Three Achievements And One Disappointment

When an editor asks an author to contribute to an anthology of original stories, he does not know what he is going to get. Does he?

Poul Anderson's Technic History

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Future Quest, ed. Roger Elwood, 1974.

"Lodestar" IN Astounding: The John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, ed. Harry Harrison, 1973.

"Rescue on Avalon" IN Children of Infinity, ed. Roger Elwood, 1973.

Clifford Simak's City future history

"Epilog" IN Astounding... (see above)

(We are talking about only two editors and two authors here.)

We already know what outstanding additions to his Technic History those three stories by Anderson are.

"Epilog" (this should be my last reference to City): the Ants, who have covered most of the Earth with a single Building, and the robots who had helped them have died. The deathless robot Jenkins learns this when the Building begins to crumble and he is able to enter it for the first time. All that it contains is a lot of now dead ant hills. Coincidentally, when the Building begins to crumble, some wild robots who had left Earth in interstellar spaceships visit and take Jenkins away with them. End. Point? 

Contemplation

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, one Wodenite, Adzel, converts to Mahayana Buddhism when he studies planetology on Earth. In a later historical period, another Wodenite, Axor, is converted to Jerusalem Catholicism and ordained by missionaries on his planet. Buddhism is contemplative. Catholicism is Abrahamic, therefore prophetic, but also incorporates contemplation.

When Buddhists practice "just sitting" meditation, they enter the presence of that which theistic contemplatives call "God." Practitioners of the Abrahamic faiths identify ultimate reality with the deity that is described or "revealed" in their scriptures whereas many - although not all - contemplatives in other traditions think that personification of reality is anthropomorphic. But we can meditate in any case. When some of us say that we must sit with whatever comes up in meditation, theists say that God wants us to sit with whatever comes up: same practice, different understanding.

I am using these Andersonian characters as a hook to hang one of my personal hobbyhorses on but I think that it is a legitimate hobbyhorse nevertheless. We can find much in Anderson's works.

Trappings And Texts

A book is very different when you reread it sixty years later. Case in point: Clifford Simak's City. In my teens, I focused on the sf trappings: machines, mutants, Martians etc. Now I notice that, in Chapter VI, when a man and a woman converse in Geneva, the text, transcending its trappings, reads almost like a contemporary novel.

In Poul Anderson's works, the novelistic interactions, so to call them, are more closely incorporated into the sf:

Christopher Holm joins an Ythrian choth and becomes estranged from his father even though the latter identifies with the Domain of Ythri and speaks of "deathpride" when confronting a Terran;

van Rijn and Falkayn clash over Merseia;

Aycharaych appeals to Flandry to help him to preserve Chereion;

Commonalty Ranger Daven Laure learns that he cannot marry a Kirkasanter...

New blog readers might not understand many of these references. However, explanations can be found by searching this blog and also by reading Poul Anderson's works which the blog urges all its readers to do.

On Rustum

Orbit Unlimited, part four. 

A school bus on Rustum is a flying vehicle. When it takes off, its driver, Jan Svoboda, sees:

the school's sod roofs and dusty playing field;

the timber village of Anchor;

the Swift and Smoky Rivers descending from the Centaur Mountains to join as the Emperor;

land green with some blue;

dark woods;

corn and rye;

murky forest;

hills rising into the Hercules range;

reddened Centaur snowpeaks;

a big, bright, slowly descending, orange sun in a wan blue sky.

Children born on Rustum accept this environment as natural and know Earth and Sol only as history lessons.

Every fictional Andersonian planet is described in detail.

Astounding Memorial

Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1973, Ed. Harry Harrison) is an original anthology which includes:

"Lodestar" by Poul Anderson, intended when written to be the last Nicholas van Rijn story although Anderson subsequently added Mirkheim;

"Epilog" by Clifford Simak, one last City story, included in later editions of City;

an addition by Isaac Asimov to his very obscure "Thiotimoline" series.

For these and other contents, see the above link. I have not checked whether any of the other stories are additions to series by their authors.

"Lodestar" is both a van Rijn story and an Ythrian story. Of Anderson's seven Ythrian instalments, the first, "Wings of Victory," was published in 1972 and the rest in 1973: a rare burst of creativity.

In my estimation, "Lodestar" has to be the jewel in the crown of the Astounding Memorial anthology although it is interesting to learn that there are at least two other series stories.

"Lodestar":

signals the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League;

introduces van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, who will marry David Falkayn;

shows the dramatic confrontation between van Rijn and Falkayn and also the generation gap between van Rijn and Coya;

brings together van Rijn and his trader team (including Falkayn) and the Ythrians;

is included in that ultimate future history collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate;

presents a brief sense of life and work in the Solar Commonwealth through Coya;

refers back to the Satan affair and became the precursor of Mirkheim.

What's not to like?

Real World Issues

After roaming about town, I have returned home and might, before midnight, post more about Poul Anderson's Rustum or about Clifford Simak's future history. However, I have meanwhile acquired the current copy of a journal containing analyses of the global economy and of some contemporary military conflicts. I really ought to spend more time reading about our problems and less about those of fictional characters. Except in the most general terms, real world issues do not belong in blog posts although anything goes (just about) in the combox.

