Autumn Leaves, Snow, Life And Gods

The Broken Sword, III.

Rereading a novel by Poul Anderson, we notice not macro-features like the plot but micro-features like anything interesting in the text and we always find the latter although we must remember to check whether we have posted about any particular detail before. Thus, we appreciate a troll woman's summary of life, beginning:

"'Hurry and hurry...'" (p. 22)

See:

A Changeling In Elfland

She says that:

autumn leaves hurry on rainy wind;

snow hurries out of the sky;

life hurries to death;

gods hurry to oblivion.

Autumn leaves mean change and death. Snow symbolizes transience. ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?") Gods personify life. It is all about life and the imminence of death.

Our old friend, the wind, is ever present. When Imric rides to change the child, a storm is mountainous, lightning is runes and:

"Wind hooted and howled." (p. 23)

What else was it going to do?

Brythons And Goidels

Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1977), II.

An sf writer can extend a list into the future. See:

From An Odyssey To An Elegy

Can a fantasy writer extend a list into the past? 

When:

"Imric the elf-earl rode out by night to see what had happened in the lands of men." (p. 18)

- a witch told him that the Danes had come to eastern England to kill, loot, burn and seize. Imric replied that that was not bad because several groups had done likewise earlier. 

Imric's list:

Angles and Saxons;

Picts and Scots;

Romans;

Brythons and Goidels;

still others before.

Brythons and Goidels?

However:

Brythons are Celtic Britons - in Welsh, Brythoniaid;

Goidels are Gaels.

So Imric was using unfamiliar (to me) terminology, not referring to fictional populations like Robert E. Howard's Cimmerians.

THE BROKEN SWORD

Poul Anderson's Vault Of The Ages was published in 1952.

Anderson's Brain Wave was serialized in 1953 and novelized in 1954 by Ballantine Books.

His The Broken Sword was published in November 1954 by the obscure Abelard-Schuman and republished by Ballantine in 1971 with an introduction by Lin Carter entitled "A CHANGELING IN ELFLAND."

This introduction begins with two paragraphs that summarize the plot before Carter discusses the author who was then of course a very much younger man than when we knew of him later. (My only contact with Anderson was when he apologized for squeezing past me at a party during the Worldcon in Brighton in 1987.)

The second paragraph of Carter's introduction ends by informing us that the character named Skafloc:

"...was reared to manhood in the twilight fields and whispering woods of timeless and shadowy Faerie...."

-Lin Carter, "A CHANGELING IN ELFLAND" IN Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1977), pp. 5-9 AT p. 5.

I am unsure of the status of this passage. Is Carter just writing lyrically or quoting the blurb from the original edition? (There are no quotation marks.)

Got to go. Things to do. Busy weekend. May Day and Wesak. Back here some time later.

From Aliens To Elves

Poul Anderson presents a scientific rationale for why Ythrians, winged extra-solar aliens, can have bodies heavy enough for intelligence and yet be able fly in terrestroid environments and also explains that the elf-like Lunarians are human being genetically modified to live in Lunar gravity although not on the Lunar surface but there is no need to explain the elves and trolls in The Broken Sword because such beings are simply assumed to exist in works of fantasy. However, to our surprise, in his FOREWORD, Anderson suggests that:

magic is control of external phenomena by means not yet known to science but maybe coming under "parapsychology";

an alien metabolism able to live indefinitely, change shape etc might be vulnerable to actinic light or to electrochemical reactions with iron;

such immortals might resort to nonferrous metal and alloys and, e.g., sail like the wind in almost frictionless ships;

they might have built castles earlier than human beings but would not have developed science, e.g., gunpowder or steam engines, in their long-living, aristocratic, conservative, warrior culture.

However, I don't think that any of these rationalizations appear in the text of the novel?

A Joke And An End

 

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 14.

"'Would you please fill me in?' the download requested.

"Falaire's look suggested she would like to fill him with concentrated sulfuric acid." (p. 187)

I think that that counts as humour. I am rereading a recent novel by Alan Moore whose prose is rich in similar turns of phrase.

Jesse Nicol has completed the anti-matter hijack, has the Lunarians who had duped him at gunpoint and has freed their prisoner, the Federation intelligence agent, Venator, so he could return to the Federation in triumph with the rescued anti-matter and two prisoners but instead opts to accompany the Lunarians to Proserpina where it is always night because theirs:

"'...is a new world, in a heroic age.'" (p. 190)

- where he might become a poet. 

Homer: the Trojan age;

Shakespeare: Cleopatra, Macbeth etc;

Fitzgerald: Omar Khayyam;

Kipling: India;

Nicol: stars, comets, unknowing universe but humans there.

(Observation: the universe knows through us.)

