Wind And A Sign

The Fleet Of Stars, 21.

Swearing Kinna to secrecy, Fenn tells her that she must not say a word to anyone, not even to her parents, to her robot pet:

"'...or the wind.'" (p. 278)

The wind is becoming incorporated as a character.

To seal the secret:

"She made a curious gesture, right forefinger flitting from left to right shoulder, then from brow to breast.'" (ibid.)

Gestures outlast their origins.

"...Harpagus drew the sign of the cross, which was a Mithraic sun-symbol."

-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 5, p. 77.

A neighbour made the sign of the cross when I informed her of another neighbour's death.

During a pause in their confrontation, we are told that Fenn and Kinna:

"...could not hear the Martian wind, and the dust devils afar spun in silence." (pp. 279-280)

Could not hear them? But wind and devils must have been in their minds or the text would not have mentioned such inaudible outdoor phenomena.

I have written more than I expected to this evening but with Poul Anderson that is always possible.

What was the secret? Read The Fleet Of Stars.

Questions And Answers II

 

An alternative title for Planet Of No Return is Question And Answer. Since I knew this when composing the immediately preceding post, Questions And Answers, I might have mentioned the fact and also have illustrated the post with a Question And Answer cover illustration as here. However, when searching for images, I found the more attractive blue and white cover of Collected Works, Volume I, which I had never seen before so I used that instead. I have now found the red and yellow cover of Collected Works, Volume II, but there is not enough room for it on this post. I have ideas about how to present Anderson's collected works but they would not correspond to anyone else's. Imagine his three novels set BC, followed by the The King Of Ys Tetralogy, then the five Norse fantasies, then the The Last Viking Trilogy, then the three novels set in the fourteenth century and so on, in other words chronological order of fictional events as far as possible. In the twentieth century, there is a fantasy novel and a detective trilogy. There are also alternative histories and, of course, all the futures. The non-series short stories of various genres I would relegate to several volumes at the end of the collection instead of starting with any of them but this is just my peculiar point of view.

Questions And Answers

Are human beings ready to swarm out into the universe? Will we ever be? This question is the crux of Poul Anderson's Planet Of No Return, The Avatar and The Fleet Of The Stars. Does such a recurrent theme become "same-y" (as some people I have known have used that word)? In many works by Anderson, human beings do swarm out and, by and large, continue to conduct themselves as they have been accustomed to do on Earth. In two short dystopias, they become extinct. In Genesis, they become extinct but are re-created by a post-organic intelligence. That is a vast body of reflection on mankind and his place in the universe.

(I am just back from Manchester, tired and maybe not about to post much this evening. Think about Anderson's questions and answers.)

Information About Jihannath

Early departure for a day trip to Manchester tomorrow morning. No early posts.

Comments in the combox for Red Skies On Other Planets mentioned Jihannath.

For an Appendix on Jihannath, see FUTURISTIC SEX by Sean M. Brooks.

For other blog posts that mention Jihannath, see here.

Jihannath is a minor planet in Poul Anderson's Technic History. We compare and contrast such planets within the Technic History and between future histories.

Ancient Horrors

The Fleet Of Stars, 20.

Chuan lists three ancient horrors that the Synesis prevents:

famine;

servitude;

unfree speech.

Observations

We human beings now have the need and the ability and lack only the collective will to eliminate these and other such horrors.

If another, more powerful, agency protects us from famine etc, then we will have lost our human agency.

It will transpire later in this novel that the artificial intelligence which Chuan serves plans a massive deception of humanity, an immense and unforgivable contravention of "free speech." (How can we "speak" freely if we can think only within the elaborate falsehoods of a deliberately implanted and sustained misconception?) This alone invalidates Chuan's side of the disagreement between him and Fenn. But it also makes the cybercosm incredible. We should expect truth, not lies, from a pure intellect.

Red Skies On Other Planets

On Brae in the Technic History:

"Wherefore Flandry walked through smashed ruins under a red dwarf sun, with a few raindrops falling like blood drops out of great clotted clouds."

-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 303-339 AT p. 304.

Clouds like clotted blood?

Is Flandry a "Defender" or a conqueror?

