Drugs, Chemicals And A Machine

An sf writer can create a new prop or gadget as a plot device. Thus:

in Poul Anderson's "Honorable Enemies," a drug that makes a person believe whatever he is told (see Sorgan and Flandry On Alfzar);

in Anderson's There Will Be Time, chemicals with the same effect (see Sorgan And The Maurai Drug);

in Anderson's "I Tell You, It's True," a machine with the same effect (see It's True);

in Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, a "zombie" drug that makes people do as they are told, believe what they are told and answer any question (not mentioned on this blog before).

Tomorrow: Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

Wednesday: Paul Wilcock. (We have not mentioned him before.)

Next Tuesday: the Gregson.

Lancaster: a high energy place.

Any Last Thoughts On Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER?

 

Robert Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (London, 1970).

Not really. Not at the moment. Heinlein's causal circles hang together and he makes them work just as Poul Anderson, Audrey Niffenegger and some others do in their time travel novels. Heinlein makes the point that some events that could have happened did not happen:

"...the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded 'not possibles' of the basic circuit design." (p. 188)

If the narrator had read that line of print, then he would have done something that would have prevented its existence but it does exist, therefore he did not do anything that would have prevented its existence.

James Blish thought that all previous circular causality narratives were limited. He proposed at some time to write a finite-spinning-universe-theory-of time-travel novel with its entire plot and characters based on the paradox. That is one of the might-have-beens, like Stieg Larsson's seven further Millennium volumes.

Three Kinds Of Interests

In my youth, I read a lot and what I read perhaps addressed three kinds of interests:

intellectual

imaginative

spiritual

By "spirituality," I mean inner practice of prayer and/or meditation. 

Some works address more than one such interest. Thus, Poul Anderson's sf is imaginative, is based in the physical sciences, which require intellectual understanding, and addresses the spiritual concerns of some of his characters. CS Lewis imagined other worlds and presented philosophical arguments for his beliefs about spirituality.

I am rereading Ninian Smart's World Religions: A Dialogue, a fictional conversation between a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Ceylonese Buddhist and a Japanese Buddhist. Anderson readers can imagine Axor agreeing with C (the Christian) and Adzel agreeing with JB (the Japanese Buddhist).

All reading is good and forms a continuum.

See also C And Axor. 

(I need to eat something before going out to the Zen group which hires a room in the Friends' Meeting House: two great spiritual traditions.

(Homage to the Buddha, homage to the Dharma, homage to the Sangha.)

The Tradition

We have identified a literary tradition whose characters transition or "travel" (inaccurate and misleading though that word is) into the future. Three primary authors are:

HG Wells

both time travel and suspended animation

Robert Heinlein

three circular causality narratives, one featuring suspended animation as well as time travel

Poul Anderson

six time travel volumes: 

three novels; 

one series; 

enough short stories for a collection

Another major name, in my opinion, is CS Lewis whose Ransom Trilogy is a Christian response to Wellsian secular sf and whose "The Dark Tower" is specifically a response to the The Time Machine because it begins by arguing the impossibility of physical time travel and then presents both a chronoscope and mental travel between alternative timelines. And, to cap it all, both Heinlein and Lewis mention the two ladies at Trianon.

Poul Anderson's readers can, if they want to, move to other authors with common themes and then to reports of psychic experiences.

Transitions

While out and about and engaged in mundane activities, my brain has again been unravelling the physical and literary aspects of "time travel," which is our common abbreviation of HG Wells' original "time travelling." I wanted to return to the literary tradition but sometimes the physical issues intrude.

In the previous post, we willfully conflated transition to the future with "travel" into it but greater precision is necessary. Everyone transitions. Everyone here has transitioned from nonexistence to existence and from childhood to adulthood (- although, of course, nothing has really begun or ceased to exist; mass/energy/being has changed form). Wells' Sleeper transitions to a later century just by sleeping long enough. What does Wells' Time Traveller do? And also the Time Traveller's literary successor, Poul Anderson's Jack Havig?

The Time Traveller does not move in any direction. What he experiences is time dilation accompanied by an inexplicable (in my opinion) sensation of headlong forward motion. He slows down while everything else (from his point of view) speeds up. He just sits still for far longer than anyone else, in both temporal directions. And, while this is happening, he should remain both visible and palpable to everyone else.

Jack Havig:

stands instead of sitting;

exercises a psychic power instead of driving a vehicle;

shares the perception of external events rushing past but not the sensation of headlong motion;

also becomes inexplicably invisible and intangible.

