"Cerdic...was not quite the prince's name, but near enough to catch Flandry's fancy; he was a bit of a history buff." (p. 249)
"...Cerdic and his father Penda (another word-play by Flandry) were no ordinary barbarian chiefs..." (ibid.)
Writing about sword-wielding, idol-worshiping, interstellar barbarians, Poul Anderson provides them with historically appropriate but nevertheless sufficiently exotic names. More familiar names like "William" or "Godfrey" would not have fitted as well in this context.
Flandry's knowledge of history is demonstrated when he reflects:
"The historical pattern was time-worn; Terra herself had been through it, over and over, long before her children departed for the stars." (p. 245)
We did not think of ourselves as "Terra," one planet among many, back then. All Terrans do not depart for the stars but much sf gives this wrong impression.
General Nartheof says that Terran fighting units:
"'...are staffed by venial cowards.'" (p. 259)
Does he mean "venal"?
Cerdic says that Terran science has declined into dogma: a damning accusation. How could a civilization moving through the galaxy let this happen?
18 comments:
Paul:
"You know, it's odd; practically everything that's happened on any of the inhabited planets has happened on Terra before the first spaceship."
— H. Beam Piper, Space Viking
(It's said by a Space Viking captain whose hobby is history. Imagine the conversation if he and Chunderban Desai showed up in the Old Phoenix one evening and were able to find a language both understood.)
David,
Is Piper's future history in any way comparable to the Technic History?
Paul.
Paul:
What's published is nowhere near as extensive, but there are points of resemblance. Piper had a great deal of background information planned out, with a timeline, details on various planets, and at least one star map. It all vanished after he committed suicide. I once quoted here a fantasy about finding it in one of those little shops that sell all manner of odd things.
A Piper-homage site called zarthani.net/terro-human_future_history tells us:
"Piper's Terro-human Future History is a future-historical science-fiction series which imagines the expansion of the human race from its origins on Earth (Terra) out into the galaxy. Consisting of the novels of Piper's famous Fuzzy trilogy (1962 et al.), Piper's novels Uller Uprising (1952), Four-Day Planet (1961), Junkyard Planet (1963)—also known as The Cosmic Computer, and Space Viking (1962), and eight Piper stories originally published in pulp science-fiction magazines between 1957 and 1962 (originally reissued, along with an additional, previously-unpublished story, in the Piper collections Federation and Empire edited by John F. Carr, and more recently in Carr's The Rise of the Terran Federation), the Terro-human Future History spans over thirty millennia of future history."
Except in the Fuzzy trilogy, no major character in one story/book recurs as a major character in any other story, although he or she may be referred to briefly. A starship in "Naudsonce" is named after the Space Force commanding officer with an archaeological expedition on Mars in "Omnilingual."
The language most used in the TFH is "...Lingua Terra ... [an] indiscriminate mixture of English, Spanish, Portuguese and Afrikaans, mostly English. And you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the Ninth Century Pre-Atomic, and no more legitimate than any of the other results."
— Fuzzy Sapiens, second book in the trilogy
The reason for the heavy use of Spanish, Portuguese, and Afrikaans as well as English is that South America, Africa, and Australia rebuilt Terran civilization after nuclear World Wars III and IV devastated the Northern Hemisphere. Some of the stories talk about military action against the savages of northern Eurasia. No mention of North American savages ... there may not have been enough survivors for that.
Erratum: The quoted passage says the TFH spanned "over thirty millennia of future history." That's an error, as I should've commented immediately; the farthest-out TFH date was somewhere around 7000 Atomic Era.
Jerry Pournelle said that he had an exclusive right to write more TFH but I don't think he ever did.
Paul:
To the best of my knowledge, you're right; Pournelle never wrote any TFH work. Perhaps he got bogged down by how much of Piper's missing work he'd have to recreate or try to approximate. Also, he might have worried that further TFH stories would be seen as a rip-off of the Technic History. Some of the resemblances....
Consider McCormac's rebels fleeing to somewhere far from the Terran Empire — and then the statement in Space Viking that the Sword Worlds were colonized when "Ten thousand men and women on Abigor, refusing to surrender, had taken the remnant of the System States Alliance navy to space, seeking a world the Federation had never heard of and wouldn't find for a long time."
