Conquests And Conflict

Poul Anderson, Seven Conquests: An Adventure In Science Fiction (New York, 1970).

Collection titles remain confusing. Conquests and Seven Conquests are the same collection but different from Conflict although both contain "Kings Who Die" and "Details."

Seven Conquests has an explanatory Foreword whereas Conflict does not. This Foreword states:

art, including sf, must entertain;

entertainment involves telling stories but also examining reality;

reality is more than the little that we have experienced;

there are billions of years and light-years and infinite possibilities;

speculation illuminates past and present;

Seven Conquests is "...a one-author one-theme one-genre collection." (p. 9);

the theme is "...institutionalized violence." (ibid.)

I am not fully in accord with the way that Anderson discusses the issue. Should peace parades be decried for being "noisy"? Is United Nations Day "mealy-mouthed"? Sure, opposing Nazism was necessary but let's talk about how to prevent Nazis from coming to power again.

"...we don't understand the phenomenon [of war]. He who claims to have final answers to the question of why men fight and how to stop them from fighting, is merely showing his own ignorance." (p. 10)

No one should claim to have final answers to anything! But I think that we can understand the phenomenon readily enough without being able to stop it so easily.  

Conflicts Then And Now

On my computer screen right now are images and reports of contemporary destruction while, lying beside the computer, are sf novels, due to be reread, describing future conflicts. Our present conflicts are history to the characters in those novels. Reality and fiction become a continuum. Contemporaries of Dominic Flandry studying the period of the Chaos will have access to reports of killings happening today, 15 October, 2026. Or not quite our 15 October. We must have diverged from the Technic History by now. "The Saturn Game" is only twenty-nine years away. But we are still in a very close parallel timeline. The issues are similar whether we read about the twenty-first century (now) or the thirty-first (fiction). We read fiction for escape from reality and for reflection of it.

A Life With SF

While at secondary school ("high school") in the 1960's, I:

liked men on horseback but preferred men in spacesuits;

bought sf paperbacks and borrowed hardbacks from a Library;

twice found a hardback sequel to a paperback in a Library;

put several authors, although not yet Poul Anderson, on a "must read" list;

was very impressed by Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky as being set in a completely different kind of environment and did not yet know that it was part of a series;

read Anderson's "The Game of Glory" in the British reprint edition of Venture Science Fiction and did not yet know either that this story was part of a Dominic Flandry series or that that series was part of a future history series;

learned that Merseians had existed in the Polesotechnic League period by reading a reader's letter in an sf mag;

thought of "The Game of Glory" and James Blish's "Beep" as space secret service stories;

learned that the future would be different from the present by reading Guardians Of Time, Twilight World and sf in general;

in particular, knew that Great Powers grow, then decline;

imagined an sf film entitled The Green Fields Of Earth with an appropriate theme song and then saw Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth (that is the order in which this happened in my memory).

The "must read" list was revised later.

Perspectives

Events on the world-stage that are current to us now will be history in the future and therefore can be referred to in futuristic sf and in future histories. That part is easy. But what will future attitudes to our current conflicts be like? Don't just project our attitudes onto our descendants! Let us quote from Poul Anderson and James Blish:

"'...you know, enmities needn't be eternal. I daresay, oh, for instance, Governor Saracoglu and Admiral Cajal had ancestors on opposite sides at Lepanto.'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 437-662 AT XVIII, p. 661.

In fact, the Governor and the Admiral are both for Terra against Ythri but, later in the Technic History, Ythri helps Terra against Merseia. Still later, the Terran-Merseian conflict is no more.

"'If an Englishman of around 1600 had found out about the American Revolution, he probably would have thought it a tragedy; an Englishman of 1950 would have had a very different view of it. We're in the same spot. The messages we get from the really far future have no contexts yet.'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), 127.

And, if reading sf doesn't broaden our perspectives, then nothing will. Because I read sf, I used to think while still at school, "Things will not always be as they are now." Since then, much has changed.

Future Histories: Structural Differences

Poul Anderson's Technic History and Larry Niven's Known Space History each incorporate entire sub-series about individual characters whereas Robert Heinlein's original five-volume Future History and Anderson's Psychotechnic History do not. 

In Heinlein's Future History, several seminal characters appear only once:

Pinero the Charlatan;

Rhysling, Blind Singer of the Spaceways;

Dahlquist, hero of the Space Patrol,

Lazarus Long, the Senior (oldest member of the human race).

All of these characters die except Long who maybe won't.

DD Harriman, "The Man Who Sold The Man," also appeared and died in a single short story but then Heinlein wrote a prequel recounting how Harriman had sold the Moon.

In the Psychotechnic History, the important characters, Etienne Fourre, and Trevelyan Micah, each appear twice and that's it.

