Axor's Quietism

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER FIVE.

"Axor looked distressed. 'This conversation is taking a horrid turn,' he said. 'What can we do about it but tend our private affairs and pray to God for mercy upon helpless beings throughout the galaxy?'" (p. 259)

Everyone can do more than that, Father. Where you have a vote, exercise it. Where you don't have a vote, campaign for one. Lobby elected representatives. Organize - at work and in communities. Learn from previous resistance to military dictatorships and from other struggles. If you can't give a lead, then follow someone else's lead - but not blindly. 

That's a start.

All

 

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER FOUR.

Olaf Magnusson was not:

"...rapt in the contemplation of the All that his Neosufic religion enjoined. He had striven to be, but his thoughts kept drifting elsewhere, until at last he accepted their object as the aspect of the Divine which was set before him tonight." (p. 250)

How can you contemplate the All? Can you strive to? Surely thought always drift elsewhere? In zazen, we contemplate the here and now which includes drifting thoughts. They are not to be suppressed but to be noticed and let go of. (To practice is to persevere, not always to succeed.)

The aspect of the Divine that is set before Magnusson is:

"Strength. Strength unafraid, unhesitant, serving a will which was neither cruel nor kind but which cleanly trod the road to its destiny.... He could not hold the vision before him for very long at a time. It was too superb for mankind." (ibid.)

Indeed. The alert reader remembers Djana's visions on Talwin:

"Before her flashed the image of a Merseian Christ, armed and shining, neither compassionate nor cruel but the Messiah of a new day.... She hadn't heard of any such belief among them. Maybe they had no need of redemption; maybe they were God's chosen...."

-Poul Anderson, A Circus Of Hells IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 193-365 AT CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 298.

Merseian conditioning had worked on Djana's Catholic upbringing. It went further:

"He on the throne: 'For that they have sinned beyond redemption, the sin that may not be forgiven, which is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, no more are they My people.

"'Behold, I cast them from Me; and I will raise against them a new people under a new sun; and their name shall be Strength.

"'Open now the book of the seven thunders."

-A Circus Of Hells, p. 304.

A Third Testament? Does Magnusson's religion come from Sufism or from the Roidhunate?

Finally, after Magnusson's vision of Strength:

"Into his awareness there kept jabbing mere facts, practicalities, things he must do, questions of how to do them - yes, crusades have logistic requirements too -" (ibid.)

Mere facts are what we have to attend to, Magnusson. A pity he mentioned his crusade...

Not Like Men

The Game Of Empire.

In what ways does Targovi the Tigery differ from a human being? Longer legs, clawed feet, short tail, four-fingered hands, a single breathing slit, carnivore teeth, chemosensor tendrils, movable ears, black and orange striped fur, wearing only a breechclout, belt and artificial oxygill, with a purring, hissing, growling or screeching voice. He can stalk like a cat, crawling flat on the ground, inaudible and almost invisible, remaining motionless, sensing every clue or hint. Thus, a faint shudder in the ground confirms his suspicion of an underground tunnel between a spaceport and an alleged defence facility. A running start, speed and claws enable him to scale a wall that would be impossible for a human being. Female Tigeries are dominant possibly because their bodies maintain a higher blood supply - to feed the blood directly to their young.

How do Merseians differ - apart from being green, scaled and tailed etc? Although Brechdan Ironrede states that most Merseians actively and instinctually enjoy combat, they also learn patience and dissimulation in pursuit of long-term goals. Thus, a disciplined Merseian will, if ordered to do so, retreat and flee, confident that his apparent defeat furthers the aims of the Race. Further, Dennitzan citizens of Merseian descent show no signs of enjoying combat as such so maybe Brechdan's statement is more culturally specific than he thinks.

Adzel And Axor

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Wodenite Adzel converts to Mahayana Buddhism while studying on Earth whereas the Wodenite Axor converts to Jerusalem Catholicism because the Galilean Order has established a university in Port Campbell on Woden. (The future honours Galileo Galilei and John W. Campbell.)

Spiritual practitioners disagree as to whether the ultimate reality is a person. If some of us are mistaken and It is, then presumably that ultimate person acts for the good of all, unlike the deities of some sects. Anyone can address Him or Her, at least hypothetically. Myths provide imaginative accounts of such a being. Axor seeks for evidence of a nonhuman Incarnation. In Hindu mythology, Vishnu the Preserver, the second member of Trimurti, is incarnated through evolutionary stages as:

a fish

a tortoise

a boar

a man-lion

a dwarf

Rama

Krishna

the Buddha

Kalki

Parasurama

Hinduism can also incorporate Christ and any extra-terrestrial Incarnations discovered by Axor.

Human And Alien

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

As we have seen, Poul Anderson's Technic History is a future history not only of humanity but also of several other intelligent species, notably Ythrians and Merseians. Some entire chapters recount conversations and interactions between nonhuman beings. We want the nonhumans to be genuinely alien. This is sometimes but not always the case. In an exchange between Diana Crowfeather (human) and Targovi (Tigery):

"'The Navy staked you, didn't it? I never really believed what you said about the pirates.'

"'Well, he growled,' miffed, 'we can talk further another time...'" (p. 244)

Targovi's conversational response is no different from that of a human male who realizes that his young female friend has seen through his cover story. He comes across, this time at least, not as an alien but as a man in an alien body.

In Ensign Flandry and The Game Of Empire, we learn that Merseians sleep in beds. This sounds too human. When awake, they do not sit on chairs but squat on their tails so that Chee Lan, visiting a Merseian residence, must sit on a table. Could the Merseians sleep squatting? Maybe that sounds unstable but the point is that we want to read about differences between intelligent species. And, often, they are.

