In Olga's Landing II

Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), CHAPTER ONE.

See In Olga's Landing.

We try to convey the feel of Anderson's descriptive passages and have come close in the above linked post although we omitted some details:

the sky is not just blue but "...clear, deep blue..." (p. 195);

the breeze is cool although -

"It would have been deadly cold before [Diana's] people came to Imhotep" (ibid.);

Mount Horn is twelve kilometers above sea level;

the city holds not only the Pyramid but also the Institute, industries, shops, hotels and apartments;

Diana is in the old quarter whose description we have quoted several times before (search the blog for "old quarter" although at least one other such quarter will come up!);

pioneers built in brick and low because of Imhotepan gravity;

in the market, videos show Terran sleaze and a vaz-Siravo dance from the Seas of Yang and Yin;

a gun dealer sells rifles, stunners and illegal Merseian blasters.

Every scene in Anderson's works reads as if the place exists and has not just been created at the stroke of a pen - or on a typewriter or a computer screen. We want to read more but can gain immensely just by rereading.

World Con, '62

Poul Anderson is a minor character in SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation series. We will come back to that. 

No wonder I could not remember whether:

"World Science Fiction Convention

"Chicago, Earth

"Labor Day, 1962"

- was in Lords Of Creation, Volume I, The Sky People, or in Volume II, In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. It is at the end of Vol. I as a preview and at the beginning of Vol. II as the PROLOGUE (although maybe not still present as a preview in later editions of Vol. I?). 

We are still rereading The Sky People, rediscovering obscure ERBian references like "Vepaja," but have skipped ahead to the preview.

If you read this preview/PROLOGUE, then read the Wikipedia account of the 1962 World Con, then you will find that Stirling has got the names of Con attendees and even of the Guest of Honour right.

In Stirling's alternative historical Con, sf authors say a lot of things relevant to their works and this could lead to a detailed post on my Science Fiction blog. In fact, it probably will lead to something on that blog but, for present purposes, we will confine ourselves to "Poul" and to "the editor of Astounding." (Later: See Mars Books.)

While the authors watch transmissions from a Martian lander, Poul:

had brought in a case of Tuborg (The Sky People, p. 314);

addresses "Arthur" on p. 315;

grumbles that the Viking horns worn by fans were not historical on p. 316;

comments on Martian sea level and highland air on p. 317;

is said to like messing about with boats and to murmur about pointing into the wind on p. 319;

guffaws that the Martians have put the lander in a sack when the screen goes dark after a tarpaulin has been thrown on p. 322.

The Astounding editor insists that Terrestrials are the most advanced Solar species on p. 319. This was a disagreement with Asimov.

Campbell:

edited Heinlein's Future History, Asimov's Foundation and Robots, Blish's Okies and Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn;

published Heinlein's Time Chart;

made suggestions that affected Foundation, Okies and the Technic History.

In the case of the Technic History, Campbell's suggestions were the ideas that became the Ythrians and Mirkheim.

Dominic Flandry And His Legacy

Volumes IV-VII of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization are:

IV Young Flandry

V Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire

VI Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra

VII Flandry's Legacy

Young Flandry collects three novels, beginning with Ensign Flandry.

We gather from these titles alone that Flandry starts young, matures, is promoted and knighted and has an impact.

Flandry's Legacy begins with A Stone In Heaven whose Chapter I ends:

"'...have you ever perchance heard of Admiral Flandry?'"

-Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 1-188 AT I, p. 16.

Flandry's Legacy continues with The Game Of Empire. In CHAPTER ONE of that novel, Diana Crowfeather says:

"'Oh, my father's Dominic Flandry. You may have heard of him. He's become an Admiral of the Fleet, but forty-odd years ago he was a fresh-caught ensign...'"

-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 212.

The Wodenite, Axor, responds in part:

"'I have, yes, encountered tales of Admiral Flandry's exploits...'"

-ibid., p. 213.

The remaining four instalments collected in Flandry's Legacy take us centuries and millennia beyond Flandry's lifetime although readers of the series as a whole recognize consequences of his exploits even in the concluding instalment.

1818-2026

In recent posts and comboxes, we have differentiated sf from fantasy and have outlined sf's trajectory from its founding novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818), through the classics, the Golden Age and New Wave to recently published novels like SM Stirling's The Winds Of Fate (2025).

Poul Anderson's works, 1947-2001, cover just over fifty years of this period of just over two hundred years and fully develop the Wellsian-Stapledonian themes of space travel, time travel, alien invasion and future history as well as more recent themes that they did not know about.

(Frankenstein is the pivotal character between Gothic fiction and sf as Superman is between sf and superheroes and Anderson could easily have created a substantial sequel to either.)

I feel drawn towards rereading Anderson's The Game Of Empire, alongside other current reading, but it remains to be seen how much such rereading will generate blog-wise.

Nothing more this evening!

Solar Planets In The Pulps And Later In Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Anderson And Stirling

Follow the link from "Northwest Smith " in Planetary Adventurers.

