Multiple Instalments

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is long enough that several ideas can be developed at a leisurely pace instead of being confined to a single instalment each. The threat from Merseia grows through three instalments before Dominic Flandry confronts the Merseian Roidhunate in his opening trilogy. The People Of The Wind is set in a transitional period. The Polesotechnic League is long gone but Flandry has not yet been born. The novel focuses on the planet Avalon which has appeared at different stages of development in three previous instalments. Two interstellar powers, Domain and Empire, clash while a third, the Roidhunate, grows at a distance. The People... has no characters in common with any earlier or later instalments but does feature descendants of characters who had appeared previously, including the historically significant David Falkayn. Ythrians have appeared in three previous instalments and The People... introduces the idea of Avalonian human beings joining Ythrian choths. Every future history instalment combines earlier information with new material.

Aliens In Future Histories

In Robert Heinlein's Future History collection, The Green Hills Of Earth, the first person narrator of one short story reminisces about his contacts with Martians whereas the viewpoint character of another short story interacts briefly with Venerians. In Heinlein's Future History novel, Methuselah's Children, the Howard Families meet two intelligent species when they venture beyond the Solar System. These three instalments account for the only four encounters with extraterrestrial intelligences in the Future History.

How much richer is Poul Anderson's Technic History featuring many intelligent species and also many closely observed details like the influence of Planha on Anglic when human beings and Ythrians jointly colonize the terrestroid planet, Avalon. Both human and Ythrian Avalonians fight to remain in the Domain of Ythri and not to be annexed by the Terran Empire. Some human beings serve the Merseian Roidhunate. Some beings of Merseian descent form a minority in the population of the humanly colonized planet, Dennitza, where they are loyal to the Emperor, not to the Roidhun. We read about several of these species often enough to learn what they are like.

Arinnian Speaks

Ideally, in film adaptations of Poul Anderson's Technic History, human characters in the Polesotechnic League and Terran Empire periods would speak Anglic with English subtitles but that is asking a lot especially since there would have to be an entirely different language in the Commonalty period by which time Anglic is long dead. 

On Avalon, Anglic is influenced by the chief Ythrian language, Planha:

vowels are pure;

r's are trilled;

m's, n's and ng's are hummed;

speech is deepened, slowed and strongly cadenced.

Having read Poul Anderson's description of Planha-influenced Avalonian Anglic, we would like to hear that speech direct rather than in English translation.

When Christopher Holm speaks as Arinnian of Stormgate Choth, he sounds as if he is translating Ythrian thoughts for human ears. He tells his father that he must go to his choth because Khruaths are being called around Avalon. Arinnian will participate in a decision-making process that has so far been impossible for human beings. But species learn from each other.

Old Stories

I am paraphrasing Poul Anderson's Afterword to his first Psychotechnic volume.

Why read or reread old stories when newer stories are better?

First, old stories still entertain.

Secondly, if we are old enough to have read them before, then rereading them might evoke nostalgia. 

Thirdly, if we are of a younger generation, then they are new to us.

Fourthly, republication of old stories might help scholars:

"These tales were not seminal like Heinlein's, but they were a noticeable part of the field a generation ago. We've all come a long way since then, but sometimes we do well to look back and see where we have been.

"-Poul Anderson"

-Poul Anderson, Afterword IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1 (Riverdale, NY, October 2017), pp. 229-231 AT pp. 230-231.

Although republished in 2017, Anderson's Afterword is copyright 1981, another two generations ago from us now.

It is paradoxical to look back at a future history with all of its by now outdated assumptions and anticipations but that is the nature of fiction and literature. We permanently value Frankenstein, The Time Machine and Poul Anderson.

Juveniles

Robert Heinlein is rightly respected for most of his juvenile sf novels - all twelve of the Scribner ones. Five of these form a Juvenile Future History, in my opinion. They are consistent with the "Green Hills of Earth" period of the (adult) Future History.