We need hardly again list the exploits of the Technic History and Known Space continuing characters.

Coughing and sneezing, I will not venture out through the rain to a meeting but might just read instead of blogging.

Ad futurum.

Two Major SF Themes

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2)

There is a gravity that draws us back to time travel and future histories, the two most fascinating themes in sf. Both involve time, more specifically human experience of time. It is consciousness that divides a temporal sequence into past, present and future. Without consciousness, there are days, years and relationships of before and after, although they remain unnoticed, but there is nothing to mark any place as here or any moment as now. Every moment is the present moment to any organism that is conscious in that moment. A time traveller enters his past which is the present of anyone living in it, possibly including his younger self. 

Poul Anderson excels at both of these themes, writing several, in some cases many:

single-volume future histories;

future history series;

circular causality time travel narratives;

causality violation paradox time travel narratives;

other aspects of time travel.

There is a future history triad:

Heinlein's Future History;

Anderson's Psychotechnic History;

Anderson's Technic History.

The Psychotechnic History was modelled on the Future History whereas the Technic History grew organically, without preplanning, into a longer, more elaborate Heinleinian future history series.

More later.

"The Pirate" On Screen

We imagine a screen adaptation of Poul Anderson's "The Pirate." I think that the first two paragraphs should be spoken as a voice over.

Opening paragraph (a single sentence):

"We guard the great Pact; but the young generations, the folk of the star frontier, so often do not understand." (p. 92)

I imagine that a crowded starscape would suffice for that sentence.

Second (longer) paragraph:

"They avail themselves of our ordinary work. (Ship Harpsong of Nerthus, out of Highsky for David's Landing is long overdue.... Please forecast the competition which a cybernation venture on Oasis would probably face after the older firms elsewhere learned that a market had been established.... Bandits reported.... How shall we deal with this wholly strange race of beings we have come upon?) But the we step in their own paths and say, 'Thou shalt not.' And suddenly we are the Cordys, the enemy." (ibid.)

(I think that "Cordys" should be written "Cordies.")

This should be illustrated by:

quick scenes on the planet Nerthus (which should have appeared in earlier installments of a Psychotechnic series!);

a quick scene on Oasis, created for the occasion;

a shot of bandit spaceships;

a glimpse of newly created strange beings;

a man in a Coordination Service uniform stepping in someone's path.

Then we should see - not just be told about - Braganza Diane's medieval stone house at Laugerie Haute.

At the end of the story, Trevelyan explains Service policy to red Faustina:

"But she did not understand." (p. 126)

At this point, the voice-over should return, reading the concluding paragraph to draw the moral of the story as the camera draws away from Faustina seated in the ground and Trevelyan crouching down to clasp her hands.

Excellent film material.

Of the two women, Trevelyan begins by speaking with his and ends by speaking to Murdoch's.

Bay And Ocean

"The Pirate."

Nature continues on the planet called "Good Luck" after the extinction of all or most vertebrates:

"The bay glittered and chuckled between golden-green hills. At its entrance began an ocean; coming down [Trevelyan] had identified fantastically big shoals of marine plants and animals. No wings rode the wind that rumpled his hair... Insects, or their equivalent, swarmed on delicate membranes that often threw back the sunlight in rainbows. Silvery forms leapt from the water. The wind smelled of salt, iodine, and life.

"Overhead wandered some clouds, blue-shadowed in a dazzlingly blue heaven.

"...the day was sunny, cool, and peaceful." (p. 112)

I have had to select rather than to copy an entire page - but read the page and the story.

It reminds us of the exploration of Gray, not yet named Avalon, in the Technic History. Future histories enrich each other, especially when written by the same author.

Lancaster life: Rain. Gym this morning. Meeting this evening.

Get Smart

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, humanity, and therefore also human religions, spreads out into the galaxy: 

Orthochristianity on Dennitza;

a Muslim-Buddhist synthesis on Altai;

a Jewish colony on Dayan.

A brief and readable account of the three Abrahamic faiths and of three contemplative traditions is World Religions: A Dialogue by Ninian Smart. A fictional conversation between adherents of six major faiths or paths, this books reads almost like a dialogue in a novel  except, of course, that these characters have an unrealistic ability to sum up the discussion so far and to avoid digressions and repetitions. It is all very friendly, as it should be. If you want to understand some of Anderson's characters better, then I suggest that you read at least this one book by Smart.

Other main aspects of Anderson's works, of course, are physics and history and other background reading has to be recommended for them. What a well-informed and comprehensive sf author.

Spock And Smokesmith

"The Pirate." 

