Astounding Memorial

Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1973, Ed. Harry Harrison) is an original anthology which includes:

"Lodestar" by Poul Anderson, intended when written to be the last Nicholas van Rijn story although Anderson subsequently added Mirkheim;

"Epilog" by Clifford Simak, one last City story, included in later editions of City;

an addition by Isaac Asimov to his very obscure "Thiotimoline" series.

For these and other contents, see the above link. I have not checked whether any of the other stories are additions to series by their authors.

"Lodestar" is both a van Rijn story and an Ythrian story. Of Anderson's seven Ythrian instalments, the first, "Wings of Victory," was published in 1972 and the rest in 1973: a rare burst of creativity.

In my estimation, "Lodestar" has to be the jewel in the crown of the Astounding Memorial anthology although it is interesting to learn that there are at least two other series stories.

"Lodestar":

signals the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League;

introduces van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, who will marry David Falkayn;

shows the dramatic confrontation between van Rijn and Falkayn and also the generation gap between van Rijn and Coya;

brings together van Rijn and his trader team (including Falkayn) and the Ythrians;

is included in that ultimate future history collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate;

presents a brief sense of life and work in the Solar Commonwealth through Coya;

refers back to the Satan affair and became the precursor of Mirkheim.

What's not to like?

Real World Issues

After roaming about town, I have returned home and might, before midnight, post more about Poul Anderson's Rustum or about Clifford Simak's future history. However, I have meanwhile acquired the current copy of a journal containing analyses of the global economy and of some contemporary military conflicts. I really ought to spend more time reading about our problems and less about those of fictional characters. Except in the most general terms, real world issues do not belong in blog posts although anything goes (just about) in the combox.

This post is an explanation and partial apology but any departure from the blog will only be temporary. 

Laterz.

Rustum Gravity

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

A guy that I knew fell from the roof of his cottage: multiple fractures, both legs; never fully recovered. If he had fallen head first, then he would not have recovered, period.

Jan Svoboda reflects that a man who fell off a roof on Earth might just have broken a leg. However, Rustum has 1.25 gravity. A man whom Svoboda sees fall off a roof has a smashed pelvis and his ribs driven into his lungs. 

Colonists face hardship. Every terrestroid planet is different and its environment is not the one that human beings have evolved in and for. Poul Anderson always makes it clear that extra-solar planetary surfaces are not just stage-sets where human beings can land and carry on business as usual which is the impression that we get of all the colonized planets in Asimov's Galactic Empire. 

I did not set out to take a side-swipe at Asimov but I did it anyway.

My friend from the Birmingham Buddhist Centre should arrive for a visit soon and I have some videos to watch about current events. (Anderson's characters have their crises and we have ours.) 

Not Time II

See Not Time. 

This line of thought has been occasioned by reading an sf work not by Poul Anderson but by Clifford Simak. However, there is an underlying issue here that Anderson gets right but that most people most of the time get wrong and the people who get it wrong include not only Simak but also HG Wells and James Blish! - so let's stay with the line of thought for a while. (N.B.: Neither Wells nor Blish confuses the nature of time as much as Simak.)

The Issue

Matter moves through space and motion takes time but we then think of time itself as a dimension that we move along. Clearer thinking is needed. If you sit under a clock in a waiting room from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM, then you are fully and equally present at 9:00 AM and at 10:00 AM and at every intermediate moment. You do not in any sense move from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. There is a 9:00 AM with you in it but there is no subsequent 9:00 AM with you not in it because you have moved away from it. Nor can you accelerate and arrive at 10:00 AM before me. We both arrive (if that is the right word) at 10:00 AM at 10:00 AM. 

Wells

The Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that our bodies extend along the Fourth Dimension whereas our immaterial mental existences move along it.

Blish

"'...the consciousness of Robin Weinbaum is moving along that entity in that invisible direction.'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), p. 116.

("...that entity..." is Weinbaum's body extending in four dimensions.)

Simak

In City, VII, on pp. 196-197, there is a passage that I will try to summarize rather than to quote in full. It is claimed that we had thought that we were passing through time whereas really we were moving along with it. Seconds did not pass. Instead, a single second moved along and we moved with it! What does that mean? He stays with the idea of motion through time but then tries to differentiate between two kinds of temporal motion. If something moves along through time, then the time that is moved through is measurable in units including seconds. Therefore, the moving entity is not itself one of those seconds.