A few instalments of Poul Anderson's Technic History were written and published for a younger audience - also possibly one instalment of his Time Patrol series. Also in the Technic History, Christopher Holm and Diana Crowfeather strike me as perfect Heinleinian juvenile heroes. Crucially, both are able to assert their independence. On the eve of war, Christopher/Arinnian bids a hasty goodbye to his father on the phone screen, does not have time to visit his mother and flies by antigrav belt to where he wants to be, a household of the Stormgate Choth where he eats in a dining hall and meets his friend, Eyath, a young female Ythrian. Diana runs away from home rather than attend Navy school and marry an officer while:

"...Tigeries were hunting through hills where wind soughed in waves across forests, and surf burst under three moons upon virgin islands."

-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 214.

She sleeps in a "...ruinous temple..." (p. 196) which is surely very Heinlein and Kipling.

Arinnian and Diana cannot meet because they live in very different periods of the Imperial era.

Time Travel In Heinlein And Anderson

Robert Heinlein presents:

three ingenious statements of the circular causality paradox in future settings;

a time travelling organization called the temporal bureau in one of these three works;

what should have been a definitive novel about the immortal Lazarus Long time travelling from the further future of the Future History to World War I when his younger self was just a few years old.

(The title, "Da Capo," had been in the Future History Time Chart from the beginning. Just imagine if that novel had been written properly, summing up everything about World War I, the twentieth century and the Future History.)

Poul Anderson presents:

three ingenious statements of the circular causality paradox in historical settings and, in two of these cases, also in future settings;

a long series about both the circular causality paradox and the causality violation paradox in historical settings;

a time travelling organization called the Time Patrol in this series;

enough time travel short stories to fill a collection.

Anderson gives more and better.

Robert Heinlein And Poul Anderson

In an Afterword to Volume I of his Psychotechnic series, Poul Anderson informs readers that, inspired by Robert Heinlein's Future History, he compiled a time chart and occasionally set a story somewhere within this chart. These stories became Anderson's first future history series. Although his second future history, the History of Technic Civilization, was not directly modelled on Heinlein's series but instead grew spontaneously from two originally independent series, it is nevertheless a Heinlein-type future history series on a vaster spatiotemporal scale than Heinlein's. In an Introduction to his Operation Chaos, Anderson informs readers that this work deals with possibilities implied by Heinlein's "Magic, Inc." in which magic works like a set of technologies. These are Heinlein's two explicit influences on Anderson. Stories in the Psychotechnic History address the Heinleinian ideas of longevity/immortality and of a multi-generation interstellar spaceship and the Asimovian ideas of robots and of a predictive science of society.

"Magic, Inc.," a one-off story set in a near future where magic has been found to work, is collected in a single volume with another short novel, "Waldo," which may be conceptually linked. Both involve powers gained by contact with another universe. Operation Chaos is set in an alternative history and thus became linked to other novels by Anderson set in such histories. It also acquired a sequel in which magic is applied to space travel. Thus, Anderson developed Heinlein's ideas further.

Of the three Heinlein volumes mentioned in the previous post:

Starman Jones is one of Heinlein's twelve Scribner Juvenile novels;

The Man Who Sold The Moon and Orphans Of The Sky are the opening and concluding volumes of his five-volume Future History.

Apart from the Future History and Magic, Inc., we might find some parallels between Heinlein and Anderson in juveniles and in time travel.

Heinlein And Co

Some passages in Poul Anderson's main future history series, the Technic History, strike me as very Heinleinian. I will return to this theme in a while. 

The four Campbell-edited future historians were:

Robert Heinlein

Isaac Asimov

James Blish

Poul Anderson

I encountered these authors in approximately that order although I am not sure about Anderson. I was seven in 1956 when Anderson's first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," was published but I had no knowledge of that then. At that time, I liked pictures of men in spacesuits in comic strips or, less frequently, on TV and preferred them to men on horseback or in military uniform. Many of my contemporaries preferred footballers. What determines early preferences?