Trevelyan and Smokesmith observe a planet whose population has been wiped out by radiation from a nearby supernova:

"Smokesmith...appeared to have no trouble maintaining detachment. But then, he did not feel humanlike emotions..." (p. 110)

We immediately think of Spock although he is only the most visible sf alien without human emotions. I first learned of Spock's emotionlessness in James Blish's first volume of Star Trek script adaptations (see image) because, as a Blish fan, I read this book before I had heard of the TV series which had not reached the UK yet.

But, if an alien does not have human emotions, then what motivations does he have? We need a positive description.

See also Rovian.

Proto-

By a proto-series, we mean a story that is potentially the opening installment of a series. Thus, Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" was a proto-series until Anderson wrote a second Time Patrol story. Of the five items indicated in the immediately preceding post, each is a part of its respective future history series:

(i) the Psychotechnic History;

(ii) -(v) the Technic History.

However, there can also be sub-series within such a series. Thus:

(i) is a proto-sub-series about Coordinators;

(ii) is the opening installment of the trader team sub-series;

(iii) is a passage in a novel;

(iv) is a proto-sub-series about Targovi and Diana Crowfeather as Intelligence agents;

(v) is a proto-sub-series about a Ranger.

Some of us would have appreciated a longer and more detailed Technic History.

Five Small Spaceship Crews In Two Future Histories

(i) Two Stellar Union Coordinators in the Psychotechnic History.

(ii) The first trade pioneer crew in the Polesotechnic League period of the Technic History.

(iii) A Terran Naval Lieutenant and his crew of two in the early Imperial period.

(iv) A Terran Intelligence agent and his two companions in the late Imperial period.

(v) A Ranger of the Commonalty and his ship's computer in a post-Technic period.

These accounts include two Wodenites, two Cynthians, two other aliens, two conscious computer systems and six human beings.

(ii) Nicholas van Rijn, founding the first trade pioneer crew, tells David Falkayn that the crew should be three because he cannot afford any more and that they should be of different species because:

"'Different talents, you see, also not so much nerve-scratching when cooped together.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Trouble Twisters" IN Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (New York, June 1967), pp. 99-190 AT p. 112.

(i) These same two reasons are cited for mixed-species crews in the Stellar Coordination Service, with the second point expressed as follows:

"Homo sapiens is a wolfish creature; two of him can end with ripping each other apart, on an indefinitely long voyage in as cramped a shell as this."

-"The Pirate," p. 100.

Wolfish? Surely not when they are "integrate"? Trevelyan and the Reardonite, Smokesmith, have just finished saying that Murdoch's crew, which they are following, are:

"'...quite unintegrate...'" (ibid.);

"'...hard cases...'" (ibid.);

"'...several nonhumans from raptor cultures...'" (ibid.)

But human beings like Trevelyan himself are "wolfish"? There does not seem to be much difference between "integrate" and "unintegrate." This idea is not thought out well enough.

Integration

 

Searching this blog for the term, "unintegrate," shows that a single theme runs through Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History but is not fully developed. In early installments, the Psychotechnic Institute (not League!) sets out to remake human society and psychology but is overthrown and outlawed and indeed is corrupted by its attempt to regain power. However, psychotechnicians continue to be employed, a distinction is made between the "integrate" and the "unintegrate" and psychotechnicians lead in the eventual Galactic civilization. A revised Psychotechnic History could have given these issues centre stage instead of relegating them to the background in later instalments. 

With the house to myself, I have sat too long over Poul Anderson Appreciation but must now venture out on other errands.

The sun shines here and I hope elsewhere.

Conquering The Galaxy

"The Pirate."

"This galaxy alone is too big for any power to control." (p. 97)

Then why do some sf villains want to conquer it? And, specifically, why, in a later future history series, do Poul Anderson's Merseians want to conquer it? Anderson can answer that. His Merseians started out as standard pulp space opera villains with green skins out to conquer the galaxy but it emerges that their aim is a network of autonomous realms, not a single galactic government. What matters to them is the race, not any particular regime. And, by "them," we mean the dominant culture on Merseia during a particular historical period, not the species as a whole. On the human colony planet, Dennitza, the minority of beings of Merseian descent are loyal to the Terran Emperor, not to the Merseian Roidhun. The Technic History mirrors real history in complexity.

Men And Women

"The Pirate" is about a conflict between two men, Coordinator Trevelyan Micah and Captain Murdoch Juan. Each is shown in the company of a woman. Braganza Diane cares about Trevelyan and hopes that he will spend his next leave with her although he makes no promises whereas Faustina has grown up in poverty and attached herself to a strong man for survival purposes. The two women could not be more different. In this particular narrative, each serves to define the role of the man that she is with. Poul Anderson, of course, shows us many men and women in different contexts, contrasting sharply with EE Smith's Lensman series in which stereotypically bad women realize the futility of trying to seduce stereotypically heroic Lensmen who are either celibate or monogamous. (I am remembering a particular scene in one of these novels.)

