"Conjecturally..."

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER X.

Brother Parvus recounts a conversation between Sir Roger and Lady Catherine, then tells us that:

"This I did not hear myself. They rode ahead of us all..." (p. 62)

So one of them told him later, then? No:

"But I set it down here, conjecturally, in the light of the evil which followed." (ibid.)

Humor, of course, but also (I think) one aspect of how ancient historians did construct their texts.

Modern history is very clearly demarcated from historical fiction or drama. Shortly before the Saville Inquiry obliged the British government to acknowledge what had happened on Bloody Sunday, two dramatized TV documentaries presented the recorded and attested facts of the incident. An actor playing Edward Heath spoke a single sentence that Heath was on record as having said.

If those TV programs had been historical dramas, then a script writer would have composed fictional/"conjectural," although also hopefully plausible and authentic-sounding, conversations involving Heath. However, the documentary nature of the programs ruled out any such conjectures.

Parvus describes events that he witnessed and is honest when his account becomes conjectural. We can be confident that he is telling us God's own truth - in that alternative timeline.

Note: This is the time of month when there is sometimes activity on other neglected blogs, e.g.:

on Science Fiction, here, here, here and here;
on Logic of Time Travel, here.

(Still much fewer page views on those other blogs!)

Adjusting To Changed Conditions

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IX.

Brother Parvus realizes a problem for himself and his coreligionists. Having crossed an interstellar distance and landed on a planet with a very long day and night and two moons, they no longer know when it is Friday, Sunday, Advent, Lent, Easter etc.

There are several possible solutions:

question and dispense with religious observance;

worship God within without reference to days or seasons;

after their Exodus, someone might claim a new revelation that might even be accepted by a majority;

more probably, the clergy will make pragmatic decisions about observances in their changed circumstances;

Sir Roger argues logically:

"'...that God himself has commanded us to this war!'" (p. 58)

- and that he, Sir Roger, will cut down anyone who disagrees.

See also:

Enforced Unity Or Continued Diversity
Uncertainties About Gods

In SM Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy, some time travelers have the theological problem that they are practicing Christianity before Christ. See Endings And Beginnings.

Bluster And St. Dismas

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VIII.

With Brother Parvus as his interpreter, Sir Roger outblusters the Wersgor herald. The language difficulties probably help. Parvus thinks that:

"'...St. George - or more likely, I fear, St. Dismas, patron of thieves - must have watched over you.'" (pp. 54-55)

We welcome this reference to Nicholas van Rijn's patron saint.

Parvus thinks that the Englishmen's small numbers, antique weapons and lack of home-built spaceships must make the Wersgorix recognize their weakness soon. Sir Roger has no answer to this as yet. Neither have I. And I cannot remember how Poul Anderson managed this situation - except that more outrageous bluff was involved.

Our Many Mini-Ragnaroks

Hrolf Kraki's men must rally to defend him in his last battle.

Dominic Flandry, believing that the Long Night is inevitable, vividly imagines the sack of Archopolis (see here) and thus plays the role of a foreseer of the Fall of Empire.

James Blish's Black Easter transforms Armageddon, the Biblical last battle, into a Ragnarok, a doom of the divine powers.

Ymir

Poul Anderson, War Of The Gods.

"Always, though, jotuns remembered how Odin and his brothers slew Ymir their forebear." (I, p. 10)

Why did the first of the Aesir kill the first giant?

"'Two brothers does Odin have, Vili and Ve. It was with them that he slew Ymir and made Midgard from the body of the father of giants.'" (XI, p. 83)

Observations
As noted here, in I, the story is told by the authoritative omniscient narrator whereas, in XI, it is told by a character who might be misinformed. However, in this particular passage, Hadding recounts what is generally known in Norse mythology, that the first gods made Midgard from Ymir's body.

Thus, even more of the mythology is summarized than I had indicated here. Thus also, the gods had a very questionable motive for killing Ymir as Neil Gaiman confirms:

"Odin and Vili and Ve killed the giant Ymir. It had to be done. There was no other way to make the worlds. This was the beginning of all things, the death that made all life possible."
-Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (London, 2018), p. 12.

- the first sacrifice. Mithras killed a bull, Christ and Odin offered themselves and the Buddha taught that the best sacrifice is an offering not of blood to the gods but of fruit to the poor.

If you want to live inside Norse mythology, then imagine that soil is Ymir's flesh, mountains are his bones, rocks his teeth, the seas his blood, the sky his skull and the clouds his brains.

Draughts

"The gods raised their halls and halidoms. They played at draughts with pieces made of gold."
-Poul Anderson, War Of The Gods (New York, 1999), I, p. 10.

Did the Aesir also play chess? I have read elsewhere that they did and Neil Gaiman presents an elaborate account of the finding of golden chess pieces, modeled on the gods themselves, after the Ragnarok. However, Gaiman's source, the Gylfaginning, says only:

They find in the grass those golden tables which the asas once had.
-copied from here.

(An "as" is a god. "Aesir" is the plural.)

Narrative Layers

Poul Anderson's War Of The Gods, I, states that:

"The gods themselves fought the first war that ever was." (p. 9)

- and much more. This is the omniscient narrator at work and we must accept whatever he tells us as true - within the fiction. (Within another work of fiction, it is true that the world was divided into three permanently warring superstates in 1984.)

