Souls

The Merman's Children, Book Three, XI.

"'...soulless things out of heathendom are not for Christian people to consort with, are they?'" (p. 188)

This is the end of Book Three and of posting for today. (Not before time, says you.)

The introductory Author's Note makes clear that the conceptual framework of the novel is not Thomist theology but medieval popular mythology. Nevertheless, the contradiction is so great that I have to comment. Merfolk exist. That is mythology. They are described as "soulless things." No organism is a "thing," let alone a self-conscious one. If "soul" entails self-consciousness, then the merfolk have, or are, souls.

In any case, they can reason and make decisions. Therefore, they have intellect and will which were meant to be the two faculties of the, supposedly immaterial and immortal, soul. Therefore, by that definition, they already have souls and do not need to be given them.

I now believe that unconsciousness, consciousness and self-consciousness are three qualitatively different properties or states of organisms and that self-consciousness includes intellect and will. Organisms are temporary local negative entropy composed, according to scientific evidence, of mass-energy and of nothing else.

Needless to say, I disagree both with Thomism and with medieval mythology.

Men And Seasons

The Merman's Children, Book Three, II.

"There was a man in Hadsund called Aksed Hedebo, a well-to-do dealer in the horses that were a Danish export." (p. 125)

We recognize this kind of opening sentence. See: 

There Was A Man Called... II

(And see also There Was A Man Called...)

Also instantly recognizable is:

"Summer had passed, fall come back."

-quoted in the preceding post.

For earlier examples of passages beginning with a seasonal change, see:

Seasons

Living With The Seasons

Seasons

Such story-telling techniques transcend particular narratives. A creative author is able to apply different kinds of opening passages to an indefinite number of short stories or novels in any genre. I ought to return to the plot details of The Merman's Children but instead am focusing on other textual peculiarities that are drawing our attention further away from them.

Northlights And Autumn

The Merman's Children, Book Three.

A feud ends, a feast is prepared and:

"That night the northlights came out in such splendor that they covered half of heaven." (X, p. 184)

The chapter ends with "...heaven." If a feud had begun, then a storm would have come!

Chapter XI opens with a change of seasons:

"Summer had passed, fall come back." (p. 185)

Purple ling blooms, rowan flares, golden aspen trembles, wandering geese sing, breath smokes, puddles crunch, cloud shadows chase sunlight, wind is chilly and oaks sough beside a red-bricked building and a heath beyond. Across a lake, the sisters of Asmild Cloister see the cathedral and castle of the market town of Viborg. Riders approach and we return to the plot of the novel but might we prefer to linger with the autumnal scenery?

The Great Nature

The Merman's Children, Book Three, X.

Apparently:

"'...the Great Nature...' was as close as Inuit could come to 'God.'" (p. 181)

That is a good approximation, in my opinion. "Nature" means everything. "Great" emphasizes its immensity and transcendence. Thirdly, and finally, it is not anthropomorphic. "Nature" is impersonal, "it" or "that," not "he" or "she," except maybe metaphorically or mythologically. I once heard a Christian missionary explain on television that he tried to find some figure in a local, e.g., Chinese, mythology that could be identified with the Old Testament deity or God the Father. That will be harder to do if native ideas are impersonalist. If I were to spend some time among the Inuit, then I would be happy to accept their "Great Nature" while maybe also offering some scientific information about how water freezes, fire burns etc.

Wind As Benediction

The Merman's Children, Book Three, IX.

Haakon and his men in two boats aided by Tauno underwater fight the tupilak. Haakon and some others and one of the boats are lost but, despite this, Tauno manages to dismantle and deactivate the horrific manufactured monster. Then:

"When Tauno, air-breathing, reached the second boat, he felt the wind on his brow like an austere benediction." (p. 179)

Extraordinary. That wind which has whined, moaned, threatened and brought winter suddenly becomes a blessing when the story requires one! The immediate struggle at least has ended. We turn the page to learn what will happen next in Chapter X. Tauno and Eyjan still have a mission to fulfill.

A Double Standard Of Truth

The Merman's Children, Book Three, VIII-IX.

Tauno suspects that Haakon lies and challenges him to swear on the Cross:

"Haakon sat. He stared." (p. 171)

He had lied. Later, when Haakon wants Tauno's cooperation in battle, he says:

"'If you win, you both go free. That oath I will give you on the Cross.'" (p. 173)

So Haakon has a double standard of truth. Some of us prefer, when giving evidence in court, to affirm instead of to swear on the Bible. The Bible itself tells us not to swear on anything: Matthew 5:37. If we do not believe in the Bible, then we should not swear on it. If we do believe in the Bible, then we should not swear on it. Whether or not we believe in the Bible, we should not swear on it because we should not have a double standard of truth as the Quakers in particular say. If we are definitely telling the truth when holding a Bible, then we might be lying at other times. A Quaker that I respected once said that he thought that, if some of his co-religionists were really honest, then they would acknowledge that they did not believe in God. That goes against the principle of no double standard. Non-theists can practice silent contemplation.