I suppose that my introduction to male-female relationships in sf was the complicated set of interactions between the Okies, John Amalfi and Mark Hazleton, and the Hamiltonian Woman, Dee, in James Blish's Cities In Flight. One marries her but...

Sf is mainly about men and women and their relationship to the universe.

"You Again!"

(I don't know what this title means but let's use its cover image anyway.)

"The Pirate."

Murdoch sees Trevelyan entering his private suite at:

"...the discreet and expensive Altair House." (p. 95)

- and exclaims:

"'...Sunglaze! You again!'" (ibid.)

This is a standard fictional hero-confronts-villain routine: Trevelyan hero; Murdoch villain. The former has thwarted the latter before. Imagine that this story is an installment of a series in which these two men have clashed at least once before. It is not. "The Pirate" is written as a prequel to The Peregrine but not as a sequel to any earlier Trevelyan Micah installments. There were none. However, Poul Anderson easily persuades us to accept that Trevelyan has had a long and distinguished career in the Stellar Union Coordination Service and that, in this role, he got the better of Captain Murdoch Juan on a previous occasion.

Heroes confront villains all the time and it has to seem fresh every time. Written by Alan Moore, the Batman intones, "So, Red Hood, we meet again!" (Standard stuff.) But the dupe inside the hood thinks, "What is happening? Is that a demon?" (Very unstandard, Alan Moore stuff.)

"You again!" can mean something completely different. When Robert Heinlein's Dan Davis approaches the scientist who has discovered "temporal displacement" but has been pressurized to suppress it, the latter says:

"'You again.'"

-The Door Into Summer, p. 141.

Davis remembers no previous encounter. However, temporal displacement is involved...

WWIII?

Startling revelations from (male) Andrea, military historian:

most nuclear launchers in the world are expected not to take off; 

most warheads are expected not to detonate;

the Russians would aim five at London in the hope that two would arrive there and then detonate;

our area, the North West of England, is no longer a major target;

our shipyard turns out very few subs, our nuclear power station is due for closure and our population is dispersed;

a nuclear explosion will cause rain which will dilute/dispose of (?) a lot of the radiation (I am just quoting here; is this correct?);

we, in NW England, will survive an attack but, of course, will then have problems about food supplies, power, marauding gangs etc;

still not a welcome future but not what I had expected either.

Andrea's insights (if such they are) usually impact topics discussed blog-wise. 

Maybe another post this evening but we are coping with house guests.

Titles II

 

See Titles.

I am just going out the door but here are some additions. So far, we have found five titles by Poul Anderson that are complete sentences. Harvest The Fire is a sixth because it has a verb in the imperative mood. The verb has an object but would constitute a sentence even without it. A single word command, e.g., "Go!" is a sentence with the implicit subject, "You..."

Sentence Titles by James Blish

Earthman, Come Home

Spock Must Die!

"Get Out Of My Sky"

"There Shall Be No Darkness"

This reminds us that "Earthman, Go Home!" is an alternative title of Anderson's "A Plague of Masters" and that Earthman, Go Home! is the title of a collection by Harlan Ellison who also wrote "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said The Tick Tock Man."

There is a Larry Niven story called "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" (I am unsure of the punctuation) and a Star Trek episode called "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky."

As always, there is more than I expected when I started this post. Laterz.

Titles

A title of a work of fiction is usually a noun or a phrase referring to a single person or thing. For example, the titles of the installments in Poul Anderson's Technic History begin with "The Saturn Game" and end with "Starfog." Thus, here we have a game and a fog, either of which could have been the subject or object of a sentence although they usually do not play that grammatical role when part of a title. 

Poul Anderson has at least four titles which are complete sentences:

Orion Shall Rise

There Will Be Time

"Peek! I See You!"

"I Tell You, It's True"

- two in the future tense and two with the first person singular pronoun as their subject.

Does this prove anything significant? I doubt it. Good night. 

Addendum, next morning: Also, The Stars are Also Fire. See combox.

Drugs, Chemicals And A Machine

An sf writer can create a new prop or gadget as a plot device. Thus:

in Poul Anderson's "Honorable Enemies," a drug that makes a person believe whatever he is told (see Sorgan and Flandry On Alfzar);

in Anderson's There Will Be Time, chemicals with the same effect (see Sorgan And The Maurai Drug);

in Anderson's "I Tell You, It's True," a machine with the same effect (see It's True);

in Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, a "zombie" drug that makes people do as they are told, believe what they are told and answer any question (not mentioned on this blog before).

Tomorrow: Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

Wednesday: Paul Wilcock. (We have not mentioned him before.)

Next Tuesday: the Gregson.

Lancaster: a high energy place.

Any Last Thoughts On Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER?

 

Robert Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (London, 1970).