From 1956 to 1960, I was at a small boarding school in Scotland. From 1960 to 1967, I was at a large boarding school in the Republic of Ireland. I live in England. In Scotland, I saw a boy reading a large format omnibus collection of several juvenile adventure novels, illustrated. A second boy was looking over the first boy's shoulder and saying, "That's ridiculous!" Intrigued, I looked and saw that the object of his ridicule was illustrations of aliens. Even more intrigued, I subsequently borrowed the book and read that story which was called Starman Jones. Presumably the author's name was displayed but authors' names meant nothing to me that far back.

Early in the 1960-'67 period, I found in a Public Library the Gollancz edition of Orphans Of The Sky by Robert Heinlein and was intrigued by its at that time unique environment. Generalizing from a single instance, I imagined that this guy, Heinlein, had written only a few books that were short but of high quality, the exact opposite of the truth. Next came - I am not sure in which order - the Pan paperback edition of The Man Who Sold The Moon, thus an introduction not only to Heinlein's Future History but also to the idea of a future history series, and a Public Library copy of Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein. At last I connected that title with that author.

Early in the 1960-'67 period, having noticed that there were adult paperback novels with spacemen, aliens and robots on the covers, I decided to buy some, not sure whether I would like them. I chose two by different authors:

The Caves Of Steel by Isaac Asimov;

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

At an airport, while returning to school in Ireland, I saw Earthman, Come Home by James Blish, a new name, read the blurb and bought the book because I was intrigued by the idea of cities flying through interstellar space. Also during that period, I bought and read After Doomsday by Poul Anderson. I do not think that that was my first Anderson but do not remember what was. He was making less impression than the others as yet but that would eventually change big time.

A Cool Breeze

The Avatar, L.

In Ireland, after everything:

"A cool breeze bore odors of sea and soil and growth. High overhead a lark sang." (p. 400)

Appropriate to the ending of this novel: not a cold wind bearing storm clouds but a cool breeze etc.

For once a character comments on the wind as it comments on the conclusion:

"'Aye,' Caitlin said. 'As if the country would bid us goodbye with a blessing.'" (ibid.)

And, even closer to the end, yet another of Poul Anderson's many hovering birds of prey:

"From behind a ridge, a hawk swung to hover where the sun turned its wings golden." (p. 404)

Anderson's The People Of The Wind ends with the last line of a song:

"High is heaven and holy."

The Avatar ends with the last line of another song:

"Rejoice in the joy that comes after!" (ibid.)

Awesomeness And Pettiness

The Avatar.

Contrast the awesomeness of where Broderson and his crew have been, with the Others at the end of two universes and the beginning of a new universe, with the pettiness of Ira Quick and his crony trying to save if not their political then at least their personal hides when their crimes have been exposed. Joelle the holothete is all too conscious that there are different levels of consciousness and that she is blind on many wavelengths both literally and figuratively. Quick and his fellow conspirators both fail to realize that they are blind and at the same time struggle to remain so!

We are in a similar situation, still struggling on Earth while surrounded by the universe.

"Do we want to remain big people in a tiny world or to become little people in a vaster world? This is the ultimate climax to which I have directed my narrative.

"J.B.

"17 January 2021" 

-Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1965), EPILOGUE, p. 219.

Changing Laws And Constants

In Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men and in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," cosmic time is literally a circle. Travelling forward on the Earth's surface returns us to our starting point. Travelling futureward from 1973 eventually returns Anderson's Martin Saunders to 1973 although he passes through the end, then the beginning, of the universe en route. Stapledon's Last Men reveal that the time between the beginning and the end of the universe is only a fraction of the time between the end and the beginning although they do not know what happens in that longer inter-cosmic period. But this is imaginative fiction. What really happens with cosmic time? 