The Land Of Trees Beyond

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

Before battle on Starkad, Dragoika had told Flandry that perhaps they would meet in the Land of Trees Beyond. Kursovikian religion was an inchoate paganism with tutelary spirits and hidden powers. Flying above Imhotep, Dragoika's son, Targovi, thinks that the continent-wide forest is as:

"...mysterious as the Land of Trees Beyond where some aged people believed the spirits of the dead went." (p. 236)

Losing Starkad and migrating to Imhotep would obviously uproot religious ideas although since, of necessity, the Starkadians have moved to a sufficiently similar planet, they still live near a forest that could, in some minds, reinforce the idea of "Trees Beyond." No doubt Imhotepan Tigeries include conservatives and secularists and maybe also some that reconfigure traditional ideas although we were told in Ensign Flandry that the Tigeries were less interested than human beings in finding ultimate causes.

Starkadian sea-dwellers, also evacuated to Imhotep, might think of "Seas Beyond" except that their world-view, as summarized in Ensign Flandry, was empirical and made no reference to a hereafter.

Dragoika's Apartment

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

Dragoika's apartment in the Gaarnokh Tower of the Castle of the Sisterhood in Toborkozan on Dawnside Bay on Imhotep:

floored with slate;

walled with granite;

gentled by tapestries;

books and a seashell goblet from Starkad;

bronze candelabrum;

silver;

glass;

a massive table;

ship-shaped couches.

The conversation is only between Dragoika and her youngest son, Targovi. Thus, no human beings are involved. There are similar scenes between Merseians on their home planet. Poul Anderson gives his nonhuman characters detailed physical environments to inhabit.

The Ensign Flandry cover shows Flandry and Dragoika during their earliest encounter back on Starkad when that planet still existed.

Targovi And Flandry Tell The Same Lie

The Game Of Empire.

Targovi questions a Merseian prisoner. He, Targovi, claims that some Starkadians are considering where their interests lie. Merseia might capture Patricius next time:

"'It would be well for us to gain understanding of you.'" (CHAPTER TWO, p. 229)

This is not what Targovi is after. He knows where his interests lie.

Flandry conducts a parley under truce with the rebel, Magnusson:

"'After all, Sir Olaf, you may be our next Emperor. It would be nice to know beforehand that you'll be a good one.'" (CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 394)

Again, that is not what Flandry is after. Like Targovi, he has a theory of what is happening right now and is seizing an opportunity to gather more intelligence, to identify the real enemy.

Two very dangerous opponents. 

Targovi

The Game Of Empire.

Like van Rijn and Falkayn, Targovi trades.

Like Flandry, he spies.

Unlike any of them, he is nonhuman.

But he is loyal to Terra.

Maybe Targovi represents a new synthesis in the Technic History: a nonhuman being who learns, combines and applies the lessons of Technic civilization? In The Day Of Their Return, Erannath of Stormgate Choth on Avalon in the Domain of Ythri spied for both Empire and Domain. Axor functions as a Jerusalem Catholic priest. He would be able to say Mass and administer sacraments to a congregation of human beings or of other nonhuman converts. We might have read an entire novel with no human characters but members of other species, including Dennitzan ychani, performing the tasks that, for a little while longer, maintain Technic civilization - then one of its successor civilizations. 

Two Bar Conversations

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTERs ONE-TWO.

Imhotep and Daedalus are the two colonized planets of the star, Patricius. The Imperial sector defence command has been established in Aurea, the capital city of Daedalus. Sector Admiral Sir Olaf Magnusson lives a hundred kilometres north of Aurea. 

Bars are good places for characters to converse and divulge.

On Imhotep

In the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle at Olga's Landing:

six human miners, drinking, talking and playing dice;

with them, two joygirls (one shrieks at Axor's crocodilian smile);

one Tigery, sipping through the chowlock of her helmet;

Diana Crowfeather;

Axor lying on the floor;

the proprietor, Hassan, serving Axor beer from a bucket.

Two nonhumans. Diana and Axor exchange stories. He tells her of his quest and she agrees to help.

On Daedalus

In Ju Shao's inn on a lane along a cliff outside Aurea:

Ju Shao, a Cynthian;

Targovi, a Tigery;

four human Navy personnel, praising Magnusson but bitching about the Empire.

Again, two nonhumans. Ju Shao offers Targovi cowbeef and Winged Smoke. The human beings include Janice Combarelles of Intelligence who does not know that Targovi the trader is an undercover colleague. He gathers intelligence from the conversation. Ju Shao likes Targovi because he stays quiet till he needs to kill, then does it without fuss.

Falkayn's team had a Cynthian. Diana's will have a Tigery. It as if Ju Shao, on behalf of Chee Lan (now long dead, of course) passes the baton to Targovi.

Planets As Shields

I can't find it now but somewhere in A Stone In Heaven, one of the moons of Ramnu was like a shield, resembling a shield in shape and also concealing and protecting Hooligan. I meant to quote this when posting about planets seen from space. 

CS Lewis imagined that Earth's Moon was:

"'...as the shield of the Dark Lord of Thulcandra - scarred with many a blow.'"

-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 17, p. 338.

Thus, Lewis incorporates lunar craters into his fictional mythology. He also finds a place for the "canals" of Mars and the supposed oceans of Venus. In haste. Back here later.