Not really. Not at the moment. Heinlein's causal circles hang together and he makes them work just as Poul Anderson, Audrey Niffenegger and some others do in their time travel novels. Heinlein makes the point that some events that could have happened did not happen:

"...the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded 'not possibles' of the basic circuit design." (p. 188)

If the narrator had read that line of print, then he would have done something that would have prevented its existence but it does exist, therefore he did not do anything that would have prevented its existence.

James Blish thought that all previous circular causality narratives were limited. He proposed at some time to write a finite-spinning-universe-theory-of time-travel novel with its entire plot and characters based on the paradox. That is one of the might-have-beens, like Stieg Larsson's seven further Millennium volumes.

Three Kinds Of Interests

In my youth, I read a lot and what I read perhaps addressed three kinds of interests:

intellectual

imaginative

spiritual

By "spirituality," I mean inner practice of prayer and/or meditation. 

Some works address more than one such interest. Thus, Poul Anderson's sf is imaginative, is based in the physical sciences, which require intellectual understanding, and addresses the spiritual concerns of some of his characters. CS Lewis imagined other worlds and presented philosophical arguments for his beliefs about spirituality.

I am rereading Ninian Smart's World Religions: A Dialogue, a fictional conversation between a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Ceylonese Buddhist and a Japanese Buddhist. Anderson readers can imagine Axor agreeing with C (the Christian) and Adzel agreeing with JB (the Japanese Buddhist).

All reading is good and forms a continuum.

See also C And Axor. 

(I need to eat something before going out to the Zen group which hires a room in the Friends' Meeting House: two great spiritual traditions.

(Homage to the Buddha, homage to the Dharma, homage to the Sangha.)

The Tradition

We have identified a literary tradition whose characters transition or "travel" (inaccurate and misleading though that word is) into the future. Three primary authors are:

HG Wells

both time travel and suspended animation

Robert Heinlein

three circular causality narratives, one featuring suspended animation as well as time travel

Poul Anderson

six time travel volumes: 

three novels; 

one series; 

enough short stories for a collection

Another major name, in my opinion, is CS Lewis whose Ransom Trilogy is a Christian response to Wellsian secular sf and whose "The Dark Tower" is specifically a response to the The Time Machine because it begins by arguing the impossibility of physical time travel and then presents both a chronoscope and mental travel between alternative timelines. And, to cap it all, both Heinlein and Lewis mention the two ladies at Trianon.

Poul Anderson's readers can, if they want to, move to other authors with common themes and then to reports of psychic experiences.

Transitions

While out and about and engaged in mundane activities, my brain has again been unravelling the physical and literary aspects of "time travel," which is our common abbreviation of HG Wells' original "time travelling." I wanted to return to the literary tradition but sometimes the physical issues intrude.

In the previous post, we willfully conflated transition to the future with "travel" into it but greater precision is necessary. Everyone transitions. Everyone here has transitioned from nonexistence to existence and from childhood to adulthood (- although, of course, nothing has really begun or ceased to exist; mass/energy/being has changed form). Wells' Sleeper transitions to a later century just by sleeping long enough. What does Wells' Time Traveller do? And also the Time Traveller's literary successor, Poul Anderson's Jack Havig?

The Time Traveller does not move in any direction. What he experiences is time dilation accompanied by an inexplicable (in my opinion) sensation of headlong forward motion. He slows down while everything else (from his point of view) speeds up. He just sits still for far longer than anyone else, in both temporal directions. And, while this is happening, he should remain both visible and palpable to everyone else.

Jack Havig:

stands instead of sitting;

exercises a psychic power instead of driving a vehicle;

shares the perception of external events rushing past but not the sensation of headlong motion;

also becomes inexplicably invisible and intangible.

Futureward "time travel" by the Time Traveller and Havig is a fictional extension or exaggeration of the transitioning that all of us do anyway. It is not a kind of "travel" although we have inherited that word from Wells.

Matter both extends and moves through space, the difference being that motion takes time whereas extension does not. We endure through time. If we moved through time, then that motion would take time in a second temporal dimension which is unnecessary to describe our experience of time. Four dimensions suffice: three spatial; one temporal.

Change

 

Sf can address any part of the cosmos, past, present or future. A lot of sf is about the future and change. "Things to come" will not be things that were. We recognize periods of great change and that we are living in one. Sf is the literature of this period. Even narratives about the cosmic past reflect recently acquired scientific knowledge.

First biological evolution, then agricultural, scientific, industrial, social, political and new technological revolutions. Some sf is about people travelling or transitioning into a changed world. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave begins in the then contemporary world but then people and society are transformed. The cause of the transformation is speculative and fictional but it reflects the fact of real change as well as cosmic interconnection.