Muslims swear on the Koran. When we had a Hindu Prime Minister, he once gave evidence in public and swore on the Gita. Huck Finn felt ok about lying when a girl asked him to swear on a dictionary!

Poverty And Winter Wind

The Merman's Children, Book Three, VIII.

Haakon Arnorsson's steading:

clay floor;

peat fire in a pit;

blubber-burning lamps;

a single room;

thirty people;

Haakon's shut-bed;

straw pallets on benches or the floor;

smoked meat and fish hanging from the rafters;

flatbread on poles;

"...wind...blowing winter in." (p. 165);

carved high seats;

a bronze crucifix;

cedar chests;

stained, rotted tapestries;

racked weapons and tools;

weak, sour beer in silver goblets;

"...wind piping around walls and snuffing at the door." (p. 166);

waning fire;

shadows;

dank, gnawing chill.

Tauno thinks that the family and retainers have moved from a hall to this hovel.

A detailed description and two more references to wind that I had missed.

Whining Wind And Grinding Waves

The Merman's Children, Book Three, VIII.

When Tauno and Eyjan approach the garth of Haakon Arnorsson:

"Wind whined sharp-toothed; waves ground together the stones of the beach." (p. 162)

This is all promisingly Andersonian: a beach, waves and wind - a wind, moreover, that plays its usual scene-setting role by, on this occasion, whining instead of, for example, sighing, which winds can also do when appropriate. Are we to be treated to a chapter of winds commenting on the action? Well, yes, but we also find that we have posted about it before!

See: Wind In Greenland And Elsewhere Later.

Let's not repeat ourselves as we sometimes do. In the above-linked post, we had missed the whining wind and started with the moaning wind but it all blows the same way in the end. Poul Anderson's texts are inexhaustibly analyzable.

Some Sounds At Sea

The Merman's Children, Book Three, VII.

We have read and reread this novel before and this time are focusing our attention not on the contents of the characters' conversations but instead on the rich background details that are always present in Poul Anderson's works. We encourage Poul Anderson Appreciation readers to read or reread Anderson's novels and stories rather than to expect synopses of them here although sometimes we provide those as well.

Apart from the dialogue, the sounds are:

gulls mew;

waves squelp;

Inuit women in an umiak and men in kayaks shout and laugh;

one yells when he spies the two naked swimming merfolk.

Inuit and merfolk converse and, during a significant pause:

"Wind blew, waves trundled, the boat swayed in shrill cold." (p. 159)

Well, we know by now that, in Anderson's works, the wind will almost always underline any conversational silence. When the single white woman among the Inuit questions the merman and -woman:

"...it was as if the blond girl spoke through silence..." (ibid.)

For the content of the dialogue, we refer readers to Anderson's text.

Might Have Been

Poul Anderson made good contributions to how many sf series created by other authors? I cannot remember right now. Someone will know. The Man-Kzin Wars period of Larry Niven's Known Space future history series is a major example.

I wish that Anderson had written a Superman novel. Elliot S! Maggin wrote Superman comics for fifteen years and added two prose novels. What is it like to fly at such speeds while wielding such (impossible) physical, visual and mental powers? Maggin knew and Anderson would have known. Novelists at their best are able to give us new perceptions and understandings of familiar legendary and mythical characters. Anderson did this with Odin and others and could also have done it just once with a twentieth century myth.

But there are more might have beens than beens.

Like Life

Does an author express what life is really like? I am not going to look this up now - we can go into it later if we want to - but CS Lewis wrote that, before his conversion to Christianity, Christian authors seemed to him to communicate what life was like as we live it whereas secularist authors like Wells seemed tinny, especially by comparison. We can all ask this about the authors that we read. For what it is worth, I think that, when Lewis, Christian supernaturalist, wrote fiction, he really did convey what human experience is like, at least human experience before death. Some of his characters go a bit further...

I mention this here because I am concerned about whether Poul Anderson passes Lewis' test. I think that he does. We get inside Coya Conyon's head when she thinks about her life in the Solar Commonwealth and about her grandfather, Nicholas van Rijn, and his fellow merchants. We appreciate life in the Commonwealth when we are inside the head of James Ching as he navigates his way through the problems and pitfalls of his attempts to get into space with the Polesotechnic League.

But this is very subjective. What is life like and which authors convey it best?

Off Greenland

The Merman's Children, Book Three, VII.

Merfolk brother and sister, Tauno and Eyjan, swim near Greenland. The cold choppy sea water rocks their bodies, caresses their muscles, warms their interiors and tastes not only of salt but also of:

"...life and deeps and distances." (p. 156)

Winds have smelled of distance. Now water tastes of it. This water also whooshes and gurgles around the two merpeople but roars on the shore. As for colours, the blue-black whitecaps shimmer green. Thus, the water generates inner and outer bodily sensations, multiple tastes, sounds and colours.

There are many other sensations. The wind is sharp. Gull wings and cries fill the silver-gray sky where wrack flies like smoke. Cliffs are darkling. Autumnal meadows are yellow. Peaks are snow-covered. Inland ice is bleak but bright. Merpeople live in and with nature.

Mutable Metaphysics?

