Anatta

See Teachings II.

Joelle the holothete does not fear death because:

"Having looked straight into Reality - There is no "I" to dread the loss of. There is a temporary association of mitochondria, eukaryotic cells, intestinal flora, and the like, the whole symbiosis shading off into the world around it that begot it, serving no end except the perpetuation of the genes within."
-Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXVII, p. 238.

This is the Buddhist anatta (no-soul or no-self) teaching expressed in scientific language and with a scientific explanation: genes. Buddhists, philosophical but not yet scientific, could speak only of beginningless causation.

Joelle continues:

"Were the immortality of my 'person' offered me, I would not want it. Too petty, amidst atoms, eons and galaxies." (ibid.)

But surely she would appreciate more time with the atoms, eons and galaxies? Or does she feel that her existing experiences and memories are complete and therefore do not need to be extended?

There must be alternatives to mere mortality and mere immortality? Renewal? Regeneration? Different perspectives on time? More than one dimension of time? Some such alternatives might exist elsewhere or in the future.

Addendum: 100 is a round number of posts and tomorrow is the last day of this month so I will see you all back here next month. Meanwhile, see:

Some Apparent Deaths And Resurrections
After The First Jump
After The First Jump II
After The First Jump III 

Addressing Every Issue

We address every issue because we discuss Poul Anderson's works which address every issue. Cosmic! Anderson's The Avatar addresses the self-serving psychology of an unscrupulous politician, the awesome origins of multiple universes and a few things in between, like the sensory impressions of a salmon, a human-computer linkage and life on a pulsar.

Anderson's works are rich enough to yield new insights and enjoyments from careful rereading and are also illuminated by comparisons with the works of authors like HG Wells, Olaf Stapledon, CS Lewis, James Blish and SM Stirling, as I hope to have demonstrated in recent posts. Stirling imparts a sense of adventure from the exploration of alternative Earths, thus renewing the familiar idea of parallel universes.

In The Avatar, I have only just begun to reread Chapter XXVII of L so we will be here for a while. However, posts about passages in Anderson's texts can transport us to other works of fantasy and sf, backwards through history or outwards into astrophysics.  A recent question in the combox was whether the US and the UK were right to ally with the USSR during World War II. If those governments had decided otherwise, then history would have diverged. Do all our alternative choices and their consequences exist somewhere - including the really bad ones? We exist in one universe but Anderson and his colleagues can and do imagine many others.

Life In Space

"'Free?' His gaze swung wildly about, he gripped the table edge with needless force, till his nails whitened. 'Locked in a metal shell, blundering blind through space as long as our food holds out, no longer, if we don't go crazy first -' He wrestled for control."
-Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXVII, p. 235.

Here yet again is the stark contrast between infinite space and a metal shell. Travel through the former involves enclosure in the latter. An interstellar spaceship should carry an environment and an ecology with it. However, Chinook is merely an interplanetary spaceship that makes subjectively instantaneous interstellar jumps via T machines. (Technical question: does T machine theory allow for subjectively instantaneous jumps?) The crew expects to make port before running out of food but they are now lost in space.

Surely, in a high tech craft, surrounded by cosmic energy and the universe, the crew can either find or synthesize food some time in the ten years before their existing food supply runs out? Maybe not. The entire universe above the terrestrial atmosphere is an inhospitable place:

"In the raging sea of streams which was the reality of 'empty' space, it was death, not pear-leaves, that whispered every second just outside..."
-James Blish, Welcome To Mars (London, 1978), Chapter 2, p. 26.

This makes a sharp contrast to CS Lewis' unscientific idea that a space traveler would feel a new vitality from the many rays that never penetrate the atmosphere. Lewis' Ransom rightly learns that "Space" is not, as he had thought, a cold, black, dead vacuity but an "...empyrean ocean of radiance..." (The Cosmic Trilogy, p. 26) but he wrongly thinks, and even feels, that life pours into him from it.

"How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the world and all their life had come?" (ibid.)

But the other solar planets are lifeless and terrestrial life can survive only in terrestrial conditions, not anywhere else.

Times Three

James Blish, Welcome To Mars (London, 1978), p. 9.

I found a strong parallel between three novels by CS Lewis and three by James Blish, then tried to find three similar works by Poul Anderson but did not quite manage it. Here are the results.

Lewis
In Out Of The Silent Planet, Elwin Ransom visits Mars.

In Perelandra, Ransom visits a sinless planet.
In That Hideous Strength, demons manifest on Earth.

Blish
In Welcome To Mars, Adolph Haertel visits Mars.
In A Case Of Conscience, Haertel's successors visit a sinless planet.
In Black Easter, demons manifest on Earth.

Anderson
"The Saturn Game": exploration of the outer Solar System.
 "The Problem of Pain": I will explain.
 Operation Chaos: demons manifest on Earth.

Maybe the only kind of sinless planet in Anderson's works has to be an uninhabited one! - in which case, Gray/Avalon before colonization qualifies. Also, "The Problem of Pain" is relevant because it shares its title with a work of Christian apologetics by Lewis.

The Three Theological Conundra
Lewis' newly created Venerians are as yet unFallen. The theological conundrum is why their creator, Maleldil, allows them to be tempted. (I think that, as an omnipotent creator, He does more than "allow" but we have had this argument before.)

