Cosmic Responsibility

I want to quote Poul Anderson's "Outpost of Empire" on intelligent organisms being produced as casually as snowflakes and the same author's Genesis on life of any kind being so rare as to seem miraculous but, of course, I have already done so. See Snowflakes And Miracles.

This issue will recur as more is learned about the universe in general and about exoplanets in particular. Whatever provisional conclusions have been reached could be overturned tomorrow.

A quotation from Brian Cox came across my computer screen yesterday. He thought that unicellular life should be common in the universe and maybe even elsewhere in the Solar System. However, a vast amount of time has to elapse between single living cells and then - consciousness, intelligence, civilization and technology. None of this is predestined to happen. If plants but not animals survive best in a particular environment, then that is all that will evolve there.

If we are alone in the observable universe, that part of reality that is observable by us, then we alone are responsible for preserving meaning and understanding in that part of the universe, a big responsibility. If we wipe ourselves out soon, then it would be good to have learned at least that we were not alone. So, while fearing that intelligence is rare, we hope that it is not. 

The Oneness Of Time In One Future History Series

"Cold Victory."

Robert Crane reminisces:

"...I went alone down the steep bluffs above the Mississippi. There I found the old man denned up under the trees, a tramp, one of many millions for whom there was no place in this new world of shining machines - but he was not embittered, he drew his citizen's allowance and tramped the planet and he had stories to tell..." (p. 82)

That would be me if we were to live into such a future. The shining machines might remind us of old sf mag covers. An allowance is the least that we could expect although we might campaign for more. Denning under trees would be a way to eke out the allowance.

The tramp takes us back to an earlier Psychotechnic History installment, "Quixote and the Windmill," which is about technological unemployment. Even the first humanoid robot is unemployed. He too walks across the Earth but he will live for centuries and cannot get drunk.

The fact that one installment reminds us of more than one earlier instalment reminds us of:

"...the great Pact, which is the heart of civilization, of society, and ultimately of life itself: the unspoken Pact between the living, the dead, and the unborn, that to the best of our poor mortal abilities they shall be kept one in the oneness of time."

-"The Pirate," p. 126.

One In Time In The Psychotechnic History

Eino Valti (who remains off-stage)

Jacques Reinach ("Marius")

Etienne Fourre

Stefan Rostomily

the Un-Men

the Sensitive Man

the first robot in the world

the Planetary Engineers

clans on Venus

the Solar Guard

the Crane brothers

the tramp

Trevelyan Micah

Braganza Diane

the Stellar Union Coordination Service

the Nomads

the native Nerthusians

the Hulduvians

the people evacuated from Earth

the Galactics

(not a complete list)

Sanity Prevails Or At Least Tries To

"Cold Victory."

Garcia and Wolf would both mutiny rather than bombard Earth and deserters leave K'ung's fleet. But the Humanists have built a hard cadre over a decade - although not living up to their name. When people say, of a particular atrocity, that it is against Islam or against Christianity etc, I reply that it is against our common humanity which is what should unite us. 

Crane reflects that Union personnel are not saints, indeed most had signed on for booty. Booty!

"...the System knew how much treasure was locked in the vaults of Earth's dictators." (p. 81)

But treasure in a physical form that can be looted by a fleet of men who arrive from space, then break military discipline to take and carry away whatever they can find? (Some of this does happen now.)

Although it is not saintliness that makes men like Garcia and Wolf reject the idea of bombardment:

"...the horror of nuclear war had been too deeply graven for anyone but a fanatic at the point of desperation to think of using it." (ibid.)

This horror is a legacy from the opening installments of the Psychotechnic History, "Marius" and "Un-Man," where Etienne Fourre was a fanatic against any further international wars. The Psychotechnic Institute has gone under but not the ideal of the United Nations/Solar Union. This future history series has a direction despite its many twists and turns. The Institute overthrown between installments and the Humanists overthrown in the next installment is two turns for the price of one.

Robert Crane's Solution

(I don't know what "Silent Victory" is but let's be having it.)

"Cold Victory."

