"You Again!"

(I don't know what this title means but let's use its cover image anyway.)

"The Pirate."

Murdoch sees Trevelyan entering his private suite at:

"...the discrete and expensive Altair House." (p. 95)

- and exclaims:

"'...Sunglaze! You again!'" (ibid.)

This is a standard fictional hero-confronts-villain routine: Trevelyan hero; Murdoch villain. The former has thwarted the latter before. Imagine that this story is an installment of a series in which these two men have clashed at least once before. It is not. "The Pirate" is written as a prequel to The Peregrine but not as a sequel to any earlier Trevelyan Micah installments. There were none. However, Poul Anderson easily persuades us to accept that Trevelyan has had a long and distinguished career in the Stellar Union Coordination Service and that, in this role, he got the better of Captain Murdoch Juan on a previous occasion.

Heroes confront villains all the time and it has to seem fresh every time. Written by Alan Moore, the Batman intones, "So, Red Hood, we meet again!" (Standard stuff.) But the dupe inside the hood thinks, "What is happening? Is that a demon?" (Very unstandard, Alan Moore stuff.)

"You again!" can mean something completely different. When Robert Heinlein's Dan Davis approaches the scientist who has discovered "temporal displacement" but has been pressurized to suppress it, the latter says:

"'You again.'"

-The Door Into Summer, p. 141.

Davis remembers no previous encounter. However, temporal displacement is involved...

WWIII?

Startling revelations from (male) Andrea, military historian:

most nuclear launchers in the world are expected not to take off; 

most warheads are expected not to detonate;

the Russians would aim five at London in the hope that two would arrive there and then detonate;

our area, the North West of England, is no longer a major target;

our shipyard turns out very few subs, our nuclear power station is due for closure and our population is dispersed;

a nuclear explosion will cause rain which will dilute/dispose of (?) a lot of the radiation (I am just quoting here; is this correct?);

we, in NW England, will survive an attack but, of course, will then have problems about food supplies, power, marauding gangs etc;

still not a welcome future but not what I had expected either.

Andrea's insights (if such they are) usually impact topics discussed blog-wise. 

Maybe another post this evening but we are coping with house guests.

Titles II

 

See Titles.

I am just going out the door but here are some additions. So far, we have found five titles by Poul Anderson that are complete sentences. Harvest The Fire is a sixth because it has a verb in the imperative mood. The verb has an object but would constitute a sentence even without it. A single word command, e.g., "Go!" is a sentence with the implicit subject, "You..."

Sentence Titles by James Blish

Earthman, Come Home

Spock Must Die!

"Get Out Of My Sky"

"There Shall Be No Darkness"

This reminds us that "Earthman, Go Home!" is an alternative title of Anderson's "A Plague of Masters" and that Earthman, Go Home! is the title of a collection by Harlan Ellison who also wrote "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said The Tick Tock Man."

There is a Larry Niven story called "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" (I am unsure of the punctuation) and a Star Trek episode called "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky."

As always, there is more than I expected when I started this post. Laterz.

Titles

A title of a work of fiction is usually a noun or a phrase referring to a single person or thing. For example, the titles of the installments in Poul Anderson's Technic History begin with "The Saturn Game" and end with "Starfog." Thus, here we have a game and a fog, either of which could have been the subject or object of a sentence although they usually do not play that grammatical role when part of a title. 

Poul Anderson has at least four titles which are complete sentences:

Orion Shall Rise

There Will Be Time

"Peek! I See You!"

"I Tell You, It's True"

- two in the future tense and two with the first person singular pronoun as their subject.

Does this prove anything significant? I doubt it. Good night. 

Addendum, next morning: Also, The Stars are Also Fire. See combox.

Drugs, Chemicals And A Machine

An sf writer can create a new prop or gadget as a plot device. Thus:

in Poul Anderson's "Honorable Enemies," a drug that makes a person believe whatever he is told (see Sorgan and Flandry On Alfzar);

in Anderson's There Will Be Time, chemicals with the same effect (see Sorgan And The Maurai Drug);

in Anderson's "I Tell You, It's True," a machine with the same effect (see It's True);

in Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, a "zombie" drug that makes people do as they are told, believe what they are told and answer any question (not mentioned on this blog before).

Tomorrow: Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

Wednesday: Paul Wilcock. (We have not mentioned him before.)

Next Tuesday: the Gregson.

Lancaster: a high energy place.

Any Last Thoughts On Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER?

 

Robert Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (London, 1970).