Blish's Lithians are sinless but Godless. The theological conundrum is whether the Devil created them to mislead mankind.

Anderson's Ythrians welcome a difficult death as an opportunity to give God the Hunter a good fight and this is their apotheosis because they do not expect a hereafter. The theological conundrum is whether the same God can have created them and humanity.

Thus, by linking these three works, we have identified three interconnected theological conundra.

Evasive Language

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXVI.

The premier of Great Russia proposes that the conspirators kill not only their (innocent) prisoners but also even the guards. Ira Quick responds:

"'Sir, let's sleep on it and then talk further, but at the moment I am inclined to believe that in principle you are right.'" (p. 232)

That translates as: "You are right," or, in one word, "Yes." The preceding twenty one words seem to qualify but instead merely delay Quick's admission of his complicity in murder:

sleep necessary;
further talk necessary;
at the moment;
inclined to believe;
in principle...

How many prevarications are possible? An American celebrity once said, "I (used to be a person who) was promiscuous."

Before speaking, Quick thinks:

"I've had an inferno's worth of hours to agonize over the moral issues..." (ibid.)

We do not think that Quick has ever agonized over a moral issue but he has to tell himself that he did. Dishonesty begins within, as with CS Lewis' character, Mark Studdock:

"If the idea, 'Feverstone will think all the more of you for showing your teeth,' had occurred to him in so many words, he would probably have rejected it as servile; but it didn't."
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT p. 379.

Quick's inner thoughts continue:

"A time finally comes when the civilized man must attack alongside his ally of expediency, or be left behind and have no voice at the peace conference."
-op. cit., p. 232.

One word: expediency.

Starting The Jumps

Is that what a Betan looks like? Reading prose sf, I mostly forget how the aliens have been described. In a visual medium, they would be in front of us all the time.

I reread and posted about The Avatar in June 2012. See the posts from "An Elder Race?" to "The Avatar VIII." However, I am pausing on more details this time.

In XXVII, Brodersen's ship, Chinook, has made its first random jump. I previously summarized the jumps here and here.

After the jump, the stars as seen from space are so numerous that an untrained eye cannot see how the constellations have altered:

"...nor did the argence of the Milky Way pour through channels greatly different from those above Earth or Demeter." (p. 233)

In XXIV, Caitlin had seen:

"...the Milky Way stream past Fidelio's head." (p. 208)

We have one list of descriptions of the Milky Way and another of objects seen against the Milky Way.

The Alien As Threat

(There are a lot of good covers of The War Of The Worlds. See here.)

One phrase in Poul Anderson's The Avatar, XXV, recalls:

three short stories by Anderson;

one short story by James Blish;

one novel each by HG Wells, Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle;

Volume II of the Ransom Trilogy by CS Lewis;

two TV series, Quatermass and The Invaders;

a feature film, Independence Day -

- but there are many examples of "alien as threat." (In fact, did the Kryptonians send Kal-El to Earth to conquer it? Is that self-made man, Lex Luthor, the champion of non-superpowered humanity?)

In The Avatar, Ira Quick thinks that the human heritage is "...now menaced by inhumanness." (p. 215)

In Anderson's "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," the organizers of the Festival of Man think that:

"'...the Solar Commonwealth is deluged with alien - nonhuman - influence...the false glamour of ideas never born on man's true home.'"
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic..." IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 49-67 AT p. 53.

In Anderson's "Interloper," an alien alliance secretly exploits Earth. In his "Soldier From The Stars," militarily superior extra-solar humanoid aliens sell their services to the highest bidder among human governments and thus conquer Earth economically.

Wells' Martians come to consume our blood but we are sorry for them when they die in London. Lewis as character fears that his friend, Ransom, who has been to Mars and who is still in touch with extraterrestrial intelligences, is the Trojan Horse for an invasion from outer space but Lewis as author reverses this notion by showing us Terrestrial evil invading the sinless Venus.

In James Blish's "Citadel of Thought," human telepaths detect:

"'...an alien thing, not human, and inimical, cold, deadly, coming from we knew not what nadir beyond our Earth...We felt this deadly current, this other-world pattern, playing coldly across the Earth, and we were afraid.'"
-James Blish, "Citadel of Thought" IN Blish, The Best Of James Blish, Ed. Robert Lowndes (New York, 1979), pp. 1-19 AT p. 8.

Does that remind you of Wells' Martians?

"...intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
-HG Wells, The War Of The Worlds (Penguin Book, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1974), p. 9.

In "Citadel of Thought," when the alien ship is destroyed, the defenders:

"...caught brief, horror-sickened glimpses of things forever unknowable and indescribable..." (p. 18)

There is an (earlier) kind of sf in which the alien is merely horrific. Many years ago, our local sf bookseller displayed a publishers' poster that read:

"Remember the days when androids didn't have personality problems, every Earthman was a hero and the only good alien was a dead one?" 

Dead Men And Omelettes

How does a powerful political faction keep a secret and dispose of those, even among its own loyal supporters, who threaten to expose the truth? If you want to know the answer to this question, then read Poul Anderson's The Avatar, XXV. Anderson might have eavesdropped on the conspiracy.

