Future, Present And Past

Three kinds of reading complement each other:

sf about future political conflicts like Poul Anderson's "The Pugilist," "A Man To My Wounding" etc;

the current news;

recent political historical works like Bye Bye Blackshirt: the fight against Oswald Mosley, antisemitism, and the British Union of Fascists, 1934-1936, by Mark Krantz who signed a copy for me at a book launch meeting last night.

Futuristic sf is part of this spectrum, commenting on the time in which it is written and the recent past. 

I am finding "A Man To My Wounding" somewhat heavy going but will persevere until the end, knowing that something is always to be learned from reading anything written by Poul Anderson.

(Book launch and other meetings are held in a Methodist Church Centre. We walk through a very lively Food Bank to get to the meeting room. All human life is here - or some of it, at least. The Centre is just off Dalton Square with the Town Hall and the statue of Queen Victoria.)

Some Special Days

Because of our cultural heritage, certain phrases resonate in our consciousnesses whether or not an author intends any such resonance. When Poul Anderson wrote:

"On the third day he arose..."

- and Mike Carey wrote:

"...the third day he rose..."

(for both references, see On The Third Day)

- they obviously intended to remind us of something!

However, I am far less certain that Ian Fleming had anything particular in mind when he wrote:

"On the morning of the third day a bloody nightmare shook him awake, trembling and sweating."

-Casino Royale, CHAPTER 19, p. 132.

- or:

"...on the eighth day he asked for her..."

-ibid., CHAPTER 21, p. 149.

(For a possible significance of the eighth day, see again the link to "On The Third Day," above.)

In Facing Death, we referred to religious observances on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Two further points about Fridays:

Christians have fasted and abstained on Friday because it was the day of the Crucifixion;

I suspected that Muhammad had opted for Friday as the Muslim day of prayer just to be different from Jews and Christians and a Muslim friend acknowledged that some aspects of Islam have been instituted on such a basis but he nevertheless checked on the Internet and found that one significance of Friday is that it is the day on which Adam was created!

See A Self-Contained Universe.

If (mythologically speaking), God rested on the seventh day, having created human beings on the sixth day, then, yes, Adam was created on a Friday! (But note the two creation stories in Genesis, summarized in the linked post.)

I acknowledge without apology that passages in works by Anderson and other imaginative authors can generate lines of thought that carry us far away from those authors' texts. If my interests were different, then I would post more about Anderson's many references to world history or to the physical sciences. But other readers must follow their lines of interest. We might eventually compile a collection of "Anderson on Everything."

Marks On Paper

Physically, a book is ink marks on paper. It comes to life when read. RG Collingwood argued that, if copies of Shakespeare's works survived but the ability to read and understand English was lost, then the works would no longer exist. They exist only in the minds of theatre audiences and readers and can be transmitted in different physical media. 

If this is the case, then we maintain decades-old short stories like Poul Anderson's "The Pugilist," "A Man To My Wounding" etc by reading and rereading them. The texts are lifeless until reread. Keep them alive.

Twenty Strong Women Characters In Poul Anderson's Works

Betty Riefenstahl

Coya Conyon

Tabitha Falkayn

Persis d'Io

Djana

Aline Chang-Lei

Luang

Kit Kittredge

Ella McIntyre

Kathryn McCormac

Tatiana Thane

Fraina of Jubilee

Miriam Abrams

Diana Crowfeather

Graydal

Dagny

Yasmin

Evalyth Sairn

Janne Floris

Wanda Tamberly

As usually happens, I am finding that there are more than I had bargained for and I do not want to go and look up names at this time of night. However, I have just found several on the blog instead of going upstairs to check future history volumes.

Contrast James Bond's attitude:

"These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men."

-Casino Royale, CHAPTER 15, p. 105.

(I said that it was difficult to choose between cover images so here is another.)

It is worse in Goldfinger: homosexuality results from giving women the vote.

Some More Fictive Discussion

"A Man To My Wounding."

Next, the first person narrator and a ten-year-old shoeshine boy discuss the assassination system - so it is still being discussed, not yet demonstrated. The narrator, although he does not tell the boy this, is a field agent or trigger man for the Bureau of National Protection and the boy gets some of his ideas about how the BNP operates from a TV character called Secretive Operative Dan Steelman.

Fleming tried to develop Bond for TV and I should have commended his appeal to three bodily senses when I quoted the opening sentence of Casino Royale here. In fact, it is late enough to return to that novel now so we might get some more from the BNP over breakfast tomoz. That is an unfortunate set of initials in Britain although googling discloses that it can have other meanings as can many TLA's.

Poul Anderson's short stories are systematic logical developments of alternative sf ideas. Comprehensive though he was, Anderson did not cover every possibility. SM Stirling imagined the slave-owning mentality and ideology surviving through the present and into the future. Dystopias warn us what to avoid. Sf, covering every option, should also present utopias.

Rationalization

An author can address an issue either in an article or in a work of fiction. Articles discuss; fiction dramatizes. An author can also express a viewpoint either directly in nonfiction or indirectly in fiction. Both characters and readers hold viewpoints and discuss issues. Hence, blog comboxes.

