Anglesey And Helmuth

"The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.

"He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil..."

-Poul Anderson, "Call Me Joe" IN Anderson, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 1, Call Me Joe (NESFA Press, Framingham, MA, 2009), pp. 11-36 AT p. 11.

Anglesey stands on a ground composed of some kind of soil and, a few sentences later, is hit by an uprooted tree.

"A screeching tornado was rocking the Bridge when the alarm sounded; the whole structure shuddered and swayed. That was normal, and Robert Helmuth on Jupiter V barely noticed it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge. The whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes and worse."

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CHAPTER TWO, pp. 28-29.

We soon learn that these texts are set on very different versions of Jupiter. Helmuth's Jupiter has neither trees nor even a single fixed surface. We notice that Anglesey is physically present in the wind and dust whereas Helmuth watches from a Jovian moon. However, we are soon to learn that both men are on Jupiter V, each with his heads enclosed in a remote control helmet.

The comparison continues.

The Jupiter Project

We have been at Windermere for most of today and I will be with Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for most of tomorrow.

This evening, I have revised and improved Comparing ERB. My new project is to reread and discuss the Jupiter stories by Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, James Blish and ERB listed in that post. 

"Call Me Joe" by Anderson is the title story of Volume 1 of the NESFA The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson series. I have a copy.

"Desertion" by Simak is in his future history volume, City. I shed my copy when downsizing but have ordered a replacement on eBay.

"Bridge" by Blish was incorporated into his Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, as the five evenly numbered chapters and the concluding eleventh chapter. I have this novel as a separate volume and in the Cities In Flight omnibus edition.

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by ERB is in John Carter Of Mars and I have a copy.

Anderson's and Blish's characters experience Jupiter remotely from Jupiter V. Anderson's and Simak's characters decide to live on Jupiter. Sometimes story ideas in sf overlap.

See also:

On Jupiter And Jupiter V

Three On Jupiter

The End Is A Beginning

The Lords Of Creation.

OK. A local war is resolved but the whole rest of the Dyson sphere remains to be explored so what happens next? Volume IV? Trilogy 2, Volume I? As an early Star Trek film poster proclaimed, "The Adventure Continues..." - or at least should continue. This cannot be the end. The end of the trilogy is only a beginning. Will the same characters return to the Sphere or will we be introduced to what would become a fourth set of characters in the series? The original "Lords" can remain off-stage indefinitely, I think. How far is the Sphere from the Solar System? Instantaneous interstellar transition is a neat trick, not to say implausible. Such things can be made to seem easy in sf - but they would benefit from some kind of explanation.

Even in retro-sf, we are always looking forward to what is going to happen next.

Lewis And Anderson

In CS Lewis' fictional Solar System, the truth of monotheism is acknowledged everywhere except by many of us benighted souls on Earth - and, even here, Maleldil and his servitors turn out to be actively present.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, such questions remain open but are treated seriously. Two alien monotheisms, Ythrian and Merseian, are incompatible with any Terrestrial tradition whereas two Wodenites, Adzel and Axor, have converted to different Terrestrial religions. 

I consider such questions and occasionally publish brief posts on the Religion and Philosophy blog where today I have felt moved to add "God."

Moran

See Wells And Verne. 

Of course the list from Mary Shelley to Poul Anderson and his successors covers the modern sf tradition. Anderson's other literary antecedents are:

the Bible

the Eddas

the Sagas

Saxo Grammaticus

Der Nibelungenlied

a Danish ballad

William Shakespeare

Rudyard Kipling

Arthur Conan Doyle

- and maybe some that I don't know about.

We have noticed the many Holmesian references in Anderson's works, particularly the appearance of a private investigator and his amanuensis in "Time Patrol."

In SM Stirling's The Lords Of Creation, one of the Brittanians is named Colonel Sebastian Moran although their ancestors came to the Sphere pre-Doyle so this is a coincidence although it conveys the ambience of the Brits.

(End of posting for a while. We will walk to Morecambe for a concert and tomorrow will visit Bowness on Windermere. On Tuesday, I will visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. On Wednesday, there will be a solar eclipse here.)

Wells And Verne

The Lords Of Creation, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Janice reflects that the Britannian ancestors who came to the Dyson sphere were so historically recent that they were:

"Post Jules Verne, or mid-Jules Verne, at least." (p. 155)

For a long time, I have thought of Poul Anderson as a successor of:

Mary Shelley

Mark Twain

HG Wells

L. Sprague de Camp

Robert Heinlein

- but have not included Verne in this list maybe because I think in terms of English-language sf?

In Alan Moore's The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the early twentieth century space race is between the British who have Cavorite and the French who have a big cannon...

Retro-sf should acknowledge and combine the heritages of Wells and Verne. The latter disliked Cavorite:

"'Il invente!'"

No Horizon

The inner surface of a Dyson sphere has no horizon because it is the inner surface of a sphere. The planet Daedalus has no horizon because atmospheric conditions refract sunlight around the curve of the planet. In both cases, a distant object is not seen because it is too far away but not because it is out of the line of sight. Nevertheless, inhabitants of a Dyson sphere live on the inside of a sphere whereas inhabitants of any planet, including Daedalus, live on the outside.