What is the metaphysics of Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children? The merfolk knew the Norse gods but can now receive immortal souls and gain entry to the Christian Heaven if they accept baptism. Has Christianity become true? If so, might it later cease to be true? But either human and other beings have immortal souls or they do not!

The Merman's Children approaches the end of Faerie which Poul Anderson had anticipated at the end of his Foreword to The Broken Sword. The realm of Faerie is driven from the world both by Christianity and by measurement, an assault from two directions, although Anderson's "Delenda Est" points to some connection between these two directions. However, we find that we have covered this question in some detail already. See The End Of Faerie as well as other posts referring to "soft places."

Morning

The Merman's Children, Book Three, III.

Rain has washed the dawn pure. (I think that we know that feeling.)

Tomislav and Vanimen stand at the edge of the woods before the former departs.

The sky is white in the east, blue above them and violet in the west.

The western sky holds a planet and the Moon. (The mention of a planet makes Poul Anderson's readers think science fictional thoughts.)

Trees are described as "...all bronze and brass and blood..." (p. 139)

Dead leaves crunch.

Cocks crow.

Air is chill.

Maybe all Poul Anderson's descriptions of mornings, evenings, nights, storms and seasons comprise a vaster narrative than the doings of mere mortals? 

During The Storm

The Merman's Children, Book Three, III.

"Goblets went to mouths for a time in which the storm alone had voice." (p. 137)

Here again, the wind underlines a pause in the dialogue. The text says "storm" which, in this case, we have been told, means both dashing rain and howling wind. Maybe this storm even contributes to the dialogue since its sound is described as a "voice."

Ivan's grudge against Nada is that he thinks that it was she that caused the oldest son who should have been his heir to go into a monastery but he adds:

"'I could be wrong. Who knows the wellsprings of the heart, save God?'" (ibid.)

An important question. It would be glib just to say, "I don't believe in God." That is not quite the point. The main point is that no human being can fully know the motivations of another. I have had motives attributed to me wrongly. We can imagine what it would be like if there were an omniscient being who knew everyone's innermost thoughts and even their unconscious motivations. Many among us believe that such a being exists. It is an enlightening exercise to imagine conversing with such a being. Dishonesty would be impossible. In Zen meditation, we "sit with" whatever thoughts or memories come up. We practice neither denying nor suppressing them. There is some overlap with prayer. God, if He exists, knows us even if we do not know Him.

Multidimensionality

I have to acknowledge that a new routine of regular gym eats into time that might have gone into blogging. And other things are happening as well. There is political unrest in Britain. Both the right and the left are on the streets and I do not stay at home. We try to keep such issues, when they arise, in the combox and out of the posts. However, how (or whether) to organize society is one of the many issues addressed by Poul Anderson's imaginative fiction and we certainly do not try to dodge such questions here. What a great political novel is Mirkheim - and it is preceded by the dramatic confrontation between van Rijn and Falkayn in "Lodestar." Anderson's two most basic values are freedom and diversity.

Blog readers will gather that Anderson is one of several imaginative authors that I am rereading at present. We can imagine that all of their fictional worlds coexist in a multi-dimensional multiverse although some of the narratives are compatible with our current reality. For example, in Anderson's The Merman's Children, the realm of Faerie has almost completely withdrawn from Earth by the fourteenth century. Thus, it should be completely gone by the twenty-first century - when his History of Technic Civilization begins.

Storm

The Merman's Children, Book Three, III. 

After a feast, there is a storm. Outside, rain dashes against the walls of Ivan Subitj's castle. The night is said to howl. That must mean wind. OK. Outside, there is wind, rain and darkness. It must be comfortable inside, though? However, there, coldness is said to creep out of the tapestried stone walls and the lamps are surrounded by darkness which is even said to besiege them. Ivan's wife, seated in a corner, tries to warm herself at a brazier. 

This is the appropriate setting for a sad story recounted by Ivan to Vanimen. A young woman who had drowned in the lake now haunts it. A narrative about merpeople can also include ghosts...

Festival

The Merman's Children, Book Three, III.

Celebration because the mermen have expelled a monster from the lake:

pealing bells;

thanksgiving Mass;

embroidered vests;

flowing blouses;

sweeping skirts;

roasting ox;

steaming kettles;

beer, mead and wine barrels;

bagpipes;

flutes;

horns;

drums;

fiddles;

kolo around a cauldron;

Father Tomislav, dancing, says, "'Leap like David before the Lord!'" (p. 134)

And that is yet another Biblical reference that we have not noted before: 2 Samuel 6: 14-15.

We always appreciate Poul Anderson's details, whether in battle or in feast.

At The Lake

The Merman's Children, Book Three, III.

A bright, ringed, full moon makes treetops hoar and silvers the wavelets of a lake while a chill autumnal breeze rattles dying leaves. Three senses and, so far, a natural scene but then a vodianoi rises in the lake and a vilya flits on the shore: two supernatural beings. We must remember that this novel is a historical fantasy, midway between heroic or mythological fantasy and historical fiction. Poul Anderson wrote all of these genres and kept them distinct although maybe the scenes in his inter-universal Old Phoenix Inn transcend genre?