Anderson

There is none of this in Anderson. In his Time Patrol series and in his There Will Be Time, our bodies extend along the fourth dimension - as in Wells and Blish although not in Simak - but there is no suggestion that any immaterial entities move along those bodies from their births to their deaths. Every moment is the present moment for any organism that is conscious in that moment. There is no moving present.

Not Time

We have discussed time and time travel on the Logic of Time Travel blog and on this blog. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, three independent time travel novels and enough short stories to fill a collection are major works of sf and also major successors to HG Wells' The Time Machine.

Should we devote some time to addressing glaring errors about the nature of time in works by other sf authors? Not too much time.

I try to avoid lengthy quotations but sometimes they are unavoidable:

"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is to-morrow and to-morrow is the past.

"Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No film that one could run backward and see what-once-had-been."

-City, VII, p. 186.

"'We can't travel in the past.'"

-ibid.

"...there wasn't any past, there never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.

"Like two dogs walking in one another's tracks. One dog steps out and another dog steps in. Like a long, endless row of ballbearings running down a groove, almost touching, but not quite. Like the links of an endless chain running on a wheel with a billion billion sprockets."

-ibid.

Writing worthy of Ray Bradbury but making no sense.

This three dimensional spatial universe moves along a fourth dimension to be identified with time? What does it move in relation to? Time is the measure of change within this universe, not a dimension that it moves along. Any such motion would take time. It may very well be the case that we cannot travel into the past but that is not because there is another world directly behind ours moving along a fourth dimension!

See:

Space and Time

We extend, move and endure:

extension is through space;

motion is through space and takes time;

endurance is through time;

endurance is neither extension nor motion.

A Myth

In CS Lewis' The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, a Faun has a book entitled Is Man A Myth? In Clifford Simak's City, a Dog has written a book entitled The Myth Of Man: a parallel worth recording. Fantastic fictions can show us ourselves from fantastic perspectives. In Poul Anderson's The Rebel Worlds, the tripartite Didonians with their inherited but dwindling memories struggle to recall their brief encounter with human beings:

"(Blurred, two legs, faceless...no, had they beaks?)"

-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 367-520 AT p. 369.

"Be not afraid of the strangers with single bodies... Rather pity that race, who are not beasts but can think, and thus know that they will never know oneness." (p. 520)

On Dido, we are becoming a myth - although they understand us.

Anderson And Simak

individual flying vehicles replacing road vehicles

robots

Martians

enhanced animals

mutants

telepathy

exploration of Jupiter

an interstellar space drive

parallel worlds

suspended animation

I am trying to list ideas which:

have become standard in sf;

are in Poul Anderson's works;

are also in Clifford Simak's City which I am still rereading.

Anderson: enhanced seals;

Simak: enhanced dogs and ants;

Anderson: mutant time travelers and immortals;

Simak: a hyperintelligent mutant. 

There might be more. But some of Simak's ideas are impossible, even cartoonish, like an anthill with chimneys as the ants, with no increase in brain size, smelt ore.

(Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is another sf work that takes some standard ideas, like telepathy, robots and time travel, and then does something more with them.)

Simak's descriptions of wind and sunsets recall Anderson's:

"The wind talked harshly in the crouching trees and ripped the long grass in sudden gusts. The last rays of the sun struck fire from the distant peaks."

-City, II, p. 46.

"The sun sank in a lake of crimson, hushed finally to the glow of a fire burned low."

-ibid., p. 48.

"They sat for long minutes in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, by the ghostly whisper of an autumn wind in the trees outside."

-ibid., III, p. 71.

(As in Anderson's works, natural sounds do not interrupt but underline conversational silence.)

"...in the west the green-tinged glow that marked the passing of the sun was fading into night."

-ibid., p. 81.

Somewhere in there, a couple of sounds become one with the wind. I will quote those passages if I can re-find them but right now other activities call.

The Masterworks

At the back of my copy of Clifford Simak's City, there is a two-page list of eighty nine (or thereabouts) titles in this SF Masterworks series. Only one, Tau Zero, is by Poul Anderson.

There are:

1 title by Robert Heinlein

1 by Larry Niven

1 by Frank Herbert

1 by Clifford Simak

2 by James Blish

2 by Greg Bear

2 by Michael Moorcock

2 by Kurt Vonnegut

2 by Ursula le Guin

2 by Richard Matheson

3 by Robert Silverberg

3 by Samuel R. Delaney

3 by Brian Aldiss

3 by Olaf Stapledon

3 by Frederik Pohl + 1 by Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth

5 by HG Wells

5 by Arthur C. Clarke

14 by Philip K. Dick

- and thirty other authors are represented by only a single title. (This includes two titles with two authors.) If anyone else has a copy of this edition, please check my numbers. I don't always get the same total when I re-count.

