"Earth Is Dead."

Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (New York, 1962), 1.

Shrieking, skirling winds scour black stone continents that had run molten. The crust shakes, rumbles and bellows. Mountains break open. New volcanoes are born. Boiled oceans cool, seethe and hiss. Sulfurous clouds shed ash, smoke and acid rain. Lightning cracks and booms. Cities are engulfed. Ships are sunk. Human beings, trees, grass, deer, whales - all things remembered - are dissolved in lava.

This is a beginning. I have paraphrased one paragraph. The opening sentence is:

"'Earth is dead.'" (p. 5)

So who says it? Well, there is a returned interstellar spaceship and, contrasting with the noise on Earth, there are the hums and whispers in the ship:

air renewers

ventilators

thermostats

electric generators

weight maintainers

instruments

nuclear converter

- all the details that I would not have thought of if I had been asked to describe such a scene.

So what happens next? Some men go to pieces and one man takes charge. Given a group of human beings, responses will differ and hopefully some of the responses will meet the challenge.

 

Where To Next?

Blog-wise, we have passed from Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History to other future histories to what I call "future historical writing" and this has brought us back to Anderson's After Doomsday which will be our next blog rereading title although, here at Blog Central, other activities intervene such as gym this afternoon, Zen this evening and the monthly visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for a long afternoon tomorrow.

Also, in other reading, Somerset Maugham's World War I secret agent, Avenden, has just been sent to:

"X...the capital of an important belligerent state; but a state divided against itself; there was a large party antagonistic to the war and revolution was possible if not imminent. Ashenden was instructed to see what under the circumstances could be done..."

-Ashenden, 11, p. 214.

Appreciating the distance afforded by fiction, we pretend not to know exactly where X might be.

The problems of Avenden and of X are nothing compared to those of the returned spaceship crew at the beginning of After Doomsday. Sf writers know where we all have been - of course - and take us further.

"(New centuries scream in birth)"

-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (New York, 1962), 13, p. 104.

Adversity and resistance.

Abrams And Avenden

"An image jumped to view. Abrams could spot individual differences between nonhumans as easily as with his own species. That was part of his business. An untrained eye saw merely the alienness."

-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 14.

"[R] took out a photograph and handed it to Ashenden.

"'That's him.'

"To Ashenden, unused to oriental faces, it looked like any of a hundred Indians he had seen. It might have been a photograph of one or other of the Rajahs who come periodically to England and are portrayed in the illustrated papers."

-W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden (London, 2000) AT 7, p. 117.

Who could resist juxtaposing these two passages even at this time of night and even when trying to read Maugham instead of Anderson?

Both Abrams and Ashenden, the latter a fictionalized Maugham, work in intelligence but Abrams is better than Ashenden in this aspect of the work. How different are their settings! Long may we read different kinds of fiction.

Future Historical Writing

I think that the category of future historical writing encompasses more than just the single volumes or series that we recognize as "future histories." James Blish's Nietzschean short story, "A Dusk of Idols," refers back to major events in the same author's juvenile novel, The Star Dwellers. Thus, these two starkly contrasting works have a linear chronological relationship with each other although not with any of the other stories or novels in this author's multi-branched "Haertel Scholium." This is future historical writing although without a linear history - although Blish did create two such histories in his Okie and pantropy series.

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, Hugh Valland is three thousand years old, thanks to the antithanatic. He is possibly the oldest human being in his timeline like Lazarus Long in Heinlein's Future History and Hanno in Anderson's own The Boat Of A Million Years. Valland was young when the antithanatic was developed. The dates on his girlfriend's grave are 2018-2037. Thus, this novel represents a history stretching from our lifetimes to three millennia hence. It is a piece of future history although not a volume of a future history series.

Anderson's After Doomsday begins in a near future soon after the advent of extra-solar aliens and recounts history-changing events on an interstellar scale, including a space battle celebrated in a ballad that will continue to be sung in bars and inns on different planets into an indefinite future. This is clearly future historical material although the novel does not cover a long enough period for this text itself to be classified as a "future history."

The Campbell Future Historians

Recapitulating yet again, the Campbell future historians are:

Heinlein

Asimov

Blish

Anderson

Heinlein's future history, which is "the Future History," includes longevity and a generation ship ( a slower than light multi-generation interstellar spaceship). 

Asimov's future history comprises robots and a predictive science of society.

Anderson uniquely wrote eight future histories. His first, the Psychotechnic History, has one story each on:

longevity

a generation ship

a robot

- and is based, especially in its earliest instalments, around attempts to apply a predictive science of society.

Heinlein perfected the circular causality paradox whereas Anderson fully developed both time travel paradoxes: circular causality and causality violation.

Heinlein also wrote about magic used as a technology. Anderson expanded this theme and wrote other fantasies. 

Anderson and Blish both wrote sf, fantasy and historical fiction, the main difference being Anderson's much larger output. Despite this difference, I think of Anderson and Blish in parallel and this blog reflects that.