"If the superdreadnaught Monitor could be destroyed, and K'ung with it, Earth might not be bombarded. Then if the Unionists won, Ben would go free, or he would die cleanly in battle - reason enough to ride this thing into the Humanist fleet!" (p. 81)

The fate of Ben is not the main point!

I certainly agree with killing K'ung. See Killing No Murder.

Years ago, a guy in Britain wrote a book taking the title, Killing No Murder. He argued that assassinating political leaders is preferable to war as a way to conduct international conflicts. Interviewed on TV, he was asked whether there was any then current politician whom he thought it would be good to assassinate. He replied that he could not answer that question because he had been carefully warned that he could lay himself open to a charge of incitement to murder.

Correction: We do know what "Silent Victory" is. See here.

Issues In War

"Cold Victory."

Extraordinary but true: rereading a single early short story by Poul Anderson brings up descriptive passages, literary cross-references, moral and political issues, the works.

"...Dushanovitch-Alvarez, half idealist and half buccaneer, was assembling the Unionist fleet..." (p. 80)

Really? Does buccaneering work in space? (Gunnar Heim makes space privateering work in Anderson's The Star Fox.)

The Moral Problem

Lieutenant Robert Crane, fighting on the Unionist side, learns that his brother, Benjamin, is a spaceship captain on the Humanist side.

Dushnovitch-Alvarez announces that Admiral K'ung's threatened nuclear bombardment of Earth:

"...would be regarded as genocide and all officers partaking in it would be punished under Union law." (p. 81)

- assuming that the Solar Union survives this war, of course.

Robert Crane, who obviously has a personal issue here, protests that:

"...this was not a normal police operation, it was war, and executing men who merely obeyed the government they had pledged to uphold was opening the gates to a darker barbarism than the fighting itself." (ibid.)

Really? Darker than nuclear bombardment of a population? Unless the rebels surrender, K'ung will:

"...start bombing with nuclear weapons. That, of course, would kill perhaps a hundred million civilians, flatten the factories, poison the sea ranches...he'd turn the planet into a butcher shop." (p. 77)

War crime. Genocide. K'ung's men should arrest him as soon as he issues this threat. What is K'ung thinking of? What good will a murdered planet be to either side? Robert is prepared to condone this because his brother might be involved?

Too understaffed to demote Lieutenant Crane, the Unionist Navy publicly reproves him for insubordination and he earns the disapproval of his messmates. That makes him volunteer for a mission that brings him face to face with his brother, the crux of the story.

We here and now support opposed sides in current conflicts. "Cold Victory" is simultaneously escapist and highly relevant. Quite an achievement.

Would we like to fly out through the Solar System? Some of us would. Would merely doing that free us from the conflicts back on Earth? Clearly not. Certainly not while the human race continues to produce K'ungs.

Fleet

"Cold Victory."

"'...the Unionist flee under Dushanovitch-Alvarez had rendezvoused off Luna; as mixed a bunch of Martians, Venusians, and freedom-minded Earthmen as history ever saw.'" (p. 77)

Really? That sounds more like a sea fleet assembled in past history than like a space fleet assembled in future history. Sure enough, when Garcia says that he had volunteered for a mission because:

"'If Antonio Garcia of Hesperus gets his name in the history books, my whole clan will contribute to give me the biggest ranch on Venus.'" (p. 80)

- Crane reflects:

"They were an anachronism, thought Crane, a resurrection from old days when war was a wilder business." (ibid.)

In the warfare of the Psychotechnic History, psychotechs pick a team for compatibility, then weld them "...into an unbreakable brotherhood." (ibid.) But in the scramble of this Solar civil war, any volunteers are accepted. Results are haphazard, which they probably are in the best planned wars anyway.

See also Space Warfare.

A View From Space

"Cold Victory."

Robert Crane and two comrades ride "...a giant air tank..." (p. 78) through space. Their purpose will be revealed. (But it is military.) 

Poul Anderson inserts a descriptive paragraph which many other sf writers would not have thought to write:

"The stars turned about [Crane] in a cold majestic wheel. Luna was nearly at the full, ashen pale, scored and pocked and filling his helmet with icy luminescence. Earth was an enormous grayness in the sky, a half ring of blinding light from the hidden sun along one side." (ibid.)