In XI, Hadding tells his two guards how Odin traveled to Jotunheim, met Loki and hanged himself on the Tree. Since Hadding was not there, he must have heard this story from someone else and, in fact, when asked what had happened next, he replies in part:

"'The rest is merrier. Mind you, I heard it from a jotun, who may not have felt as worshipful toward the gods as he should.'" (p. 83)

And who told the jotun? Thus, in this case, the omniscient narrator tells us what Hadding claims he had heard from a probably disrespectful jotun who in turn must have heard the story from someone else. We are not obliged to accept this story as true.

Earliest Events

We think that the earliest event known to us was the earliest event but could there have been an earliest event?

If a vacuum full of virtual particles generated our monobloc (see here), could that vacuum also have generated other monoblocs or indeed other unknown phenomena?

What did the Spirit do before it moved on the waters and what happened in the waters before the Spirit moved on them?

Why was Surtr waiting with flaming sword even before any giants or gods had been born in Ginnungagap?

In any cosmology, we see a part and think that it is the whole.

To Jotunheim

Poul Anderson, War Of The Gods (New York, 1999), XI.

Traveling a long and dangerous way alone, Odin often loses his path although always, slowly and painfully, refinding it:

passing through warring Midgard as the wanderer, he must often fight;

Ironwood is haunted by monsters and trolls and has no food;

cold, dark Niflheim, has rushing rivers, swarming vipers and the dragon that gnaws the deepest Tree roots;

he skirts Muspellheim where Surtr waits;

eventually, he reaches his destination in the highest mountains of Jotunheim where he will meet Loki.

The mention of Surtr raises a question that will be addressed in the following post.

Retellings III

Although Poul Anderson's War Of The Gods begins after the Ginnungagap and ends before the Ragnarok, it nevertheless condenses much Norse mythology. Retold stories and background information include:

the two divine races
the Tree
nine worlds
men, elves, dwarves and jotuns
the Norns
runes
Heimdall/Rig begetting the first thralls, yeomen and highborn
Kon, the first king
the first war
Mimir's well and Odin's eye
the carving of the first man and woman from logs of ash and elm
Njord, Freyr and Freyja
the building of the wall around Asgard
Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse
Mimir's treacherously severed but magically reanimated head
the giant Hymir
the origin of Loki
Odin's self-sacrifice
Odin's brothers
the story of Hadding

For longer retellings of some of these stories and also of others, we can read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology.

Retellings II.

See Retellings.

We can read:

history in conjunction with Poul Anderson's historical fiction;

Shakespeare in conjunction with his A Midsummer Tempest;

Sherlock Holmes in conjunction with his "Time Patrol";

Eddas, sagas or retellings of Norse myths in conjunction with his Viking novels;

scientific texts in conjunction with his hard sf;

Wells, Stapledon and Heinlein in conjunction with his time travel and future histories;

SM Stirling in conjunction with his alternative histories.

Walking home, I see a new retelling of Greek myths by Stephen Fry in a shop window and an ad for a new Holmes And Watson film on the side of a bus. The process continues. Anderson's contributions endure.

Undersea War

The film, Aquaman (see also here and here), has up-to-date cinematic special effects, including underwater battle scenes. We want to see cinema adaptations of:

the encounter with the aquatic being in "The Horn of Time the Hunter" (see here);

the fight against the aquatic monster, A'u, in "The Game of Glory" (see here);

the fight against the kraken in The Merman's Children (see here);

the exorcism of Liri and the long swim across the Atlantic in The Merman's Children (see here).

The sea, like the atmosphere and interplanetary space, is a three-dimensional environment so we can vicariously enjoy the adventures of beings free to move in three directions.

The Astronomy Of The Technic Civilization Saga by Johan Ortiz

-Hard science, artistic license and obsolete data-

 

The son of an engineer and with an education in physics himself, Poul Anderson was not shy about including hard science in his fiction. While future tech was often handwaved off with a minimum of techno-babble, when it comes to strange stars and planets, we get a veritable catalogue of facts from spectral type of the star, the axial tilt of the planet, even in some cases including the geology of his worlds! And while he did create a lot of fictional stars, he also made use of real ones when building his future histories. This is very apparent in his Technic civilization stories, where some actual stars are recurring “characters” together with some fictional ones. It is notable that in that series of stories, most of the action takes place either in the Sol system or in rather distant star systems. Hardly any Technic story takes place within 20 light years of Sol (excepting Sol itself). Staple stars of science fiction like Epsilon Eridani, Sigma Draconis or Tau Ceti are seldom mentioned. In a rare exception, the future first Emperor of Terra, Manuel Argos, is captured by the Gorzuni on Alpha Centauri. Another relatively close system mentioned is Chee Lan’s home planet Cynthia which orbits Omicron 2 Eridani A, 16,3 LY from Sol.

The position of the real star systems used, just as the fictional ones, are often described at least relative to the Sol system – and it is here that the advancement of science has made a disservice to Anderson’s work. During, and especially after the period during which he worked on the technic civilization saga, the data we have on the distance from Sol of many of the stars mentioned in the stories have improved considerably.

Because we do not know with certainty the absolute luminosity of a distant star – we cannot really tell at a glance if it is a shining giant at an enormous distance we are seeing or a modest dwarf closer to Sol – we can measure distance from us by using the parallax method. It is how our depth vision work. Just as our brains can calculate the distance to an object through (among other means) the slight difference in angle between the picture of either eye, astronomers can measure the angle to a star at two points in time. Using the difference in angle between the two observations, trigonometric calculus can give an estimate of the distance to a star. However, the more distant the star, the smaller the angle is and the harder it is to accurately calculate the distance. And in this, the state of the art has advanced considerably since the 1950s. For example, in the 1990s, close to the end of Poul Anderson’s career, the Hipparcos mission obtained parallaxes for over a hundred thousand stars with a precision of about a milliarcsecond, providing useful distances for the first time for stars out to a few hundred parsecs (a parsec is equal to about 3.26 light years). With the Hubble telescope we can today reliably determine distances out to 5 000 parsecs. None of this was possible in the 50s, 60s or even 70s.

This coupled with the fact that the Technic stories involve mainly distant stars has caused the distances mentioned by Poul Anderson to become very dated. I shall name a few examples.

In A SUN INVISIBLE, the distance from Sol to Beta Centauri is given as 190 LY. Currently, it is believed to be 397 LY. In SATAN’S WORLD, the Serendipity supercomputer tells David Falkayn that Beta Crucis is 204 LY from Sol. Currently it is believed to be 287 LY. Note that this also means that the author thought of these two stars as being be much closer to each other than what we now believe.

The obsolete data for distance to real stars have consequences also for the locations of fictional ones, since their position is often described as relative to real stars.

In WINGS OF VICTORY, in which an Earth star ship of The Great Survey visits the Home world of the avian Ythrians, their star is said to be “beyond the great stars Alpha and Beta Crucis”, “in the constellation Lupus” and “278 light years from Sol”. As mentioned earlier, this is inconsistent with modern data, since the closer of the two stars, Beta Crucis is about 287 LY from Sol, and Alpha Crucis is 326 LY. To be considered “beyond” both these stars in any sense of the word, Ythri must be no closer than 326 LY to Sol. Add to this that Ythri is to be found in Constellation Lupus, not Crux as Alpha and Beta Crucis, that is to say a considerable distance to one side of Crux.  If we are truly to consider us to be “beyond” and not “beside” Alpha Crucis, we would have to increase the distance further – exactly how long is impossible to determine, but one could safely assume another 100 LY at the least, to place A .Crucis “behind” rather than beside us.

But we have more clues in other stories. In THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND, the Terran Empire initiates a war of conquest against the Ythrians. Among the reasons are to secure for Terra the system of Beta Centauri, around which orbited several Krakoan- and one human-inhabited worlds before Ythri might beat them to it, as they already had with the Dathyna-system (from SATAN’S WORLD). Beta Centauri is, also as mentioned, 397 LY from Sol, and while it is not inconceivable that Terra and Ythri would dispute a system beyond Ythri from Sol, intuitively we would assume that the disputed systems are between the two. Beta Centauri is not mentioned as a close neighbour to Ythri in “wings of victory”, which makes sense since we know that the author believed B. Centauri to be only 190 LY from Sol, we can conclude that he also thought of Ythri as being no closer to B. Centauri than 88 LY (which would any way require it to be behind Beta Centauri and in Constellation Centaurus, not Lupus). These considerations would lead us to the conclusion that Ythri is near to 500 LY from Sol.

Another problematic set of data appears in Anderson’s Dominc Flandry stories set in the decadent Terran Empire of the early 31st century. The Empire is said to control a rough sphere with a radius of two hundred light years including around 4 million stars – but within that sphere are Beta Centauri (397 LY away), Alpha Crucis (326 LY from Sol), Beta Crucis (287 LY) and Antares (609 LY from Sol). Betelgeuse (642 LY from Sol) is not within the Empire, but a buffer state between Terra and Merseia (which is said to be located in “the wilderness between Betelgeuse and Rigel” in THE DAY OF BURNING). To make matters worse, Antares and Betelgeuse are almost exactly opposite each other from Sol. The Empire thus claims space up to more than 600 LY in both these directions.

Another problem is that within a sphere with even a 250 LY radius from Sol, there are in the proximity of 260 000 stars, so nowhere near the 4 million stars mentioned. That amounts to about 0,0038 stars per cubic light year. Using this star density, it would require a sphere with a radius of almost 630 LY to include 4 million stars.

On the other hand, in THE REBEL WORLDS, Polaris and Deneb are said to be “unutterably far beyond the Empire and its enemies”. This is doubtlessly true about Deneb (1 547 LY from Sol) but Polaris is “only” 431 LY from Sol, that is to say closer  than both Antares and Betelgeuse and also notable for being on one end of the sphere controlled by the Polesotechnic League in the era of Van Rijn and Falkayn, which held sway “from Polaris to Canopus” (Canopus is 313 LY from Sol, by the way). While it is mentioned by Flandry that the Polesotechnic League explored far beyond the Empire’s reach, it is odd that Polaris should be considered “unutterably” beyond the Terran sphere, when being closer to Sol than some of the Empire’s more notable border systems.

None of the this would really be problematic unless for the oft-repeated statement that the Empire controls a “rough sphere” 400 LY across, or with a radius of 200 LY. An Empire that controls Antares, Alpha and Beta Crucis, Beta Centauri and which borders Betelgeuse but otherwise only holds sway out to a radius of 200 LY from Sol is not a sphere – rather it is shaped like a three-dimensional starfish!

Now, how to reconcile these inconsistencies with Poul Anderson’s texts? One way is to decide that the entire universe is fictional, and that in the universe of the technic civilization, Beta Crucis really is only 200 LY from Earth. Another approach is that of “minimum rewrite”, i.e. to ignore those measure of distance given by the author that are inconsistent with modern data but accept all other facts – in other words, accept that Antares is an Imperial system, and Betelgeuse is a buffer state, and thus conclude that the Empire is over 1 200 LY across between those systems. That would also mean accepting that the Empire, as stated, is a rough sphere rather than a starfish, but that it is a sphere with a diameter of roughly 400 parsec (rather than light years). Interestingly, the earlier mentioned radius of a sphere required to englobe 4 million stars, 630 LY, corresponds to 193,1 parsecs. A sphere with a 200 parsec radius would hold, on average, 4,4 million stars. Close enough!

Not all astronomic inconsistencies in Anderson’s work stem from obsolete data however. Above all, he was a writer of fiction, and as such he would engage, from time to time, in artistic license. In WE CLAIM THESE STARS, the dastardly Merseians are trying a land grab (or star grab perhaps?) in the fictional Syrax star cluster, which, if held by the Merseians would “bypass Antares” (presumably an imperial bastion) and thus hasten the demise of the Terran Empire by a century or more. The only problem is that, as mentioned before, Antares in constellation Scorpio is on the exact opposite side of Sol from constellation Orion where Merseia orbits the star Korych between Betelgeuse and Rigel (according to THE DAY OF BURNING). Thus, if we are to take this at face value, the Merseians have completely surrounded the Terran Empire at least on one side and can threaten it from the exact opposite direction of their home world, more than 1 250 LY away, in a straight line and more than 2 000 LY away if they have to fly around the circumference of the Terran sphere. Assuming speeds similar to those given in SATAN’S WORLD (Sol to Beta Crucis in two weeks), such a journey would take close to 100 days. It could be less, if the state of the art of hyperlight travel has improved in the centuries since SATAN’S WORLD, or it could be more, given that the estimated travel time in that story was for a small, swift ship for a few passengers. A heavy battlefleet might be considerably slower. The Merseian fleet at Syrax could well have made a journey comparable in length to that of the ill-fated Russian Baltic Fleet sailing to Tshushima in 1904-1905 (which took around six months).

On the other hand, we are told the Merseia threatens the Empire on its “Betelgeusan flank, and the barbarians everywhere else” – the Empire does not have Merseia around half of its periphery. This leaves a distant Merseian base the only possible explanation, perhaps similar to Cuba becoming a Soviet base during the Cuban missile crisis. That analogy makes clear the problem with that assumption obvious – while the US would have very much deplored and opposed a Soviet attempt to take over, say Haiti from its Cuban base in 1961, the really big beef was having Soviet missiles on Cuba in the first place.

By the same token, if the Merseians were threatening Syrax from a distant exclave in Constellation Scorpius, then surely it would be worth at least a passing mention by Flandry or his superiors? Such a base would constitute a major strategic conundrum for Terra, far more important in itself than the fate of the Syrax cluster and one it could scarcely leave unaddressed, even in it morose decadence. Nonetheless, this is what the reader will have to assume, if we are not to dismiss the premises of the story out of hand!

In this case, obsolete data are not to blame – the directions of Antares and Betelgeuse where as well known in 1969 when that particular story was written as they are today.  But Antares had been used in several prior stories and connects the reader with the Technic universe through familiarity of places and names. It will be noted though that never in the story does Anderson say that Antares is anywhere near Betelgeuse or Korych. The inconsistency is not in astronomy but rather in somewhat implausible geo- or rather astropolitics.

Ancient Northern Sources

Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum preserves the tales of Amleth, retold in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and of Hadding, retold in Poul Anderson's War Of The Gods.

Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla contains the Ynglinga saga and the Saga of Harald Hardrada, the latter retold in Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy, and ends its story of Swedish and Norwegian kings in 1184.

Anderson also retold Hrolf Kraki's Saga and the story of Gunnhild, Mother of Kings. Anderson's The Broken Sword continues a story begun in the Elder Edda and a saga. See here.

Thus, heroic fantasy and historical fiction share sources and blend into a single narrative.

Retellings

Imaginative authors create new stories and retell old stories. Poul Anderson retold Norse sagas and the legend of Ys. He mentioned the archer god, Uller, although none of that god's stories survive. New stories can be imagined but the lost originals cannot be retold.

Neil Gaiman suggests in the Introduction to his Norse Mythology that the fullest appreciation of myths comes neither from hearing nor from reading them but from making them your own and retelling them. Thus, the myths live:

"...tell your friends what happened when Thor's hammer was stolen, or of how Odin obtained the mead of poetry for the gods...
"Neil Gaiman
"Lisson Grove, London,
"May 2016"

Anderson tells and retells much about Odin's scheming and self-sacrifice.

Another Christmas Activity

See:

Aquamen (scroll down)
Comics And Science Fiction
"Great Books"

Another possible Christmas activity is going to see a superhero film. Aquaman recalls Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children. Superheroes began in sf and still overlap with it. Poul Anderson could have novelized and rationalized superhero characters. The heroic deeds of medieval knights in his The High Crusade are an earlier form of superheroism, especially when translated to an interstellar stage. Comic book superheroes have included Thor (and see here) and a time traveling Arthurian knight.

Biocentrism?

Poul Anderson's later Time Patrol stories refer to quantum mechanics:

a time traveler arriving from a prevented future is like a macroscopic quantum event;

causality can be violated not only by time travelers but also by quantum fluctuations;

the Patrol, counteracting both kinds of violations, holds time to a single course where life and freedom are possible.

That third point sounds like the Strong Anthropic Principle.

I cannot buy the similar-sounding argument in Biocentrism:

before consciousness, the universe was indeterminate;

consciousness determined that the previously existing universe was one that would generate consciousness.

But why did consciousness begin?

An influx of new books means an interruption to rereading old books but normal service will be resumed in the New Year.

At This Time Of Year...

Relevant Christmas Presents
(i) Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology - relevant to both Gaiman's and Poul Anderson's works.

(ii) Julian May's The Many-Coloured Land (Pliocene Exile, Vol. I) - an author's note refers to Mananaan, the Son of Lir.

(iii) Robert Lanza's Biocentrism, which argues against mainstream cosmogony.

(iv) The next volume of Bill Willingham's Fables. (Scroll down.)

There may be more next week when it is my birthday.

Three Nines And Another Historical Reference

There were Nine Witch Queens in Ys and Nine Worthies during the Middle Ages and a group called the Nine discovers time travel in the Time Patrol timeline.

James Blish also refers to one of the Nine Worthies. When a colleague thinks that a Fundamentalist must be too simple-minded to lead an army, John Amalfi advises him to learn about:

"'...Godfrey of Bouillon...The leader of the First Crusade.'"
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 466-596 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 488.

As we recently saw with the Battle of Bannockburn, history remains relevant to futuristic sf.

I may or may not post tomorrow but, in any case, Happy Christmas to all blog readers.

Three Futures

By 802,701 A.D., human beings have devolved into Morlocks and Eloi, visited by the Time Traveler.

A million years in our future, human beings have evolved into Danellians who found the Time Patrol.

Two thousand million years in our future, the Eighteenth and Last human species lives on Neptune and some of its members mentally time travel through the lives of the earlier species on Earth, Venus and Neptune.

Three future visions, each involving time travel.

I have not been (re)reading so I reiterate: Wells, Stapledon and Anderson forever.

Who Is Among Us?

Are there aliens, mutants, telepaths, immortals, time travelers or disguised supernatural beings hidden among us? We could list yet again the relevant works by Poul Anderson. Some of these categories overlap:

mutant immortals in The Boat Of A Million Years;
mutant time travelers in There Will Be Time;
immortal time travelers in Time Patrol.

Some time travelers do not depart from the present but arrive from the future and, in this respect, resemble visiting aliens. In fact, Olaf Stapledon's time traveling "Last Men" are from Neptune.

There are immortals born in antiquity who have lived through history and time travelers born recently or not yet who have lived through years or decades of history.

Julian May's Pliocene/Intervention/Galactic sequence incorporates all or most of the above categories into a single fictional history.

Literary References

Literature is full of literary references. Platonic dialogues refer to Greek drama which retell Homeric myths. Maybe only Homer had no one earlier to refer to?

Sherlock Holmes appears in Poul Anderson's first Time Patrol story. Although I had already read some Holmes storoes, I did not recognize the private investigator and his companion in "Time Patrol" as Holmes and Watson on first reading but I was very young. It was obvious on a later rereading.

How many Holmes references are there in modern fiction? Here is another. In Julian May's Intervention,  a confidential agent tells the Swiss banking regulatory board that the Edinburgh University Parapsychology Unit will soon publicly demonstrate extracorporeal excursion, thus ending banking confidentiality. A frail, ill-looking banker tells the agent that the chief Scottish parapsychological researcher is a menace to civilization and that something must be done about him...

The sinister banker is called Herr Reichenbach. If May had not intended a Holmesian allusion, then she would not have used that surname. Just another of our Anderson-May parallels.

A Historical Precedent

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VIII.

Brother Parvus thinks that the bedraggled villagers look more French than English. (National humor.)

The Wersgorix hesitate to attack this new unknown enemy that has already unprecedently captured a fortress. The prisoners shudder at the camp's wolfish guffaws. Sir Roger will try to parley with the cautiously approaching enemy. He makes a weapon of bluff and also knows a relevant precedent:

"'...my father was at Bannockburn, where a handful of tattered Scottish pikemen broke the chivalry of King Edward II.'" (p. 52)

History is always with us even in Anderson's sf. Even when I had read this far the first time, I did not expect, or suspect, that Anderson would take his Englishmen all the way to interstellar victory, conquest and empire.

What Next?

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VIII.

Many Wersgor ships approach and hover above. How will Sir Roger prevail this time? I will find out but not tonight.

Brother Parvus assures Red John that, if the enemy have magic, then he need not fear:

"'...for the black arts do not prevail against good Christian men.'" (p. 51)

But, in James Blish's Black Easter, the black arts do prevail and what happens then? Blish was obliging enough to write a sequel, The Day After Judgment.

Very often, a single phrase in one work encapsulates or implies the theme of another work. For example, one of the Time Traveler's dinner guests mentions the danger of using time travel to verify accounts of a historical battle, the essential point of Ward Moore's later Bring The Jubilee, and how to counteract that danger is the essential point of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series.

The line of thought in this post connects:

The High Crusade (Anderson)
Black Easter
The Day After Judgment
The Time Machine
Bring The Jubilee
Time Patrol (Anderson)

My advice to blog readers: in the New Year, read or reread all these works.

The De Tournevilles

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VII.

See "Finding An Unexpected Connection" by Sean M. Brooks here.

William of Normandy conquered England in 1066 (see Poul Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy);

an Earl Godfrey was outlawed for piracy;

an illegitimate grandson of William married an illegitimate daughter of Earl Godfrey, thus founding the de Tourneville line (p. 49);

Brother Hugh de Tournville was a Knight of Malta in the fourteenth century;

Sir Roger de Tourneville led an English expedition into space later in the fourteenth century.

I suspect that William is the only historical figure in this list.

An Ocean From A Wet Dishcloth

I am frankly amazed that so much information can be extracted from a light weight novel like Poul Anderson's The High Crusade:

the Nine Worthies and a comparison with GK Chesterton;

the Third Heaven and comparisons with Dante and Milton;

the contrast between adventure fiction and speculative fiction but also their incorporation into a single future history series here;

comparisons with ERB and Michael Moorcock here;

medieval and modern concepts of survival after death here.

I will continue to reread and post about this novel as Christmas festivities allow. (An academic once said to me that we lose about a week at Christmas.)

Johan might submit a second article. Hopefully, Nygel and Ali, either independently or jointly, will review a Trygve Yamamura novel in the New Year. We approach the end of the second decade of the third millennium of our era.

The title of this post is taken from an obscure sf story.

The Nine Worthies

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VII.

The data necessary for a return to Earth have been lost in the crash landing of the ship:

"A groan went up. They were hardy men, but this was enough to daunt the Nine Worthies." (p. 48)

I have read The High Crusade twice before but do not remember the Nine Worthies and do not remember hearing of them anywhere else.

Christians
Charlemagne
King Arthur
Godfrey de Bouillon

Pagan
Julius Caesar
Hector
Alexander the Great

Jews
David
Joshua
Judas Maccabeus

Elsewhere, de Bouillon is placed in a triad with Richard the Lionheart and Raymond IV:

It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
-copied from here.

Second Blood

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VI.

Sir Roger:

makes the ship hover above the fortress of Ganturath on the planet Tharixan;
burns down approaching aircraft;
lands lengthwise, crushing half the fortress;
leads a cavalry charge into the Wersgorix exiting the uncrushed part of the fortress;
kills three at once with his lance;
fights with his sword when the lance is broken;
leads men who use "...handguns from the ship..." (p. 42) as well as conventional weapons but who also engage the enemy so closely that axes, daggers and staffs are more effective than guns;
leads a second cavalry charge against the outlying fort holding the upward-pointing laser cannons;
defeats the defending Wersgorix, who are no longer familiar with ground combat;
leads a further charge of armored cavalrymen on galloping horses that topples a small spaceship before it can take off to attack from above;
makes it impossible for patrol boats flying overhead to shoot downward without killing their own people.

Attacking a detachment of longbowmen, the patrol boats and their pilots are riddled with arrows and crash. The toppled spaceship fires lasers but the bowmen, using a fallen steel beam as a battering ram, break open the portal and kill the crew. The speedy attack has destroyed the far-speakers and the nearest estates are not close by so it will be a while before the escaped Wersgorix can summon reinforcements. Few Englishmen have been killed and none are seriously wounded because the heat beams either kill or miss.

The Next Stage Of Mastery

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER V.

Words have power even if they are not magical spells. The prisoner learned Latin. Now Brother Parvus learns the Wersgor language, quickly because it is uninflected. Finding charts and numerical tables with exact writing (print), he identifies navigational directions and a map of the target planet, Tharixan, showing:

"...the symbols for land, sea, river, fortress, and so on." (p. 37)

Then he interprets symbols on dials for altitude and speed but does not yet understand "fuel flow," "sub-light drive" or "super-light drive." (p. 37)

And I do not think that it will be anything like that easy to understand the interior of an alien spaceship.

Cosmological Revision

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER V.

Brother Parvus revises his cosmology:

the Wersgorix inhabit the Third Heaven;

scriptural references to "...the four corners of the world..." (p. 35) mean a cubical universe, not Earth;

he has already started applying the word "planet" to Terra;

the blessed must dwell beyond the cosmic cube;

Brantithar's references to a molten Terrestrial core fit with "...prophetic visions of hell." (ibid.)

(Dante places Hell in the Terrestrial center whereas Milton locates it at the bottom of Chaos:

 As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.
-copied from here.)

In the attached image, the three heavens are the atmosphere, space and what we would call "Heaven."

The Wersgorix And Souls

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

Brother Parvus' problems:

if the Wersgorix have souls, then it is the Christians' duty to try to convert them;

if they do not have souls, then it is blasphemous to administer sacraments to them although provisional baptism can be given if requested;

an authoritative definition of doctrine is required;

when asked whether he has a soul, Brantithar replies only that scientists lack sufficient data to answer the question whether personality is a pattern that can be transferred to another matrix.

Such a pattern would not be a soul. Parvus acknowledges that the Wersgorix can reason. I was taught, although I no longer believe this, that the soul comprised precisely the combination of intellect/reason and will. If this were true, then it would follow that the Wersgorix have souls. However, in Anderson's The Merman's Children, medieval Catholics believe that merpeople can reason yet lack souls.

Blueskins And Women

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

The captured spaceship carries twice as many men as women and is bound to a place where the "blueskin" (Wersgorix) females are expected to be as unsightly as the males that were encountered and defeated. However:

"'How do you know they don't hold beautiful princesses in captivity that yearn for an honest English face?'
"'That's so, my lord. It could well be.'" (p. 32)

Beautiful princesses! It could well be! If this were a novel by ERB, then it would well be! Any ERBian planet bears both a race of recognizable aliens and also a human race with a beautiful princess for the hero to marry.

The High Crusade is not that kind of pastiche. If it were, then Anderson would either accept human Martians etc as one of the premises or ingeniously rationalize the existence of such a race. For example, in Michael Moorcock's Martian Trilogy, the hero time travels to Mars at a time before the human race had migrated from there to here - and there is also a blue (not green) race that did not come to Earth.

Two Kinds Of Aliens In SF

There are anthropomorphic aliens in action-adventure fiction but also hypothetical organisms in serious speculative fiction. The Wersgorix and the Merseians are obviously the former, space opera villains, like fantasy trolls or orcs. The second kind of aliens appear in Poul Anderson's Starfarers, The Avatar and "Kyrie." His Ythrians are a serious speculation about post-mammalian organisms. Thus, Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, incorporates both kinds of aliens. And these brief remarks might be all that I have time for today. The blog contains information about the fictional species mentioned here.

Military Technology

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

Anderson has to inform us of some arbitrary facts of military technology:

the ship's fire-beams would be able to "'...reduce a city to slag...'" (p. 30);

however, Wersgor cities are protected by force screens;

but the ship lacks such screens because the screen generators would be too bulky for it to carry.

We are used to FTL warcraft protecting themselves with force screens. It sounds as though the ship, on arrival, will be vulnerable to attack from a planetary surface. However, Anderson will arrange matters so that the Earthmen can turn the tables. Human superiority is a familiar theme in sf although Anderson, covering every option, writes in other works about human inferiority.

More than a thousand years later, a descendant of these fourteenth century Englishmen will say:

"'I'd have loved a fresh crusade. Life's been dull since we conquered the Dragons ten years ago.'" (EPILOGUE, p. 160)

This sense of crusades as an adventure is shared by Lorenzo de Conti in Anderson's The Shield Of Time. However, these feudal conquerors are nowhere near as oppressive as Anderson's Merseians, Larry Niven's kzinti or SM Stirling's Draka.

Outward Bound

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTERS II-III.

The Wersgor prisoner, Brantithar, learning Latin quickly, is told to fly the ship, with the entire population of an English castle and village on board, first to France, to win a war there, then to Jerusalem, to recapture the Holy Land for Christianity. Instead, he sets the ship on automatic pilot to the nearest colony planet of his race. Brother Parvus, who had spotted what the reader knew to be an air lock, is now scandalized to see mountains and craters on what should be the perfectly circular Moon.

The narrative has now left England, Earth and even the Solar System never to return. There is a sort of nightmare inevitability to the plot. I saw that Anderson was going to take his characters as far as he could but not that he would take them as far as he did.

The large ship had had a small crew because it was supposed to return to base with many samples of Terrestrial life. Thus, it is big enough to accommodate not only the knights but also their wives, lemans, children, clergy, serfs and farm animals. There is an explanation for everything.

First Blood

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER I.

With swords and axes, the Englishmen kill the mostly unarmed alien crew, taking only one unconscious prisoner:

"The ship's artillery was ready to use, but of no value once we were inside." (p. 14)

The entire novel is like that. Not knowing any better, the English attack, then (mostly) plausible factors work in their favor. But this has to be a self-contained narrative - there is one short sequel - because such unlikely events cannot be fitted into any longer historical or future historical series.

At the end of this chapter:

"[Sir Roger's] eyes grew thoughtful as he stared at the ship." (p. 15)

As well they might.

Humor And Observation

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER I.

An alien (demon?) emerges from a spaceship before a crowd in fourteenth century England. As the circular door opens:

"...all stood their ground, being Englishmen, if not simply too terrified to run." (p. 12)

The latter, obviously, but we realize that we are to read a humorous text.

The first person narrator, Brother Parvus, glimpses that there are two doors with a chamber between. An air lock, well spotted.

The first emerging alien thinks that he can with impunity kill a local with a heat beam. Almost immediately, answering arrows have killed four aliens. Heartened by the realization that these beings can be killed, Sir Roger leads the charge up the gangway into the ship. The Englishmen will conquer all before them although I really did not expect Poul Anderson to take his premise quite that far the first time I read the novel.

The High Crusade

As suggested in the previous post, I have started to reread Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (New York, 1968). Knowing, as we do, that there is a framing sequence, we reread the opening page of the text, then the concluding two pages.

The opening passage is generic sf. The captain of a spaceship sits with a port "...open to alien summer night..." (p. 7) and is addressed by a "sociotechnician" - not a "psychotechnician," although they too address society, not just individual psychology. We are to understand that there have been advances in both the spatial and the social sciences. Nothing on p. 7 tells us that these are human beings. A surprise ending might have revealed that they were aliens. However, pp. 159-160 make clear that they are from Earth. In fact, the captain is:

"...Captain Yeshu haLevy, who was a loyal citizen of the Israeli Empire..." (p. 160)

- a likely story but not meant to be taken seriously since it serves only as a joke of sorts.

Implicit here is yet another thousand year future history. However, the main action of the novel has been off Earth and among the first generation of involuntary exiles.

Secrets In Darkness

Because the secret places are part of the darkness within, the two previous posts (see links) are more closely connected than expected. Poul Anderson's Carl, a recent convert from post-nuclear polytheism to ancient monotheism, thinks that the darkness within cries out to the dying gods whereas Julian May's Uncle Rogi, a French-American Catholic, believes that only God can love us despite seeing our secret places. Thus, in both cases, contemplation of human inwardness leads to contemplation of divinity.

The next Poul Anderson volume to be reread might be The High Crusade, with its interstellar medieval Christendom.

Secret Places And Elder Races

"The secret places. All rational beings have them and guard them - not only for their own sakes but for those of others. Who but God would love us if all the secret places of our minds lay exposed?"
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 20, p. 166.

This is the theme of Poul Anderson's "Journeys End."

In May's Galactic Milieu, one species thinks that the elder race has survived from a previous universe, as in Anderson's Tau Zero and The Avatar. Another thinks that they are angelic like CS Lewis eldila or the fallen angels in James Blish's Black Easter.

Darkness Within

Poul Anderson, Vault Of The Ages, Chapter 20, "Twilight of the Gods."

When the High Doctor acknowledges that he had been mistaken to taboo scientific knowledge:

"It was as if a great brooding presence were suddenly gone, as if the wandering night breeze sobbed in a new loneliness." (p. 187)

Pathetic Fallacy: the darkness of ignorance is about to be dispelled; the night breeze sympathizes. Yet again, the wind comments on human actions.