This was meant to be a longer post but it is being cut short. Laterz. 

Posting About "The Pirate"

"The Pirate."

See the above link for the haunting opening and closing sentences of this story.

See The Oneness Of Time for a rare connection in sf between a future history and prehistory.

See Port Nevada for a summary of Poul Anderson's vivid description of the spaceport on this future Earth.

These are the main aspects of this story that I would have wanted to post about this time and a search of the blog reveals that I have already posted about them in far more detail than I would have felt able to now.

The coming week and a day will present some real life obstacles to blogging but maybe we need a break anyway? Other reading continues. I agree with Sean's recent comment that even pre-"off the rails" Heinlein is not necessarily that good to read. However, I continue to find his The Door Into Summer interesting and will say more about it when time allows.

Other Reading II

I am rereading Heinlein's The Door Into Summer for comparison purposes. It is a solid novel about how a talented inventor, Dan Davis, responds to being swindled by his business partner and fiancee. Davis invents neither the suspended animation technique nor the time machine but another sf prop, domestic robots. The two future dates in the novel are 1970 and 2000-'01! Davis' cat plays a big part in the narrative. James and Judy Blish, who had two cats when I visited them, said that Heinlein's account of feline behaviour is all wrong, even canine. That is what my Aesthetics lecturer called an "aesthetic interference condition." Of course, the comparison with Anderson will focus on the time travel and the circular causality paradox when we get to them. In Chapter Four, our villain and villainess argue about which of them had left a door unlocked. Dan Davis, time traveller, had unlocked/will unlock it.

Next Music Festival event: jazz in The Castle Chapel.

Summary

Suspended Animation

On Earth, it is a way to:

improved medicine, a cure for cancer etc;

a fortune from investments (if the economy holds up);

a better, or at least a different, society. 

In space, it is a way to:

transport shiploads of colonists to extrasolar planets at sub-light speeds.

Examples

On Earth: 

Wells, The Sleeper Wakes; 

Heinlein, The Door Into Summer.

And, in Poul Anderson's "Time Heals," temporal stasis has the same effects.

In space: Anderson's Orbit Unlimited.

Also And Acknowledgements

The Door Into Summer features time travel as well as suspended animation.

Heinlein's The Door Into Summer explicitly acknowledges Wells' The Sleeper Wakes.

Anderson's time travel novel, There Will Be Time, implicitly acknowledges Wells' The Time Machine.

As I always advise, read them all.

"The Pirate"

Poul Anderson, "The Pirate" IN Anderson, Homeward And Beyond (New York, July 1976), pp. 92-126.

Of the stories in this collection, I am most drawn back to this one, even though I have reread it most recently. It is a later addition to Anderson's first future history series and has a palpably elegiac tone. A long series like the Pychotechnic History is bound to be uneven in quality especially if maturer works are inserted into earlier sections of the fictional timeline. 

In his introduction to the story for this collection, Anderson writes:

"Of readers who have commented on it to me, the young have generally confessed to being a bit puzzled, while the older have instantly seen what was going on." (p. 92)

Indeed, the text opens and closes by observing that:

"We guard the great Pact; but the young generations, the folk of the star frontier, so often do not understand." (p. 92)

"But the young generations so often do not understand." (p. 126)

I see what is going on but I am old but I do not remember being puzzled when I was any younger and that is enough for tonight, folks.

Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop on Tuesday, I hope. Maybe more music tomoz.

Other Reading Update

Each of us that reads Poul Anderson also reads other authors and each of us reads different authors. Thus, each of us appreciates Anderson in a different literary context. Am I alone in comparing Anderson to both Neil Gaiman and Stieg Larsson? - between whom there is no direct comparison. Will I reread Heinlein's The Door Into Summer in order to compare it to Andersonian time travel or will I no longer find Heinlein's text interesting?

I reread Larsson's Millennium Trilogy the way many others reread Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. My granddaughter buys me Alan Moore's prose fiction. I am quite unexpectedly finding Anderson's collections worth rereading. That is about it right now. Life contains several activities other than reading, of course.

Lancaster Music Festival update: local people marched through Market Square singing, the Community Choir; when musicians performed in a covered shopping precinct, the public danced spontaneously - the musicians thanked their audience for the dancing; walking past shops that are open for business, we hear live music from inside, including a band in a shop window.

Suspended Animation Or Temporal Stasis (And Time Travel)

OK. We, editorially speaking, are thinking about HG Wells, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson. Heinlein is a successor of Wells and Anderson is a successor of both.

Wells' When The Sleeper Wakes, about suspended animation, was serialized in The Graphic in 1899.

Anderson's "Time Heals," about temporal stasis, was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1949.

Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, about both suspended animation and time travel, was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1956.