The premier of Great Russia quotes English proverbs:

"'Dead men tell no tales.'" (p. 219)

"'"You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." Is an excellent saying.'" (p. 221)

He elaborates:

"'In the past I have found it necessary to sign death sentences of followers who had been valuable. I judged they were beginning to follow me too independently; or they had questionable associates...'" (p. 221)

He adds that he had a state to rebuild from chaos and could not investigate each case. His final metaphor is that of a woman having a cancerous breast cut off.  Ira Quick agrees that, just as you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, you can't maintain social order without breaking heads. Are such people the solution or the problem? The premier did not have to rebuild the Russian state at any cost. There are always alternative courses of action.

(On TV last night: spin an egg vigorously, then boil it. Apparently, it comes out of its shell as a miniature omelette.)

While Quick hears the premier explain in detail, the background Gregorian chant (see here) approaches its "...triumphant conclusion." (p. 222) Quick imagines triumph for his unworthy cause.

Again York Minster And The Haunting Of Europe

For previous references both to York and to its Minster, see here.

In Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXV, Ira Quick projects a moving picture of the Minster, with a Gregorian chant on the sound track, onto a giant screen. This "...loveliest of medieval churches..." (p. 215) reminds Quick of Terrestrial achievements that are now threatened by interstellar contact - as he sees it. Extra-solar intelligences are merely "inhuman..."

In XXIV, Frieda von Moltke says that the Others, who constructed the T machines, haunt the extra-solar Betans "'...more than Christ haunted Europe...'" (p. 213)

More than that? Have the Betans focused systems of belief, hope and even architecture on the Others? Europeans now have access to every tradition. They can either ignore Christianity or locate it in a wider context, e.g., see Teachings.

Which significant political tract opens by stating that a specter is haunting Europe?

Danellians And The Others

The Danellians are our descendants and masters of time travel whereas the Others are aliens and masters of space-time travel.

A Time Patrol Academy instructor tells a group of recruits:

"'You'll probably never meet a Danellian. If you ever should, it will be...rather a shock. They aren't malignant - nor benevolent - they are as far beyond anything we can know or feel as we are beyond those insectivores who are going to be our ancestors. It isn't good to meet that sort of thing face to face.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT p. 11.

But one recruit, Manson Everard, does come face to face:

"He could not look at the shape which blazed before his eyes. There was a dry sobbing in his throat as he backed away."
-op. cit., p. 51.

However, Everard and Wanda Tamberly later meet a Danellian that is humanoid and benign.

A space explorer says of the Others:

"'I can easily imagine they keep out of our sight. We could be overwhelmed by their presence, crushed. But, damn it, they must be benign. They must care.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Avatar (London, 1985), XXIV, p. 207.

 Later the explorers meet two of the Others who appear in the form of Irish gods but I have not reread that far yet.

Joelle And Eric III

Poul Anderson, The Avatar XXIII.

In An Observatory Beyond The Moon (continued)

Eric:

sees stars;

links to an instrument seeking the ends of space-time;

sees spectra from gas and suns;

feels a solar wind;

experiences radio spectra, cosmic ray spectra, magnetic fields, neutrino fluxes, relativistic relationships and "...the curve of the continuum..." (p. 201);

apprehends the cosmic origin;

lives the lives of stars and forges planets (?);

beholds the totality;

screams when drawn back to his body.

He does not literally forge planets but must be understanding how they form.

Joelle And Eric II

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXIII.

In The Accelerator
When shifting from the cell in the genetics lab to the accelerator, Eric is described as sweeping "...through space and time, at lightspeed across unseen prairies..." (p. 200) This reads like poetic license. He is somehow one with the "storms" raging in the accelerator. This has to be some sort of simulation? I find the account difficult to follow:

"This world outranged the material. He transcended the comet which meson he had become..." (ibid.)

He enters the electron shells and bursting kernel of an atom.

In An Observatory Beyond The Moon
This time they travel up a laser beam and through a satellite relay.

(Interruption by mundane responsibilities.)

Joelle And Eric

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXIII.

To link, Joelle and Eric each relax in a reclining lounger, don a head-enclosing helmet, put wrists through contact loops and check settings on a control plate. She phases him in with her and is able to scan his mind.

When he activates, first he remembers a childhood experience, then both are fully aware of their immediate environment. A small part of him "...calculate[s] the value of an elliptical integral to a thousand decimal places." (p. 198) He begins to calculate the stability of Jovian vortices but Joelle calls him to follow her. They merge as their neuron webs adapt "...to each other's synapse patterns..." (ibid.) and their forebrains mesh. Their imperfect communication, via the computers, includes random numbers, flashes and noises. His enhanced logical ability reconstructs what she might be thinking at each moment but they also continue to converse orally.

In The Genetics Laboratory
Joelle is often asked to conduct the most difficult of the experimental operations, to invent new tasks or to interpret results and can at any time access the current, automatically running, work on the sub-molecular level of life. She links both to the instruments, sensors and effectors and to the sum total of biological/chemical knowledge and understanding. Following, Eric not only receives the numerical knowledge but also senses a living cell from its membrane to its nucleus, then enters and ascends a double helix which Joelle partly reshapes.   

Linkers And Holothetes

(Clouds completely concealed the eclipse.)

Poul Anderson, The Avatar,  XXIII.

Eric, a mere "linker," linked by electromagnetic induction to a computer, can:

continually rewrite the program;

create n-dimensional spaces with time-variant curvatures and tensors as well as previously unimaginable functions and operations;

devise and revise conceptual cosmoses;

monitor and control scientific instruments not by reading meters but by directly sensing the data.

