HARVEST OF STARS: Summary II

See HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

What I missed:

Conscious AI dominated society which became stable, peaceful and prosperous but neither fulfilled nor content.

Synnoionts are human beings who have become human-AI interfaces.

Lunarians colonized a large, dense asteroid, Proserpina, on a two million year orbit, currently passing from the Kuiper Belt to the Oort Cloud, and mine bodies in those outer regions. 

Nichols did not know about:

Life Mothers guiding planetary ecologies and growing new organic bodies for downloaded personalities;

the colonization of three other extra-solar planets.

HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, November 1997).

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy, each volume covers a single different period of a future history except Volume II, The Stars Are Also Fire, which covers two periods. Thus, if we read the series in numerical order, then, as we begin Harvest The Fire, PROLOGUE, pp. 9-31, with four pages of illustrations, we are already familiar with the first three of the five periods.

Jesse Nichols, a frustrated poet, seeks inspiration by recounting the future history to date to a simulation of Jorge Luis Borges. Of course the summary in Nichols' mind helps readers whether they have read Volumes I and II or not.

Human beings got into space when the cost of launch had been brought down, mainly by Fireball Enterprises. The Moon was colonized but completion of pregnancy was impossible in Lunar gravity so Lunarians were genetically engineered. Other human species were engineered on Earth and also the Keiki Moana, intelligent seals. 

Robotics became highly developed. Some human personalities, including Anson Guthrie, founder and chief executive of Fireball, were downloaded into artificial neural networks. Lunarians, led by Selenarchs, became independent of the World Federation and colonized Mars, asteroids and outer moons.

Fireball and the Selenarch Rinndalir waged war against the Federation for a reason not stated here. Download Guthrie led dissident Terrans and Lunarians to Alpha Centauri. Terrans colonized Demeter, doomed to be destroyed in a planetary collision in a thousand years, whereas Lunarians colonized Centaurian asteroids. 

The Federation reincorporated Luna and moved an abandoned L-5 colony to Lunar orbit where Terran women from Luna could give birth, thus enabling Terrans to outnumber Lunarians on Luna. The Lahui Kuikawa, comprised of human beings and Keiki Moana, moved to a mid-Pacific island. 

Conscious AI was developed, then developed itself further.

There is some more but I have to go out.

Endings

The Fleet Of Stars, 31-32.

At the end of Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, we want to read about Lazarus Long and Andy Libby searching the galaxy for colonizable planets. At the end of Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, we want to read about Anson Guthrie and Fenn regaining consciousness in newly grown organic bodies on Beta Hydri IV, Amaterasu. What a long way we have come since reading about an organic Guthrie on Amaterasu in Chapter I.

It is nearly midnight here, I have reread to the end of The Fleet Of Stars and have nothing more to add for now until some time tomorrow when our prescribed text will be Harvest Of Stars, Volume III, Harvest The Fire. Rereading the Tetralogy backwards is proving to be productive.

Let us hope that our world will still be here tomorrow morning.

Ezekiel, Monet, Bach And Lunarian

The Fleet Of Stars, 27.

Fenn does not know where he has read:

"Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." (p. 347)

We know either from our scriptural knowledge or from the Internet that it is Ezekiel 37:9 and therefore is yet another of Poul Anderson's many Biblical references.

See, in particular:

A Note On Anderson's Use Of The Bible by Sean M. Brooks

Guthrie's spaceship has a projection of Monet's "Cliff at Varengeville" in the saloon. See the attached image. Guthrie plays Bach's Fourth Brandenberg Concerto.

We read a single sentence of Lunarian:

"'Aou, scavaire ti sielle.'" (p. 374)

I interpret this as:

"Hail, make yourself known."

Other languages are in the background of Poul Anderson's works but never come to the fore.

There is an account of the visuals of a cosmic civilization but, because this will turn out to be a deception, I do not want to summarize it.

After all this build-up, Guthrie and Fenn have become an unbeatable team as we approach the end of the tetralogy.

Arrakis And Aeneas

Reading about Mars in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars makes us think of Arrakis/Dune in Frank Herbert's Dune series and, indeed, see:

Mars And Dune

For more discussion of Dune on this blog than I had realized, and particularly for comparisons between Herbert's Dune and Anderson's Aeneas, see a blog search result for Dune here. Maybe that suffices and we can leave it at that?

Aeneas is better realized than Dune and deserves to be seen in serialized screen adaptations of The Rebel Worlds and The Day Of Their Return with some extra scenes to show the earlier lives of characters like Hugh McCormac and Ivar Frederiksen but no extended series about this planet. We do not need any Children Of Aeneas...

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.