Addendum

Correction: It was not a Ramnuan moon but Ramnu itself that became a shield:

"Hooligan curved around and departed from Ramnu. The planet became a shield, emblazoned azure, argent and sable, against the stars."

-A Stone In Heaven, XII, p. 166.

The emphasis is on the appearance of Ramnu as an emblazoned shield, not on the planet as shielding Hooligan.

Fictional Theology

Why discuss theology if some of us are atheists?

First, some of us are not.

Secondly, some fictional characters created by Poul Anderson, James Blish, Philip Jose Farmer, SM Stirling, Walter M. Miller, Ray Bradbury and CS Lewis accept Christian theology.

Thirdly, Lewis did.

Fourthly, sometimes we can translate from theistic into nontheistic terminology, e.g., "God wills x" equals "X is good"; "What does God want us to do?" equals "What should we do?"

In Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire, Axor seeks for evidence of an extraterrestrial Incarnation and finds parallels between religions on different planets. How will he distinguish between evidence for an Incarnation and evidence for belief in an Incarnation? There are bound to be parallels if there are so many oxygen-breathing intelligences on terrestroid planets. In one region of Ikranaka, where there are seasonal changes, it is believed that Zuriat the Bright is reborn annually. On Earth, belief in cyclical resurrection preceded belief in one unique historical Resurrection.

CS Lewis was more imaginative than Axor:

"...nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion: perhaps - who knows - not even a second Incarnation...some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility."

-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT II, p. 278.

By the way, crucifixion/impalement, turns me off big time.

Continuity And Novelty

 

A future history series combines continuity with novelty. A human being, a Wodenite convert to a Terrestrial religion and a second nonhuman being: this description fits two teams in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Further, the second nonhuman being in the second team is a Tigery, a member of a species that has meanwhile become familiar to us. Indeed, he, Targovy, is the son of Dragoika who had appeared in Ensign Flandry. Reading there about Flandry and Dragoika, we little suspected that his daughter and her son would form a team decades later. Yet there is also much that is genuinely new in The Game Of Empire: the Patrician System, the Zacharians and the disaffection of the Magnussons which, we now learn, had paralleled earlier events. Poul Anderson designs a convincing future history by skilfully combining continuity with novelty and the series could have been continued indefinitely on this basis.

Times And Places

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER ONE.

A future history series informs us of events that occur not only in different generations and centuries but also in different places and regions of space. Some instalments of Poul Anderson's Technic History overlap chronologically. Thus, Adzel studies on Earth while van Rijn outsmarts pirates in space. Later, van Rijn is on one planet while his trader team is on another. Ensign Flandry, The Rebel Worlds, "Hunters of the Sky Cave," A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows and A Stone In Heaven show us Terra in Flandry's time whereas The Game Of Empire, set in the distant Patrician System, refers to the remote "...inner Empire..." (p. 197) Since there has been a recent "...Merseian onslaught...," (ibid.) we infer that Patricius, like the Taurian Sector, is in the volume of space that borders the Wilderness between the Empire and the Roidhunate. Although consecutive readers do not know this yet, A Stone In Heaven was our last sight of Terra because The Game Of Empire and the subsequent four instalments of the Technic History move not only further into the future but also further away in space, eventually arriving in another spiral arm of the galaxy.

The Game Of Empire, Chapter One

Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453.

CHAPTER ONE of this novel, originally published in 1985, displays Poul Anderson's confident mature writing and particularly his future historical writing:

a new viewpoint character whom we know initially only as Diana;

additions to the Technic History, the star Patricius and its planet Imhotep;

a blue sky with white clouds, two moons and a cool breeze;

historical references to the Troubles and to the arrival of the Terran Empire;

a busy crowded street scene;

a marine growling, "'Merseian bastards...'" (p. 198);

familiar nonhumans, Tigeries, a Donarrian, Irumclagians, Shalmuans - and a Wodenite.

A new team is about to be formed. 

Approaching The End

Poul Anderson's Technic History potentially opened up just when it was instead winding down. Anderson felt that the series had made its point - that a society that makes a wrong decision goes into a long-term decline through several discernible stages - but we had become more interested in the characters and their stories than in Anderson's point, interesting though that was when explained by Chunderban Desai to Dominic Flandry, then by Flandry to Miriam Abrams.

In The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume VII, Flandry's Legacy, The Game Of Empire has an internal title page on p. 189, a dedication to James P. Baen on p. 190, an Introduction by the author on pp. 191-192, maps of the Patrician System and its planets, Imhotep and Daedalus, on pp. 193-194 and an opening chapter that begins on p. 195. The Introduction gives away that this novel is a coda to Flandry's biography but not everyone reads introductions. We have not previously heard of Patricius, St. Barbara or Diana although p. 195 refers to Imperial offices which suggests that the narrative might still be in the Terran Empire. The following page confirms this by referring first to the Troubles, then, explicitly, to the Terran Empire. However, for the rest of this evening, I will return to rereading Stieg Larsson and/or Neil Gaiman!

Five Proto-Series

 

A proto-series is a story or novel that is potentially the opening instalment of a series. Thus:

"Time Patrol" would have remained a proto-series if Poul Anderson had written nothing further about the Time Patrol;

"Margin of Profit" would have remained a proto-series if he had written nothing further about Nicholas van Rijn;

"Tiger by the Tail" would have remained a proto-series if he had written nothing further about Dominic Flandry;

and so on.

The six works collected in Flandry's Legacy present at least five proto-series. More could have been written about:

the new team of Dominic Flandry and Miriam Abrams;

Diana Crowfeather and her friends;

Roan Tom's exploits during the Long Night;

the Allied Planets recivilizing isolated interstellar colonies;

Daven Laure, Ranger of the Commonalty.