"...he was lonesome among his fellow conquerors..." 

-ibid., p. 306.

On Mars in the Harvest Of Stars History:

"Corpses lay strewn among blackened, twisted hulks. Behind them, the hills out of which the guerillas had struck rose dark, torturous, riddled and seamed with hiding places, toward Arsia Mons and a sky the color of clotting blood."

-The Fleet Of Stars, 20, p. 252.

The sky matches the scene on the ground, of course.

"...landscape tumbled away in black desolation, weirdly pocked and riven, under a sky gone murrey."

-ibid., p. 256.

"Murrey" is one of Anderson's words that I had to google and my computer does not recognize it.

We, editorially speaking, are reading about a historical revolution and also about the Inrai outrages on one future Mars.

(For the full story, please read The Fleet Of Stars. I comment only on whichever arbitrary details catch my attention.)

News And Thunder

The Fleet Of Stars, 16.

From Vernal, Fenn telephones Wanika in the Pacific where data search has located her on the shiptown, Malolo. She relays a recorded message for him from Mars. Kinna tells him that:

"'...a ship from Alpha Centauri is approaching Proserpina.'

"Thunder rolled through his skull." (p. 206)

Observations

We, the readers, already know that an Anson Guthrie download is coming from Beta Hydri via Alpha Centauri but, because of the distances and times involved, what is known to us is news to them.

We are very used to elemental forces like wind or thunder emphasizing the dramatic moments or pauses in Andersonian dialogue. Here it happens again although this time the (metaphorical) thunder is only inside Fenn! Pathetic fallacies and metaphors are Anderson's punctuations.

Vernal, the Pacific, Mars, Proserpina and Alpha Centauri gradually come together. The convergence is slow but we expect a climax.

Our Real Future

During the Apollo missions, I was reading a lot of sf, mainly focused on James Blish but also reading Heinlein, Anderson etc. Consequently, I hoped for interstellar exploration in the early twenty-first century. Heinlein's Future History had introduced the idea of an interregnum of space travel. That has happened, more or less, at least beyond Earth orbit. But by now I would have expected reusable spaceships, not another circum-Lunar mission beginning with a big rocket blastoff and ending with a parachute splashdown. 

We are living in the real future, not in any of the fictional ones. Some of those fictional futures involved a World War III aftermath. Poul Anderson covered every option, including WWIII aftermaths followed by space travel. Late at night, I always ask: which further future are we moving into? Wells' Time Traveller sped through tomorrow into futurity. We will live into it, starting tomorrow morning.

Good night.

Whatever Is Alive

The Fleet Of Stars, 18.

"[Fenn] was in space, and he would not trade; but ever more he remembered the seas of Earth, wind in a sail, waves thunderous, and the thrum of a tiller beneath his hand. When you get right down to the bones of the matter, he thought, the only meaning the universe has comes from whatever is alive." (p. 227)

He means consciously alive. 

Where else could meaning reside? Some words mean objects to which they refer. Others derive their meaning from their use. Only consciousness and intelligence give meaning to sounds and signs. Only experiences that are enjoyed, appreciated, valued have any meaning. For a man enjoying "wind in a sail," see Fran And The Technic History.

I agree with Fenn (and Fran) but have to ask how it could be otherwise. When consciousness began, meaningfulness began, as also did the division of time not only into (as yet unnoticed) days and years but also into past, "present" and future. Any moment is "present" to any organism that is conscious in that moment but not otherwise. 

Robotic Software

The Fleet Of Stars, 18.

"As for safety, the software in the robot, which could not be altered or replaced without triggering a burnout of the robot itself, would never obey an order that had any reasonable probability of endangering others." (p. 225)

Here is a faint echo of Isaac Asimov's future history in a later Poul Anderson future history. What a long way we have come from I, Robot. Indeed, the title story of Robot Dreams is one of three alternative culminations of Asimov's Robot stories. And Anderson's inclusion of the term, "software," reflects the distance that has meanwhile been travelled in the real world with computer technology.

Sf is one long discussion of ideas and extrapolations. And, so far, Anderson's Genesis, published appropriately in 2000, is one culmination of sf.