Deimos Or Phobos?

The Fleet Of Stars.

Is it proposed to transform and inhabit Deimos (see 10, p. 131, and Fenn's Futuristic Speculation) or Phobos (see 26, p. 338, and Israel And The Space Program)? I had to check which Martian moon was meant and found references to both. This was not meant to be a new post but it seemed easier to do it this way than as an addendum to the preceding post.

We will come to the details of how the cybercosm had planned to demoralize and demotivate mankind which is an abysmal story. More positive stuff is going to happen in the further future but the tetralogy ends with the thwarting of this dismal plot.

And now I will try to close down operations for tonight. Tomorrow, some gardening, some exercise, the Gregson and probably some more posts about The Fleet Of Stars. Good night.

Israel And The Space Program

The Fleet Of Stars, 26.

We peer forward into speculative futures and sometimes see them peering back at us. Chuan says that the project to transform Phobos and terraform Mars:

"'...was always more an ideal...than a business venture... Not unlike the state of Israel or the movement for a viable space program on twentieth-century Earth.'" (p. 338)

How will our remote descendants regard us?

Since writing the immediately preceding post, I have:

attended a Zen group where two of us agreed that maybe our Prime Minister is currently facing a "koan," an unanswerable question;

returned home and watched TV news coverage of the Prime Minister facing questions and accused of lying;

reread and posted about Chuan's remarks as above.

And that brings us up to date. As ever, the future stretches ahead from this moment, from tomorrow morning and in sf.

Tempus fugit.

Pure Mind

The Fleet Of Stars, 26.

Chuan tells Fenn:

"'The highly evolved sophotectic mind is pure mind.'" (p. 335)

Its drives, desires, emotions and spirituality are neither expressions nor sublimations of instinct. Instead, it seeks goodness, truth and beauty. Chuan asks whether these are constructs or discoveries. Truth at least is a discovery, not a construct! According to Chuan, many philosophers and prophets, including the Buddha, Plato and Jesus, spoke of something that:

"'...was only words and wistfulness...'" (ibid.)

- for them but:

"'...is real for the machine.'" (ibid.)

I do not agree with listing these great names together like that. The Buddha taught meditation and is believed to have realized enlightenment. Plato analyzed concepts, like contemporary analytic philosophers. Jesus was a first century Jewish preacher-healer whose message was that the kingdom was at hand. These were three different men.

According to Chuan, goodness etc are ethereal, inner, not outer, of spirit, not matter. A false dichotomy. Truth and beauty are both inner and outer. Matter is being. Spirit is conscious being. Therefore, spirit is conscious matter. But matter is energy/what is, not just mechanically interacting particles.

Got to go. 

Chuan

The Fleet Of Stars.

Chuan, a human being and a human-AI interface, has some features in common with two characters in Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return. Like High Commissioner Chunderban Desai, Chuan tries to manage a planetary sociopolitical conflict. Like the Merseian agent, Aycharaych, he tells lies about the existence of a cosmic civilization.

Chu(nderb)an = Chuan?

Chuan cannot mask his feelings. When Kinna questions him about some sensitive issues:

"'Fenn, he grew so sad. I felt as if I had stabbed him.'" (12, p. 149)

Kinna continues:

"'...I have just written how sorrowful he became. Not that he said he was, but I could read it on him, how he looked away from me and his shoulders slumped and his voice drooped.'" (p. 150)

Much later:

"Below [Chuan's] smile, behind his eyes, Fenn sensed that immeasurable sadness of which [Kinna] had spoken." (14, p. 173)

On a still later occasion, Chuan's tranquility breaks and he screams at Fenn that he will say no more. (20, p. 264)

What Chuan is sad and most on edge about is the suppression of data from a solar lens. When he finally gives Fenn an account of the data, Chuan can:

"...no longer look into [Fenn's] eyes. He got up, went to the viewport, clasped hands behind his back, and stood staring out at the night." (26, pp. 331-332)

That is because every word that he is about to say is a lie.

When Fenn turns eagerly to look at Chuan, the latter:

"...saw him from the corner of an eye but did not look back." (p. 332)

Eye contact would give him away.

A Gunfight And A Lie

The Fleet Of Stars, 25.

There is a gunfight on Mars exactly as in a Western film. In the 1950's, I enjoyed Westerns a lot but preferred sf. I realized that I enjoyed pictures of men in spacesuits more than pictures of men on horseback. Many of my contemporaries preferred footballers. I still wonder about that a lot.