Ninety years ago, pulp sf writers treated the Solar System like a galaxy of inhabited planets with breathable atmospheres and even jungles on moons of Jupiter. Such an approach even affected Robert Heinlein's Future History although that series is primarily about the future development of human society, not about human-alien interactions. Isaac Asimov admitted in The Early Asimov that he wrote in this tradition even when he knew better.

We can see later writers emerging from the tradition. In James Blish's Cities In Flight and Mission To The Heart Stars, Martians had existed but are now extinct. Poul Anderson has half a dozen versions of Martians. There are Martians in his Psychotechnic History and in the original version of his "Margin of Profit" although, when that story was revised to fit into his Technic History, these "Martians" had become extra-Solars who had colonized Mars. Anderson also has Venerians in "Sister Planet," Jovians in Three Worlds To Conquer and Mercurians in "Life Cycle." 

When SM Stirling wrote a series in which Mars and Venus turned out to be more or less how earlier sf writers had imagined them, he also worked towards an explanation. A scientist working on Venus says:

"'Sam thinks...and I think...that two hundred million years ago, in the earliest Jurassic...this planet was different. Radically different from what we have now; as far as we can tell, it didn't have life at all. And we don't have any idea what changed it.'"

-SM Stirling, The Sky People (New York, October 2007), CHAPTER TWO, pp. 40-41.

But they will find out.

Planetary Adventurers

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars, a virtual reality features John Carter on Mars. See:

Two Virtual Realities

Is this Anderson's only reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB)?

In a Known Space story by Larry Niven, a murderer on Mars is called John Carter, although Niven's text understates the name.

In his Acknowledgements for The Sky People, SM Stirling includes the pulpsters who created:

John Carter

Northwest Smith

"Wrong Way" Carson of Venus

I am sufficiently familiar with ERB to recognize Carter and Carson but not "Nobs" who is mentioned on p. 62.

SM Stirling's LORDS OF CREATION Trilogy

Volume III, which has almost the same title as the Trilogy, should arrive tomorrow but first I should reread Volumes I and II which I have retrieved from the room where a house guest is sleeping. There is also a short story with the same planetary setting as Volume II but I seem no longer to have the relevant anthology. Books are shed during a house move, especially to a smaller house. 

Volume I is The Sky People, which has the same title as one of Poul Anderson's Maurai short stories. 

Can I say anything more about this series now? I will be busy some of the time tomorrow and out of town all day on Friday.

I thought that The Sky People conveyed the same sense of adventure in a new world as Stirling's Conquistador and The Peshawar Lancers.

HG Wells pioneered alternative histories in Men Like Gods and A Modern Utopia. We are still in the grand sf tradition.

Magical Space Travel?

What form does space travel take in a fantasy narrative? I confess to not remembering the details in Poul Anderson's Operation Luna but see:

The Magicians Who Sold The Moon

a steel broomstick

a piece of Moon rock

a Native American medicine bundle for life support

There might be more details somewhere else on the blog but these three seem to be the essentials.

In Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, magicians become detached from the Earth so that it is painful for them to touch it and eventually they float upward and away. The (evil) Master is drawn towards the Moon. He winds up like a balloon held to the Earth by only a single rope which Ashbless cuts... The Master recedes towards the Moon, cursing and complaining. Ashbless thinks that he will:

"...cut the title right out from under Neil Armstrong." (13, p. 402)

That is odd.

In Operation Luna, Valeria Matuchek is the first human being on the Moon in her timeline and therefore is the equivalent of Neil Armstrong - or, alternatively, of the Master - in that timeline.

About Now

Brian Aldiss said that sf is always about the time at which it is written. The twentieth century experience of two World Wars and more wars made sf less utopian and more dystopian. Poul Anderson moved from writing about intelligent species from many planets crossing space faster than light to writing about post-organic intelligences emanating from a single planet and crossing space slower than light. Alternative history fiction is a commentary on contemporary experience, not (or not just) an escape from it. SM Stirling's American time travellers narrowly escape from World War III. They escape. We do not. Where are reality and its fictional reflections heading to now? We are still in the Chaos which may be the only part of Anderson's Technic History to come true.

-Punk And Retro-

Poul Anderson's sf is Golden Age/Old Wave as opposed to New Wave.

Here at Behind-The-Times blog, we are only just getting to grips with New Wave phenomena like cyberpunk, steampunk and dieselpunk although we have previously mentioned retro-sf. (Scroll down.)

Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates is seminal steampunk.

SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation is retro.

Anderson did not write any steampunk or retro although he could easily have turned his hand to either of these sub-genres if an editor or publisher had asked him to. 

Every time that a new sf idea or sub-genre is mentioned, it is necessary to scan Anderson's vast output to check whether anything that he wrote does come under this category. And probably none of us is familiar with everything that he wrote.

Steampunk or retro characters would easily fit into the multiversal clientele of the Old Phoenix, whose name seems appropriate.

Sf is always looking forward, to the future, and back to the classics like Wells, people in the past looking forward - to the future. Now we just have to meet ourselves.