LONGevity

We saw in Untold Series that Lazarus Long lived a long time. This highlights something else that Poul Anderson did better than Robert Heinlein with:

Hugh Valland

Hanno and the other mutant immortals

Hanno etc live right through history, then into a fictional future. A guy that I know disliked that future section of The Boat Of A Million Years. However, Anderson had prepared his regular readers to combine historical fiction with sf.

Anderson followed Heinlein with:

future history

longevity

time travel

magic treated as technology

- and, in each case, improved on Heinlein's performance. Read (the early) Heinlein first. Then read and reread Anderson.

This might be the last post for this month but let's see how that pans out. 

Untold Series

Reading Robert Heinlein's Future History Time Chart in The Man Who Sold The Moon decades ago, we were intrigued to notice first that the lifetime of one character, Lazarus Long, extended for the length of the Chart and secondly that six titles were bracketed as "Stories-to-be-told." We wondered whether these stories had by now been told in some other volume. Now we know that five of them would have filled one extra volume but they have never been told. 

Poul Anderson's Technic History implies entire potential series that have never been told although it is down to us readers to identify them. The following periods have either one or no stories set during them:

the first and later Grand Surveys

young van Rijn

Adzel's student days on Earth

Jim Ching's career

the trade pioneer crew with Coya in it

the second crew that Chee Lan joined

van Rijn patching up the League

his expedition outside known space

his visits to the Old Phoenix

the Time of Troubles

the reign of Manuel I

Aycharaych if he escaped from Chereion

Diana Crowfeather's career

the last days of the Empire and of the Roidhunate

the Long Night

the Allied Planets

Rangers of the Commonalty

But Poul Anderson would have to have devoted a lifetime to just one maxiseries. (We remember one other such author.)

Beginnings In The Technic History

History is one beginning after another.

Beginnings

In "Wings of Victory": human-Ythrian interaction.

In "The Problem of Pain": Ythrian and human involvement with Avalon; human knowledge of Ythrian religions.

In "The Three-Cornered Wheel": David Falkayn's career.

In "A Sun Invisible": Falkayn's employment by SSL.

In "Esau": human-Baburite interaction.

In "The Trouble Twisters": van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew.

In "Day of Burning": League-Merseia interaction.

In "Lodestar": the Supermetals company; Falkayn's and Coya Conyon's relationship.

In "Wingless on Avalon": colonization of the Hesperian islands on Avalon.

In "Rescue on Avalon": colonization of the Coronan continent on Avalon.

In "The Star Plunderer": the Terran Empire.

In Ensign Flandry: Dominic Flandry's career; his recruitment to Intelligence.

In "Tiger by the Tail": involvement of the Scothani in the Terran Empire.

In "Honorable Enemies": Flandry-Aycharaych contact/conflict.

In A Stone In Heaven: Flandry-Miriam Abrams relationship.

In The Game Of Empire: Diana Crowfeather's career (we don't know what it is yet).

In "Starfog": a new age of prosperity in one human civilization.

Never The End.

New Beginnings

A series begins with its first episode. Right? But sometimes an author backtracks and tells us what had happened before, beginnings before the beginning. Let us consider four by now familiar authors, culminating of course with Poul Anderson.

Ian Fleming's novels just follow each other chronologically, starting with Casino Royale. In that novel, Bond recounts how he had earned his 00 number so there is no later need to backtrack to that.

CS Lewis tells us how the Pevensies first went to Narnia, then later tells us how, earlier, people had started to travel between worlds.

Watson tells us how Holmes and he met, then later Holmes tells Watson about his first case and the case that had started his career.

See:

The Structure Of A Series: Conan Doyle (merely introductory)

The Structure Of A Series: Conan Doyle II

When Poul Anderson's Technic History began to be collected, Volume I, Trader To The Stars, opened by quoting Shelley: "The world's great age begins anew." However, this volume did not include, although it quoted, the first van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit." Also, the van Rijn novel, The Man Who Counts, and some other Technic History installments are set earlier than the first story in Trader..., "Hiding Place."