Even if the universe really oscillates as in Eastern mythologies and in Anderson's Tau Zero, the same events will not recur. It will be a new universe with a new history each time. Recent cosmological thinking was that dark energy is accelerating cosmic expansion, preventing any collapse or contraction. Now we might hear something different although, in a period like the current one, the latest findings are never going to be the final word. 

Is the dark energy weakening? If so, is it weakening enough to make a difference? Might the expanding universe collide with others, causing it to rebound and contract? 

"-Here and now, our burnt-out cosmos, expanding, fleeing from itself, has intersected another. From this union, when it is complete, will arise a whole new world of worlds. (Praised be the chance that the other plenum is old itself, that no life - we pray - will perish in the genesis!) What the next cycle will be like, we cannot foretell.

"-Already the very laws and constants of physics are changing." 

-The Avatar, XLVI, p. 381.

The Others aim to become part of something new and strange. Universes are bubbles in a hyperdimensional ocean where their substance becomes part of something new as with stars and flowers.

End And Beginning

The Avatar.

"JUMP.

"Blackness, nothing, blind and absolute. Folk moaned in a kind of terror." (XLIII, p. 359)

Chinook has jumped futureward into a period when:

the universe has expanded to four or five times the size that mankind knew;

clusters of galaxies have receded too far away to be seen;

the Milky Way and its neighbour galaxies are disintegrating cinders;

the dimmest stars are dying;

but one black dwarf has a planet with life because the Others have transformed its moon into a nuclear reactor which is an artificial sun that should last for five or six billion years;

that single planet has white clouds, sapphire and lapis lazuli oceans and green continents.

Should Chinook continue futureward or turn back?

Caitlin argues that the living planet shows that the Others are pro-life and anti-death. Therefore, an outpost of theirs should be found at the very end.

"JUMP.

"Light, everywhere light. It was as if space had become a dewdrop in dawnlight, and they at its heart." (XLIV, p. 366)

CHINOOK At The End Of The Universe

The Avatar, XLIII.

When the universe is old, dark and dying, Chinook viewscreens show not the view outside but:

Pericles

Shah Jehan

Hokusai

Monet

Phidias

Rodin

Crew members listen to:

Swan Lake

"Sheep May Safely Graze"

There is more to say here but not enough time to say it.

Two More Biblical References

The Avatar.

Chinook lingers near a large T machine that seems to be a cosmic junction. The crew hope to be spotted by someone else passing through:

"'Somebody happening past who's not too advanced to pay attention, the way we're not too advanced to notice a fellow man in the woods. Or else somebody who's so very far along that his eye is on the sparrow.'" (XLI, p. 354)

We had the sparrow reference recently here which will be why Broderson mentions it again.

Next Chinook travels to a time between seventy and a hundred billion years after the crew's births when:

"'No stars are left alive except the dimmest [the meek shall inherit], and they are now dying, while the galaxy itself is disintegrating.'" (XLIII, p. 360)

This is not the kind of "meek" that the Gospel verse anticipated but Anderson's author's mind seems to have automatically spotted any possible textual opportunity for a Biblical reference.

Joelle thinks that, if they travel further into the future, then they will learn whether the universe oscillates - as in Anderson's Tau Zero - or expands indefinitely - as was thought at least until recently.

Motivations And Aspirations

Fictional characters who engage only in cynical power politics and power struggles are uninteresting and inauthentic. By "inauthentic," I mean not that no such individuals exist - look at the world right now! - but that life is not only or mainly about people like that. If a central character exercises power, then we need to be shown the lives and aspirations of some of the people over whom he exercises it. There should not be a permanently off-stage population of a future Earth or another planet. This is my problem with Frank Herbert's Dune series and with some other sf.

In Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind, the threat from Terra is met by:

the Marchwardens

the Wyvans

Khruaths

choths

the Parliament of Man

individual Avalonians, both Ythrian and human

(It is possible to search this blog for explanations of Planha terms.)

If the leading characters had been motivated only to exercise power over each other, then the book would have been very different and also not worth reading.