We would also like to know what became of Merseians, Ythrians, Avalon, Cynthians and Wodenites and whether Aycharaych survived. He would be a changed Chereionite and might have been able to help Fr. Axor to find and interpret Ancient inscriptions.

When We Were Young, What Might Have Been And Always The Wind

A Stone In Heaven, XIV.

Mirian "Banner" Abrams:

"'...I don't want to begin again with another Ramnuan. Our sisterhood, Yewwl's and mine, was wonderful, I'll always warm my soul by it, but it came to be when we were young, and that is gone.'" (p. 187)

Nature comments as the text continues:

"The forest soughed. Wind boomed through the canyon." (pp. 187-188)

Dominic Flandry responds:

"'...we make one crackling hell of a team. A pity if we disbanded. Would you like to continue?'" (p. 188)

Youth lost is a perennial Andersonian theme. See his Time Patrol series and, earlier in the Technic History, Mirkheim. 

The wind really is always with us.

Continue the Flandry series with a new Flandry-Abrams sub-series, as implied here? That did not happen although I would have preferred it to some of what Poul Anderson did write later but I cannot tell a man what to write, especially not retroactively.

A Stone In Heaven is the first of six works collected in Flandry's Legacy but we know that this is the seventh and concluding volume of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga. Whatever else happens, the Technic History approaches its end which happens to be millennia after Flandry's lifetime.

Planets Seen From Space And Idealism In Two Timelines

A Stone In Heaven.

Terra left behind by Hooligan is:

"...a blue jewel falling away into depths beyond depths..." (VI, p. 65)

Elaveli, a moon of Ramnu is:

"...airless, lifeless, a stone in heaven." (XIII, pp. 171-172)

Ramnu is:

"A sapphire, Flandry reflected. Yes, another stone...a precious jewel..." (p. 172)

One Asimov title describes Earth as a Pebble In The Sky.

"'Idealism has killed a lot of people throughout history.'" (XIII, p. 169)

"'I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics...'"

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 5, p. 42.

Flandry and Everard speak for Anderson. I think that there are other major causes of misery.

The Time Traveller's Children

The title of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife suggested that this novel might be a direct sequel to Wells' The Time Machine but fortunately it is much better than that. I have read half a dozen Time Machine sequels and thought that none was successful except Christopher Priest's The Space Machine which is mainly a sequel to The War Of The Worlds. Poul Anderson could have sequelized The Time Machine well but did not need to. In his There Will Be Time, one of the mutant time travellers gives the time travel idea to a young English writer.

Niffenegger's time traveller and his wife have a daughter who is also a time traveller so an obvious title for a sequel would have been The Time Traveller's Daughter but apparently the sequel, not yet published, is to be called The Other Husband because the time travelling daughter has husbands in two periods. The real literary successors or "children" of the original Time Traveller are several characters created by Poul Anderson and by some other sf writers. I started to compile a list but every reader can do this for him- or herself. However, Anderson's list is longer than anyone else's and particularly impressive.

Sentience And Random Change

A Stone In Heaven, XII.

"If sentience did not abate the accidents of a blind universe, what meaning had sentience itself?" (p.161)

"'A cosmos of random changes must be senseless, ultimately self-destructive. In it could be no freedom.

"Has the universe therefore brought forth sentience, in order to protect and give purpose to its own existence? That is not an answerable question.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART SIX, 1990 A. D., p. 435.

The two main philosophical questions are the natures of time and of consciousness. My two favourite kinds of science fiction are future histories and time travel. Poul Anderson's main future history series is the Technic History and his most substantial work concerning time travel is the Time Patrol series. Thus, it is good to find parallel passages in these two major series.

The Molecules Of His Brain

"Through and through him that mental vision seared, down to the very molecules of his brain, his life lay open to Them in a white flame of incandescence."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER SIX, p. 281.

Merely seeing the molecules of Saunders' brain will not show anyone his life. However, the vision is described as "mental" which implies that "the gods," as he thinks of Them, see not only his cerebral molecules but also his mentality.

Consciousness is irreducible:

the property of gaseousness is caused by and reducible to rapid molecular motions;

liquidity is caused by and reducible to slower molecular motions;

solidity is caused by and reducible to molecular cohesion;

consciousness is caused by but not reducible to neuronic interactions;

visible colours are caused by but not reducible to interaction between electromagnetic radiation, eyes and neurons.

Consciousness is caused but qualitatively distinct.  

Future Cities

In the Technic History, on Earth:

"Everywhere around towers soared heavenward in fluid grace; this quarter of the city went back two centuries, to when an inspired school of architecture had flourished. White clouds wandered through blue clarity; aircars sparkled in sunlight. A breeze brought coolness and a muted pulse of machines in the service of man."

-A Stone In Heaven, III, p. 32.

Flandry in his roof garden sees white clouds and blue sky and feels a cool breeze so he is not completely enclosed or cut off from nature. His urban environment comprises high, graceful towers, aircars and machine sounds. Although it is all a thousand years in the future to us, it is two hundred years old to Flandry, living in his present.

In the Technic History, on Ramnu:

"Across a bridge, Dukeston reared and roared and glared."

-ibid., XI, p. 151.

This sentence conveys the dynamism of a city without, for once, delineating any details.

In The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge sees Niyorek:

"Monstrous it gloomed on the shore, and inland further than his vision went. Maps and diaglossa had told of an America webbed from end to end with megalopolis. Little broke that mass of concrete, steel, energy, ten billion slaves jammed together, save here and there a desert which had once been green countryside...