Joelle, a "holothete," not only linked to a computer, its sensors, effectors and interconnected systems (e.g., a laboratory, an accelerator and an orbital telescope) but also applying computer-provided theory to the data and thus entering an intuitive mode, can:

perform experiments;

intuit discrepancies between observational data and theoretical models and improve the latter.

A Full Lunar Eclipse And Holothetes

Very soon some of us will drive to view a full lunar eclipse so I cannot spend very long here.

I think I am getting it (Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXIII) but only by very careful rereading and blogging. Joelle will intervene in a genetics experiment but will merely observe inside an accelerator and through a telescope. But, tomorrow, I will continue to reread to make sure.

We are half way through the novel and have not yet started the cosmic Jumps which I think are the main glory of The Avatar.

Holothetes IV

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXIII.

Joelle says:

"'We'll begin with you and the 707.'" (p. 196)

707?

"'Just think in it for a while, get settled down. Then, through the cross-connections, I'll phase you in with me and my computer. That will have to be strictly input to you, no access to effectors, or you might ruin some delicate experiments.'" (ibid.)

In computers, an effector makes a change in an object in response to an input. So the object is outside the computer?

She says that she has open channels to a genetics lab, an accelerator and "'...Sagan Orbital.'" (p. 197) - and is "...going to look in on them...'" (ibid.)

OK. They are going to experience a genetics experiment, an event inside an accelerator and the universe as seen through an orbiting telescope? We will go into the details of this next time.

Holothetes III

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXIII.

This is ambiguous. A lecturer states that a holothete can use force-fields and ions to manipulate amino acids. In this case, (it sounds as if) the computer-linked holothete is perceiving and acting on external reality. The lecturer then says that, quite often, a holothete "'...senses...that something is wrong with the model - and intuits what changes to make, what the real situation is, as we so often do in our ordinary lives.'" (p. 195)

Is the lecturer now describing the testing of a model within the computer or the application of the model to a "real situation" outside the computer? Has the discussion shifted without the reader fully realizing it?

I am going to try to unravel Joelle's and Eric's joint experience but that will take longer. 

Holothetes II

I am addressing what I perceive as an unclarity in Poul Anderson's The Avatar. This issue will require some careful rereadings of particular passages and will probably continue beyond the present post.

Briefly and basically: does a holothete experience reality or a very realistic simulation? Sometimes it seems to be one, sometimes the other.

Joelle, the holothete, thinks:

"I will touch the Absolute, I will be in the Noumenon, I will know Final Reality, not as a mathematical construct, but immediately, in my brain and bones." (XXII, p. 191)

Philosophically, the Noumenon is reality in itself and is contrasted with the phenomenon which is reality as perceived. Therefore, direct experience of the Noumenon is a contradiction. By the way, I do not believe that we perceive appearances and infer reality. Instead, I believe that we perceive reality, that reality appears to us and that our perception of it is its appearance to us. However, there remains an important distinction between the totality of reality and the aspects of it that we perceive.

On the one hand, Joelle is not mystically linking to the universe but technologically linking to her computer. On the other hand, the computer is giving her experiences, not mere abstractions. But the gripping hand, to quote Niven's and Pournelle's Moties, is that these experiences are within the brain-computer linkage, not in her brain's interactions with the universe at large. Therefore, surely, what she calls Absolute, Noumenon and Reality is a simulation, not the reality to which the simulation refers?

When a holothete directs force-fields that direct ions that manipulate amino acids, that is an interaction with reality but, when, on pp. 199-202, Joelle leads Eric through genetics, then through cosmology, surely that process is a series of simulations - certainly the cosmology? I will return to this passage.

Holothetes

(A cover of The Avatar and Lake Windermere where we were today.)

Poul Anderson,The Avatar, XXIII.

A human brain and nervous system can be integrated with a properly designed computer not by wires to the head but by electromagnetic induction. The computer stores and processes data and carries out mathematico-logical operations almost instantaneously while the brain supplies creativity and flexibility and continuously rewrites the program better than a computer alone can because the brain packs trillions of cells into a kilogram.

"Furthermore, linkage gives humans direct access to what they would otherwise know only indirectly." (p. 192)

Does it? That is the part of the concept that I question. An example given is that an operator simultaneously sees a spectrum and knows its wavelengths and intensities and that this is like directly sensing the data as if with new, powerful and sensitive, organs. Just as, in ordinary experience, we not only receive but also interpret sensory impressions, the most advanced linkers, now called holothetes, are supplied with theory as well as with data and thus enter an intuitive mode. Thus, e.g., a holothete directs force-fields that direct ions to manipulate amino acids within proteins. By direct perception, the holothete intuits what to do just as the organism of a sportsman, an acrobat or a pedestrian intuits how to move without conscious thought.

How this works in practice, we will address shortly.

States And Stars

See State And Stars.

Is Brodersen unrealistic with his prediction that the balance of economic power will shift to "'...small outfits and individuals..."?

Let us project:

many planetary systems are easily accessible via T machines;

human beings will colonize planets in many such systems and will also build bases on moons and asteroids and in space;

planetary populations will grow;

each planetary economy will require a state or states to provide an infrastructure and to protect property;

competition leads to bigger corporations and then to monopolies;

finance capital will become more important;

monopolies merge with financial institutions and with states;

there are armed clashes between armed states.

