Poul Anderson Appreciation
Sunday, 16 August 2026
Interplanetary Periods
Historical Interpretation
The Advisory Council of the spaceship Astra clarifies the need for selection and interpretation of historical facts. The examples given are reasonable. They could obviously be discussed further but here they are offered only as examples. "Mohammedanism" should be "Islam" but that is the kind of historical detail that is always with us.
"'...man being what he is, moral judgments are inevitable. Was it right, was it desirable that Christianity take over Europe...?'" (p. 16)
Do we need to discuss whether this was right or desirable? It happened and we certainly need to understand why. One question in a future history takes us back into past history and, within the works of the Andersons, to the times when merfolk fled from an exorcism or when the last King of Ys converted to Christianity.
I have a Religion and Philosophy blog for such questions but fewer people read it.
Narrators Who Address Us
Future Historical Perspectives
We are still with the inexhaustible subject of future histories and there is more to be said than can be fitted into this lunch break. As ever on this blog, our focus is on Poul Anderson even if we first refer to the earlier Campbell future historians: Heinlein, Asimov and Blish.
Blish's Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity in Welcome To Mars and has invented the first faster-than-light interstellar drive in "Common Time." These are different achievements. See Gyrogavitics. The discoverer of antigrav and the inventor of FTL need not have been given the same name.
Heinlein's Future History, Volume I, The Man Who Sold The Moon, opens with Heinlein's Time Chart, a PREFACE by the author and an INTRODUCTION by John Campbell. None of these three texts, with the partial exception of the Time Chart, is a fictional introduction written as from a future historical perspective whereas Asimov has Encyclopedia Galactica and Blish has Acreff-Monales, The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits.
In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, a committee, meeting in interludes between the stories, discusses how to teach history and explains to its newest member that teachers must select and interpret facts and raise children to become "'...intellectually trained and emotionally mature...'" (p. 17) adults who can debate interpretations of historical events "'...with pleasure and profit.'" (ibid.)
Early in the second story, "The Rogue," the narrator refers to himself and his readers as "We..." (p. 43) That single pronoun shows that this speaker/author is not the omniscient narrator of most fiction but a counterpart of the narrator in Heinlein's Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, who comes across as the writer of popular magazine articles published in the "Green Hills" period of the Future History.
In haste. Will expand as necessary later.
Saturday, 15 August 2026
Green Hills And Flying Mountains
Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains is a single-volume future history about people living on terraformed asteroids thanks to gyrogravitics, a technology not possessed by Heinlein's characters - who do gain control of gravity in one story set on Earth although this technology is not mentioned subsequently and later interstellar craft are spun to simulate gravity. A technology lost during the Interregnum of Volume III?
Interstellar travel has begun at the beginning of Tales Of The Flying Mountains. Indeed, it is the travellers themselves who review their asteroidal history for their own benefit and, of course, for ours.
There, if you want it, is a partial comparison between Heinlein's Future History and one of Anderson's eight future histories before I turn in for the night, looking forward to a morning of gardening. Good night.
Gyrogravitics
It seems that Poul Anderson's gyrogravitics and James Blish's "spindizzy" arise out of the same set of observations and speculations about rotation, gravity and magnetism - and I cannot follow the technicalities. However, Blackett's predictions did not pan out and, even if they had done, they might have led to Anderson's control of gravity but there would have been no reason for them also to lead to Blish's faster-than-light drive. See Flying Mountains And Cities. Blish's They Shall Have Stars presents a keen sense of his characters experiencing conceptual and technological upheavals while anticipating consequent social transformations. However, Blish's prologue or prelude volume could be decoupled from the subsequent flying cities series and might instead presage something more like Anderson's terraformed asteroids. However, in any case, neither of these futures has come to be. Gravity remains uncontrolled.
Jupiter And Longevity
Comparisons And Future Histories
first, with Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe" because both are about exploration of Jupiter remotely controlled from Jupiter V;
secondly, with "Nothing Succeeds Like Failure," the first story collected in Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, because both are about the discovery of antigravity despite resistance from political bureaucracy.
See also:
"Bridge" is part of Blish's major future history series whereas Tales Of The Flying Mountains is in itself one of Anderson's eight future histories, which in turn reminds us of their diversity, e.g.:
the Maurai History, set almost entirely on Earth and linked to past history by time travel;
the Kith History, two versions, the second version a single long novel showing millennia of societal and civilizational change on Earth;
the Rustum History, eight stories focused on a single extrasolar colony planet although one other story about one other such planet is also set in this timeline.
This has given me an idea for a post on James Blish Appreciation. I will link to it from here when it is published.
Later: See Sweeney On Ganymede.
Politicians And Space
(i) cut government spending on space technology because they want either to save money or to spend it on something else like welfare;
(ii) label all scientific research secret in case it has weapons applications and would benefit an enemy.
Both cuts and secrecy stifle research. (i) happens in Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains and (ii) in James Blish's Cities In Flight. However, in both cases, researchers develop antigravity despite the political restrictions.
Blish's scientific rationale is the little-known Locke Derivation followed by the Blacket-Dirac equations whereas one of Anderson's characters speaks more vaguely about: