In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, human beings evolve into the "Danellians," whereas, in his Genesis, they create and are succeeded by post-organic intelligences. I mention this because, in one Saint story, a mad scientist breeds giant intelligent ants to replace mankind but the Saint kills the scientist and burns his laboratory.
Apparently, Leslie Charteris wanted to include every kind of story in his Saint series so this is the single example of science fiction although whether it is a plausible one is another matter!
9 comments:
Paul:
One collection of Charteris' short stories is titled The Fantastic Saint, and contains only tales with an element of science fiction or fantasy — "The Man Who Liked Ants" among them. Most of the time, these elements are minor and restrained, but "Dawn: The Darker Drink" slowly came to the conclusion that Templar was somehow experiencing another man's dying dream. A hint of this was that every character in the dream referred to The Saint in exactly the same words.
One of the less-fantastic bits of Saintly sf was "The Newdick Helicopter." A con-man as part of his scam accidentally invented a real helicopter as we'd use the term, because he didn't realize autogyros couldn't manage quite the same maneuvers. His scheme was to get people to buy stock in his invention, then "contritely reveal" that he'd "unintentionally" infringed on an autogyro patent. Only he'd tinkered with the design to the point that it didn't violate the patent, and the autogyro company was very, very interested in buying this new device ... once The Saint had bought out the con-man for a much smaller sum.
A full-length novel from 1930, The Last Hero, featured an evil scientist developing a gas weapon which, instead of being poisonous, electrocuted its victims. It could be electrically controlled, too, to move across a battlefield regardless of what way a wind might be blowing. The inventor was more than willing to sell this to the highest bidder, but The Saint decided this weapon was just TOO vile for any country to possess, and he killed the man.
Kaor, DAVID!
What you said about Leslie Charteris' THE LAST HERO, oddly perhaps, reminded me of Louis XIV of France. I think I read in Will and Ariel Durant's THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV, of how that king was offered the use of an early kind of poison gas or chemical weapon. Louis XIV refused but gave the inventor a generous pension on condition that he never offered his invention to any other nation.
Apparently this king of France thought poison/chemical weapons too vile to be used by anyone!
Sean
Poul did one story -- I forget the name -- in which a post-human species is not particularly intelligent.
As he points out, evolutionary leaps don't result from increasing the capacities of already specialized animals in the fields in which they already excel.
They result from the evolution of -new- capacities in a previously unspecialized, often more "primitive" form.
So the post-human species isn't super-intelligent, any more than we're super-good at brachiation in trees. It has some intelligence (as we retain some climbing ability) but evolved from a lemur which developed -different- mental abilities, ones that we can't really comprehend, any more than a monkey can comprehend our degree of intelligence.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
At first I wondered if you had "Night Piece" in mind. But that story makes no mention of "Superior" as the unnamed scientist POV character called that post-human being descended from lemurs. In fact, the Scientist in "Night Piece" speculated evolved on Earth alongside mankind and that their paths seldom crossed. I can't recall any story by Anderson like the one you discussed.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Another thought I had, which I discussed in my article about "Night Piece," was to wonder how it might be possible for an intelligent NOT to be particularly intelligent. Would it really make sense for any such species to remain forever at a hunter/gatherer level? To never be able to dream great dreams, never achieve anything in the arts, philosophies, theologies, sciences, literatures, etc.? What a dismal prospect!
Sean
They'd be different from us to an extent that neither could really understand the other well -- and they'd be doing things -we- couldn't understand.
I think it was "Night Piece"; it didn't specifically mention lemurs, but a more primitive and unspecialized species, rather than evolving from us.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
"Night Piece" was one of the most difficult to understand stories by Anderson that I ever read--and the hardest for me to write about. Not that I object! Poul Anderson was pushing the boundaries in that tale--so of course readers needed to work harder at understanding it, or trying to.
Yes, in "Night Piece" Anderson strove to give us some idea of what a truly alien and different race might be like. That other race had abilities we don't understand and maybe could never understand. And they might not even have much need for "intelligence," difficult as that may be to grasp.
As for the bit about "lemurs," or the ancestral stock of the "Superior" race we get a glimpse of in "Night Piece," this is the relevant part, from the story: "They probably evolved here right along with us. All life on earth has an equally ancient lineage. I've no idea what the common ancestor of man and Superior could have been. Perhaps as recent as some half-ape in the Pliocene, perhaps as far back as some amphibian in the Carboniferous. We took one path, they took another, and never the twain shall meet."
I did wonder, in my essay, how it would be possible for two such races to share the same planet and not become aware, somehow, of the other species if they needed any of the same RESOURCES. Wouldn't Superior and mankind both need to EAT and hence need to grow food if they both practiced agriculture? How could Superior and human farmers and hunters not bump into each other?
Sean
I think that was the point -- their mode of existence makes them inaccessible to us.
Tho' in some senses not all lineages are equally ancient, in practical terms.
Eg., mammals evolved a long time ago, but they were very few and of a limited number of species. True placental mammals are only unambiguously attested from after the dinosaurian extinction event, 65 million years ago, and they were small very unspecialized insectivores.
This has notable consequences.
For instance, humans are the most intelligent species ever, but we have enormous brains. Some birds are extremely intelligent -- corvids, large parrots -- and are capable of tool-making and of complex logic chains including hypotheticals and contingency planning.
They have tiny brains but the neuron density and architecture is much more efficient than ours.
Birds are theropod dinosaurs, and dinosaurs in general were probably already as intelligent as equivalent mammals 65 million years ago. Therapods were one of their most advanced clades. In evolutionary terms, birds are "older" than we are -- they're left over from the dominant species group of the last cycle.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I have struggled to grasp how two races, presumably both of which have bodies, can still have such different modes of existing that they are inaccessible to each other. Despite living on the same planet. Anderson suggested in "Night Piece" that Superior's mode of existing has to do with ESP. It's a pity never thought of writing a letter to Poul Anderson discussing "Night Piece" more or less as I did in my essay and asking for his opinion.
I have heard of how "intelligent" corvids--crows, ravens, etc.--and parrots are. But can they truly communicate, with mutual understanding, with humans? And don't they lack the HANDS needed to truly make tooks of any kinds? I've never heard of such birds chipping stone and mastering fire.
I have wondered what might have happened if the dinosaur extinction event had not happened. I can easily imagine one or more species of them developing true intelligence a la mankind.
Sean
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