Check out the hidden sun in James Elroy Flecker's "The Old Ships."

Also:

"I saw Eternity the other night,

"Like a great ring of pure and endless light..."

-see here.

This passage takes us in one direction into poetry and in another direction into a comic book that I read in the 1950's. Crane is accompanied by Garcia, a Venusian (should be Venerian) with clan markings painted on his spacesuit, and by a Martian named Wolf. In the remembered comic book, an Earthman, fighting in an interplanetary or interstellar war (I would not have known the difference), was accompanied by two faithful companions, natives of Mars and Venus. Across the decades, I salute the author of that short work.

Super Beings

Poul Anderson's Joel Weatherfield and Jack Havig are two super-powered beings: a telepathic alien and a mutant time traveller. Superman is sf because his origin is extraterrestrial but he is also the transitional figure between sf and superheroes which is a distinct genre, combining sf, fantasy and action-adventure. (Frankenstein transitional between Gothic and sf.) I am reviewing this - it's all been said before - because it is that time of night when I read other things, then find connections, currently Illuminations by Alan Moore with a sometimes hilarious parody of the history of American comic books, "What We Can Know About Thunderman," incorporating a comic script, an online fan discussion and an insane concluding vision into the text. What next?

Poul Anderson could have written a solid Superman novel, scientifically rationalizing the powers and the space journey from Krypton, but he could have done all sorts of things like rewritten John Carter and recruited Holmes to the Time Patrol after his retirement. I am trying to keep going but am fading out...

See also An Acknowledgement And A Contrast.

Five Wars In Four Stories

It is getting late here. Let us summarize the wars that we have read about so far in Poul Anderson's Seven Conquests.

In "Details"

World Wars I and II. (Galactic intervention put Lenin into Russia in 1917! The Galactics later regretted it. In another timeline, the Time Patrol would have to ensure that Ulyanov/Lenin got into that sealed train.)

In "Kings Who Die"

An interminable war beyond the Moon between the United States Astromilitary Corps and the Cosmonautical Service of the People of United Asia. (World War III taught the powers to move war off Earth.)

In "Wildcat"

A Cold War culminating in a nuclear exchange that destroys all life on Earth in the twentieth century.

"Cold Victory"

The Martian and Venerian colonies intervening to help the anti-Humanist counterrevolution and to restore Earth to the Solar Union in a future history that had begun in the aftermath of World War III.

That is four of the seven stories. What are the other three about?

Expository Dialogue

Poul Anderson, "Cold Victory" IN Anderson, Seven Conquests (New York, 1970), pp. 74-94.

Finishing "Wildcat" and turning the page we find "Cold Victory," the title story of Volume II of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, which we have discussed before as part of that series. See here. Again, the characters discuss war. In fact, they expound their history for our benefit. Captain Crane begins to tell a story:

"'This happened during the final attack on the Humanists -'" (p. 75)

The academic, Professor Freylinghausen, having invited the Captain to tell his story, promptly interrupts:

"'A perfect case of inevitability, sir,' interrupted Freylinghausen. 'May I explain? Thank you. Forgive me if I  repeat obvious facts. Their arrangement and interpretation are perhaps not so obvious.'" (ibid.)

Then this impossible man speaks without interruption, telling the other characters their own history, until three quarters of the way down p. 76: an introduction to the story for Anderson's readers but a very unrealistic conversation between his characters. 

Freylinghausen argues that the sequence of events from the failure of psychotechnic government to the Mars-Venus intervention in support of the anti-Humanist counterrevolution was inevitable whereas Crane replies that the success of the counterrevolution and the intervention was not guaranteed. His story is supposed to be what makes the difference. 

Needless to say, Freylinghausen, near the end, says:

"'But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you.'" (p. 93)

He maintains that the Humanists will return even if under a different name and, as we continue to read the Psychotechnic History, we find that he is correct.

"'The war was merely a ripple.'" (ibid.)