

Lirion

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 1.

It is the Lunarians that threaten the "peace." The successful Proserpinan colony inspires the Lunarians in the inner Solar System with the knowledge:

"...that their old wild ways are still alive, still free." (p. 38)

And this is a problem for the cybercosm!

Lirion of Zamok Dragon returns from Proserpina to Luna and is suspected of - something.

An aspect of the central intelligence opines:

"-The temptation is to seize him and brainphase his knowledge out of him, legality or no." (p. 39)

But this temptation will be resisted on moral grounds? Well, no. The aspect continues:

"But he doubtless has emergency means, such as blowing his skull to bits, and we have no idea what his disappearance might trigger." (ibid.)

Venator helpfully adds:

"-Besides, he in himself may provide a spoor to follow into the heart of whatever this conspiracy is. I will seek him out, and then we shall see." (ibid.)

Lirion is not seized only because it is more expedient to follow him. The cybercosm has unequivocally identified itself as the villain of the piece/peace.

Onward with the story after I have been out for the evening.

Peace

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 1. 

A downloaded personality named Venator has been incorporated into the cybercosm but reactivated so that he can perform a specific task in a robot body. Before his robotic re-embodiement, Venator converses with an aspect of the central intelligence which informs him that:

"Our great peace lies once more under threat." (p. 34)

The entire narrative leaves us in no doubt that this peace is a carefully maintained, managed, even manipulated, passivity. There is a general misconception, here encouraged by Anderson, that "peace" means nothing but passivity. Do we have to choose between violence and passivity? There are more than two options. It is the task of sf to consider every option and we can read utopias as well as dystopias. We need to end and transcend conflict and violence so that society can become more interactive, dynamic and creative, not so that it can be held indefinitely in a static equilibrium. 

The cybercosm congratulates itself that:

"Little active hostility to the order of things remains on Earth, and it is ideational or emotional - ill informed, ill organized where it is organized at all, devoid of any significant resources." (p. 35)

That is a death knell. Why should the cybercosm maintain an "order of things"? Everyone, especially those who are hostile, should be given every opportunity to understand and express themselves and to shape their own order of things, both individually and collectively. That is possible. That is what society can aim at. AI is welcome to help - certainly not to obstruct.

HARVEST OF STARS: Summary II

See HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

What I missed:

Conscious AI dominated society which became stable, peaceful and prosperous but neither fulfilled nor content.

Synnoionts are human beings who have become human-AI interfaces.

Lunarians colonized a large, dense asteroid, Proserpina, on a two million year orbit, currently passing from the Kuiper Belt to the Oort Cloud, and mine bodies in those outer regions. 

Nicol did not know about:

Life Mothers guiding planetary ecologies and growing new organic bodies for downloaded personalities;

the colonization of three other extra-solar planets.

HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, November 1997).

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy, each volume covers a single different period of a future history except Volume II, The Stars Are Also Fire, which covers two periods. Thus, if we read the series in numerical order, then, as we begin Harvest The Fire, PROLOGUE, pp. 9-31, with four pages of illustrations, we are already familiar with the first three of the five periods.

Jesse Nicol, a frustrated poet, seeks inspiration by recounting the future history to date to a simulation of Jorge Luis Borges. Of course the summary in Nicol's mind helps readers whether they have read Volumes I and II or not.

Human beings got into space when the cost of launch had been brought down, mainly by Fireball Enterprises. The Moon was colonized but completion of pregnancy was impossible in Lunar gravity so Lunarians were genetically engineered. Other human species were engineered on Earth and also the Keiki Moana, intelligent seals. 

Robotics became highly developed. Some human personalities, including Anson Guthrie, founder and chief executive of Fireball, were downloaded into artificial neural networks. Lunarians, led by Selenarchs, became independent of the World Federation and colonized Mars, asteroids and outer moons.

Fireball and the Selenarch Rinndalir waged war against the Federation for a reason not stated here. Download Guthrie led dissident Terrans and Lunarians to Alpha Centauri. Terrans colonized Demeter, doomed to be destroyed in a planetary collision in a thousand years, whereas Lunarians colonized Centaurian asteroids. 