Will the interstellar economy merely repeat on a larger scale the history of the planetary economy?

State And Stars

In Poul Anderson's The Avatar, XXII, pp. 189-190, Dan Brodersen argues that:

as soon as possible, large-scale extra-solar emigration will begin;

even before that, interstellar travel will generate immense profits;

therefore, "'...the balance of economic power will shift away from Earth...'" and from "'...governments, unions, giant corporations, toward small outfits and individuals.'";

therefore, the "'...world welfare state...'" will end.

Joelle asks why politicians like Ira Quick should try to preserve the welfare state when there has ceased to be any need for it. Brodersen replies that the welfare state, like any state, "...is an end in itself,'" a means of dictatorship, and he refers to no less than six Empires.

I am not sure that the welfare state compares to Empires? In any case, the bulk of the world population will not immediately emigrate for all sorts of practical and sociological reasons yet Earth will be in considerable turmoil while interstellar colonization and commerce begin. Therefore, there will continue to be a role for "welfare state" politicians as long as they are honest, admit their limitations and cooperate with entrepreneurs like Brodersen instead of trying to kill them. Instead of trying to control and delimit the future of humanity, Quick could have offered to join with others in building it.

The Milky Way And Ginnungagap

Our old friend, the Milky Way, returns three times in the first half of Poul Anderson's The Avatar:

"...the Milky Way, the nebulae, the galaxies beyond our galaxy...." (XVI, p. 140);

"...the Milky Way gleamed around its lanes of darkness..." (XVIII, p. 160);

"The Milky Way rivered in silver, nebulae glowed where new suns and planets were being born, a sister galaxy flung her faint gleam across Ginnungagap." (XXIII, p. 201)

Poul Anderson compares intergalactic space to the Ginnungagap of the Norse creation myth. I think that this myth comes closest to scientific cosmogony (see here):

void;
within the void, opposed material forces, heat and cold;
interaction between the opposed forces;
emergence of life and consciousness from the interaction;
thus, no conscious creator in the beginning;
eventual destruction of the worlds by fire;
renewal;
a cosmic cycle.

Armstrong On Luna II

See Armstrong On Luna.

I forgot three important "first man on the moon" works. Fortunately, however, the blogging medium allows time for second and third thoughts.

(i) ERB's The Moon Maid is:

a "first men on the moon" story;
a sequel to his Martian series;
Volume I of a future historical trilogy.

(ii) Larry Niven's "Wrong Way Street" (and here) combines time travel with "first man on the moon";

(iii) in Poul Anderson's Operation Luna, Valeria Matuchek becomes the first human being on the Moon in her timeline.

Thus, "first man on the moon" interacts with:

future history;
alternative history;
time travel;
other interplanetary travel;
fantasy.

The sky is not the limit.

Armstrong On Luna

Sf has had many "first men on the Moon." Wells had Cavor and Bedford. Heinlein had three such stories:

his Future History version;
his Scribner Juvenile version;
his film version.

CS Lewis wrote "Forms of Things Unknown." (See here.)

Poul Anderson wrote "The Light."

Since 1969, sf writers can instead refer to the real first Moon landing. The Chronology of Jerry Pournelle's Codominium future history begins with it and, in Anderson's The Avatar, a wall in the space Wheel has "...a photomural, Armstrong on Luna..." (XIX, p. 170)

Parallel Reading

Poul Anderson wrote pulp action-adventure fiction. Daring escapes and rescues also occur in his serious novels like The Avatar and The Boat Of A Million Years. In The Avatar, Dan Brodersen's crew rescues interstellar explorers who have been secretly imprisoned in a space Wheel by government conspirators. There is gunfire and some deaths.

Not wanting to blog after about 9:00 PM, I stop rereading The Avatar and start rereading Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire where Paulo Roberto (and see here) rescues the title character's kidnapped girlfriend. There is violence, a warehouse is burned down and, behind it all, there is an intelligence services conspiracy.

Similar plots in dissimilar settings.

A Compassionate Man (In His Own Opinion)

British farms were hit by foot and mouth disease. A monk at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey (see here and image) started to say, "We must not seem to be insensitive to the farmers' predicament," then corrected herself and said, "We must not be insensitive..." Compassion is real, not apparent.

Poul Anderson shared with CS Lewis the ability to articulate his characters' innermost self-deceptions and hypocrisies. The loathsome Ira Quick, calling his wife to say that he will work late, maybe all night, thinks:

"Her look pains me. I am a compassionate man." (The Avatar, XVII, p. 152)

No, Ira. "I am a compassionate man" is about you, not about her.

Dan Brodersen has an extra-marital relationship that his wife knows about and accepts whereas Quick lies although, on this occasion, his "working late" is about something else: concealing his illegal imprisonment of returned explorers. Anderson's villains do not match SM Stirling's for pure evil but they are pretty dreadful.

The Incomplete Psychotechnic History And The Iffy Department

A The Complete Psychotechnic League that excludes two entire novels is not complete!