"North, south, and ahead, the city raised ramparts where nothing but a few wan lamps, and the spout from a hundred furnaces, relieved the lower murk. A sound came over the sea, humming, throbbing, sometimes shrilling so high it was pain to hear: the voice of the machines. On the upper levels, individual towers lifted a mile or more, the first dawn-glow pallid on their windowless sides. Cables, tubes, elevated ways meshed them together. The spectacle had a certain grandeur. They were not small-minded, the men who dreamed those vertical caverns into the sky. But the outlines were brutal, bespeaking a spirit whose highest wish was the unrestrained exercise of unlimited power, forever."

-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (Panther Books, St Albans, Herts, 1975), CHAPTER FIFTEEN, pp. 130-131.

Compared with Archopolis: higher and louder; not inspired but brutal.

After four million years of time travel, Martin Saunders stops in a city:

"...he couldn't follow the wild geometry of the titanic structures that loomed about him and they were never the same. The place throbbed and pulsed with incredible forces, it wavered and blurred in a strangely unreal light. Great devastating energies flashed and roared around him - lightning come to Earth. The air hissed and stung with their booming passage."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER SIX, p. 280.

Why does he think that this is a city? Not a voice but a thought warns him away.

"A billion years in the future there was a city standing on a plain where grass grew that was blue and glassy and tinkled with a high crystalline chiming as the wind blew through it. But the city had never been built by humans, and it warned him away with a voice he could not disobey."

-"Flight to Forever," p. 283.

After a billion years, it does not matter whether the non-human builders are our descendants or have evolved separately. This city is not described.

Premature Interruption

A Stone In Heaven, XI.

"'He's sending for people to take us prisoner -'

"[Yewwl] got no chance to explain that surrender was the single sensible course. Skogda howled and sprang." (p. 154)

How often does that happen? Premature interruption. Probably we have all experienced it. When I tried to tell a fellow student, "If you are criticizing me for taking so long to do that job, that's ok," I got as far as "If you are criticizing me..." and was interrupted by her shouting, "NO! I am NOT criticizing you!" What was she doing then? Although I thought that criticism was part of training, I found that the word "criticize" was highly charged among trainee careers advisers (verbal communicators).

I am both fascinated and frustrated by the ways in which verbal communication can fail and premature interruption is a classic example. Novelists ought to convey more accurately just how chaotic real conversations can be. People speak across each other, interrupt themselves and utter phrases like "Is the thing on the thing?" (I heard this a few evenings ago.) Communication works to the extent that it does because it is necessary for survival. Without it, there would be no human society and thus no self-conscious individuals.

Surnames And Merseian History

On Talwin, Flandry met Cnif hu Vanden who was of Lafdiguan ancestry, shown by a slightly yellow complexion, but was born on a colony planet.

The Game Of Empire presents:

Fodaich Eidhafor the Bold, Vach Dathyr;

Cyntath Gadrol Cannonshield, Vach Ynvory, commanding a Merseian task force from the dreadnaught, Ardwyr;

Qanryf Bryadan Arrowswift, Vach Hallen, commanding a squadron from the cruiser, Tryntaf;

Afal Uroch the Lucky, Vach Rueth, commanding an escadrille of Fangryf-type gunboats launched from Tryntaf.

All of these Merseians have names of the Wilwidh Ocean type although Uroch has partial Lafdiguan ancestry, again shown by a yellow tint to his green skin.

While reading Bryadan's instructions to Uroch, I realized that the Technic History series presents a history not only of Technic civilization but also of Merseia:

first contact between Technic civilization and Merseia during the first Grand Survey;

interactions between Merseians and the Polesotechnic League in "Day of Burning" and Mirkheim;

the Roidhunate grows in the period of the Terran-Ythrian War;

the Roidhunate becomes the Empire's main enemy although some Merseians migrate to the Imperial planet, Dennitza;

Merseians do not conquer human space during the Long Night so we infer that the Empire and the Roidhunate have worn each other out.

There is a similar contemporaneous history of Ythri.

Surnames

A Stone In Heaven, XI.

Around Dukeston on Ramnu, clans do not share a territory. Instead, a single family owns a small patch of land and passes a surname down the generations. Thus, Yewwl of the Kulembarach clan meets a fellow Ramnuan called Ayon Oressa'ul.

In the dominant Wilwidh Ocean culture on Merseia, an individual is known by his personal name, his (changeable) nickname and his Vach. However, other laws and customs survive. Thus, in Ensign Flandry, Dominic Flandry meets Tachwyr the Dark but also Lannawar Belgis whose full name sounds like a personal name and a surname. Lannawar mentions his old friend, Ralgo Tamuar. Centuries before, in "Day of Burning," Chee Lan had met Dagla Quick-to-Anger, Hand of the Vach Hallen, but also Olgor hu Freylin, Warmaster in the Republic of Lafdigu. Again, Lafdiguans seem to use surnames. David Falkayn dealt with Morruchan Long-Ax, Hand of the Vach Dathyr, but also with the disreputable (black, not green) Haguan Eluatz, head of the Gethfennu, organized crime. 

So how many intelligent species in the galaxy use surnames? We know of at least one other...

Myths

A Stone In Heaven, XI.

Myths make sense of life. There are two on p. 143:

"...time was always gnawing, the snake at the root of Yggdrasil." (p. 143)

"Flandry sat down and laughed. Why not? The gods, if any, did. I sometimes think we were created because the gods wanted to be entertained one evening by a farce - but no, that can't be. We are high comedy at least." (ibid.)