The Federation reincorporated Luna and moved an abandoned L-5 colony to Lunar orbit where Terran women from Luna could give birth, thus enabling Terrans to outnumber Lunarians on Luna. The Lahui Kuikawa, comprised of human beings and Keiki Moana, moved to a mid-Pacific island. 

Conscious AI was developed, then developed itself further.

There is some more but I have to go out.

Endings

The Fleet Of Stars, 31-32.

At the end of Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, we want to read about Lazarus Long and Andy Libby searching the galaxy for colonizable planets. At the end of Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, we want to read about Anson Guthrie and Fenn regaining consciousness in newly grown organic bodies on Beta Hydri IV, Amaterasu. What a long way we have come since reading about an organic Guthrie on Amaterasu in Chapter I.

It is nearly midnight here, I have reread to the end of The Fleet Of Stars and have nothing more to add for now until some time tomorrow when our prescribed text will be Harvest Of Stars, Volume III, Harvest The Fire. Rereading the Tetralogy backwards is proving to be productive.

Let us hope that our world will still be here tomorrow morning.

Ezekiel, Monet, Bach And Lunarian

The Fleet Of Stars, 27.

Fenn does not know where he has read:

"Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." (p. 347)

We know either from our scriptural knowledge or from the Internet that it is Ezekiel 37:9 and therefore is yet another of Poul Anderson's many Biblical references.

See, in particular:

A Note On Anderson's Use Of The Bible by Sean M. Brooks

Guthrie's spaceship has a projection of Monet's "Cliff at Varengeville" in the saloon. See the attached image. Guthrie plays Bach's Fourth Brandenberg Concerto.

We read a single sentence of Lunarian:

"'Aou, scavaire ti sielle.'" (p. 374)

I interpret this as:

"Hail, make yourself known."

Other languages are in the background of Poul Anderson's works but never come to the fore.

There is an account of the visuals of a cosmic civilization but, because this will turn out to be a deception, I do not want to summarize it.

After all this build-up, Guthrie and Fenn have become an unbeatable team as we approach the end of the tetralogy.

Arrakis And Aeneas

Reading about Mars in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars makes us think of Arrakis/Dune in Frank Herbert's Dune series and, indeed, see:

Mars And Dune

For more discussion of Dune on this blog than I had realized, and particularly for comparisons between Herbert's Dune and Anderson's Aeneas, see a blog search result for Dune here. Maybe that suffices and we can leave it at that?

Aeneas is better realized than Dune and deserves to be seen in serialized screen adaptations of The Rebel Worlds and The Day Of Their Return with some extra scenes to show the earlier lives of characters like Hugh McCormac and Ivar Frederiksen but no extended series about this planet. We do not need any Children Of Aeneas...

Deimos Or Phobos?

The Fleet Of Stars.

Is it proposed to transform and inhabit Deimos (see 10, p. 131, and Fenn's Futuristic Speculation) or Phobos (see 26, p. 338, and Israel And The Space Program)? I had to check which Martian moon was meant and found references to both. This was not meant to be a new post but it seemed easier to do it this way than as an addendum to the preceding post.

We will come to the details of how the cybercosm had planned to demoralize and demotivate mankind which is an abysmal story. More positive stuff is going to happen in the further future but the tetralogy ends with the thwarting of this dismal plot.

And now I will try to close down operations for tonight. Tomorrow, some gardening, some exercise, the Gregson and probably some more posts about The Fleet Of Stars. Good night.

Israel And The Space Program

The Fleet Of Stars, 26.

We peer forward into speculative futures and sometimes see them peering back at us. Chuan says that the project to transform Phobos and terraform Mars:

"'...was always more an ideal...than a business venture... Not unlike the state of Israel or the movement for a viable space program on twentieth-century Earth.'" (p. 338)

How will our remote descendants regard us?

Since writing the immediately preceding post, I have:

attended a Zen group where two of us agreed that maybe our Prime Minister is currently facing a "koan," an unanswerable question;

returned home and watched TV news coverage of the Prime Minister facing questions and accused of lying;

reread and posted about Chuan's remarks as above.

And that brings us up to date. As ever, the future stretches ahead from this moment, from tomorrow morning and in sf.

Tempus fugit.