Not really. Not at the moment. Heinlein's causal circles hang together and he makes them work just as Poul Anderson, Audrey Niffenegger and some others do in their time travel novels. Heinlein makes the point that some events that could have happened did not happen:

"...the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded 'not possibles' of the basic circuit design." (p. 188)

If the narrator had read that line of print, then he would have done something that would have prevented its existence but it does exist, therefore he did not do anything that would have prevented its existence.

James Blish thought that all previous circular causality narratives were limited. He proposed at some time to write a finite-spinning-universe-theory-of time-travel novel with its entire plot and characters based on the paradox. That is one of the might-have-beens, like Stieg Larsson's seven further Millennium volumes.

Three Kinds Of Interests

In my youth, I read a lot and what I read perhaps addressed three kinds of interests:

intellectual

imaginative

spiritual

By "spirituality," I mean inner practice of prayer and/or meditation. 

Some works address more than one such interest. Thus, Poul Anderson's sf is imaginative, is based in the physical sciences, which require intellectual understanding, and addresses the spiritual concerns of some of his characters. CS Lewis imagined other worlds and presented philosophical arguments for his beliefs about spirituality.

I am rereading Ninian Smart's World Religions: A Dialogue, a fictional conversation between a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Ceylonese Buddhist and a Japanese Buddhist. Anderson readers can imagine Axor agreeing with C (the Christian) and Adzel agreeing with JB (the Japanese Buddhist).

All reading is good and forms a continuum.

See also C And Axor. 

(I need to eat something before going out to the Zen group which hires a room in the Friends' Meeting House: two great spiritual traditions.

(Homage to the Buddha, homage to the Dharma, homage to the Sangha.)

The Tradition

We have identified a literary tradition whose characters transition or "travel" (inaccurate and misleading though that word is) into the future. Three primary authors are:

HG Wells

both time travel and suspended animation

Robert Heinlein

three circular causality narratives, one featuring suspended animation as well as time travel

Poul Anderson

six time travel volumes: 

three novels; 

one series; 

enough short stories for a collection

Another major name, in my opinion, is CS Lewis whose Ransom Trilogy is a Christian response to Wellsian secular sf and whose "The Dark Tower" is specifically a response to the The Time Machine because it begins by arguing the impossibility of physical time travel and then presents both a chronoscope and mental travel between alternative timelines. And, to cap it all, both Heinlein and Lewis mention the two ladies at Trianon.

Poul Anderson's readers can, if they want to, move to other authors with common themes and then to reports of psychic experiences.

Transitions

While out and about and engaged in mundane activities, my brain has again been unravelling the physical and literary aspects of "time travel," which is our common abbreviation of HG Wells' original "time travelling." I wanted to return to the literary tradition but sometimes the physical issues intrude.

In the previous post, we willfully conflated transition to the future with "travel" into it but greater precision is necessary. Everyone transitions. Everyone here has transitioned from nonexistence to existence and from childhood to adulthood (- although, of course, nothing has really begun or ceased to exist; mass/energy/being has changed form). Wells' Sleeper transitions to a later century just by sleeping long enough. What does Wells' Time Traveller do? And also the Time Traveller's literary successor, Poul Anderson's Jack Havig?

The Time Traveller does not move in any direction. What he experiences is time dilation accompanied by an inexplicable (in my opinion) sensation of headlong forward motion. He slows down while everything else (from his point of view) speeds up. He just sits still for far longer than anyone else, in both temporal directions. And, while this is happening, he should remain both visible and palpable to everyone else.

Jack Havig:

stands instead of sitting;

exercises a psychic power instead of driving a vehicle;

shares the perception of external events rushing past but not the sensation of headlong motion;

also becomes inexplicably invisible and intangible.

Futureward "time travel" by the Time Traveller and Havig is a fictional extension or exaggeration of the transitioning that all of us do anyway. It is not a kind of "travel" although we have inherited that word from Wells.

Matter both extends and moves through space, the difference being that motion takes time whereas extension does not. We endure through time. If we moved through time, then that motion would take time in a second temporal dimension which is unnecessary to describe our experience of time. Four dimensions suffice: three spatial; one temporal.

Change

 

Sf can address any part of the cosmos, past, present or future. A lot of sf is about the future and change. "Things to come" will not be things that were. We recognize periods of great change and that we are living in one. Sf is the literature of this period. Even narratives about the cosmic past reflect recently acquired scientific knowledge.

First biological evolution, then agricultural, scientific, industrial, social, political and new technological revolutions. Some sf is about people travelling or transitioning into a changed world. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave begins in the then contemporary world but then people and society are transformed. The cause of the transformation is speculative and fictional but it reflects the fact of real change as well as cosmic interconnection.

This was meant to be a longer post but it is being cut short. Laterz.