"The gods, if any..." is my theology. Gods are important in imagination, which is important to humanity, but, if they also exist literally, then they have yet to show themselves in the public arena. If asked to pray for the success of any enterprise, I would be able to say only," All gods, we ask your help. But, if you cannot or will not help, then we'll do it ourselves." That is intended sincerely, not disrespectfully. If there is Anyone there, that can help, then please do...

Cities

 

A Stone In Heaven, IV.

Towers spread around the curve of the planet and Terra "...was a single city." (p. 44) See also here.

Maybe someone could write a definitive sf novel about the history and destiny of cities from Babylon to an ultimate future megalopolis? Isaac Asimov does not do this in The Caves Of Steel or the Trantor passages in Foundation. James Blish's and Norman L. Knight's A Torrent Of Faces, a possible source for The Caves Of Steel (see here) describes the life of a child growing up "...deep down inside Great London...":

"'Until I was six years old I had never seen the sky, or sunrise or sunset.'"

-James Blish and Norman L. Knight, A Torrent Of Faces (New York, 1967), 6, p. 124.

She attended school three corridors away. Then her class visited:

"'...a children's hostel on the roof, where we could see the outside.'" (pp. 124-125)

This idea of living not in streets under the sky but in corridors under a roof is taken even further by Asimov whereas Anderson's Terra is covered in towers but they can be viewed from outside them. Anderson assumed and described future cities but did not write that definitive sf novel that I think cities deserve.

No Wars Or Gods

A Stone In Heaven.

Miriam "Banner" Abrams sends Yewwl and her followers to spy in what might be enemy territory:

"'I seize no sense,' Ngaru of Raava complained.

"In truth, the idea of organized enmity was vague and tricky as wind, and felt as icy." (X, p. 137)

(My computer suggests "...wind and..." instead of "...wind, and..." and I would write this phrase without the comma but, of course, inside quotation marks, I must reproduce the text as written by Poul Anderson. Comma use varies considerably.)

Anderson fans note, first, that, in this passage, the ever-present wind is characterized as "vague" and even as "tricky."

"'Wodan-Mercury-Hermes is the Wanderer because he's the god of the wind.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 390.

And Odin is certainly tricky - and comes from an icy realm.

But the Ramnuans do not understand "...organized enmity..." and do not have gods:

"'...Ramnuans don't have religions of human type and most definitely have never had armies...'" (IV, p. 48)

Why no armies? Well, why should they have them? Large scale killing of members of one's own species is certainly a questionable concept. In the case of the Ramnuans, grief tends to drive them berserk. Thus, a soldier whose comrade was killed would run amok. Ramnuan societies have had to cope with a lot of individual fights but have never had wars, armies or states. In this, they resemble the Ythrians.

Yewwl explains to Ngaru:

"'Suppose a feud is between Banner and the clan-head at this place... Their retainers are naturally loyal to them, and thus likewise at odds.'" (X, p. 137)

So there are feuds between individuals who have loyal retainers but that is as far as the Ramnuans go down the road to war.

What of gods?

Ramnuans lose themselves in Oneness through dance, music, chant, winds (!) and distances but this is not what Banner calls "worship" because:

"...worship involved a supposed entity dwelling beyond the stars-..." (VIII, p. 123)

The earliest worship involved many entities in the immediate natural environment. Then the object of worship was unified and pushed away beyond the stars. But the Ramnuans began with Oneness without animism. 

Aquatic Men

 

In Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children, merpeople exist because the novel is historical fantasy.

In Anderson's "The Horn of Time the Hunter," human colonists of an extra-solar planet have adapted to become sea dwellers.

In James Blish's The Seedling Stars, one group of Adapted Men lives in pools of water on an extra-solar planet.

In James Blish's and Norman L. Knight's A Torrent Of Faces, the Tritons are genetically engineered human amphibians on Earth.

Maybe that fourth group is the least implausible. They colonize Terrestrial oceans, not other planets.

Flandry And Chives

 

A Stone In Heaven, IX.

Weather continues. Wind roars. The hull trembles. Rain smites. Lightning flies. Teeth rattle. Gravity is seven standard. Despite all this, Chives, spacesuited, "...alone among aliens...," (p. 128) flies on impellers to herd the onsars into Hooligan, after advising Flandry what to serve for dinner in the event of an accident.

Flandry reflects that he and Chives:

"...can never really communicate, but this dance we dance between us does say, 'I care for you.'" (ibid.)

They communicate as well as any two beings can across the barriers of species and social status. Not living in a master-servant relationship, I appreciate reading about them in fiction:

Flandry and Chives;

Wooster and Jeeves;

Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth;

Dornford Yates's heroes and their manservants (a team of three automatically becomes a team of six able-bodied men).

Ramnuan Weather

A Stone In Heaven, IX.

Ramnu has extreme weather. Clouds change dusk into night. Frequent lightning shows every large raindrop falling straight and striking explosively. In the thick air, thunder is like a bombardment. Small storm bats wing through the violence. Wind is hard but slow:

"...its voice more drumroll than shriek." (p. 124)

The wind often comments on the action and here is granted an appropriate voice.

Hooligan descends, guided by known landmarks for radar and infrascope, although it is hard to home on Yewwl's communicator through this extreme weather. Landing is difficult and Flandry sweats as he works with the spaceship's systems. He needs a beam to find Yewwl's encampment.

An Undated Letter

A Stone In Heaven, VIII.

