Meeting The Future

The Fleet Of Stars, 15.

Fenn tells Maherero, a high councillor of the Southern Coagency:

"'Nobody can forecast the future. If somebody isn't willing to meet it as it comes, he should get out of the way of those who are.'" (p. 190)

A succinct summary of the Andersonian philosophy? (Also van Rijnian etc?) See a much-quoted passage about "'...bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future," here.

Maherero sits unmoving. The accompanying music, dance and bird flight stop. Has this been a diplomatic disaster for Fenn? Then Maherero laughs and accepts the deal to work with the Lahui Kuikawa on the transformation of Deimos. The music, dance and flight resume triumphantly. 

Interactive entertainment of guests is an important custom in this polity just as human service to new arrivals is among the Lahui and archaism is in London. Some customs are contrived whereas others are alive.

Fleet stands up well as an sf traveloque.

Fenn And Maherero

The Fleet Of Stars, 15.

After Amaterasu, the Habitat, Alpha Centauri, Luna, Mars and the Pacific, we read about a bay on the South Atlantic.

The restless, blue, green and white-foamed ocean shines and glitters. Its cool breeze is salt-tanged. Walvis Bay stretches from Pelican Point to a high tower of homes and offices. Pleasure boats dance while robots unload freighters. Metamorphic grass, trees and flowers cover former desert. Invisible communication lines cover half a continent. 

On the roof of the tower, Fenn and Maherero converse with refreshments while watching a dance accompanied by specially bred colourful birds. The dance leader follows their conversation through sonic ear plugs and directs the dance accordingly. 

The next question is what are they talking about but we will have to return to that later.

DNA

The Fleet Of Stars, 14.

"Some people didn't take to being civilized; their DNA wasn't right for it." (p. 185)

Poul Anderson's first, Psychotechnic, future history referred to:

"...the revolt of a primitive against the unnatural state called civilization and freedom."

-see here.

- whereas, in Anderson's Technic History, Nicholas van Rijn claims that he and his friends are wild animals. See here.

For more on this issue, see this blog research result. (Scroll down.)

OK. An issue that spans three future histories and The Winter Of The World and a good place to end for tonight, maybe, although you never know. I have not seen any news yet today. What is happening in the real world that generates all the fictional worlds? Any new madnesses or Messiahships?

(In one of my jobs that involved interviewing clients, "DNA" meant "Did Not Attend." Maybe fictional characters are those who do not attend reality?)

Narratives And Perspectives

Poul Anderson presents mutant immortals in The Boat Of A Million Years and mutant time travellers in There Will Be Time. Far from bring successive instalments of a single series, these works are the exact opposite of that: alternative speculations. An immortal can remember a historical period but not revisit it whereas a time traveller who does not remember a period can visit it for the first time. Thus, history plays different roles in these narratives, as also in the same author's historical novels.

Fictional characters sometimes experience time travel very differently. Anderson's Time Patrollers, seated on timecycles, experience what is to them an instantaneous transition from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates to another whereas the protagonists in Anderson's "Flight to Forever" are enclosed within their vehicle, called a "time projector," while external events fast forward around them. Anderson's mutant time travellers, travelling by will power alone, see the rest of the world fast forwarding or rewinding around them as does HG Wells' Time Traveller and this is not surprising because we are to understand that it was one of the mutants who gave the time travel idea to Wells.

Some completed bodies of work are straightforward boxed set material like four volumes of The King Of Ys, four of Harvest Of Stars, three of The Last Viking etc whereas others are not what readers would expect like:

three Maurai future history short stories;

one long Maurai novel;

There Will Be Time in which the Maurai History is fiction -

- or:

two Kith future history short stories;

a long novel presenting an alternative Kith history -

- or:

A Midsummer Tempest in which Holger Danske from Three Hearts And Three Lions and Valeria Matuchek from Operation Otherworld meet in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, from "House Rule " and "Losers' Night." 

Reading through any of these sequences gets you to somewhere completely unpredictable.

Poul Anderson's Series

Does anyone know how many series Poul Anderson wrote?

The Wikipedia Poul Anderson bibliography lists:

Hoka (with Gordon R. Dickson)

The Psychotechnic League (which I call the Psychotechnic History)

Tomorrow's Children, collected as Twilight World

The Technic History

Time Patrol

History of Rustum

Maurai and Kith (giving the wrong impression that these are one series)

Harvest of Stars

The King of Ys (with Karen Anderson)

Operation Otherworld

The Last Viking

The Trygve Yamamura Trilogy (not named as such)

This bibliography lists Tales Of The Flying Mountains as a collection although not as a collected series.

It does not mention:

connections between Three Hearts And Three Lions, A Midsummer Tempest, Operation Otherworld and two "Old Phoenix" short stories;

the three Wing Alak stories;

a few other connections between works.