(Both The Door Into Summer and Anderson's first story about Nicholas van Rijn, "Margin of Profit," were published in late 1956 when I was in my first term at a Scottish boarding school. In a science fictional future, I write about these works on a world-wide web of computers in 2026.)

The Sleeper's inherited wealth has been put into a trust that has become the basis of the world order.

In "Time Heals," Hart has invested all his money before going into temporal stasis. That money does not survive historical changes but, in 2837/2841, he avails of free public transport and an unlimited government credit card.

In The Door Into Summer, Dan Davis had lived in Connecticut, recalling the title of Mark Twain's time travel novel. Insurance companies promoting suspended animation give away free copies of Wells' book and Davis knows all about compound interest and stock appreciation. People with incurable diseases go into suspended animation as they had gone into temporal stasis in "Time Heals."

We can also list one time travel novel by each of these three authors:

Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (1956)

Anderson, There Will Be Time (1972)

Anderson, of course, wrote much more than just this single volume about time travel. However, There Will Be Time seems particularly appropriate as a successor to The Time Machine. Anderson's mutant time travellers, like Wells' Time Traveller, see the world flashing past them while they are in transit.

Noetics

Poul Anderson wrote about goetics and also mentioned noetics. (I am trying to keep the terminology straight here.)

Anderson respected Edward Mitchell's school of noetics because Edwards had been on the Moon. I do not think that that is a reason to respect a man's views on anything else. Nevertheless, I do approve of the aims of Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences which at least overlap with those of the Society for Psychical Research. 

IONS researches:

psychic abilities

channeling

mind-matter interaction

energy healing

intention

spontaneous remission

meditation

alternative healing

consciousness-based healthcare

spirituality

human potential

psychokinesis

survival of consciousness after physical death

yoga

ESP

lucid dreaming

telekinesis

precognition

Every alleged phenomenon should be investigated. The outcome should be either debunking or confirmation and understanding of a specifically identified phenomenon. Maybe telekinesis works but precognition doesn't or vice versa or both or neither. I don't know. That's what we need to find out, just as we try to learn about anything else: electromagnetism; gravity; the strong and weak nuclear forces; quantum mechanics etc. The fact that any particular line of enquiry is difficult makes it worthwhile.

Dunne, Rhine And Mitchell

Poul Anderson, "The Long Remembering" IN Anderson, Homeward And Beyond (New York, July 1976), pp. 22-36.

I wanted to comment on Poul Anderson's reference to JW Dunne but find that I have already done so at some length. See here. But there are two other references. The first is to Rhine.

The second, to quote the entire passage, is as follows:

"'I've done nothing more than systematize the work of predecessors, from as long ago as Dunne and Rhine if not further. I owe a tremendous debt to Mitchell and his colleagues; in fact, what I've done amounts largely to fusing their discoveries in noetics with some new concepts of physics and cosmology, and using modern laboratory equipment to check out the hypotheses that followed.'" (p. 25)

I took Mitchell to be a fictional future researcher like the speaker, Rennie, or like James Blish's Adolph Haertel and Thor Wald. However, in his introduction to another story collected later in Homeward And Beyond, Anderson writes:

"When an Edward Mitchell sees fit to found a school of noetics, I pay respectful attention. He's been on the Moon." (p. 166)

See IONS.

While trying to track down the references to Dunne, I have only just now, over breakfast, made this connection between the two references to Mitchell in this Anderson collection.

Ythrians And Two Supernovae

Poul Anderson's short story, "Wings of Victory," introduces the Ythrians, intelligent flying carnivores that play a major role in Anderson's Technic History. His "The Pirate," featuring Coordinator Trevelyan Micah, is a later written prequel to The Peregrine, the culminating novel of the same author's earlier Psychotechnic History. Yet both of these stories contribute to his thematic collection, Homeward And Beyond, where it does not matter that each is also a single instalment of a different future history series.

John Campbell's idea that led to "The Pirate":

"...what might be the effect of a supernova, a gigantic exploding star, within a few light-years of an inhabited planet?" (p. 92)

- is also the premise of a Technic History story, "Supernova"/"Day of Burning."

In "The Pirate," an intelligent species is killed and an interstellar civilization must preserve its heritage whereas, in "Day of Burning," a very different interstellar civilization is able to intervene at an earlier stage and to prevent the megadeaths although at great cost and consequence.

Poul Anderson explores every option.

HOMEWARD AND BEYOND II

Homeward And Beyond. 

To continue from the above linked post:

"Peek! I See You!" (pp. 37-73) began as idea about how advanced aliens might conduct themselves when visiting Earth but required a letter from John Campbell to turn it into a story.

"Murphy's Hall" (pp. 74-91) contrasts with the previous three stories by being pessimistic and was co-authored by Karen Anderson.