The main outcome of this Martian gunfight is that Fenn's fiancee, Kinna, is shot dead. Thus, Fenn suffers exactly the same kind of bereavement as Poul Anderson's series character, Dominic Flandry.

In the following chapter, Chuan begins to tell Fenn the Big Lie that is meant to distract and mislead humanity. Human beings are to be shown manufactured evidence of a cosmic civilization so that they will spend entire lifetimes entranced by this fiction instead of venturing out into the universe, beyond the control of the cybercosm.

Knowing from previous readings that this cosmic civilization is an elaborate falsehood makes it anti-climatic to reread what would otherwise have come across as a massive revelation by Chuan to Fenn. I will reread The Fleet Of Stars to the end but might not find much more to say about this concluding volume of Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history.

Ad astra.

Fenn And Kinna On Mars

The Fleet Of Stars, 22.

Mountaineering on Mars, Fenn and Kinna stop to enjoy a view.

See:

On Mars

I did not know that there could be ice-clouds in a deeply blue sky on Mars but then I do not know very much about conditions on Mars. Poul Anderson must have made his description as accurate as he was able to at the time of writing. James Blish tried to do likewise in Welcome To Mars. (Also here.) (Scroll down.)

Kinna, born and bred on Mars and therefore a "Martian," with nearly every atom in her body from her home planet, loves that planet as it is now but also wants it to be terraformed. It will not change enormously in her lifetime, after all.

I have not mentioned the purpose of their mountaineering but we will maybe get to that after I have dealt with some other stuff. Retirement is not just about blogging.

Ad Martem.

Wind And A Sign

The Fleet Of Stars, 21.

Swearing Kinna to secrecy, Fenn tells her that she must not say a word to anyone, not even to her parents, to her robot pet:

"'...or the wind.'" (p. 278)

The wind is becoming incorporated as a character.

To seal the secret:

"She made a curious gesture, right forefinger flitting from left to right shoulder, then from brow to breast.'" (ibid.)

Gestures outlast their origins.

"...Harpagus drew the sign of the cross, which was a Mithraic sun-symbol."

-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 5, p. 77.

A neighbour made the sign of the cross when I informed her of another neighbour's death.

During a pause in their confrontation, we are told that Fenn and Kinna:

"...could not hear the Martian wind, and the dust devils afar spun in silence." (pp. 279-280)

Could not hear them? But wind and devils must have been in their minds or the text would not have mentioned such inaudible outdoor phenomena.

I have written more than I expected to this evening but with Poul Anderson that is always possible.

What was the secret? Read The Fleet Of Stars.

Questions And Answers II

 

An alternative title for Planet Of No Return is Question And Answer. Since I knew this when composing the immediately preceding post, Questions And Answers, I might have mentioned the fact and also have illustrated the post with a Question And Answer cover illustration as here. However, when searching for images, I found the more attractive blue and white cover of Collected Works, Volume I, which I had never seen before so I used that instead. I have now found the red and yellow cover of Collected Works, Volume II, but there is not enough room for it on this post. I have ideas about how to present Anderson's collected works but they would not correspond to anyone else's. Imagine his three novels set BC, followed by the The King Of Ys Tetralogy, then the five Norse fantasies, then the The Last Viking Trilogy, then the three novels set in the fourteenth century and so on, in other words chronological order of fictional events as far as possible. In the twentieth century, there is a fantasy novel and a detective trilogy. There are also alternative histories and, of course, all the futures. The non-series short stories of various genres I would relegate to several volumes at the end of the collection instead of starting with any of them but this is just my peculiar point of view.

Questions And Answers

Are human beings ready to swarm out into the universe? Will we ever be? This question is the crux of Poul Anderson's Planet Of No Return, The Avatar and The Fleet Of The Stars. Does such a recurrent theme become "same-y" (as some people I have known have used that word)? In many works by Anderson, human beings do swarm out and, by and large, continue to conduct themselves as they have been accustomed to do on Earth. In two short dystopias, they become extinct. In Genesis, they become extinct but are re-created by a post-organic intelligence. That is a vast body of reflection on mankind and his place in the universe.

(I am just back from Manchester, tired and maybe not about to post much this evening. Think about Anderson's questions and answers.)

Information About Jihannath

Early departure for a day trip to Manchester tomorrow morning. No early posts.

Comments in the combox for Red Skies On Other Planets mentioned Jihannath.

For an Appendix on Jihannath, see FUTURISTIC SEX by Sean M. Brooks.

For other blog posts that mention Jihannath, see here.

Jihannath is a minor planet in Poul Anderson's Technic History. We compare and contrast such planets within the Technic History and between future histories.