The last three items in Volume 3, "Entity," "Symmetry" and "The Chapter Ends," are all iffy vis a vis Psychotechnic History continuity so maybe it is appropriate that they are gathered together like this at the end of the series: in an "Iffy Department," so to say. It can be argued that the History properly so called culminates, satisfactorily, with The Peregrine.

However -

Two chief threads in the History are psychotechnics and the Nomads. There are psychotechnicians in the Galactic era of "The Chapter Ends." Sandra Miesel's interstitial passage immediately preceding "The Chapter Ends" reads in part:

"...as Trevelyan had foreseen decades earlier, the self-sufficient, enterprising Nomads bore seeds of knowledge safely through the Third Dark Ages. The antecedents of our own civilization were among those who reaped what the wandering Nomad ships had sown." (p. 194)

I think that this passage plausibly bridges the gap between Trevelyan's period

of the Stellar Union with its Coordination Service and the later Galactic period especially since Trevelyan, when leaving the Service and joining a Nomad ship, would have brought with him knowledge of psychotechnics. The technological discoveries made in "Entity" and "Symmetry" might have affected only parts of the galaxy, then been lost during the Third Dark Ages.

Thus, the single irresolvable contradiction remains one line in "Entity" stating that interstellar travel is, at that time, only a few decades old. If Anderson had not dropped "Entity" from the time chart, then he could have edited it to iron out this chronological anomaly.

Mysticism And The Others

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XVI.

Brodersen's engineer, Weisenberg, of Neo-Chasidim descent, says:

"'This might be our last possible way to reach the Others.' Weisenberg still sat quietly and did not raise his voice; but in his eyes appeared a light that the Baal Shem Tov would have recognized." (p. 143)

Observations
I had to google "Baal Shem Tov."

In Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return, many characters hope to meet the Ancients. In The Avatar, Brodersen's crew will meet the Others. Anderson's many sf works address every possibility.

Ireland In The World Union

(The Penny Bridge across the River Liffey in Dublin.)

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XV.

In this fictional future:

Gaelic is the main language of Eire, Ireland;

the capital city, Dublin, is called "Baile Atha Cliath," the Town of the Ford of the Hurdles, although "Dubh Linn" literally means "Black Pool";

Eire is part of the Canton of the Islands and of Europe and of the World Union;

the Irish population is low since the Troubles - which does not mean the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1960s.

Declaration of Interest
My mother was from the West of Ireland.
I was at secondary school and University in the Republic.
Sheila is from the North of Ireland.
She and I met at University in Dublin.
I wrote a fictional fragment referring to a Federation of Welsh, Irish, Scottish and English Republics. See here.

Extra-Solar Races

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XI.

T machines allow contact with many rational species. "Betans" are from an extra-solar planet humanly designated "Beta," not from a planet of the star, Beta Centauri. Their biology and therefore their history is different from ours. Rather than summarize it here, I urge everyone to read it.

The Betans have contact with several races, including humanity, and find that our kind of equality between the sexes is what they are trying to achieve. Other species are not as helpful:

"(For instance, one race, winged, was perpetually migratory, around and around its world. None of its institutions, mores, attitudes, beliefs were adaptable to surface dwellers.)" (p..114)

We remember the Diomedeans.

"Humans, despite every divergence, had a basic likeness..." (ibid.)

However, Betans are not mere surface dwellers. They speak two languages, one in air, the other underwater. Poul Anderson imagines genuine aliens.

They Meet Themselves II

See They Meet Themselves.

The narrative is third person Dunham pov and applies equally to both. T(he)y handle(s) the philosophical question of personal identity. By screaming and banging on the steel walls, they establish that there is no Dunham One outside the box. He must have been dissolved into energy which became part of Two and Three.

We think that we are reading Dunham One reacting to Dunham Two whereas instead we are reading Dunhams Two and Three reacting to each other. After they have escaped, they will form a perfect partnership, gradually becoming different people, and will become impossibly rich in the time between "Symmetry" and "The Chapter Ends," maybe duplicating themselves indefinitely. Can the duplicator be reprogrammed to create younger duplicates?

They Meet Themselves

Robert Heinlein's Bob Wilson and Poul Anderson's Jack Havig - and some other characters - meet themselves because they are time travelers. Anderson's Dunham (first name?) meets himself because a sufficiently advanced alien technology has duplicated him.

The two situations are not identical. One Wilson (and Havig) is younger than the other and becomes the other whereas both Dunhams are exactly the same age and will grow apart, neither becoming the other, although they start out as two instances of the same man like two copies of the same book. Can a type-token analysis apply to persons, with "Dunham" as a type that now has two tokens? (I am repeating terminology that I heard as a philosophy student.) If the second token was created after the death of the first, then the second would not be the first resurrected but would initially think that he was.

Such sf thought experiments might anticipate eventual technological advances. See Dead Men (Tell Tall Tales) here.

"Entity" III

In "Entity," the spaceship captain is an Andersonian problem-solver experiencing a moment of realization like many other Anderson characters.

A new source of energy being found a few decades after the beginning of interstellar travel makes it hard to fit this story into the Psychotechnic History. Maybe "Entity," like "Symmetry," should be included in the collection not on a "Here is a consistent history" basis but on a "These are the stories that the author thought of fitting into his first future history" basis. Some textual changes could have been made to enhance the consistency of the series but any such changes would have had to have been made by the author.

My next self-appointed task as a blogger is to reread and reassess "Symmetry." Then it will be time to return to Anderson's novel, The Avatar.