Linking Quotations

Something said by Venator in Harvest The Fire reminds us of something said by Manse Everard in "Time Patrol." However, searching this blog reveals that we have already connected these two passages not only with each other but also with something said by Nicholas van Rijn in Mirkheim. See:

Venator, Everard and Van Rijn On Misery

Opinions expressed by characters are not necessarily those of the author. However, sometimes they are and usually we can tell. Anderson also gives sympathetic treatment to characters that he clearly does not agree with in Mirkheim, The Devil's Game and Murder Bound.

Everard's saying could be included in "The Quotable Time Patrol." See Quotations which links to quotations both from the Time Patrol series and from The King Of Ys Tetralogy (with Karen Anderson). The Anderson multiverse is vast, encompassing both "scientific" and "supernatural" non-human intelligences (see Blurring A Distinction) as we might soon see depending on which direction this blog takes next.

Multiverses

See Anderson And Andrea. 

In addition to discussing the state of this world, Andrea and I also watch superhero TV series that involve inter-universal crossovers within a fictional multiverse.

Worthwhile prose sf that I have read about multiverses includes:

Conquistador by SM Stirling;

Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest in which -

the Prince Rupert of the Rhine from the Shakespearean universe of this novel (A Midsummer Tempest),

Holger Danske from Carolingian myth and from Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions,

and Valeria Matuchek from the magical universe of Anderson's Operation Otherworld -

- meet each other in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, from Anderson's "House Rule" and "Losers' Night," the first cameoing Nicholas van Rijn from Anderson's Technic History and the latter featuring among others Winston Churchill.

We can't get enough of it. (But fortunately Anderson gives us quite a lot.)

Addendum, 29 April: Life has gotten busy here. (I use an Americanism out of respect for Poul Anderson.) So far this year, we have had 440 posts in 4 months so maybe that is enough until some time early next month? On Saturday, there will be a May Day March and Rally in Lancaster and, on Sunday, I might get a lift to a Wesak (The Buddha's Birthday) Festival in Northumberland. Did both last year. (Maybe not many people celebrate both.) Anderson-wise, we are still rereading Harvest The Fire. After that, who knows? Onward through the multiverse.

Anderson And Andrea

 

(That is a neat post title, literally meaning "Son of Andrew and Andrew.")

Regular readers remember that Andrea is a male friend of Italian descent who lives above his brother's Old Pier Bookshop (see the attached image) where I visit him once a month.

The word from Andrea this month:

The world is in a bad state and getting worse. I think that each of us can fill in some of the details.

Reality reflected in Poul Anderson's works:

Time Patrol

"It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.

"Here also it was fall, the kind of crisp and brilliant day New York often enjoyed until it became uninhabitable..." (my emphasis)

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 342.

"[Manse Everard] didn't like dirt, disorder, and danger any better than I did. However, he felt he needed a pied-a-terre in the twentieth century, and had grown used to these lodgings before decay had advanced overly far." (my emphasis)

-"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" AT 1980, p. 352.

The Technic History

"The Technic Civilization series...begins in the twenty-first century, with recovery from a violent period of global unrest known as the Chaos."

-Sandra Miesel, CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION IN Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December2009), pp. 611-619 AT p. 611.

We are in the twenty-first century and entering the Chaos. Anderson's fantastic fiction resonates now.

Verbals And Visuals

We read descriptions of Valles Marineris in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, would see the Valles in a film adaptation of The Fleet Of Stars and do see it in Alan Moore's Watchmen.

This post revisits the three story-telling media. A story can be narrated, enacted or depicted. We still value narrative, whether heard or read, although it is the one of these three media that is not visual. Of course, most writers and readers have some visual imagination which I lack, being auditory digital, according to a Neuro-Linguistic Programming trainer. (You get that kind of input if you work in certain kinds of jobs.)

It is getting to that time of the evening when I turn from blogging to "other reading," in this case from Anderson's Harvest The Fire to Moore's Watchmen. And tomorrow will be a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop which means that I will be very well informed about the state of the world although not posting about it until later in the day.

Knife Thrust

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 9.

We like secret organizations in fiction and the Scaine Croi is a good one. We think of SPECTRE but I find that I have already made that comparison.

When a bribed pilot delivers a hijacked plane to SPECTRE, he receives a stiletto through his chin, mouth and brain and experiences momentary surprise, pain and light. Then he ceases to be the viewpoint character and the omniscient narrator describes his murder's subsequent actions. We remember this when we read that Falaire's affection for Nicol, prospective space pilot hijacker for the Scaine Croi:

"...meant he could hope to get his pay in money, not a bullet or a knife thrust." (p. 138)

Indeed.

To give Nicol more positive motivation, Falaire immerses him in a "dreambox" simulation of the Lunarian colony planet, Proserpina, so far away that the sun is only the brightest star.