Yewwl demands that the Lord of the Volcano give her a letter authorizing her and her followers to act for the clans. The letter is "...undated as was usual..." (p. 123)

Why are such important letters usually undated? Does it not matter that such a letter might be very old, out of date, no longer applicable etc? Perhaps the most important information on any document is its date. Someone once showed me an article cut out of a newspaper but with no note as to its date. When I pointed out this omission, he replied, "You are interested in that. I'm not." I had to say, "You are interested in the content of the article but not in how many days, weeks, months or years out of date it might be? The situation that it describes might have changed and changed again since this article was published. Thus, it might now be completely misleading to show anyone the article as if assuming that it describes a current or at least very recent state of affairs."

I apologise for haste in posting but am about to eat before going out to the Gregson Institute which has been mentioned here (scroll down) before.

Fair winds forever.

Two Futures

Sf is about futures, not the future. (It is also about everything else but a lot of it is about futures.) A Torrent Of Faces by James Blish and Norman L. Knight (see here) is set in 2794. In the twenty-eighth century in Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Terran Empire annexes Ansa while Unan Besar is being colonized. The two futures could not be more different. Blish and Knight imagine one trillion people, all but a tenth of one percent of them unemployed, living (if I have understood the text correctly) in one hundred thousand cities spread across Earth. There is interplanetary travel but no prospect of an FTL drive or of interstellar travel.

A Torrent Of Faces is a more serious attempt at fictional futurology but neither scenario is probable. Will an FTL drive be developed? Is the galaxy full of intelligent life? Will political and economic decision-makers maintain a massive unemployed global population in comfort? The answer to the third question is definitely no.

Reversals

A Stone In Heaven, VIII.

"The ancestors had decided that the Lord of the Volcano must always be male..." (p. 112)

That sounds familiar but is not what we think:

"...to counterbalance the preponderance of females who took the initiative in household and clan affairs." (ibid.)

A gender role reversal is an easy one - in the Technic History, see also the planet Cynthia - but one of the tasks of sf writers is to imagine surprising social reversals, then to make them seem plausible. SM Stirling's Draka certainly surprise us.

On the desert planet, Dune, spitting at another man's feet is an expression of allegiance because it demonstrates willingness to spend precious body water on his behalf. An Ythrian of the New Faith thinks that it is right to withhold pain-killers from someone who is dying in order to enable that person to give God the Hunter a good fight. Tachwyr must ask Flandry whether he is still a bachelor in Anglic because the Eriau equivalent would be an insult. In "The Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl, about over-production, everyone has a duty to consume so it is polite to let the other person pay for a meal in a restaurant.

Sf must be full of examples.

Pyrasphales

 

A Stone In Heaven, VI.

On Ramnu, concentrated oxygen and regular lightning cause frequent fires, burning down forests. Vegetation has adapted with:

deep roots;

rapid reseeding;

fireproofed pyrasphales, similar to Terran grasses and Hermetian yerbs.

Animal species unable to digest fireproofing became extinct as pyrasphales crowded out other plants. Now, herbivores either excrete the fireproofing or break it down with symbiotic microbes.

Poul Anderson presents not only future histories but also fictional evolutions - also on Diomedes and Dido. I record these details here because, of course, I had forgotten them from previous rereadings.

In The Hooligan

A Stone In Heaven, VI.

Flandry and Miriam converse en route to Ramnu.

Flandry:

sips Scotch and smokes;

listens to recorded singing ornithoids;

has programmed a forest odour for the air;

has programmed a mild temperature;

has dimmed the lights.

Five senses, God save the mark!

Miriam points out that the Terran Empire:

keeps the Pax;

keeps trade lanes open;

resists external enemies;

guards the heritage.

In a galaxy with FTL, a Merseian Roidhunate and nuclear-armed barbarians, something like the Empire, although not necessarily with a hereditary Emperor, would be necessary - but that is a big lot of assumptions. Member planets of the Empire are able to organize their internal affairs any way they want, like the inhabitants of Sphinx in The Game Of Empire. I am not going to look this up now but I am sure that Julian May's Galactic Milieu insists that its member planets operate market economies - and maybe the Milieu has some (impossible in our universe) way to prevent those planetary economies from having boom and slump cycles? But the Terran Empire does not legislate about planetary economic systems.

Too Late

Chunderban Desai to Dominic Flandry:

"'There is no absolute inevitability... I suppose, even this late in the game, we could start afresh if we had the means - more importantly, the will.'"

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT III, p. 389.

Flandry to Miriam Abrams, later:

"'Hans Molitor did his damnedest to restore the old institutions, which is why I did my damnedest for him. But we were too late.'"

-A Stone In Heaven, VI, p. 75.

Something has changed. A tipping point has been passed. Like with us now? (Sf is painfully relevant.)

A Tale Of Two Books

 

Browsing in the Old Pier Bookshop, I found Volumes III and IV of the omnibus collections of A.Bertram Chandler's Grimes/Rim World series. Having been told previously that Grimes had once met Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry, I searched these two volumes for any reference to Flandry but in vain. Returning home, I googled and established that the two characters meet in Chandler's The Dark Dimensions which will now be sought for on Amazon. I understand that Chandler's presentation of Flandry might be unsatisfactory but nevertheless want to see for myself.

Nicholas van Rijn, Jetman Rhysling and a Lensman visit Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix. Thus, a Grimes-Flandry encounter will be a further instance of inter-universal discourse although we might conclude that Grimes meets an alternative Flandry.