Frankenstein was transitional between Gothic and science fiction. Superman was transitional between sf and superheroes. This latter hybrid genre combines sf and fantasy. I have wandered away from the eerie moonlit lake because it is getting late and I am about to stop rereading The Merman's Children even though I had returned to it late in the day. There has been a lot of Real Life to cope with. When we are comfortably retired, all that we are really obliged to day is to stay alive but other stuff comes up.

Originality

By the very nature of the case, I cannot think of any original ideas to break sf writers out of genre cliches.

Can we get rid of hyperspace? Very fast relativistic travel with a lot of time dilation and antiagathics back on Earth so that space travellers would be able to make multiple trips yet return to find their friends and acquaintances still alive back on Earth? But do we really need interstellar space travel or even space travel? Yes, at least some space tech within the Solar System.

Poul Anderson has both used cliches well and made original contributions. His hyperspace is not like anyone else's.

Original Contributions In After Doomsday

Interstellar explorers returning to find that all life on Earth has been killed.

Civilization clusters: The superlight drive, discovered either once or many times, has been distributed among intelligent species by explorers, traders etc. Although it is possible to traverse the galaxy, there are so many civilizations that space travellers usually interact with the closest. There is no empire or federation but there are many civilization clusters which tend to adopt a single lingua franca. A few explorers travel between civilization clusters or further afield.

In Tau Zero

A relativistic spaceships accelerates indefinitely until it outlasts the universe.

In World Without Stars

A civilization with unlimited lifespans and instantaneous interstellar jumps.

An expedition to a planetary system in intergalactic space.

In The Shield Of Time

A causality violation that results not from extratemporal interference but from a quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy.

Psalm 30

 

Quick breakfast post before riverside walk to gym. Other reading generates posts although they are sometimes off at a tangent. Poul Anderson quotes from the Bible a lot. Last night, after noting that Dominic Flandry and Modesty Blaise have each been described as a tiger by the tail, we found Modesty's assistant, Willie Garvin, quoting Psalm 30: 5. However, this was a one-off and a significant piece of characterization. Modesty comments that, between the two of them, he is the expert in such matters because he is the one who had spent a year in a cell with nothing to read but a Psalter!

We hope to return to Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children this evening.

Onward with imagination in all its forms.

Addendum: That was not a one-off. Willie later quotes Psalm 120:7.

Ending The Day On A Whimsical Note, Maybe

Maybe I have spotted a minor literary parallel that no one else has.

Everyone knows of parallels between Ian Fleming's James Bond and Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry although Flandry not only pre-existed Bond but also was conceived by Anderson as an sf equivalent of Simon Templar. (Roger Moore played both Templar and Bond.)

Many people might perceive Modesty Blaise as a female equivalent of James Bond although she is and has always been an independent and original character, beginning in a newspaper comic strip before branching into novels and films.

Why do I link Modesty with Flandry? Flandry's earliest published story was entitled "Tiger by the Tail" because, in it, enemies of the Terran Empire took Flandry prisoner and wished that they hadn't. Modesty's earliest story was entitled "La Machine" because, in it, Modesty goes up against a French murder outfit of that name. When La Machine captures Modesty, her assistant, Willie Garvin, says that they have - a tiger by the tail.

OK. A very minor literary parallel.

I will now return to reading Modesty Blaise for the rest of this evening.

Autumn Evening

The Merman's Children, Book Three, I.

Autumn approaches:

some leaves are a paler green;

others are brown, red or gold;

the sky is wan;

geese cry;

when the sun sets, the cool breeze becomes chill;

many villagers idle at home.

(Three senses.)

This description sets the scene for a conversation between a parish priest and a merman. Until we added "merman," the scene was entirely natural.

There is one other detail which is not a natural phenomenon but a human response. The cries of the geese awaken:

"...wordless longings..." (p. 119)

People see and hear birds flying through the darkening sky towards the horizon. They aspire to transcendence.

The Commonplace

A lot of us have probably had this kind of experience: church flower festival; cakes and teas; second-hand bookstall; paperbacks, including sf by Iain M. Banks, Piers Anthony or whoever; back cover blurbs - a character with a military background pursued by a hostile sect travels between planets in an imaginary planetary system; a character travels from his interstellar civilization to a fabulously wealthy empire... Am I persuaded to purchase? No way. I am already reading or rereading enough at home. Besides, these blurbs offer nothing new. Certain sf ideas have become genre cliches:

faster then light interstellar spaceships;

inhabited or colonized extra-solar planets;

an interstellar civilization;

characters for whom all of the above is commonplace so why should we go there?

See a poem by CS Lewis here.

Wells and Lewis were pre-genre science fiction authors. Some authors, notably Poul Anderson and James Blish, have worked well with the cliches but that should not make us want to perpetuate such cliches indefinitely.

Greg Bear wrote in the SFWA Bulletin:

"And give me no spaceships in feudal settings...unless, of course, you are Poul Anderson, but you are most likely not."

Connections

A creative author writes different kinds of works but we also enjoy finding connections between them. Thus, we find a historical original of Odin, a time traveller mistaken for Odin and Odin in different works by Poul Anderson. This requires at least two timelines. Again, the realm of Faerie exists in the heroic fantasy, The Broken Sword, and approaches its end in the historical fantasy, The Merman's Children. These two novels could be set in a single timeline.

One Person is Aslan in Narnia and Maleldil in CS Lewis' version of the Solar System. Again, these are different universes although with a single creator. Any fantasy author who asks his readers to contemplate a multiverse could imply that Narnia exists somewhere in that multiverse but would, I hope, respect the integrity of Lewis' vision.

Right now, I am reading something else in a different medium before going out for the day. Have a good Monday.

Culminations

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is a definitive future history series.

Anderson's Time Patrol series is a definitive causality violation time travel series. (Is it the only causality violation time travel series?)

Anderson's There Will Be Time is both a circular causality time travel novel and a synthesis of time travel with future history.

Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" is perhaps the definitive circular causality time travel story.

Anderson's Genesis is an ultimate single-volume Stapledonian future history and a culmination of the theme of Frankenstein, the first science fiction novel. (Is it right to create human beings?)

Giving Heinlein his due, Anderson surpasses him.

Evening On The Strand

The Merman's Children, Book Two, V. 

The evening is chilly. The Kattegat glimmers into dusk. The shore darkens. Sunset reddens water, reeds hummocks and willows. The breeze from inland smells of mire and damp. A bittern booms. A lapwing shrieks. An owl hoots.

Four senses: I have summarized instead of quoted. Thinking to check, we find that we have discussed this passage more than once before. However, each time is slightly different. Multi-sensory scenes, present throughout Poul Anderson's works, are almost part of his grammar. And I particularly like beaches.

Some Fundamentals

Nothing that hasn't been said before but fundamental to this blog:

My two favourite kinds of sf are time travel and future histories. Poul Anderson not only excels at both but also presents multiple examples of both. 

Both of these sf themes address in different ways the mysterious nature of time. HG Wells' Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that that morning he had set off through "tomorrow" and "into futurity." The opening story of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set in 1951 - but it remains the Future History. Its readers' chronological relationship to it does not affect the nature of the series.

There are two kinds of future histories:

single-volume future historical text books, mainly by Wells and Stapledon;

series of stories and novels set in successive historical periods by Heinlein, Anderson and others.

Stapledon recounts Martian invasions of Earth the way English historians recount the Norman Conquest. Anderson's Technic History does what Heinlein's Future History should have done, expands through many volumes: seven omnibus volumes when collected by Baen Books as The Technic Civilization Saga. This blog periodically returns to the Saga. Last night, while listening to a YouTube interview, I posted Important Events which says nothing new but nevertheless drew an interesting comment about the plausibility or otherwise of the founding of the Terran Empire. Several characters are introduced in Saga, Volume I, go through some changes in Volume II and reach their climax at the beginning of Volume III. The sheer length of the Technic History allows time and space for such developments to occur.

Yesterday, we also discussed Two Meanings Of "Time Travel."

Important Events

Pivotal changes happen in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire, as its title indicates, but, in real history, many earlier events build up to such changes and this is true also in the Saga. Relevant earlier events in Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader are:

van Rijn initiates his first trade pioneer crew led by Falkayn;

that crew saves Merseia from the supernova, Valenderay;

the Shenna are revealed as an external threat to the Polesotechnic League;

some League merchants become piratical and worse;

the League cartelizes and Falkayn clashes with van Rijn.

Thus, five of the seven instalments in Volume II present events that build up to the major events in Volume III which are:

civil war in the League;

Falkayn's colonization of Avalon;

the Troubles;

the early Terran Empire;

war between Empire and Avalon.

The Mandate Of Heaven

The Merman's Children, Book  Two, IV.

"...bad luck struck down on misjudgment - unless everything was the will of Heaven..." (p. 101)

Given the premise of an omnipotent Creator from nothing of everything other than Himself, then every single event must be "...the will of Heaven..." (p. 101)

If a storm throws a ship off course, then the Creator could have prevented that storm. Indeed, He caused it. Decades ago, CS Lewis persuaded me that God was like the author of a novel. Even if his characters act consistently and fully in accordance with their fictional personalities as created by him, the author controls the course of fictional events towards the preplanned conclusion of his novel. A storm occurs only if he decides that it does. He probably follows the rule that too much coincidence is unacceptable in fiction although, at the same time, some coincidences do occur. What looks like a coincidence to a character/creature is not a coincidence to an author/the Creator. It cannot be. The Creator is not a limited deity controlling only some aspects of nature as against others. Everything that goes one way He could have made go another way. Lewis thought that creatures had "free will" and therefore could thwart their Creator by damning themselves even despite His attempts to save them. I now think that freedom of choice/absence of constraint makes sense between finite creatures but not between such creatures and their Creator. He could have made us either immune to temptation or strong-willed enough to resist it. We confidently predict that a good person or "saint" will never even think of torturing a child and yet do not think that such goodness makes a person unfree. A saint is indeed free to torture a child... Good people are not automata any more than their Creator is. And I do not believe in such a Creator. I am merely following through the logic of a particular belief.

Two Meanings Of "Time Travel"

The term "time travel" applies to two completely different fictional phenomena.

(i) HG Wells' Time Traveller is said to "travel" on his Time Machine to 802,701 AD, then to "The Further Vision," before returning to 1895. In my opinion, what the Time Traveller undergoes is not a kind of travelling but stationary time dilation. However, the term, "travel," suffices for the purpose of differentiating this process from phenomenon (ii) below.

Comparable to the Time Traveller, and still within phenomenon (i), are two of Poul Anderson's characters:

Martin Saunders "travels" in his time projector through an even further future and back around the, in this case, circular timeline to 1973;

Jack Havig, a mutant not needing a temporal vehicle, "travels" through past history and future history and remains in the future.

All three characters have what seems to them to be the experience of "moving" through objective time in a smaller amount of subjective time.

(ii) In Anderson's "Delenda Est," Neldorian time criminals generate a timeline in which Carthage, not Rome, won the Second Punic War. Do the Neldorians even travel back through the familiar timeline in order to do this? Like every other time traveller in their timeline, they do not "travel" between moments in time but simply disappear from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates and (re)appear at another set. Do they appear in the familiar timeline, then disappear from it at the moment when they change history or just not appear in it in the first place? Does the Time Patrol have records of time travellers appearing/arriving in the past, then disappearing, indicating that they have generated a divergent timeline? In any case, this is a very different process from (i).

The Part Played By Chance In The Generation Of Human Beings

Every time that a woman conceives, a different sperm and egg might have joined. In each such case, an individual with a different personality would have resulted. A person born of the same parents and at the same time and place as me could have been:

female instead of male;

 an inner conformist, fully internalizing received values; 

an outer conformist, paying lip service to received values;

a non-conformist, questioning and rejecting received values.

I did not choose to be a non-conformist but found that I was one. 

This has repercussions for Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. If history were effectively rewound and run forward again, as it is in "Delenda Est" and The Shield Of Time, then the random processes of procreation might very well have, indeed arguably would have, produced a different person as a result of every single act of human copulation - and different persons would have made different choices and decisions, thus changing the course of history unpredictably. The original timeline would have been unrecoverable.

My friend, Andrea, is right: Fortuna rules.

Two Dissimilar Works

Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" (1950) and CS Lewis' Out Of The Silent Planet (1938) are very dissimilar works. "Flight..." is pulp magazine sf whereas ...Silent Planet was acknowledged as a work of literature by Arthur C. Clarke. However, we find one concept common to both works.

...Silent Planet is about space travel and ends with a reference to time travel. "Flight..." is about time travel. In ...Silent Planet, because the villain, Weston, has closed the door on interplanetary travel, Ransom tells Lewis that the only remaining way to the planets is through time travel. At the end of "Flight...," the door is closed on time travel.

Before Weston's spaceship left Mars to return to Earth, some Martians treated it in such a way that, after ninety days, whether on Earth or still in space, it would "unbody" and become nothing. When Martin Saunders returns to 1973, his time projector dissolves into nothingness because the "gods" in the far future had preprogrammed its annihilation. In both cases, the annihilation is accompanied by a flash of light.

Mediterranean And Mussulman

The Merman's Children, Book Two.

The Mediterranean is:

"...a narrow sea divided between Christian and Mussulman with naught of Faerie surviving." (IV, p. 94)

Islam is:

"...a faith which kindled still more zeal against Faerie than Christendom generally did." (I, p. 75)

Again, this narrative is much closer to that end of Faerie that Poul Anderson had predicted at the end of his FOREWORD to The Broken Sword.

I read, and might still have somewhere upstairs after a house move (in fact, it is here), a nineteenth century work of Roman Catholic apologetics by an American clergyman who:

described the Paris Commune as a "many-headed monster";

said that the Holy Land was "profaned by the foot of the Mussulman";

accused Protestants of "monstrous ingratitude" because they accept the Bible but not the early Church that formulated the Christian canon of scripture;

accepted a literal Adam and Eve and Annunciation by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.

This demonstrates what I was told as a trainee Religious Education teacher in Manchester, that there is no unchanging religious tradition. A city centre Church incorporated a Centre for the Study of Religion in the Urban Environment which printed documents for different religious communities. We, a group of students, were taken on a tour which included a synagogue. We had access to nineteenth century Christian missionary material which, however, was not on public display because some of it was regarded as offensive. Nowadays, where they exist, Pagans are just another religious group.

Traditions will have changed again in the kinds of futures projected by sf writers.

White Cliffs

The Merman's Children, Part Two, III.

"Herning rounded Wales, passed by the white cliffs of England, followed the Lowlands on toward home." (p. 93)

Coincidentally, I have just reread a graphic novel in which some characters fly over the White Cliffs of Dover while singing a song about them. Instead of reading a sentence, we see a panel that shows the White Cliffs, a flying vehicle and a speech balloon which contains a sentence. We appreciate verbal and visual-verbal media. The third medium, also accessible, is film, which is audiovisual.

