Identities

Neuronic events generate mental events. This has become a cliche but in fact is a very recent scientific discovery. Electrically firing neurons generate sensations which would not otherwise exist. Complicated electrochemical interactions between electrically firing neurons generate thoughts and personalities which would not otherwise exist.

(i) If person A's brain duplicated the interactions in person B's brain, then A would think that he was B, complete with B's memories, motivations etc. 

(ii) If an artificial neural network duplicated B's neuronic interactions, then that network would reproduce B's consciousness and sense of identity.

(iii) If some other technology exactly duplicated the effects of neuronic interactions, then that technology would generate self-conscious individuals maybe thinking that they were living on Earth in a particular historical period. 

(i) happens in Tim Power's The Anubis Gates. 

(ii) happens in Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars.

(iii) happens in Anderson's Genesis.

In The Anubis Gates, a character seeks immortality by repeatedly projecting his personality into someone else's body while at the same time displacing that person's personality into his own abandoned and soon-to-die body. 

The idea that personalities can be generated and duplicated in these ways links these three novels.

Time Travel Scenarios

Returned from the Viking Festival, where a guy at a stall blew through a tube to make small pewter Thor's hammers, we resume rereading Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates which remains fascinating although it really belongs on the Logic of Time Travel blog which, however, has effectively transferred its functions here, to the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog. See About Time Travel.

Meanwhile, SM Stirling's The Lords Of Creation, Volume III, The Lords Of Creation, should be en route via eBay. "Poul" and other sf writers have their says at the beginning of Volume I or II as far as I can remember without being able to check the text momentarily.

Contemporary fiction has a single premise: that the contemporary world exists as it does because history occurred as recorded. Sf varies its premises. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol would be unnecessary in The Anubis Gates. How would the Patrol respond to the events of SM Stirling's To Turn The Tide? As a matter of fact, in the Patrol timeline, there is not, as far as we know, any world-wide nuclear war in 2032. Therefore, the Patrol would prevent such a war from occurring and would also, of course, try to prevent any time travellers from changing history in the second century CE.

Good guys in one scenario are bad guys in another.

Doyle And Ashbless

See:

Three Other Time Travel Novels 

A Case In Point

Brendan Doyle, time traveller, knows that, on a particular day in 1810, the poet, William Ashbless, arrived in London where he entered the Jamaica Coffee House at 10:30 and then wrote his poem, "The Twelve Hours of the Night," while seated in the coffee house. Wanting to meet and befriend Ashbless, Doyle arrives in the coffee house on time. However, Ashbless does not show up so Doyle writes the poem from memory, then remains in the nineteenth century as Ashbless...

There is more to the story than that but I have summarized the paradox and am now going to bed. Life is busy here: Robin Hood (a version of) this evening; more authentic Vikings tomorrow. It is nearly midnight.

Street Life

Poul Anderson shows us street life in Centauri on Avalon in the Domain of Ythri during the period of the early Terran Empire. Among many other details, a gaunt man shouts of some obscure salvation. Later in the Technic History, Anderson describes the towers of Archopolis, capital city of the Terran Empire, and Dominic Flandry's upper level apartment but not any of that city's street life. But we need to read more of every aspect of a real or fictional city's life. An interstellar, multi-species civilization will be multivarious but we can get a hint of that on Earth now.

Today, a group of Muslim men had come all the way from Birmingham to hand out free Korans on a street in Lancaster! They happened to stand right next to a group of left-wing newspaper sellers with whom they exchanged friendly greetings and literature.

Meanwhile, we reread Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates which presents nineteenth century London street life, involving both aristocrats and beggars although principally the latter.

All human life is here as it should be in all fiction and literature.

Take to the streets!

Two Surrenders

A scene from Poul Anderson's Technic History and a scene from SM Stirling's Make The Darkness Light series come together in one readers' mind although their settings could not be more dissimilar: a future history and an alternative history. A Merseian steps from a wrecked building and waves a white flag. A hand waves olive branches from behind rubble. Two symbols of surrender. Hastening into town on a Saturday, I leave it to blog readers to locate these references. This evening, a Robin Hood play in Williamson Park. Tomorrow, a Viking Festival in Heysham Village. We walk through legend and history.

A Case In Point

There is a particular kind of time travel paradox that is characteristic of narratives set in immutable timelines. Robert Heinlein presents this paradox very well in "By His Bootstraps" and The Door Into Summer and Poul Anderson in The Corridors Of Time, There Will Be Time and The Dancer From Atlantis as we have discussed here before but there are other examples.

In Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, thief lords, banqueting in a subterranean grotto beneath nineteenth century London, are surrounded by shabby men and boys and, beyond them, derelicts who will fight for the left-overs afterwards. The Gypsy King, Doctor Romany, is furious when a very old and disfigured man laughs madly and mocks something that he, Romany, has just said.

"'Can't you put this wretch out of his misery, Horrabin?' [Romany] asked quietly.

"'You can't because you didn't!' cackled the ancient man."

-Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (London, 1986), 4, p. 105.

Horrabin merely has the man removed but, as he is being carried away, this ancient human wreck winks at Romany and stage-whispers:

"'Look for me later under different circumstances...'" (ibid.)

- then again laughs crazily.

