Planets So Remote

 

When the Terran Emperor's birthday is celebrated:

"On planets so remote that the unaided eye could not see their suns among those twinkling to life over Oceania, men turned dark and leathery, or thick and weary, by strange weathers lifted glasses in salute. The light waves carrying their pledge would lap on his tomb."

-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 5.

Despite the quantum hyperdrive, the universe of the Technic History remains relativistic. Therefore, simultaneity is relative. So the dark and leathery or thick and weary men cannot be said to drink the Emperor's health at the same time as Birthday is being celebrated on Terra. Nevertheless, the Terrans can measure how long it would take them to travel back and forth on hyperdrive and therefore must have some way to calculate a simultaneity of events for practical purposes.

Having returned from a sandwich lunch in a country pub, I must now eat again before walking across town in a cold wind to an important public meeting.

We are building a future now although not the future of the Technic History.

Sub-Light Speeds

Anderson's Future Histories That Presuppose Only Slower Than Light Interstellar Travel

The two Kith Histories

The Rustum History

Tales Of The Flying Mountains

The Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy

The Boat Of A Million Years

Genesis (only post-organic intelligences fly between stars)

How much inter-species communication is possible at sub-light speeds? If there is a technological civilization twenty thousand light years away, then it cannot detect our present civilization because it can see Sol only as it was twenty thousand years ago. At that distance, would it be able to detect a Solar planet, then oxygen in the atmosphere, vegetation on the surface and artificial light on the night side? (Not that there would have been artificial light back then.) If there is going to be a technological civilization at that distance twenty thousand years hence, then it might with difficulty detect our present civilization. Our brief burst of radio signals - now being replaced by fibre-optic cables? - would be weak and swamped by other cosmic noise. But, if such a civilization were to launch an expedition towards Earth, then, at sub-light speeds, that expedition would arrive here well over forty thousand years in our future. Would such an expedition even be launched?

I am summarizing from memory arguments presented by Brian Cox.

Starfarers is Poul Anderson's approach to the concept of detecting an extra-solar civilization and launching a slower than light expedition to it.

New Discoveries

Sure. A faster than light drive presupposes a new paradigm but that is not why sf writers deploy FTL drives. Usually, they are just exploiting a convenient cliche to move their characters around on an otherwise impossible galactic scale. 

It is impossible to predict a new theory. If an author, pre-Einstein, had written that there was going to be a new theory called "relativity," then he would have predicted the name but not the content of that theory whereas, if he had stated the content, then he would have made, not predicted, the theory. An sf writer can convey the sense of discovery but can only guess at what new discoveries there might be. In James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, his characters receive messages from many future periods with mutually incompatible and incomprehensible paradigms.

Poul Anderson conveys the sense of new discoveries in his fictional introduction to "The Three-Cornered Wheel" where someone called Vance Hall points out that it had been thought:

that power could not be extracted from atomic nuclei until uranium fission was discovered;

that energy projectors/ray guns were impractical until lasers were invented;

that accelerating spaceships must expel mass until artificial gravity fields were generated;

that light speed could not be surpassed until the quantum hyperjump was found.

Thus, Anderson does make anti-gravity and FTL seem like up-coming stages in a current process. 

He presents several distinct FTL scenarios, e.g.:

the quantum hyperdrive in the Technic History, of course;

the superlight drive and civilization clusters in After Doomsday;

the interstellar and intergalactic space jump in World Without Stars.

Paradigms

James Blish, "The Science in Science Fiction" IN Blish, The Tale That Wags The God, pp. 35-45.

Blish writes that:

Poul Anderson

Raymond F. Jones

Hal Clement

Arthur C. Clarke

Larry Niven

Isaac Asimov

- are scientifically accurate but nevertheless write about:

telepathy;

faster than light (FTL) travel;

time travel;

anti-gravity;

force-fields or force-screens

- "...which are impossible by current standards." (p. 38)

Why?

One thing is certain:

"...the future will offer us new paradigms." (pp. 43-44)

An sf writer should not contradict known facts but should "...suggest new paradigms..." (p. 45)

We cannot know in advance what any new paradigms will be. We can only suggest them by imagining phenomena, like FTL travel, that are impossible according to current paradigms. Blish concludes that:

"...the most important scientific content in modern science fiction are the impossibilities." (p. 45)

We can look forward to a future not necessarily of FTL but certainly of unpredictable new paradigms.

Enduring Explosion

James Blish,  POUL ANDERSON: THE ENDURING EXPLOSION IN Blish, The Tale That Wags The God (Chicago, 1987), pp. 86-92.

(A posthumous non-fiction collection. This article was published in FSF, April 1971.)

Anderson was first published in an sf mag in 1944.

He was prolific and, uniquely, his work was of consistently high quality. Blish though that Anderson was the only surviving Golden Age Astounding author whose work had not gone downhill. He identifies Anderson as:

scientist

technician

stylist

bard

humanist

humorist

artist

- and immune to changes in fashion.

Blish had labelled Anderson's works as "hard copy," meaning deeply felt and carefully crafted, but was taken to mean scientifically correct, hence the term "hard sf" - which Anderson also wrote. His electrons were not miniature planets and his asteroids did not have jungles. Blish praises Tau Zero, The Day After Doomsday, "Sister Planet," The High Crusade and "A Bicycle Built for Brew," but was not so keen on "Hoka."

He points out yet another Biblical quotation, this one in "Sister Planet": Ezekiel 7: 3-4.