At this point, The Merman's Children is following two sets of merfolk, each in a ship, one proceeding up the English Channel, the other approaching Albania.

I am posting between other activities - not sure how much more posting today.

Connections

The previous post directly linked The Merman's Children back to The Broken Sword which is one of Poul Anderson's five Norse fantasies:

The Broken Sword

Hrolf Kraki's Saga

The Demon Of Scattery

War Of The Gods

Mother Of Kings

The Merman's Children is one of three novels by Poul Anderson set in the fourteenth century:

Rogue Sword

The Merman's Children

The High Crusade

Sean M. Brooks found an unexpected connection between Rogue Sword and The High Crusade.

The five Norse novels are separated chronologically only by Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy:

The Golden Horn

The Road of the Sea Horse

The Sign of the Raven

- which is preceded by Poul and Karen Anderson's The King of Ys Tetralogy:

Roma Mater

Gallicenae

Dahut

The Dog and The Wolf

- which in turn is preceded only by Poul Anderson's three novels set B.C.:

Conan The Rebel

The Dancer From Atlantis

The Golden Slave

Every time that I try to summarize a part of Anderson's past fiction, I wind up summarizing all of it.

The End Of Faerie

The Merman's Children, Book Two.

Hauau, the were-seal, foresees that a mortal woman will bear him a son but will then marry a man who will kill both him and the son:

"'I'm na afeared. Sad for the bairn, aye. Yet in those days Faerie will be a last thin glimmer ere it fades oot fore'er. Thus I can believe 'tis a mercy for him; and mysel', I'll be at one wi' the waters.'" (III, p. 88)

Thus, Hauau anticipates the end of Faerie, which Poul Anderson had already predicted:

"As for those who were still alive at the end of [The Broken Sword], and the sword, and Faerie itself - which obviously no longer exists on Earth - that is another tale which may someday be told."

-Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1977), FOREWORD, p. 12.

But it was not, despite Anderson's prolificity. However, The Merman's Children moves the inter-textual narrative much closer to that end. Most Mediterranean countries are inhospitable to merfolk. Only one, eastern, shore is otherwise. In Dalmatia:

"...Faerie was not wiped out as it had been in, say, Spain." (I, p. 75)

Vanimen's merfolk had tried to cross the Atlantic in their stolen ship but the (cursed?) storm has driven them the other way, towards the Mediterranean. Thus, Book Two at last links back to the Dalmatian Prologue.

Self-Rule

Sf writers both imagine other planets and describe the universe that we are in fact living in. In particular, Poul Anderson shows us how imaginary rational species - Ythrians, Diomedeans etc - have evolved and how their evolution has affected their rationality, social organization etc. 

Here is a different perspective:

"'There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair - or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it - like a female trying to beget young on herself.'"

-CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 1-144 AT 16, p. 91.

beasts = animals

hnau = rational animals

eldila = angels

Maleldil = God

"These creatures..." = Terrestrials

We must learn how to rule ourselves. That learning is still in progress. We are not on a level with our surroundings but have raised ourselves above them. Rationality transcends animality which transcends unconscious organicism and inanimate matter. What did Lewis think that we would find on other planets? In fact, he was against us going there.  

Mars And Martians

(I have maligned CS Lewis but first let us follow through the logic of the current post.)

Wells, Lewis and Anderson: what a trio of different imaginative authors!

Mars and Martians can be detachable items. Thus, HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds and Poul Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds are about Martians but are set on Earth - because, in both cases, the Martians have invaded Earth, obviously. Anderson never set an entire novel on the surface of Mars although there are scenes on the planet in a few of his works. Readers are invited to remember which. 

When Heinlein or Anderson wrote about Martians, it must still have been scientifically possible that Martians existed? - although Isaac Asimov acknowledged in The Early Asimov that Martians, Venerians and inhabitants of other Solar planets remained a convention in sf after they had ceased to be feasible. So much has been learned so recently with probes. 

Lewis, writing Out Of The Silent Planet before World War II - thus, in a very different era - does a very good job of explaining why Mars, which had been fertile a long time ago, appears inhospitable when observed by Terrestrial astronomers although air, water and life still persist within deep crevasses - the canali. Similarly, Lewis' oceanic Venus was no more counterfactual at the time of writing than versions of the planet written by Heinlein or Anderson.

So I was wrong to put Lewis in the same category as Bradbury.

Words

Verbal

Homer worked only with spoken words. Authors of prose fiction work only with written words.

Audiovisual

Oral narrative became drama with the addition of extra speakers and actions. Film replaces stage sets with locations.

Visual-Verbal

Representational art becomes sequential art story-telling with the addition of extra pictures, captions and speech balloons.

Nowadays, two main creative groups work only with words: poets whose works are meant to be heard or read and authors of prose fiction which is meant to be read.

The paradox that I find is that Poul Anderson in particular vividly describes natural phenomena so that his readers should be able to imagine the colours of a sunset, the brilliance of the Milky Way etc. One problem with this is that some of us, maybe only a very few, lack any ability to visualize. The more basic question is whether the prose author is trying to do with words alone what can only really be done by pictorial art or on film.