Grimes/Rim World is the kind of series that I would automatically have read if I had had access to it at an earlier age. That is how I got into van Rijn, Fladry etc. However, I will require a lot of persuading that Grimes warrants further attention after reading this single novel. But this will be his opportunity to attract one reader's attention.

Jupiter

In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer, Jupiter has a solid surface and ammonia oceans like Babur and T'Kela. See here. In Anderson's A Stone In Heaven, there is a more up-to-date description:

"Jupiter...is primarily liquid, beneath a vast atmosphere; a slag of light metal compounds does float about in continent-sized pieces, but most solid material is at the core (if it can be called solid, under that pressure). The slow downdrift of matter, drawn by the gravity of the stupendous mass, releases energy; Jupiter radiates about twice what it receives from Sol, making the surface warm." (VI, pp. 67-68)

My other favourite sf writer, James Blish, coined the term, "gas giant." From this phrase and from reading Blish's They Shall Have Stars, I had gained the impression that, on a Jovoid planet, the atmosphere just became denser and denser all the way down to a super-solid core. The Wikipedia article says that most Jovian matter is in a state where there is no distinction between liquids and gasses which is an even clearer description of what I had thought.

Lying In State

I have the live stream of the Queen lying in state on my computer screen and have just watched the changing of the guard. Ceremonial swords are very evident. Try to imagine the kind of technology that would be used to present the lying in state of Terran Emperor Georgios in the Technic History. We see the lying in state of Kossara Vymezal in St. Clement's Cathedral in Zokagrad on Dennitza but that seems to be a low tech affair. The evening news showed an inter-faith service in the Hindu Temple in Liverpool (see image) focused on the Queen. State funeral in Westminster Abbey tomorrow.

In Starfall, Hermes

A Stone In Heaven, II.

Starfall on Hermes seems like a real place, especially since this brief passage reinforces what we have already read about David Falkayn's home planet in Mirkheim:

Williams Field

Daybreak Bay

the Runeberg mansion

Pilgrim Hill

the Palomino River

fragrant daleflower and roses

a flying, trilling tilirra

blinking glowflies

Riverside Common

millionleaf trees

rainroof trees

spires

domes

towers

Antares above the Auroral Ocean

As with two other colonized terrestroid planets, Aeneas and Avalon, we learn the names of local flora and fauna and accept that a population lives there. (The Avalonian ecology combines local organisms with those imported from Ythri and Terra.)

No Wind

A Stone In Heaven, I.

After the noise and chaos, snow covers everything and:

"Suddenly there was no wind, as if that also had been seized and overwhelmed." (p. 11)

Wind is such an active force in Poul Anderson's descriptive passages that the suggestion that even it might be overwhelmed becomes significant! And, in fact, we recently encountered windlessness as an appropriate accompaniment of apparent death. See Wind In Zorkagrad.

Yewwl has been communicating long-distance with a human observer whom she knows as "Banner." On the tenth page of the text, we learn that "Banner" is Miriam Abrams whose name we might remember from Ensign Flandry. We should at least remember Miriam's father, Max Abrams. References to the planets Dayan and Terra soon establish that this novel is a volume of Poul Anderson's Technic History. The text had not told us that yet.

Chapter I ends as Miriam Abrams asks a colleague:

"'...have you ever perchance heard of Admiral Flandry?'" (p. 16)

Wind On Ramnu

A Stone In Heaven, I.

The planet Ramnu is entering an Ice Age:

"They felt how silence starkened the desolation, and welcomed a wind that sprang up near morning, though it bit them to the bone and made stands of spearcane rattle like skeletons." (p. 5)

The Ramnuans see environmental desolation, feel the cold and hear rattling vegetation: three senses. Wind biting to the bone and cane rattling like skeletons are reminders that, after their deaths in this deteriorating environment, the inhabitants themselves will become frozen skeletons. Not only that but the Pathetic Fallacy prefigures exactly what will happen to all but one member of this Ramnuan family group before the end of the opening chapter:

"The snowcliff stirred.

"A mighty wind rushed downward from it, smote like hammers, roared like thunder." (p. 100

- and Yewwl finds that the landslide, with its mighty wind, has not only destroyed the ancestral Shrine but also buried her husband and three children.

The chapter also includes a hovering flyer, like several in Anderson's works, but this one is of unknown species:

"A flyer hovered aloft, wings dark against a squat mass of clouds. Yewwl didn't recognize its kind. Strange things from beyond the Guardian Range were moving in with the freeze." (p. 5)

Of course the advancing Ice causes long range migrations.

In The Maian System

 

A Stone In Heaven, VI.

"Hooligan raised her lean form off the spacefield and hit the sky as fast as regulations allowed. Thunder trailed." (p. 62)

Thunder... Maybe we remember Thor from various works of fantasy. In any case, this is where the adventure really begins. The Hooligan, Dominic Flandry's private interstellar speedster, carrying Flandry, Chives and the current heroine, will effortlessly traverse the space between the Solar System and, in this case, the Maian System. Interesting things will be said, and possibly done, en route. Dramatic events will ensue after arrival. The reader relaxes while Flandry gets busy. First, he has to learn more about his destination.

I began this reread of A Stone... in search of information about Flandry's state of mind in these latter times and therefore commenced with his first appearance in Chapter III but perhaps I should now backtrack to earlier events in the Maian System which had set the plot in motion. ("Plot" has two meanings on this occasion.) We already know about Hermes but not about the nearby planet, Ramnu. As ever, a pyramidally structured Heinleinian future history series builds new structures on the foundation of information imparted in earlier instalments.

Onward and upward. Or, at least, outward.