The Earth Book Of Stormgate begins with "Wings of Victory."

The Technic Civilization Saga begins with "The Saturn Game."

At last, the chronologically earliest story is presented first. 

Some Past Futures

Robert Heinlein's Future History began the day after tomorrow. The first thing that happened was a series of technological innovations.

Backtrack: CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, is set after the war, another day after tomorrow. There was one technological innovation, a pragmatometer, an information processor, described as a marvelous gadget. (I am not about to seek out the precise quotation at this time of night.) That Hideous Strength is not a future history but is a Christian response to Wellsian and Stapledonian secularist future histories.

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, modelled directly on the Future History, begins very soon, in the aftermath of World WAR III. The world has regressed - except that a new science of society is being applied and is helping the recovery.

Anderson's Technic History started with FTL interstellar exploration - except that a single story about interplanetary exploration in the outer Solar System was added later.

This is a partial history of future histories and is all that I am going to write tonight!

(Past futures are big time nostalgic.)

Setting The Stage

Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978).

"Then came the Terran War, and when it had passed by, ruined landscapes lay underneath skies gone strange." (p. 14)

A major event, a war, has happened but it is finished. Either we have read about the Terran War in the previous volume or we must wait to learn more. Our human author, Poul Anderson, has to allow for either of these two possibilities. Meanwhile, however, the Ythrian author of this passage has identified himself on the preceding page:

"It is Hloch of the Stormgate Choth who writes, on the peak of Mount Anrovil in the Weathermother." (p. 13)

Another scene-setting sentence greets us on the facing page:

"Our part in the Grand Survey had taken us out beyond the great suns Alpha and Beta Crucis." (p. 15)

This is a human, not an Ythrian, narrator. The Ythrians are just about to be discovered. The phrase, "...great suns...," evokes great events to come and indeed great events will occur in Sector Alpha Crucis many centuries later.

It is worthwhile to possess copies both of the Earth Book and of the Saga even though the entire contents of the former are reproduced in the latter. We keep looking both forwards and backwards in time.

A Dynamic Future History

(There will be little or nothing in this post that has not been said before on this blog but for me it is a major part of appreciating Poul Anderson and certainly bears repetition.)

A series is by its nature linear. Poul Anderson's Technic History is not only linear but also partly dynamic which is a very strange thing for a series to be, even partially. This partial dynamism is achieved in four stages:

(i) A linear tetralogy (two collections and two novels) about the Polesotechnic League reaching a definite conclusion in Mirkheim.

(ii) A single novel, The People Of The Wind, set centuries later in the period of the early Terran Empire and focusing on the human-Ythrian colony planet, Avalon.

(iii) An omnibus collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate, which perfectly synthesizes (i) and (ii). Thus:

the Earth Book is published on Avalon shortly after the events of (ii);

the twelve collected installments are introduced by an Avalonian Ythrian, Hloch;

five of the installments feature or involve human-Ythrian interactions;

eight installments not only are set during the League period but also do an excellent "now it can be told" operation on matters that had been mentioned but not fully explained in (i).

The Earth Book is both the fifth League volume and the second Ythrian volume.

(iv) The seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga rearranges all the installments of the Technic History into chronological order of fictional events so that stories that are set earlier are now read earlier. However, Hloch's introductions to the twelve installments that had been in the Earth Book are retained so that, e.g., Hloch now refers to the Terran War on Avalon not immediately after we have read about it but long before we are due to read about it. We know that we are reading a complicated and multi-faceted fictional history and will have to wait before every passing reference is clarified. The entire series should be read in full at least twice, first in pre-Saga order, then in the Saga.

And I will probably say this all again some time. But it is a unique future history series.

A Multi-Layered Narrative

This blog rotates around Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate and sometimes gravitates towards it. One reference generates more. My paperback Earth Book became powder so I acquired a hardback which now has a torn and battered dust cover.