The alert fan of time travel sf might guess (correctly) that, later in this narrative, Romany will time travel to a very remote past date, will live for a very long time, will become so disfigured as to be unrecognizable and will, of course, mock his much younger self at the thieves' banquet.

We can appreciate it but we can't all write it.

Judgements About Empires And Options About Time Travel

Robert Heinlein's Future History avoids empires and culminates with a first mature culture. 

SM Stirling's Draka are an evil empire in an alternative twentieth century. (They are "evil" in my judgement and in that of some other readers. The author will remind us of the view that all such judgements are subjective.)

The Antonine Roman Empire in Stirling's Make The Darkness Light series is a benign empire in an alternative second century. Thus, the Antonines present a formidable antithesis to the Draka.

Poul Anderson's Terran Empire is just another empire in a fictional future. It is perceived as benign or oppressive depending on the viewpoint of any particular character. Certainly, "The Game of Glory" shows the intelligence officer, Dominic Flandry, routinely participating in the conquest and oppression of the sovereign planet, Brae.

The arrival of two books interrupted our (editorially speaking) rereading of Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates. Again, the two time travel options: the past can be changed in Make The Darkness Light but not in The Anubis Gates. Poul Anderson is distinguished by the facts that he (i) addressed both options and (ii) addressed both well.

Thoughts And Connotations

Please bear with us here. Fiction reflects life. We will start with life (or something like it), then return to fiction. 

Imagine: a sensitive recording, computing and communicational device which detects and records electromagnetic radiations, sounds, other vibrations, chemical compositions, nuclear reactions, gravitational waves etc, computes and calculates about these inputs and communicates with other such devices. Imagine further that this device randomly replays previous recordings, computations and communications and continually interrupts its own operations with further random and disjointed repetitions. If we add the single extra mysterious ingredient of consciousness, then this device becomes a superior human brain albeit with a very enhanced sensory apparatus.

What has gone wrong with the device to cause these constant replays? Well, we have been not artificially devised but naturally selected and therefore are primarily motivated not just to record and assess data but also to preserve, promote and gratify self. This motivation generates many additional mental processes, including regrets, recriminations, apprehensions, anticipations etc. 

This has consequences for both life and fiction.

First, some of us meditate, i.e., practice awareness of our own incessant and involuntary thought processes, not from narcissism but in an attempt to gain some handle on what is going on.

Secondly, a chapter or a narrative passage in a novel can locate a character in a particular time and place but can then mainly comprise that character's thoughts and reflections. This can inform readers either about the character or about his knowledge of the background situation without necessarily advancing the action of the novel. Thus, on pp. 317-324 of SM Stirling's The Winds Of Fate, CHAPTER NINETEEN, the Chinese agent, Black Jade, hears her superior, Colonel Liu, conversing with Kushan aristocrats and, at the end of p. 324, we know that she is:

"...trying to decide to do..." (p. 324)

- something!

We guess, correctly as it turns out, that the something is defection to the Americans and here we must divest this word, "Americans," of its connotations. In this context, "Americans" means not White House, State Department, Pentagon, CIA, aircraft carriers, military bases or boots on the ground. It means only five individuals of very high expertise and very good intentions.

Both the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and his chief advisor, the American, Artorius:

"...agree that being Emperor is a burden, not something for which a sensible, self-controlled man would strive! Unless duty compelled, of course."

-CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 325.

The Emperor can trust Artorius because he knows that the latter is not scheming to replace him. A perfect setup. Things can get done:

"...Artorius...is genuinely uninterested in rank for its own sake. An unusual man. He values it only for what can be done with it, as he does with money. He labors ceaselessly for Rome, as I strive to do." (p. 329)

Really, it is for the world with Rome as the instrument.

Slaughters

The Winds Of Fate, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

SM Stirling is a master of descriptions of military slaughters - which is why we re-use the attached cover illustration and indeed have found a clearer image of it.

Romans hit Parthians with extratemporal weapons supplied by time travellers. Sometimes, I summarize such accounts. This time, I just advise blog readers to read or reread this chapter - which I would also have done in any case, of course.

Marcus Aurelius and the time travellers really are aiming at a genuine Pax Romana, not just a brutally imposed pacification, and this does seem to be the only way to do it. I am interested not just in descriptions of exploded equine and human bodies but also in where all this is going. This is a major divergent timeline and potentially a long sf series.

Same basic premise as Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series - that the past can be changed - but a completely different development of it.

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

60

In his introductions to The Game Of Empire and The Night Face, Poul Anderson directly addresses his readers, that is to say you and me as we open these books. Thus, these are non-fictional introductions whereas a passage written as if by Hloch of Stormgate Choth as he addresses his fellow Avalonians is fictional. In this sense, the total number of works of fiction comprising Anderson's Technic History is greater than you think:

forty-three instalments, ranging from short stories to long novels;

twelve introductions and one afterword in The Earth Book Of Stormgate;

one original introduction in Trader To The Stars and three more in The Trouble Twisters.

Total: 60.

We might also count the fictional introduction to "The Star Plunderer" although that definitely accompanied the story when originally published as opposed to being added when the story was collected.

These additional passages are short but they impart information and enhance the series so they count.

What was a good series in any case becomes even better with these additions.