Quick morning post. Probably more later.
After a space jump, the Meteor is not in orbit above the ecliptic of a planetary system but falling towards a planet. The wrong coordinates have been given. Captain Argens freezes but gunner Valland, the more experienced man, shouts orders which Argens then relays to the crew. Experience and authority cooperate in an emergency as they should do.
I wanted to record that but now must get out to the bank. I should have time to post this evening.
See:
Aldiss, Amis, Anderson, Asimov, Lewis
The crew of the Meteor become involved in the war between Pack and Herd on the planet between galaxies.
Nicholas van Rijn becomes involved in the war between Flock and Fleet on Diomedes.
The crew of the USS Benjamin Franklin become involved in the war between Vorlak and Kandemir in the local civilization-cluster.
So, yes, there was something to what Aldiss said. But Anderson's wars are better than many others.
We know that, barring accidents, we will die in our beds comparatively soon. I am 77 and a Romany palm-reader told me that I would live to 95. Of course, she might be wrong. I might have a lot less than another 18 years still ahead of me.
Felipe Argens and his crew know something very different:
"...our immortality isn't absolute, because sooner or later some chance combination of circumstances is bound to kill you." (p. 27)
They know that they will die by accident and they have no idea how soon. Their deaths are very different from ours and that makes their lives also very different from ours.
It is the attempt to imagine what it would be like that makes Poul Anderson's accounts of his characters, Hanno, Argens, Manse Everard, Jack Havig etc, so interesting.
I will retire to Inspector Morse and then to bed.
"Immortal" spacemen live for centuries or even millennia and spend all that time in paid employment in the same kind of work. Can't they save, invest and retire either to leisure activities or to retraining for other kinds of work? It seems an odd kind of existence. Even odder, they preserve their sanity by periodically editing their memories so that they only ever consciously remember a much shorter period, maybe only a few decades, like the equivalent of what used to be a normal working life. Their previous lives and work are recorded somewhere but not in their own conscious memories. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, recalls his youth, his most recent few years of work and only a few other selected details. He speaks of revisiting old places and visiting new places but even most of the old places will be experienced anew. And, in any case, there is an infinity of new places because the space jump gives access to every galaxy. This has to be the strangest fictional future ever.
In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the small group of mutant immortals have had to solve the memory accumulation problem for themselves and are able to traverse interstellar space at only sub-light speeds so their situation is very different. They propose to part and to reconvene in another million years which I should think is impossible. Will Hugh Valland survive for a million years? Statistically unlikely. But we would have liked to have read some sequels.
In James Blish's Okie cities, unaging policemen, and men in other professions, simply stay in those roles for centuries.
Technology is assumed to work also in contemporary fiction where, however, it is not a major plot element - although Lizbeth Salander's abilities as a hacker are crucial to Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and would have been sf if hypothesized much earlier in our lifetimes.
(Comprehensiveness: in discussing hard sf, we have also referred to fantasy and to a contemporary thriller.)
However, sf adds that new scientific discoveries will continue to be made the day after tomorrow and into the further future, assuming that there is going to be a further future, although sf narratives also incorporate the opposite assumption. As James Blish argued, sf writers need to remind their readers that new paradigms will be discovered, if not the possibility of faster-than-light (FTL) interstellar travel, then something else as yet unimagined. Every story that does include FTL (as an example) makes that point and therefore serves a purpose. Maybe that is the only purpose of all these FTL stories. To avoid the "hyperspace" cliche, Anderson presented a new scientific rationale for FTL every time that he used the idea.
It is assumed that, although Kandemirian and Monwaingi numerals have a different base number, they are otherwise like Arabic numerals with a symbol for zero so that the base number is the numeral for "one" followed by the numeral for "zero." They are not like the cumbersome Roman numerals which we still use for some purposes but not for calculation.
Roman numerals are so complicated that authors can get them wrong. In Colin Dexter, The Daughters Of Cain (London, 1995), Chapter Four, p. 20, Inspector Morse thinks that 1993 requires fourteen characters in Roman numerals:
MDCCCCLXXXXIII
"...howled when the fingers of God's foremost arm glimmered into view. But he would take long to mount so high that His entire self was revealed." (p. 5)
And will that entire self display not only fingers and arms but also head, torso, legs and feet? (No, but we do not know that yet.)
The Pack have enemies called downdevils who come out of the sea and who might:
"...send a war fleet of the Herd..." (ibid.)
So there is conflict between Pack and Herd. (In Anderson's The Man Who Counts - on another planet in another timeline - there is conflict between Flock and Fleet.)
So far, then, the Pack worships the rising God (in the sky) while its enemies, the Herd, are sent by downdevils (in the sea)...
But something else:
"...had lately arrived in fire and thunder..." (ibid.)
Sf readers are immediately alerted. That sounds like the arrival of an extra-planetary spacecraft. Will it bear human beings? Indeed, we shortly read that there are:
"...legends...about creatures that had long ago come from the sky and returned..." (p. 6)
When the sunset has ended and when God has risen further, only He, the angels and three planets are in the sky. I do not know what the "angels" are and am noticing them now only because I am analyzing this chapter in more detail than before.
There is one other aspect to the dualism of God and downdevils. Apparently, God is associated with night and his antagonists with day. The Herd rarely attack by night because they worship the downdevils who fear God whereas ya-Kela, the One of the Pack and their leader in worship, addresses God as:
"'...Thou Who casteth out of the sun...'" (ibid.)
- a God Who casts out not darkness but its opposite.
But what is God? We have been told nothing about extragalactic planets as yet but we have been told that God has a "...foremost arm..." and the following chapter reminds us on the following page that galaxies have spiral arms.
See Donnan's Second Moment Of Realization And A Solution?