(Blish's two titles are his Tetralogy in a single volume and Volume III of his Trilogy, Volumes I and II being historical fiction and fantasy, respectively.)

Needless to say, I disagree with any scale of values that gives Anderson one volume and Dick fourteen.

Another Problem And The Fate Of Cities

Orbit Unlimited, part three.

This is yet another story built around:

a seemingly insurmountable technical problem;

what I have come to call an Andersonian moment of realization - in this case, one character leaps up, startling another, when he suddenly realizes what the solution must be;

a later disclosure of the solution to the readers;

meanwhile, a human problem that must also be recognized and overcome before the technical solution can be implemented.

However, since, in this case, both the technical problem and its solution are even more complicated than usual, I will not attempt to summarize them here but instead will advise blog readers to read or reread the story - which I always do anyway.

Meanwhile, in parallel reading, in the "FIRST TALE" in Clifford Simak's City, rapid transportation for commuting, replacement of agriculture by hydroponics and new easy building techniques enable populations to move to the countryside, making cities redundant. In Poul Anderson's The Peregrine, a similar situation is described as making the entire Earth a single city.

(If City continues to display such parallels, then I might continue to reread it.)

Who Represents SF?

My copy of Clifford Simak's City (SF Masterworks, Gollancz, London, 2010) has arrived and I am honestly uncertain as to whether I will summon up the motivation to reread it from cover to cover whereas, decades ago, I had rated it highly. I ordered City via eBay because recently on this blog I compared four stories set on Jupiter:

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson

"Bridge" by James Blish

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Of these stories, "Call Me Joe" is alone in not being part of a series - although three different Andersonian series do include Jupiter-related stories. "Bridge" was incorporated into Blish's They Shall Have Stars which I have recently reread with interest. "Desertion," which I was able to reread online, was incorporated into City, hence this purchase. 

The cover quotes Robert Heinlein as saying, "To read science fiction is to read Simak." What? I can think of several more significant names and would substitute Anderson for Simak. Heinlein himself - early Heinlein - is surely more important? Inside, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov and James Gunn write highly of Simak. Asimov tried to imitate his style.

By contrast with this, James Blish, whom I rank with Anderson, did not respect Simak's works.

The Introduction by Gwyneth Jones quotes Heinlein:

"The reader who does not like Simak stories, does not like science fiction at all." (p. v)

Clearly untrue!

Jones informs us that Simak was:

"Never remotely interested in 'technology', or in factual 'science'..." (p. vii)

But science fiction is about the relationship of human beings not only to each other but also to the universe revealed by science including the potentialities of technology. Sf began with Frankenstein: can a scientist create life?

Simak himself is quoted as saying that, disillusioned by World War II and the Atomic Bomb, he wrote the City stories only to create a momentary refuge. When Jones expands on this, I find it difficult to paraphrase and therefore will have to quote at greater length than I would have preferred:

"For a moment, in these tales, a Man sits in his armchair, his loving Dog at his knee, a glass of whisky at his elbow; pondering the lives of small creatures in the quiet woods around his homestead. Asking nothing, demanding no reward or second chance for the failed experiment of human civilization; inventing nothing that isn't already held in this moment, he spins a dream of blameless wonderland." (ibid.)

Inventing nothing? That is not sf! Just before the passage quoted, Jones describes the City stories as having:

"...only the most perfunctory futuristic trappings." (ibid.)

That human civilization will fail, will even destroy itself, is one of the possibilities that has to be faced and is faced by sf writers, including Poul Anderson. Retreat to a homestead in the quiet woods in the present moment and not in any future endeavour is one possible response to this...

However, Jones goes further:

"Perhaps all of science fiction secretly lives in Simak's moment, and is made of the same stuff as City - a paradoxical hybrid of nihilism and wish-fulfilment; tempered by a stoic acceptance of the cold equations." (p. viii)

No, it does not. Acceptance yes but not either nihilism or wish-fulfilment. Poul Anderson takes us to the further reaches of space and time both in mythical worlds and in the physical universe insofar as it was understood at the time of writing.

Meanwhile here and now: for me, today has become very indulgent, staying in a dressing gown and adding to the blog instead of stirring out of the house. The next few days will have to involve a lot of physical exercise and much less computer time.