"The gods were doomed - the cruel, old pagan gods of human fear and human ignorance felt their twilight upon them." (ibid.)

Not all pagan gods are cruel. See "Hers are the trees..."

Carl thinks of the doomed gods metaphorically whereas, for Gratillonius, real beings had died. See Gods Dead Or Withdrawn?

"And the darkness which dwells in every mortal heart cried out to the dying gods." (ibid.)

Does something within us regret the passing of those cruel old gods? That darkness within sounds like the old and protean enemy yet again. It also sounds like James Blish's "night shapes." Rediscovered dinosaurs are killed but:

"'The beasts in the valley may die'...' I think they will. The night-shapes are another story entirely. They can never die. The night-shapes aren't animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They're the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They've always lived there. They always will.'"
-James Blish, The Night Shapes (London, 1965), V, p. 125.

Finally, real but temporary things standing for ideas are Platonic.

A Concluding Pathetic Fallacy

Poul Anderson, Vault Of The Ages, Chapter 20.

There is a lot of fighting, which I will not summarize, in the concluding chapters of Vault Of The Ages. As a result, the invaders are defeated and the taboo on ancient scientific knowledge is lifted. After all that action and violence, this juvenile adventure novel ends with an appropriate Pathetic Fallacy, not a winter storm bringing more war but the exact opposite:

"Carl went softly to the door and opened it and looked out into the summer night. It was dark now, but dawn was not far off." (p. 189)

Again AAAS

As regular readers know, I like to find parallels between alternative future histories or other fictional futures:

They Shall Have Stars is the introductory volume of James Blish's Cities In Flight future history;

Intervention is a "vinculum" between Julian May's Pliocene Exile and her Galactic Milieu;

Poul Anderson's The Byworlder is a one-off novel.

These three works share the AAAS. For the Blish and Anderson works, see the link.

"'...the American Association for the Advancement of Science did finally admit the Parapsychological Association to membership.'"
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 15, pp. 114-115.

Since Intervention, Chapter 15, is set in 1972 whereas the novel is copyright Julian May, 1987, it should follow that the Parapsychological Association indeed exists and is in the AAAS. The Association's website confirms that the organization was established in 1957 and has been an affiliated to the AAAS since 1969 so there was a gap.

Referencing Stapledon Or Tolkien

Poul Anderson does not often refer to other authors in his fiction, certainly not by name. There is an understated reference to HG Wells, not by name, in There Will Be Time. Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous character is mentioned several times, and even appears once, but not Doyle himself. When Anderson says that "...we can only hope for another Stapledon...," (see here) this is in a work of non-fiction.

Two other sf authors do explicitly refer to Stapledon:

"The notion of modifying the human stock genetically to live on the planets as they were found, had been old with Olaf Stapledon; it had been touched upon by many later writers; it went back, in essence, as far as Proteus, and as deep into the human mind as the werewolf, the vampire, the fairy changeling, the transmigrated soul."
-James Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), Book One, 3, p. 50.

Blish covers a lot of territory, going way beyond his immediate theme of "pantropy," artificial adaptation of human beings to other planets. He mentions:

Stapledon;
later writers;
Proteus;
werewolves;
vampires;
changelings;
transmigration.

Which of these additional themes does Anderson address and in which works?

Early in the opening volume of her future history about psychic powers, Julian May summarizes the plot of Stapledon's Odd John when young Rogi, trying to understand his own ESP, reads that novel. That is one way to do it. May's Galactic Milieu and Anderson's Genesis are two successors of Stapledon's future history but one difference is that Genesis does not say so.

In SM Stirling's Emberverse alternative future history, some characters base themselves directly on Tolkien's Middle Earth, even speaking Elvish. Literature resembles one long series whether or not later texts explicitly acknowledge earlier ones.

Some Anderson-May Parallels II

Verse Disguised As Prose
See Leaves Overhead.

Then read this sentence:

"In the night outside the little room in Rogatien Remillard's third-floor flat, the wolf wind was wailing in the doorways, the snow drifted deep along the road, the ice gnomes were marching from their Norways, and the Great White Cold walked abroad."
-Julian May, Magnificat (London, 1996), Epilogue, p. 559.

Some textual rearrangement gives us:

"The wolf wind was wailing in the doorways,
"The snow drifted deep along the road,
"The ice gnomes were marching from their Norways,
"And the Great White Cold walked abroad."

The Dog And The Wolf
"It was twilight - entre chien et loup, as we used to say."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 3, p. 29.

Is the dog the day and the wolf the night?

May's Intervention and Galactic Milieu Trilogy cover the period from 1945 to 2113 so they are a future history although Rogi, born in 1945, is still alive in 2113. In this respect, he resembles Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long and Poul Anderson's Hanno.

Some Anderson-May Parallels

Seen From Space
Poul Anderson describes a moon seen from space as "...a stone in heaven." See A Planet In Space III.

Julian May:

"As Earth appears to be a white-swirled blue marble from space, so Molakar looked like a white-swirled umber marble."
-Julian May, Magnificat (London, 1997), Chapter Thirty-One, pp. 527-528.

"...the planet Okanagon, which hung in the sky like a brilliant azure lantern..."
-op. cit., Chapter Thirty-Three, p. 543.

"The sun shone on [Earth as seen from the Milieu observation vessel] and it was blue and white, suspended like a brilliant agate against the foaming silver breaker of the galactic plane."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 2, p. 26.

That third passage also describes the Milky Way.

More on this later.