"Entity" II

See "Entity."

A feature common to Robert Heinlein's Future History and Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the latter modeled on the former, is stories included in the earliest version of the time chart but excluded later. There is a period when the history is taking shape.

The Wiki article on Anderson's "Entity" (see here) suggests that Anderson had placed this story late in the time chart because the technology discovered in the story does not affect the history. This is the same reason why I suggested here that it makes sense to place "Symmetry" late in the time chart. However, "Entity" still contains that discordant statement that interstellar travel is only a few decades old.

"He felt again the weariness of his years on the long hunt. Civilization could not expand blindly into the stars. Someone had to go ahead of even the explorers and give a vague idea of what to expect. Only Earth's finest, the most ultimately sane of all mankind, could endure being cooped in a metal bubble floating through darkness and void for years on end, and even they sometimes broke."
-Poul Anderson, "Entity" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, pp. 167-181 AT p. 171.

(Merseians and kzinti conceptualize their galactic endeavor as a hunt.)

Here again is the contrast between infinite space and constricting metal, expressed as a very sharp dichotomy. Sometimes space is seen merely as a dark void to be traversed in order to reach other worlds but it can alternatively be seen as a vast environment full of stars and other sources of energy.

"Entity"

Poul Anderson's listed "Entity" as an installment of the Psychotechnic History in a time chart published in Startling Stories, Winter 1955, but it was omitted from the timeline published in Starship, 1982.

The spaceship captain is a psychotechnologist and swears by Cosmos but one of his crew says that the means of interstellar travel was discovered only a few decades previously which does not fit with placing this story in the 32nd century in the timeline.

The spaceship is exploring one part of the galaxy like the Enterprise and many other science fictional spacecraft. Several of the Psychotechnic stories do not form a linear history but merely share a common background.

I have yet to discover what the "Entity" is apart from being a dark sphere that absorbs radiation.

Pete And Joe On Nerthus

Poul Anderson's juvenile hero, Wilson Pete, solves two mysteries on the colony planet, Nerthus:

What is the ecological role of the tinklers?
Are there intelligent natives?

The alien says, "'...call me Joe.'" (The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, p. 23), the title of another Anderson story. See here. He claims to be from "Astan IV," which would mean the fourth planet of a star called "Astan." Pete makes an insightful deduction from this name. We, reading later, recall the spy, Aycharaych, claiming to be from the planet, Jean-Baptiste. Nerthus reappears in "Virgin Planet"/Virgin Planet and in The Peregrine.

Volume 3 is in any case incomplete because it excludes The Peregrine. The Psychotechnic History needs to be called that, not The Psychotechnic League, and, I suggest, should be collected in two omnibus volumes:

I, ten works, pre-FTL;
II, eleven works, FTL.

Vikings And Nerthus

Today, we attended an annual Viking Festival with two ships, a tent village, costumes, handicrafts, a battle and a talk on Viking funerals which included a reference to the unrestful dead as in Poul Anderson's "The Tale of Hauk."

Back to the Psychotechnic History -

Nerthusian grass is green but does not smell like Terrestrial grass. We have seen that many other Andersonian planets have alternatives to grass.

"The Acolytes" is yet another juvenile story and has definite parallels to Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness."

Surprisingly, "The Green Thumb" is a continuation of "The Acolytes." An alien has learned Terran "...by psychophonic means..." (p. 22) Having read later installments of this future history, I know that the alien is not what he seems. Now I must read the rest of this story.

Life On Nerthus

The colonized planet, Nerthus, in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, has six-legged, green-furred "ponies," like the stathas in his Technic History.

Which fictional planets have visibly moving moons? One of Nerthus' moons is so close that it is almost seen to move.

Children have been disappearing from Nerthusian farms as on another colonized planet in Anderson's Rustum History timeline.

In the Nerthusian night sky:

"Only the pale flood of the Milky Way looked the same."
-The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, p. 9.

"The Acolytes"

Poul Anderson's "The Acolytes" was published in Worlds Beyond, 1951;

Worlds Beyond, February 1951 (see image) contained a story by Anderson;

therefore, it is probable that that story was "The Acolytes."

(I can still construct a syllogism the morning after a party.)

"It had been a sort of disappointing trip from Sol, days and days locked inside the metal walls of the spaceship."
-Poul Anderson, "The Acolytes" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, pp. 3-19 AT p. 3.

Somewhere on the blog, I have highlighted this paradox. In American sf, interstellar travel is the ultimate symbol of freedom. On the other hand, an interstellar traveler, while traveling, is often seen as confined in metal. One example is Anderson's The Avatar which, longer term, I am rereading. Another is his Tau Zero.

Interstellar travelers need to take their environment with them. James Blish has flying cities and there is a mobile terraformed asteroid in Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains.

The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3

That looks like a Starfleet uniform on the cover.

I argued here that "Symmetry" does not fit in the Psychotechnic History. However, since it has been included in this volume, it made sense to include it near the end where it can do less damage to continuity!

The volume includes one story, "Entity," that has not previously been listed as belonging to this future history. Is it included by the inclusive or by the exclusive criterion? (See the section, "Constructing an American Future History," in American Future Histories.)

This volume should have included both "Virgin Planet" and Virgin Planet. It is incomplete without the latter.