The broadcast address heard by the first person narrator of "A Man To My Wounding" acknowledges that MAD is mad but also (literally) rationalizes violence. I try to avoid lengthy quotations but sometimes a text is so dense and compact that selection is difficult. The address includes the following proposition:

"'At the same time, force remains the ultima ratio.'" (p. 189)

Here is a dictionary definition:

"Ultima ratio" means the final argument or last resort, often implying the use of force when all other measures fail."

-Merriam-Webster.

It was the use of "ratio" that made me describe this address as a "rationalization." The passage continues:

"'It is no use to preach that killing is wrong, that human life is infinitely valuable, and so on. I'm afraid that in point of blunt, regrettable fact, human life has always been a rather cheap commodity. From a man defending his wife against a homicidal maniac, on to the most complex international problems, issues are bound to arise occasionally which cannot be resolved. If these issues are too important to ignore, men will then fight.

"'The need of the world today is, therefore, not to plan grandiose renunciations of violence.'" (ibid.)

Solutions

In Poul Anderson's "Kings Who Die," war is still waged but beyond Earth and Moon.

In his "License," crime is legalized.

In this story, political leaders are assassinated.

My point, however, is that the broadcast address, which fills more than a page, reads too much like an article and not enough like a fictional dialogue in which a character expresses his viewpoint. The narrator approves of what he hears, thus reinforcing the message. That message is reasonable but is this how to present it?

I remember a British children's TV series with a lot of sword fights. The theme song ended:

"For life and love and happiness are well worth fighting for.

"They're well worth fighting for!"

They are but this was a blatant rationalization of a series that was all about fighting and not about life, love or happiness!

A Man To My Wounding II

Poul Anderson, "A Man To My Wounding" IN Anderson, Conflict (New York, August 1983), pp. 187-209.

See also:

A Man To My Wounding.

Robert Crane's Solution

The opening phrase is also a Biblical reference:

"His names were legion..." (p. 187)

Here is another story where war has become too destructive so alternative forms of violence have had to be found. In an inept narrative device, particularly for Anderson, the first person narrator, apparently an assassin waiting to make a hit although we will have to read on to be sure of what is happening, listens to a broadcast address by a University president which explains the background.

This speaker summarizes some military history:

limited conflicts between the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution;

relative chivalry in the post-Napoleonic nineteenth century;

trench warfare in WWI;

indiscriminate aerial bombardments in WWII;

atomic WWIII;

current assassinations of political leaders.

There are Libertarian and Enterprise political parties. This story is extremely condensed and is getting to be too much for this late at night but we have made a start. 

High IQ Unnecessary?

"Backwardness."

Is it credible that a high average IQ is unnecessary for social progress because:

"The most fundamental advances, fire- and tool-making language and clothing and social organization, were made by apish dim-bulbs. It simply took a long time between discoveries.

"Given a million years, much can happen. Newton founded modern physics in one lifespan. A hundred less talented men, over a thousand-year period, could slowly and painfully have accomplished the same thing...

"It is only some freak of mutation which has made the Earthman so intelligent; he never actually needed all that brain." (p. 166)?

Could less talented men have accomplished the same over longer time? Are sudden intuitions, inspirations, insights and illuminations not necessary to shift paradigms? A quantitatively lower IQ would be incapable of initiating qualitative transformations of understanding.

Sean commented here that the low-IQ Galactics seem to assume that their technology, once in place, would continue to run indefinitely. Higher alertness and intelligence are necessary to cope with breakdowns, diminution of resources, the unexpected etc. We have to run as fast as we can just to stay where we are. Our behavioural adaptability and versatility in response to environmental changes made human beings intelligent and also made some individuals above-average geniuses.

"Backwardness": Summary

 

"Backwardness."

pp. 154-156: A conman sees a group of Galactics on a New York street.

pp. 156-159: The Secretary-General of the United Nations converses with the Galactic spaceship captain and learns that the Federation exterminates human races that are not eligible for membership.

pp. 160-162: The conman befriends the Galactics.

pp. 162-164: The Cardinal Archbishop of New York converse with the Galactic quartermaster who is the "chaplain" insofar as he is the one that kills animals to feed the gods - although, while he is a guest of the Cardinal, he is more interested in watching TV.

pp. 164-166: the conman cons his group of Galactics.

A short story that makes its point.

Superiority Or Simplicity?

"Backwardness."

I got some details wrong working just from memory, of course. This Galactic Federation comprises fifty million self-sufficient terrestroid planets.

"'A board of experts with a computer...'" (p. 158)

- handles any problems or complaints, charging for its services rather than collecting taxes, detects vibrations from any new star drive and sends a mission like the one that has recently arrived in the Solar System where a newly invented faster-than-light engine was being tested. If a newly discovered human race still wages wars, then a police ship blows:

"'...every planet in this system to smithereens.'" (p. 159)

Otherwise, the new race joins the Federation, borrows up to date machinery to start its own factories and can then participate in interstellar trade:

"'The more planets, the better for us.'" (p. 158)

Does such a simple, straightforward system signify superiority or something sinister?