SF Paraphernalia

When I read sf in the 1960's, it was enough for me then that this was prose sf addressed to adults and featuring spaceships and other sf paraphernalia. It was taken for granted that familiar ideas like telepathy, immortality and robots could enter a narrative at any time. I remember among many other works of that period:

After Doomsday by Poul Anderson

Earthman, Come Home by James Blish

Fury by Henry Kuttner

Nowadays, I do not keep up with new sf and older works must match up to much stronger criteria if they are to be worth rereading. Anderson's The People Of The Winds vividly depicts individuals and communities on a colonized planet anticipating, enduring and surviving a war. The opening dialogue sets the tone:

"'Any day we may be at war. We may already be.'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 437-662 AT I, p. 437.

From that moment, we live the Terran War with the Avalonians and with some of the Terrans.

Lived History

Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March, 2011), pp. 437-662.

The difference between how people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others:

"'I'm only a local.'

"'You're a descendant of David Falkayn.'

"'That doesn't mean much.'

"'It does where I live.'" (III, p. 466)

And it means a lot to those of us who have read Anderson's History of Technic Civilization consecutively.

Human integration into Ythrian culture:

"'...I didn't think they used drugs much in Highsky either.'

"'They don't. Barring the sacred revels. Most of us keep to the Old Faith, you know.'" (VI, p. 502)

A threat for the future:

"'...the Roidhunate is far off and not very big. But it's growing at an alarming rate, and aggressive acquisitiveness is built into its ideology. The duty of an empire is to provide for the great-grandchildren.'" (III, p. 474)

Philippe Rochefort wonders whether their reproductive patterns determine the lives of intelligent organisms:

"But no, a Jerusalem Catholic can't believe that. Biological evolution inclines, it does not compel." (IV, p. 481)

We will see more of the Merseian Roidhunate and of Jerusalem Catholicism later in the Technic History. 

Caitlin And People

The Avatar.

Caitlin Mulryan is able to use sex for love, friendship, pleasure or therapy and is able to handle a number of men who, without her help, would have been jealous, possessive, judgmental, conflicted, in general negative. Is this just how she is, what I call her "karma," or is it because she is an avatar of the Others who, we gather, have a positive attitude to all life? Caitlin achieves remarkable results with a young man who is initially hostile because she is his brother-in-law's mistress and who then becomes infatuated with her. I have read as far as Chapter XXXIX of L and so far nothing has gone wrong. (Roman numerals are tiresome.)

Caitlin also helps other women. Susanne does not want to marry because it would be wrong to have children in a lost spaceship with limited supplies and there is no contraception available but maybe Caitlin as the ship's doctor and with access to its database can do something about that?

As with Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, a novel about a long space journey has to address both the universe outside the spaceship and the people inside it. But the people can be very different.

 

Interventions By The Others

The Avatar. 

The Others do more than provide interstellar transport machines for species that achieve interplanetary capability.

They also:

directed humanity to the Phoebean System;

gave the Danaans metal tools to use on their gas giant planet;

gave the pulsar dwellers the Oracle;

constructed observation stations for other races at the pulsar and at a black hole.

Also, the Oracle, a self-conscious and hyper-intelligent artifact, gives Chinook data that will enable the holothete to plot a probable path to the Others' frontier. Something like this was necessary. Random rotations around T machines would not have returned Chinook to the Solar System where a major problem awaited resolution. 

Another novel could describe a ship travelling indefinitely through space-time via T machines. Such a ship would require a self-sustaining internal environment and also some mechanism to ensure that each T machine led to another T machine, not just to empty space. With these requirements in place, the sky would be the limit. Or rather would not be. The Others travel between universes.

From Falkayn To Flandry And Beyond

David Falkayn and Dominic Flandry cannot meet but we can trace the history between them. Each of the following numbered points represents a different historical period.

(i) David Falkayn becomes a grandfather during the colonization of the Hesperian Islands on Avalon.