"Empires rose and fell among the stars." (p. 194)

With this single additional sentence in one of her italicized interstitial passages, Sandra Miesel acknowledges how much happens between "Symmetry" and the concluding "The Chapter Ends."

I have yet to read "The Acolytes," "The Green Thumb" and "Entity."

Dissidents In Space And A Terrestrial Politician

"...certain governments subsidized the departure of dissident citizens, and pressured them to accept..."
-Poul Anderson, The Avatar, VIII, p. 74.

We recognize this theme both from Anderson's Rustum History and from his Psychotechnic History. For the latter, see here. Some dissidents would not want to emigrate and/or would refuse to abandon their struggle on Earth. And the problems would still remain on Earth.

In The Avatar, extra-solar colonists also pursue personal ambitions or utopian visions, as happens during the Breakup in Anderson's Technic History.

Anderson presents Ira Quick as an unpleasant, manipulative, self-serving politician:

"...it must be I, Ira Wallace Quick, who forces destiny into shape. On the crudest level, hearing a crowd cheer me, seeing them adore me, beats taking a woman to bed." (X, p. 97)

- but then shows us that Quick has genuine concerns about suffering that he has seen on Earth.

However, do the impoverished multitude need nothing more than a perpetual welfare state administered by patronizing posers like Ira Quick? They need to play an active role in their own emancipation and destiny as the heirs of the ages and the builders of the future. Professional politicians like Quick see the masses as merely passive and get a shock when they move. Much future-building can and should be done off Earth. However, the large Terrestrial population should not allow itself to be abandoned to continued decline and decay.

Clouds Below

Sf readers readily accept accounts of travel though interplanetary, interstellar and even intergalactic space but we can also pause for awe just at the idea of atmospheric flight above clouds that are high above the planetary surface:

"...a sea of sunlit clouds, far and far below."
-Poul Anderson, The Avatar, IX, p. 82.

See also The Hidden Folk.

We have been notified that The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume III, will arrive tomorrow. This will cause a further interruption to my rereading of The Avatar.

Northwest Of Sol

See Galactic North And South.

In Poul Anderson's The Avatar, a spaceship leaves the Solar System by orbiting around a T machine. In space, the vast number of visible stars crowds out and conceals familiar constellations. On the one hand, astronauts are trained to recognize constellations even in space. On the other hand, they are no longer in the Solar System. However, extragalactic objects are unchanged and, after a while, the astronauts think that they are able to discern a few of the constellations, albeit altered. They deduce that they have traveled to a point between one hundred and five hundred light years "...northwest of Sol." (VIII, p. 72) Here again, we find compass points in the galaxy: immense distances but nevertheless an almost parochial system of orientation.

Gates

In which sf novels did a superior civilization visit the Solar System in a remote past and leave "gates" to other worlds, to be found when human beings leave Earth?

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001;
Frederik Pohl's Heechee series;
Poul Anderson's The Avatar;
S.M. Stirling's Lords of Creation series.

I have asked a question and presented four answers but have run out of steam for this evening. Thank you all for so many page views, over 400 yesterday. Good night.

Addendum: See Comment. Thank you, David.

Another Disagreement With Brodersen

In Poul Anderson's The Avatar, Dan Brodersen's first wife was politically assassinated. Brodersen rightly condemns the assassination, then discusses the politics:

"'...terrorists...issued an anonymous announcement that they were protesting the Ruedas' hogging the benefits of space development from the masses...The Ruedas...'re rich, because their ancestors had the wit to invite private space enterprise to Peru. But hogging the wealth? Why, suppose the money was divided equally among the oprimidos. What sum would each person get? And where'd the capital come from for the next investment? ...when will these world savior types learn some elementary economics?'" (V, p. 53)

Observations And Questions
Should wealth be inherited?

Although "...world savior types..." is probably a valid description of people who think that they can solve problems by planting bombs, there are many others who want to help to transform society but who do not think that they can change the world by their own unaided efforts, still less by acts of individual violence.

There are ways to redistribute the wealth created by labor - and also to plan for the future - other than handing every member of the population a small amount of money.

Revolutionaries include students of economics. Indeed, one famous theoretician analyzed "Capital" and explained the inevitability of the decline in the rate of profit!

The phrase, "elementary economics," should not be used to mean the workings of one particular economic system.

Caesarism

(OK. I have committed some spoilers, haven't I? It is difficult, when a book has been published and I have read it, to remember that it has been published so recently that not everyone else has read it yet.)

My present purpose is to disagree with Poul Anderson's character, Dan Brodersen, who says:

"'...Earth will explode pretty soon. The best result of that would be a kind of Caesar...'"
-Poul Anderson, The Avatar, V, p. 51.

Not the best possible result. When Kornilov tried to lead a military coup in Russia, 1917, railway workers would not move his troops. Any would-be dictator can be arrested or shot by his own men who can then elect recallable leaders from among their own ranks and join forces with similar democratic organizations being formed in other regiments, in industry and in local communities. Such movements have often arisen in response to crises and are potentially the basis of a new kind of society finally free from armed states with their perpetual threat of a revived Caesarism.

Brodersen and I would be on opposite sides during a civil conflict. I fear that he would deploy his considerable social and economic resources to support a new Caesar - who, however, can be disempowered if enough people disobey his orders.