The narrative of this volume is multi-layered:

Emil Dalmady works for Nicholas van Rijn on Suleiman;

he recounts his experiences to van Rijn back on Earth;

a generation later, on Avalon, Dalmady's daughter, Judith, writes "Esau," presenting an account of her father on Suleiman and in conversation with van Rijn;

also on Avalon, Hloch includes "Esau" and two other stories by Judith Dalmady/Lundgren from the periodical Morgana in the Earth Book which is read by members of his choth and presumably also by other Avalonians of both species;

we read the Earth Book because we exist in an alternative timeline where all of the above is fiction written by Poul Anderson!

OK. I need to shut down the computer and get across town to a meeting.

A Time Travel Series And A Future History Series

To summarize many previous posts, my two main interests in sf are time travel and future histories. Poul Anderson excels at both and combines them in There Will Be Time which might, on that account, be regarded as his culminating volume except that his canon culminates several times. If we were to take just one Anderson volume onto a desert island, should it be:

Time Patrol, which collects the entire Time Patrol series excluding only the long novel, The Shield Of Time, -

- or:

The Earth Book Of Stormgate, which "spans, illuminates and completes" the first main section of Anderson's longest and most detailed future history series, the History of Technic Civilization?

For many years, I would have said Time Patrol but I now favour the Earth Book because of its more complicated structure and double-layered narrative. The twelve collected installments, including one novel, take us from First Contact with Ythri during the first Grand Survey to the human-Ythrian colonization of the Coronan continent on Avalon. Thus, they begin before and end after the entire Solar Commonwealth-Polesotechnic League period of the Technic History, which they also incorporate. Hloch's twelve introductions and single afterword transport his readers even further into the future, into the early Terran Empire period and the aftermath of the Terran-Ythrian War which is recounted in the Earth Book's companion volume, The People Of The Wind.

The Earth Book is followed by the Young Flandry Trilogy if read as a discrete volume or by "The Star Plunderer," about the Founder of the Terran Empire, when its contents are incorporated into The Technic Civilization Saga, Volumes I-III (of VII). Thus, there are two alternative but equally valid reading orders.

The Earth Book is the kind of detailed future history series that Robert Heinlein had envisaged when he began to write the original Future History which inspired Anderson's Psychotechnic History.  

Fictional Texts

What is the status of a fictional text? If it has a first person narrator, then that narrator might be mistaken, lying or composing a fiction within a fiction. Usually this is not an issue but it can be made into one. Poul Anderson's War Of The Wing-Men has an omniscient narrator. However, when this novel was republished under its proper title, The Man Who Counts, in the omnibus Technic History collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate, the fictional editor of the Earth Book, Hloch, informed his Avalonian readers that this text was a historical novel about Nicholas van Rijn and that it had originally been published either on Terra or on Hermes with a different author's name and date given in each case! We know from later installments that van Rijn had been on Diomedes but we read only a fictional account of what he did there. Three other Technic History installments collected in the Earth Book are based on fictional "facts" but, we are told, had originally been published as short stories in the Avalonian periodical, Morgana. Immediately after the Earth Book, a scholar in a much further future informs us that John Henry Reeves' account of the Founder of the Terran Empire, Manuel Argos, is either an authentic memoir or a historical fiction.

A discerning blog reader might suspect that this breakfast post is occasioned by late night other reading. Thus, Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me, narrated by its heroine, is, prima facie, contradicted by the following Bond novel. However, that narrator tells us what Bond had told her that the Secret Service had believed at the time! Thus, multiple narrative layers intervene between the readers and any fictional "facts." In the eleventh of the twelve Bond novels, an obituary written by M informs readers of The Times that the previous ten novels and one collection had been grossly inaccurate popular accounts written by a former friend and colleague of Commander Bond. Thus, all the inconsistencies - which are certainly present - are instantly smoothed over.

In two concluding volumes by Dornford Yates, his familiar characters discuss all his previous novels and collections as works of fiction written by one of them. Boy Pleydell, who had narrated the Berry books, now turns out to have been the author of these and other works attributed to Dornford Yates.

Fictional narratives disappear.