Past And Future History

Any future history is the second part of a complete history of which the first part is past. Sometimes we are shown the complete history. HG Wells wrote The Outline Of History and The Shape Of Things To Come. Olaf Stapledon wrote Last And First Men and Last Men In London. In the latter volume, a future Last Man reviews past history.

The opening story of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set in 1951. Volume I of the Future History covers the second half of the twentieth century. The stories in Volume II are set around 2000. The chronologically earliest dialogue in Volume IV is in a flashback to 1874 (which was past when Heinlein wrote it).

Certain works by Poul Anderson span past, present and future:

The Corridors Of Time

There Will Be Time

The Boat Of A Million Years

Time Patrol

Some problems are common to past and future. In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History:

"...the prevailing stage of psychodevelopment..." (see here)

- prevents resolution of "...innate contradictions..." (ibid.) in an early interstellar civilization.

In Olaf Stapledon's future history, the entire struggle of the First Men from savagery to civilization was, according to one of the Last Men, a mere stirring in the sleep of the human spirit. In this stirring, two ideals were conceived. Socrates delighted in truth, Jesus in persons. Their ideals, respectively, were dispassionate intelligence and passionate worship. Socrates' intellectual integrity and Jesus' integrity of will each involved the other. (Although you wouldn't think it!) However, and this is where Stapledon's text converges with Anderson's:

"Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable."

-Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men IN Stapledon, Last And First Men/Last Men In London (Penguin, 1972), pp. 5-327 AT p. 21.

In other words, the prevailing stage of psychodevelopment was insufficient.

An End

I think that Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History needed something after The Peregrine even if "The Chapter Ends" was not necessarily the best choice for a concluding instalment. 

We needed to be told that:

the Stellar Union did not last;

there was a Third Dark Ages;

the Nomads, with some recruited Coordinators, preserved knowledge into a further future;

there was an eventual Galactic civilization where psychotechnics was at last developed fully.

Some of this knowledge comes to us from an interstitial passage by Sandra Miesel rather than from a text by Anderson but nevertheless it completes the picture.

Miesel makes two points:

"Given the prevailing stage of psychodevelopment, the innate contradictions with individuals and societies could not be resolved."

-Star Ship (New York, 1982), p. 252.

- and, in the very next sentence:

"Critical data that needed to be gathered surpassed the capacity of any organization to comprehend, much less coordinate." (ibid.)

The first point reflects the overall theme of this future history series. The second was made by Coordinator Trevelyan Micah early in The Peregrine. The consequence of both points is that:

"The Stellar Union flew apart like an overwound spring." (ibid.)

Miesel's first point has reminded me of a similar passage in Olaf Stapledon's future history but the prevailing stage of psychodevelopment is such that I must meditate for half and hour before trying to find the passage.

Wind On Loaluani

The Peregrine, CHAPTER XIX.

We notice the wind during a pause in the dialogue. I want to post about yet another reference to the wind in an Anderson work but first search the blog and find that I have twice before (here and here) posted about this very passage better than I would have been able to do this evening after cheese and onion pie followed by cheescake with ice cream at the Water Witch (also here) on Lancaster Canal. 

In any screen adaptations of Poul Anderson's works, it will be essential that all of these winds are heard on the soundtrack and also that they last long enough to have at least a subliminal effect on their auditors. This conversational silence filled by wind, surf and bird cries captures the conflict between the Stellar Union and Alori ways of life, whether or not we consciously realize this while reading or even hearing.

We approach the end of The Peregrine and of Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

Writing About Now

Sf, however futuristic, is always about the time at which it was written. When I had finished assessing the threats to humanity from Poul Anderson's Alori and Merseians and from Larry Niven's kzinti - their predecessors were HG Wells' Martians -, I concluded that we seemed to be threatened only by ourselves, a remark that pulls us right back to the present. We have projected ourselves onto alien aggressors. CS Lewis reversed this process when, replying to Wells, he presented a Terrestrial scientist exporting literally diabolical evil to the sinless Venus.

Contemporary novels can bring us almost to the present and can contain content that was sf: satellites, computers etc. We cannot read a novel about what is happening right now today although I once bought a novel and a newspaper in the same railway station newsagent and found that the former was ahead of the latter.

See:

A Newspaper And A Novel

We are pleased to accompany Anderson and others into the futures.

Interstellar Threats

The Peregrine, CHAPTER XVI.

The Alori are a strange threat. If they had their way, there would be no interstellar travel and they themselves would never have left their home planet although they have taken the opportunity to colonize a few more. They travel through space only to prevent others from doing so, surely a forlorn hope in view of the amount of inter-system travel already going on and by a number of species?

What is a credible threat? We would be subordinated by the Merseians or enslaved and eaten by the kzinti. But these scenarios presuppose both (i) many intelligent species and (ii) faster than light travel. There are reasons to think that (i) is unlikely while (ii), of course, is (currently) theoretically impossible. 

We seem to be threatened only by ourselves although, of course, anything can change. A spaceship might arrive tomorrow - although I think that, when the unexpected does happen, it is also the previously unimagined.