For earlier posts on series, see here.

Like A Tide

The Fleet Of Stars, 14.

On Mars:

"The shrunken sun declined westward. Shadows rose in Crommelin Basin like a tide lapping around the city towers. Fenn took his departure." (p. 173)

The sun looks shrunken to Fenn who has come from Luna and Earth.

The comparison of the shadows with a tide is striking. It also evokes Mars as it was long ago and might be again in the future. Mars is green as seen from Earth in Anderson's The Winter Of The World. 

Sometimes Poul Anderson devotes a paragraph to a sunrise or a sunset. This time it is just one sentence but a good one.

Remember also the haiku in Anderson's Genesis:

"The shadows, like life,
"moved beneath summer daylight.

"Evening reclaims them." 

Chuan And Fenn

The Fleet Of Stars, 14. 

Chuan claims that what Fenn calls progress is the opposite because it is both dangerous and archaistic:

"'Our proper future, our true evolution, lies in the growth of intellect, consciousness, spirit.'" (p. 172)

Fenn replies that this:

"'Seems kind of overblown...'" (ibid.)

Chuan responds that it makes sense of a universe otherwise "'...without rhyme or reason...'" (ibid.)

I would say slow down, both! Some people have - not always but for a very long time - grown intellect in universities and spirit in monasteries. That should continue. But no one should lay down that it is "our" future and evolution - for everyone. Why legislate like that? I once told a guy why I had stopped drinking and he thought that I was telling him to stop drinking. 

Fenn should say not that science, philosophy and spirituality are overblown but that they are necessary and that those who want to do them should, just as others should expand human horizons in the ways that he plans to. This really does seem to be an unnecessary conflict that they are getting into.

All consciousness makes sense of an otherwise unconscious universe. Conscious organisms experience aspects of this universe which otherwise would not be experienced or known.

One energy

With many changing forms

Builds complicated ordered patterns of itself

On different psychophysical levels

And spatiotemporal scales

And becomes conscious of itself

Whose body is the universe

Whose sense organs are living beings. 

What Chuan Says

 

The Fleet Of Stars, 14.

Chuan thinks that renewed industrial activity in space could generate new ideas and faiths as troublesome as Catharism. Why should it do that? If, as he says:

"'In everything everywhere, the equilibrium is fearsomely precarious.'" (p. 172)

- then society is not being allowed to develop. It is being held back in what sounds like a very dangerous state instead of being helped out of it.

Why should renewed activity in space generate:

"'Economic rivalry...'" (p. 171)

- leading to:

"'The bitterness in those who try and fail.'" (ibid.)?

But, if it does have such consequences, then surely an advanced technological civilization would be able to cope with them much better than earlier generations had done?

Chuan says that:

"'...the field drive makes interplanetary war possible.'" (ibid.)

Sure, any advanced technology could be used for warfare but will not be so used if there are no other causes of conflict. But, if there are such causes, then they need to be addressed, not left to fester.

Chuan sounds like not the man in the middle but a man in a muddle.

Going Home

The Fleet Of Stars, 13.

Sometimes it seems more than fortuitous that a particular paragraph falls right at the end of a right-hand page so that it is necessary to turn the page in order to continue reading. Although there is no pause in the text, the reader experiences the very slight pause of a page-turning immediately before a dramatic development in the narrative. Thus, He'o, an intelligent seal, reflecting on humanity and expressing his own experience, tells Fenn and Stellarosa:

"'Yes, you are a peculiar race... I will never fully understand you. Do you understand yourselves?' His whiskers quivered. 'I, though, I am going home to my sea.'" (p. 159)

He'o is going home.

Turning the page, we read:

"Thunder smote. His skull exploded. Blood and brains fountained. The missile whanged off two walls before it dropped." (p. 160)

His last conscious thought before his instantaneous death was of the sea. Some would say that that was the best way to die although I disagree. He'o's best death would have been at the end of a very long old age while experiencing his sea.

Do we imagine that He'o does go home, i.e., that he enters a hereafter corresponding to his memory of the sea? We can imagine this and write fiction about it but consciousness must end when the brain that generates it explodes.

Theta-Ennea And Stellarosa

"The curator of Oxford...for reasons unrevealed to [Patulcius] currently used the name Theta-Ennea..."

-The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, 7, p. 480.

Fenn and He'o are approached by a journalist from the Cosmochronicle Service who informs them that her:

"'...current name is Stellarosa...'"

-The Fleet Of Stars, 13, p. 155.

Names that are not only exotic but also merely current suggest social rootlessness. Fictional futures by a single author have common features.

Patulcius began life as Gnaeus Cornelius Patulcius in the Roman Empire. Fenn, born in an AI-dominated age, has a personal name with no surname but also a unique identification number. Poul Anderson's imagination encompasses past and future history. Immortals and time travellers experience both.