What else is either similar or dissimilar? Daedalus has been colonized by human beings, including Zacharians, and also by Cynthians and Donarrians, and is in the Patrician System where Imhotep has been colonized by human beings and by land and sea Starkadians. (In The Game Of Empire, we see neither Donarrians nor sea Starkadians but we have seen both in earlier instalments of Poul Anderson's Technic History.)

So far, SM Stirling's Dyson sphere seems to have been colonized only by human beings, indeed by types and nationalities that we recognize, but I have read only as far as p. 110 of 203 of The Lords Of Creation. The land area of a Dyson sphere presents immense possibilities (see the combox here) so what else are the American explorers with their EastBloc representative about to find? On this blog, I post while reading so that, on a first reading, I do not know The Shape Of Things To Come, to use a phrase. But the remaining 93 pages will soon disappear below the temporal horizon. How long have we been reading interesting narratives? How long will be continue to? What will come next?

(There are many books called Lords... or The Lords... Of Creation.)

Night Flight On Daedalus

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Kukulkan Zachary takes Diana, Axor and Targovi to the island of Zacharia in a flying:

"...first class passenger cruiser..." (p. 365)

- because only this is big enough:

"...to carry the Wodenite in comfort..." (ibid.)

They stand in an observation lounge with a completely transparent floor. Would you find that comfortable? It reminds me that Wonder Woman used to fly an invisible plane. However, in this cruiser, metal ribs cross the otherwise unseen floor and there are both fore and aft bulkheads.

During their night flight:

the sky is deep violet-blue above and berylline near the ocean;

a few stars are visible;

the Daedalian sun-ring surrounds the Phosphoric Ocean making distant rain and the sea below the ring gleam;

that sea gleam shades to turquoise, then to black which however swirls and sparks with green life;

Zacharia shows rivers, lakes, mists, mountains, valleys and light from dwellings and from other travellers by air or water.

We try to summarize a descriptive passage accurately and wind up writing something almost as long as it. For another attempt at the same passage, see also:

Night On Daedalus

York And Lancaster

Some of Poul Anderson's characters visit York and this blog is written in Lancaster. These are the two "Roses" cities.

In York yesterday, we:

visited the Minster;

visited the home of a Catholic martyr, which is now a chapel;

bought Yorkshire curd tart;

bought hand-made wooden kitchen cutlery from a Ukrainian market stall holder;

had a good time.

We are still reading SM Stirling's The Lords Of Creation for the first time.

Comparing ERB

This blog focuses on Poul Anderson and refers to other imaginative sf writers. It contends that:

Anderson succeeds but also surpasses HG Wells, Olaf Stapledon and Robert Heinlein;

Anderson's works should be filmed but only if it can be done very well;

James Blish should be read also;

SM Stirling is a worthy successor of Anderson, particularly in the sub-genre of alternative histories;

a series, such as several by Anderson, can become a single, sometimes more elaborate, story behind the stories (see here).

Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) is comparable in imagination although not in literary quality. He is a persistent presence in popular consciousness if only because of Tarzan and, to a lesser extent, John Carter, just as Lewis Carroll is persistently present because of Alice in Wonderland. (Narnia, if not as widely recognized, is certainly up there.)

We have found a single ERBian allusion in one of Anderson's works whereas Stirling's Lords Of Creation Trilogy is retro-sf explicitly inspired by ERB and other pulp writers.

There could be an anthology of stories set on Jupiter:

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak (from City)

"Bridge" by James Blish (from Cities In Flight)

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by ERB (from John Carter Of Mars)

James Blish could not understand why I would include the ERB story. For completeness, for nostalgia and for the absurdity of ERB's scientific explanation of human life on the Jovian surface.

ERB's Martian series is interestingly elaborate:

Volumes

I-III: narrated by Carter.

IV: Carter's son.

V: Carter's daughter.

VI: the second Earthman on Mars, Ulysses Paxton.

VII: a Martian warrior whose story is transmitted to Earth by Paxton on the Gridley Wave which is also used to communicate with Pelucidar which is at the Earth's Core and is visited by Tarzan!

X: a second Martian warrior whose story is transmitted as above.

VIII, IX and XI: narrated by Carter, featuring his granddaughter and trips to a Martian moon and Jupiter.

Also:

four novels and one novelette about Carson Napier who aims for Mars but crash-lands on Venus;

two novelettes about a soldier who travels to the extra-solar planet, Poloda, in the same way that Carter had travelled to Mars;

a future history trilogy in which a spaceship launched from Earth towards Carter's Mars is sabotaged and crash-lands on the Moon, causing a Lunar invasion of Earth;

information, in one Martian book, that there are also Mercurians.

But it all sounds better than it reads, I think.

(We are tired from a day-trip to York and you are lucky to receive this post which I mentally drafted on the return journey!)