This post is an explanation and partial apology but any departure from the blog will only be temporary. 

Laterz.

Rustum Gravity

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

A guy that I knew fell from the roof of his cottage: multiple fractures, both legs; never fully recovered. If he had fallen head first, then he would not have recovered, period.

Jan Svoboda reflects that a man who fell off a roof on Earth might just have broken a leg. However, Rustum has 1.25 gravity. A man whom Svoboda sees fall off a roof has a smashed pelvis and his ribs driven into his lungs. 

Colonists face hardship. Every terrestroid planet is different and its environment is not the one that human beings have evolved in and for. Poul Anderson always makes it clear that extra-solar planetary surfaces are not just stage-sets where human beings can land and carry on business as usual which is the impression that we get of all the colonized planets in Asimov's Galactic Empire. 

I did not set out to take a side-swipe at Asimov but I did it anyway.

My friend from the Birmingham Buddhist Centre should arrive for a visit soon and I have some videos to watch about current events. (Anderson's characters have their crises and we have ours.) 

Not Time II

See Not Time. 

This line of thought has been occasioned by reading an sf work not by Poul Anderson but by Clifford Simak. However, there is an underlying issue here that Anderson gets right but that most people most of the time get wrong and the people who get it wrong include not only Simak but also HG Wells and James Blish! - so let's stay with the line of thought for a while. (N.B.: Neither Wells nor Blish confuses the nature of time as much as Simak.)

The Issue

Matter moves through space and motion takes time but we then think of time itself as a dimension that we move along. Clearer thinking is needed. If you sit under a clock in a waiting room from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM, then you are fully and equally present at 9:00 AM and at 10:00 AM and at every intermediate moment. You do not in any sense move from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. There is a 9:00 AM with you in it but there is no subsequent 9:00 AM with you not in it because you have moved away from it. Nor can you accelerate and arrive at 10:00 AM before me. We both arrive (if that is the right word) at 10:00 AM at 10:00 AM. 

Wells

The Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that our bodies extend along the Fourth Dimension whereas our immaterial mental existences move along it.

Blish

"'...the consciousness of Robin Weinbaum is moving along that entity in that invisible direction.'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), p. 116.

("...that entity..." is Weinbaum's body extending in four dimensions.)

Simak

In City, VII, on pp. 196-197, there is a passage that I will try to summarize rather than to quote in full. It is claimed that we had thought that we were passing through time whereas really we were moving along with it. Seconds did not pass. Instead, a single second moved along and we moved with it! What does that mean? He stays with the idea of motion through time but then tries to differentiate between two kinds of temporal motion. If something moves along through time, then the time that is moved through is measurable in units including seconds. Therefore, the moving entity is not itself one of those seconds.

Anderson

There is none of this in Anderson. In his Time Patrol series and in his There Will Be Time, our bodies extend along the fourth dimension - as in Wells and Blish although not in Simak - but there is no suggestion that any immaterial entities move along those bodies from their births to their deaths. Every moment is the present moment for any organism that is conscious in that moment. There is no moving present.

Not Time

We have discussed time and time travel on the Logic of Time Travel blog and on this blog. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, three independent time travel novels and enough short stories to fill a collection are major works of sf and also major successors to HG Wells' The Time Machine.

Should we devote some time to addressing glaring errors about the nature of time in works by other sf authors? Not too much time.

I try to avoid lengthy quotations but sometimes they are unavoidable:

"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is to-morrow and to-morrow is the past.

"Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No film that one could run backward and see what-once-had-been."

-City, VII, p. 186.

"'We can't travel in the past.'"

-ibid.

"...there wasn't any past, there never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.

"Like two dogs walking in one another's tracks. One dog steps out and another dog steps in. Like a long, endless row of ballbearings running down a groove, almost touching, but not quite. Like the links of an endless chain running on a wheel with a billion billion sprockets."

-ibid.

Writing worthy of Ray Bradbury but making no sense.

This three dimensional spatial universe moves along a fourth dimension to be identified with time? What does it move in relation to? Time is the measure of change within this universe, not a dimension that it moves along. Any such motion would take time. It may very well be the case that we cannot travel into the past but that is not because there is another world directly behind ours moving along a fourth dimension!

See:

Space and Time

We extend, move and endure:

extension is through space;

motion is through space and takes time;

endurance is through time;

endurance is neither extension nor motion.

A Myth

In CS Lewis' The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, a Faun has a book entitled Is Man A Myth? In Clifford Simak's City, a Dog has written a book entitled The Myth Of Man: a parallel worth recording. Fantastic fictions can show us ourselves from fantastic perspectives. In Poul Anderson's The Rebel Worlds, the tripartite Didonians with their inherited but dwindling memories struggle to recall their brief encounter with human beings:

"(Blurred, two legs, faceless...no, had they beaks?)"

-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 367-520 AT p. 369.

"Be not afraid of the strangers with single bodies... Rather pity that race, who are not beasts but can think, and thus know that they will never know oneness." (p. 520)

On Dido, we are becoming a myth - although they understand us.