Futureward "time travel" by the Time Traveller and Havig is a fictional extension or exaggeration of the transitioning that all of us do anyway. It is not a kind of "travel" although we have inherited that word from Wells.

Matter both extends and moves through space, the difference being that motion takes time whereas extension does not. We endure through time. If we moved through time, then that motion would take time in a second temporal dimension which is unnecessary to describe our experience of time. Four dimensions suffice: three spatial; one temporal.

Change

 

Sf can address any part of the cosmos, past, present or future. A lot of sf is about the future and change. "Things to come" will not be things that were. We recognize periods of great change and that we are living in one. Sf is the literature of this period. Even narratives about the cosmic past reflect recently acquired scientific knowledge.

First biological evolution, then agricultural, scientific, industrial, social, political and new technological revolutions. Some sf is about people travelling or transitioning into a changed world. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave begins in the then contemporary world but then people and society are transformed. The cause of the transformation is speculative and fictional but it reflects the fact of real change as well as cosmic interconnection.

This was meant to be a longer post but it is being cut short. Laterz. 

Posting About "The Pirate"

"The Pirate."

See the above link for the haunting opening and closing sentences of this story.

See The Oneness Of Time for a rare connection in sf between a future history and prehistory.

See Port Nevada for a summary of Poul Anderson's vivid description of the spaceport on this future Earth.

These are the main aspects of this story that I would have wanted to post about this time and a search of the blog reveals that I have already posted about them in far more detail than I would have felt able to now.

The coming week and a day will present some real life obstacles to blogging but maybe we need a break anyway? Other reading continues. I agree with Sean's recent comment that even pre-"off the rails" Heinlein is not necessarily that good to read. However, I continue to find his The Door Into Summer interesting and will say more about it when time allows.

Other Reading II

I am rereading Heinlein's The Door Into Summer for comparison purposes. It is a solid novel about how a talented inventor, Dan Davis, responds to being swindled by his business partner and fiancee. Davis invents neither the suspended animation technique nor the time machine but another sf prop, domestic robots. The two future dates in the novel are 1970 and 2000-'01! Davis' cat plays a big part in the narrative. James and Judy Blish, who had two cats when I visited them, said that Heinlein's account of feline behaviour is all wrong, even canine. That is what my Aesthetics lecturer called an "aesthetic interference condition." Of course, the comparison with Anderson will focus on the time travel and the circular causality paradox when we get to them. In Chapter Four, our villain and villainess argue about which of them had left a door unlocked. Dan Davis, time traveller, had unlocked/will unlock it.

Next Music Festival event: jazz in The Castle Chapel.

Summary

Suspended Animation

On Earth, it is a way to:

improved medicine, a cure for cancer etc;

a fortune from investments (if the economy holds up);

a better, or at least a different, society. 

In space, it is a way to:

transport shiploads of colonists to extrasolar planets at sub-light speeds.

Examples

On Earth: 

Wells, The Sleeper Wakes; 

Heinlein, The Door Into Summer.

And, in Poul Anderson's "Time Heals," temporal stasis has the same effects.

In space: Anderson's Orbit Unlimited.

Also And Acknowledgements

The Door Into Summer features time travel as well as suspended animation.

Heinlein's The Door Into Summer explicitly acknowledges Wells' The Sleeper Wakes.

Anderson's time travel novel, There Will Be Time, implicitly acknowledges Wells' The Time Machine.

As I always advise, read them all.

"The Pirate"

Poul Anderson, "The Pirate" IN Anderson, Homeward And Beyond (New York, July 1976), pp. 92-126.

Of the stories in this collection, I am most drawn back to this one, even though I have reread it most recently. It is a later addition to Anderson's first future history series and has a palpably elegiac tone. A long series like the Pychotechnic History is bound to be uneven in quality especially if maturer works are inserted into earlier sections of the fictional timeline. 

In his introduction to the story for this collection, Anderson writes:

"Of readers who have commented on it to me, the young have generally confessed to being a bit puzzled, while the older have instantly seen what was going on." (p. 92)

Indeed, the text opens and closes by observing that:

"We guard the great Pact; but the young generations, the folk of the star frontier, so often do not understand." (p. 92)

"But the young generations so often do not understand." (p. 126)

I see what is going on but I am old but I do not remember being puzzled when I was any younger and that is enough for tonight, folks.

Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop on Tuesday, I hope. Maybe more music tomoz.