(Incidentally, Space Viking, as I quoted a few posts above, was published in '62. Compare that to the dates for The Rebel Worlds and "Starfog." Oh, dear.)
There's an initially democratic government — the Terran Federation — which after several centuries overstrains itself and collapses, leading to a Long Night, though that name isn't used. This is followed by the establishment of the Galactic Empire something like a thousand years after the Federation began to fall. The Empire's emblem is a golden sun overlaid with a black cogwheel. One emperor tells some (involuntary) new subjects, "Deserve well of us, and prosper under the Sun and Cogwheel."
About a thousand years after that, approximately 3050 Atomic Era (4993 CE), the short story "Ministry of Disturbance" shows Emperor Paul XXII scheming with the Minister of Security "to arouse the Empire to new efforts." (Amusingly, a lot of the other government ministers think Security is pulling off a coup d'état.)
With further research I've found that the 30,000-year reference comes from a brief summary of the TFH Piper gave to an obscure fan magazine which published it about six months before his death. In that, he mentioned that his short story "The Keeper" was set some thirty millennia hence. The only other date I've seen for the setting of "The Keeper" instead placed it a mere "five to six thousand years" in the future.
David,
I have posted about parallels between American future histories. Piper sounds like more of the same in a low key. Anderson combined new ideas with good treatment of old ideas.
Paul.
Paul:
By the way, "Ministry of Disturbance" also has applicability to Cerdic's accusation about science declining into dogma. A significant subplot involves the uproar when a professor at the Imperial Capital's university performs an experiment that yields anomalous results, and a senior professor, backed by the university's chancellor, tries to prevent him from looking further into the matter. The emperor, in his thoughts, sums up the matter:
"The difference was that Faress was a scientist and Dandrik was a science teacher. To Faress, a new door had opened, the first new door in eight hundred years. To Dandrik, it threatened invalidation of everything he had taught since the morning he had opened his first class. He could no longer say to his pupils, 'You are here to learn from me.' He would have to say, more humbly, 'We are here to learn from the Universe.'"
David,
Federation and EMPIRE sound much too similar to FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE.
Paul.
Paul:
Yes, there'd be problems there, too. Not to mention that Space Viking involves characters in Death-Star-shaped ships raiding into what was once Federation territory ... and one of those vessels is named Enterprise. Fans who didn't bother to notice that Piper died a year before the first Star Trek episode aired would be accusing him of ripping off Trek and Star Wars both.
At http://www.zarthani.net/future_history_gallery.htm there are samples of cover art for several of Piper's books. A superb Empire cover was done by Michael Whelan, roughly a third of the way down the page, and its front cover blurb still sends thrills up my spine: "In the wake of Federation there arose EMPIRE".
A notable feature of Piper's work is that heroes in the TFH often seem set up to solve a problem at the end of a book, and the you learn later that they didn't.
Mr. Stirling:
The Maxwell/Merlin Plan. And arguably the League of Civilized Worlds. Yeah.
Kaor, DAVID!
Your comments here makes me regret how I never delved deeply into Piper's TFH. And I regret no longer having his three Fuzzy books. Alas, I discarded them because I came to think them too ickily sentimental!
Ad astsra and Happy New Year! Sean
At his best, Piper was very good -- his LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN was his best long-form work, IMHO.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I'm almost sure I read LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN far too long ago. And I definitely did read one or two of Piper's TFH stories. Including one about the Ministry of Disturbance.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Getting back to one of the the original points of this blog piece of yours, I looked up this part of the revised version of "Tiger By The Tail" in the 1979 Gregg Press edition of AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE. And the word used by General Nartheof in his foolishly contemptuous dismissal of the Imperial armed forces was "venal," not "venial." So what we see here is an example of how errors and misprints can creep into a text. Which means one of the tasks of the editors of any COMPLETE COLLECTED WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON would be to review the texts of these works for possible errors in the texts needing to be corrected.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean,
I have both versions of the text but had not got around to checking the original. Anderson scholarship is a full-time job.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And zealous fans of JRR Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS has been passionately working to correct misprints and errors in the text of that book! I have a copy of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: A READER'S COMPANION, by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2005). A fascinating discussion of the errors which crept into the text of LOTR and the efforts made to correct them. I've gone to the trouble of sometimes comparing the text of the second edition of LOTR with the 50th Anniversary edition. I hope something similar will be done for the works of Anderson!
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
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