Anderson's works were not just adventures, tragedies etc but wholes. He deliberately appealed to at least three senses in every scene. He appealed for "unitary" sf combining every aspect of life which is a good prescription for any kind of fiction.

What We Do Not Know

Years ago, at an sf con, there was Fran, me and another guy. The other guy thought that the light speed limit was frustrating: so many things that we can see from a distance but cannot explore close up. I was not so sure. At any stage of transportation technology, we will be able to see further than we can travel. That is part of the deal. We are at least in the universe and can surely travel at least to the limits of the Solar System and improve telescopes to see much further than we can now. Other galaxies remain as mysterious to Poul Anderson's Technic Historians as they are to us. A few of his characters go further but they cannot see everything.

Fran said that there are so many things that we do not know, that maybe among the things that we do not know is a way to travel faster than light. Not if the light speed limit really is a fundamental physical feature of this universe. Science is always provisional. The vastness of the unknown is a reason to continue learning, not to hope for a particular outcome. Whatever we learn will be unexpected. We will return this point from another direction later.

Moving Space

Years ago, in his New Maps Of Hell, Kingsley Amis explained the sf "hyperdrive" as follows: although a spaceship cannot move through space faster than light, if a volume of space were somehow to be moved through the surrounding space, then it would be able to carry along with it a spaceship that remained stationary within it. I thought that that made some sort of sense at the time. 

Observations

I have never encountered that explanation of hyperspace in sf;

we do encounter many different explanations;

the cleverest is Poul Anderson's quantum hyperdrive with which a spaceship makes many short quantum jumps without traversing the intervening spaces, therefore without running up against the relativistic light speed limit;

the speculative Alcubierre drive does involve moving space insofar as expansion and contraction are forms of motion.

We have discussed Anderson's several faster than light (FTL) drives. See blog search result.

I am fairly sure that Anderson said somewhere that he devised a different scientific rationale for FTL every time that he used the concept. (His physics degree enabled him to do this.) However, searching for this quotation, I found James Blish saying it of Lester del Rey!

Brian Cox argues that future theories should not contradict but incorporate relativity just as the latter incorporates Newtonian physics. Yes, but that might allow for some way around instead of against the light speed limit which is what sf writers try to imagine. But will any warp drive require impossible quantities of energy? Some ideas work in theory but only in theory like a T-machine would have to have infinite length or something?

Differences Of Scale

We are following some lines of thought starting from What Is Possible?

Problems with slower than light interstellar flight begin with the fuel problem that is common to all space flight. How do you carry enough fuel? The more fuel you carry, the more fuel you need to carry it. Secondly, organisms do not live long enough to complete an interstellar voyage and are not adapted to spend long periods of time away from the kind of environment in which they evolved. A spacecraft surrounded by vacuum with cosmic rays sleeting through it for decades and centuries is not a hospitable environment.

Brian Aldiss wrote once that human beings populated their Terrestrial environment with other intelligences, nature deities and spirits etc, which do not exist, then populated the Solar System with Selenites, Martians etc which do not exist and now populate extra-solar planets with other intelligences which (he thought) do not exist either. A lot more has been and is being learned about the number and characteristics of exo-planets so I think that, with increasing probability, ET's can be out there but how many, how near, and how easy to contact?

We have projected consciousness into nature and onto the heavens and are still doing that in a different way, i.e., we have traversed oceans and continents and built civilizations and empires and imagine ourselves continuing to operate in this way in the galaxy where, however, the spatiotemporal scale is completely different. Quantity affects quality. There has to be some scale on which we cannot operate so where is the dividing line?

What Is Possible?

Some lines of thought have come up and might take some time to develop so I might start into something, then break off and return to it later - one of the beauties of blogging. It will be seen that everything written below is relevant to sf in general and to Poul Anderson's works in particular.

As a philosopher, I make a big deal out of two kinds of impossibility. Some people might either not understand this distinction, at least initially, or not see why it matters. In any case, both kinds of impossibility are kinds of impossibility. Let us just stay with that for the time being. 

Where is the line between possible and impossible?

interplanetary travel

slower than light interstellar travel

faster than light interstellar travel

inter-galactic travel, same differences

inter-universal travel

time travel (by this, I mean travel into the real past among events that really happened, not events that look like the past but are malleable by the traveller)

It will be seen that Anderson's works are all over this list. How confident do you feel about proceeding down the list? We know that interplanetary travel is possible because it has been done, albeit on the meanest scale, but what is next?

Brian Cox has mounted a powerful argument that we should draw the line under interplanetary travel, that even STL interstellar travel will not happen and is not happening. I was going to share a video exposition of Cox's argument but it has become unavailable. I very inadequately summarized the argument in Not To Be Pessimistic But. I have more to say about this and will not be alone in that.

Four Decades III

1971-1980

Pre-League

"Wings of Victory" (April, 1972) (Ythrians)

"The Problem of Pain" (February, 1973) (Ythrians)

League Period

"A Little Knowledge" (August, 1971)

"Wingless" (July, 1973) (Ythrians)

"Rescue on Avalon" (1973) (Ythrians)

"Lodestar" (1973) (Falkayn; team; van Rijn; Ythrians)

"The Season of Forgiveness" (December, 1973)

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" (1974) (Adzel)

Mirkheim (1977) (Falkayn, team, van Rijn)

Terran Empire

The People Of The Wind (February-April, 1973) (Ythrians)

The Day Of Their Return (1973) (an Ythrian) (Flandry quoted) 

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows (September/October-November/December 1974) (Flandry; Aycharaych))

A Stone In Heaven (1979) (Flandry)