Exotic Settings

The Merman's Children.

When Vanimen kills a watchman in order to steal his ship, the dying watchman calls on God to curse and St. Michael to avenge. When Vanimen and his people sail across the Atlantic, a freak storm batters the stolen ship. Might the curse have caused the storm? Vanimen thinks so and so should we because supernatural agencies are a premise of this fantasy novel.

We appreciate exotic settings in imaginative fiction. Thus, concurrently in my present reading:

the mid-Atlanic as explored by Poul Anderson's merfolk;

the version of Mars, called Malacandra, in CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy;

Larry Niven's Smoke Ring;

Neil Gaiman's continuation of Alan Moore's Miracleman series.

The Smoke Ring is an environment with a breathable atmosphere but no ground underfoot.

Lewis, like Ray Bradbury, presents an unscientific, humanly habitable, Mars. Anderson presents several races of Martians but always on versions of the planet that were scientifically accurate at the time of writing. What are we to make of unscientific Marses? We can only conclude that they exist in parallel universes. (Bradbury offends, in my opinion, by stating that his Mars is cold by night but hot by day! See Hard And Soft SF II.)

Gaiman's graphic novel makes us want to see visual adaptations of the other works mentioned here. 

The Nets Of Ran

The Merman's Children, Book Two, I.

Fiction is about life and death, our lives and deaths.

"No matter how long a life you might win for yourself, who in the end escaped the nets of Ran?" (p. 72)

Drowned sailor are caught in the nets of Ran. Everyone has an appointment in Samara.

This reflection is relevant to works by two of Poul Anderson's colleagues, James Blish and Robert Heinlein.

Blish's Okies have anti-agathics which prevent death by disease or old age but Blish wants to make the point that even they must die sooner or later so he shows them surviving until the end of the universe which, for fictional purposes, he brings closer to the present than expected. Time triumphs.

By contrast, the implication of Heinlein's Methuselah's Children is that Lazarus Long, a mutant, will survive indefinitely. Neil Gaiman's Hob Gadling manages this as well but that is in a work of fantasy.

Anderson's mutant "immortals" in The Boat Of A Million Years agree to rendezvous after a million years but how many of them will survive that long?

Wind And Waves

The Merman's Children, Book Two, I.

Having embarked on Book Two, we must now specify that we are in that Book because the chapter numbers recommence from I.

The merfolk have stolen a ship named Pretiosissimus Sanguis. Authors test our knowledge of Latin, some more than others.

Sail rattles, hull creaks, yaws, rolls and pitches, spray sheets, passengers jostle and cry out, waters crest, wind spills, hoots, shrills, strains, smites and strikes, rain walks, a cloud cavern gapes, lightning flares and thunder tones. We are in our elements.

The previous post listed three multiverses. As we have noted before, Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End is comparable to Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix. However, Worlds' End connects a multi-authored multiverse.

We want to see Anderson's works adapted not only to screen but also into the graphic medium commonly called comic strips where we would not only read but also see Pretiosissimus Sanguis amid wind and waves.

Three Multiverses

See Averorn. 

We compared three place-names:

Averorn

Meldilorn

Tanelorn

Each of these three authors:

Poul Anderson

CS Lewis

Michael Moorcock

- created a fictional multiverse.

Anderson's multiverse has a common point in the Old Phoenix. 

Lewis' multiverse includes the world of Narnia, the Wood Between The Worlds and Othertime.

Moorcock's Multiverse incorporates his several series.

All are united by creative imagination.

Mermen And Ythrians

The Merman's Children, IX.

Every part of a dead merman returns to nature where it wanders widely at one with the world. His spirit goes into sunlight, spindrift and sea-surge, his flesh into fleetness of fish and fowl, his bone and blood-salt back to the Bearer. I am paraphrasing a song of farewell that ends:

"The sky take you.

"The sea take you.

"And we will remember you in the wind." (p. 60)

At an Ythrian funeral, a Wyvan speaks the words of the New Faith which end:

"'Go hence now, that which [God's] talents left, be water and leaves, arise in the wind; and spirit, be always remembered."

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 437-662 AT X, p. 559.

Two intelligent species on two planets in two timelines in one author's imagination.

Three Titles

"THE MERMAN'S CHILDREN

"Also by Poul Anderson in Sphere Books:

"THE AVATAR

"THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND"

-The Merman's Children, back cover blurb.

Imagine initially reading those three novels, then seeking out others by Anderson.

The Merman's Children is about intelligent sea-dwellers.

The People Of The Wind is about intelligent fliers and is one volume of Anderson's Technic History which also features intelligent sea-dwellers in Ensign Flandry.

In The Avatar, several organisms become avatars of an Other, including:

"I was a great proud salmon, but had no words for greatness or pride; I was them."

-Poul Anderson, The Avatar (London, 1985), XIII, p. 124.

"I was a crow."

-ibid., XXI, p. 185.

Merfolk, Ythrians, Starkadians, Others, salmon and crows are all united in Poul Anderson's imagination.