(ii) Ivar Holm works in a mountain Rescue Station during the colonization of the Coronan continent on Avalon. 

(iii) Hloch of Stormgate Choth on Avalon closes The Earth Book Of Stormgate.

(iv) Donvar Ayeghen, President of the Galactic Archaeological Society, introduces Rear Admiral John Henry Reeves' account of Manuel Argos, Founder of the Terran Empire.

(v) The Empire grows.

(vi) Daniel Holm, Christopher Holm who is Arinnian of Stormgate Choth, Tabitha Falkayn who is Hrill of Highsky Choth and many others successfully resist Terran Imperial annexation of Avalon.

(vii) Dominic Flandry and later his daughter, Diana Crowfeather, defend the Empire.

(viii) Later generations survive the Fall of the Empire and eventually build bigger and better interstellar civilizations.

This is almost as complicated as real history and can become fannishly fascinating.

POVs In CHINOOK

The Avatar, XXXV.

"Elsewhere aboard, folk slept, Frieda and Dozsa together, the rest by themselves: Broderson and Weisenberg peacefully; Joelle heavily, under sedation; Rueda rolling about; Susanne with a smile that came and went and came again. Under robot control, Chinook drove on toward the transport engine." (p. 313)

This paragraph concludes a chapter. But is it noteworthy? Why quote it? Double spaces between paragraphs divide this chapter into four narrative passages:

(i) an objective account of Broderson and Caitlin together;

(ii) Caitlin's pov (point of view) as she visits Weisenberg;

(iii) an objective account of Caitlin and Leino together;

(iv) an objective account of everyone in the ship other than Caitlin and Leino.

The omniscient narrator enters Caitlin's pov in (ii) although even that is mostly an objective account. In (iv), he relates what no one else knows, what is happening in each cabin. This is less usual. (Does the omniscient narrator have a gender?)

The Pivotal Role Of "Lodestar"

This post says nothing new but is part of what this blog is about.

I still think that Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is by far the best future history series and that one of its volumes, The Earth Book Of Stormgate, is the summit of American future historical writing.

The short story, "Lodestar":

was written as a conclusion to the Polesotechnic League period of the Technic History although fortunately Anderson subsequently added the novel, Mirkheim;

is the last Polesotechnic League instalment in the Earth Book;

is the last instalment in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader;

incorporates into a single narrative -

Nicholas van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew comprising David Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan;

Nicholas van Rijn;

Ythrians.

These four individuals and one species have appeared, either separately or in combination, in thirteen of the previous seventeen instalments of the Technic History with van Rijn, Adzel and Falkayn all appearing separately before coming together.

Any future history instalment builds on the foundation of earlier instalments and also adds new information that will provide foundations for later instalments. Thus, "Lodestar" introduces:

the supermetals-rich planet later to be named Mirkheim;

van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon.

In the sequel entitled Mirkheim, Coya has married Falkayn - and most of the Technic History still lies ahead of us although we must say goodbye to the Polesotechnic League, to van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors company and to the Falkayn-founded Supermetals company. Next will come the Falkayn-founded human-Ythrian colony planet, Avalon.

Read it.

Again FURY

Today is the beginning of a new month, a new quarter and a new financial year. I hope to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop again next week.

Reading is a peculiar process. In a pile of books on a bedroom floor, I find my copy of Fury by Henry Kuttner. This reminds me that recently - it turns out to have been exactly one month ago - I began to reread Fury after many decades in order to assess it and to compare it with Poul Anderson's works. I read as far as p. 104 (of 190) and since then have completely forgotten about it which demonstrates that it was not holding my attention. 

Previous relevant posts:

FURY

JOB In FURY And STARFARERS

Some Familiar Ideas

The Queen Of Air And Darkness

"Immortals" On Venus

Wind And A Pulsar

That seems to be all. I had forgotten most of these. Maybe I will complete the project of rereading Fury to the end to find out whether anything else in it looks blog-relevant. This is the milieu that Anderson wrote in.