"The Pirate" (pp. 92-126) returns to standard sf, even, according to Poul Anderson, to space opera and the idea came from Campbell. 

"Goat Song" (pp. 127-165) is a fantasy motif in a hard sf setting.

"The Visitor" (pp. 166-181) is fantasy unless psionics is accepted as a science.

"Wolfram" (pp. 182-188) is a fiction about a science so is it science fiction?

"The Peat Bog" (pp. 189-242), set in the first century AD, is archaeological fiction.

And there is plenty here for us to reread.

What Else We Notice In "Time Heals"

"Time Heals."

We notice:

(i) Poul Anderson's several rationalizations of FTL are matched by at least two different rationalizations for temporal stasis: a level-entropy field in "Time Heals" and a superenergy state in "Welcome" - although the increased rate of existence of the latter makes no sense. It should make the protagonist move and age very quickly, not leap ahead five hundred years.

(ii) Temporal stasis is not time travel mainly because it is impossible to return. Nevertheless, the protagonists of these two stories are in exactly the same position as the futureward time travellers that we have discussed. They must cope with their sudden arrival in future periods. 

(iii) Mainly because of Wells (I think), it is generally believed (wrongly, I think) that a time traveller should be invisible and intangible while in transit but this does not apply to temporal stasis. Hart, like all the others in the Crypt, is enclosed in a totally reflecting cubical field. He is not seen but only because of the reflecting shield, not because light passes through him. (Why should it?) We are not told about Barlow in "Welcome" but it seems that he does just disappear and reappear.

(iv) When Hart emerges in 2837, people live on Earth, on other Solar planets and at Centauri although little is heard from Centauri. We get the impression that interstellar travel is STL.

(v) We recognized the term "psychotechnics" (p. 190) and the categorization of Hart as "unintegrated (ibid.) from Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

Solutions That Are Problems/Problematic Solutions

Poul Anderson, "Time Heals" IN Anderson, Dialogue With Darkness (New York, February 1985), pp. 165-191.

I will summarize what I remember from a White Hart story by Arthur C. Clarke, then show how this applies to "Time Heals." In Clarke's story:

a guy snores so loudly that he wakes up everyone else in the house;

someone cures him of snoring by curing him of sleeping so that he becomes a 24/7 insomiac;

tiring of this, he asks to be put back to sleep;

he is then put into such a deep sleep that it becomes suspended animation;

he winds up in a bed in a shop window to advertise the bed.

In Anderson's story:

Hart has cancer so he goes into temporal stasis - "'...in a level-entropy field...'" (p. 166) - until a cure is found;

however, by then, society has changed so much that he cannot adjust to it and becomes catatonic;

he is returned to stasis but, since society no longer has any mental diseases and therefore also has no curative techniques, it will be a long time, if ever, before he can be taken back out of stasis and by then society will have changed even more so that he will be even less likely to be able to adjust. 

There is more to be said about this story but in another post.

A Revision Revisited

I have more than once proposed a revised edition of Poul Anderson's collection, Past Times, and still agree with what I wrote then.

The seven stories to be included break down as follows:

Into The Past

Groups

"Wildcat"

"The Nest"

Individuals

"The Little Monster"

"The Man Who Came Early"

Into The Future

"Welcome"

"Time Heals"

"Flight to Forever"

The NESFA collections present a couple of other time travel stories which, however, are less significant.

Having just reread "Time Heals," I will have more to say about that story after attending some Music Festival events, starting with a harp performance in an indoor market venue. Life continues.

BEYOND THE BEYOND

Having mentioned Poul Anderson's collection, Beyond The Beyond (London, 1973) here, I could not resist having a quick look at it before turning in.

This collection has no stated theme, no Introduction or Foreword and no brief commentary on any of the included items. They are simply five novellas. The second, "Brake," and the third, "The Sensitive Man," are instalments of Anderson's Psychotechnic History while the fifth, "Starfog," is the concluding instalment of his Technic History and the fourth, "The Moonrakers," is a sequel to Poul and Karen Anderson's "The Innocent Arrival."

See:

The Innocent Arrival And The Moonrakers

Swindles

Still trying to make sense of these collection titles:

Dialogue With Darkness

The Dark Between The Stars

Kinship With The Stars

Time And Stars

Homeward And Beyond

Beyond The Beyond

We need a Collected Works where all the numerous series are gathered together and where all the independent stories appear only once and in order of original publication.

And this really is good night, folks. It is nearly tomorrow. (Annual Lancaster Music Festival this weekend. In fact, there was a singer with a guitar in a pub this evening.)

HOMEWARD AND BEYOND

Poul Anderson, Homeward And Beyond (New York, July 1976).

(Anderson has another collection entitled Beyond The Beyond. The titles are unhelpful for the purpose of differentiating these volumes.)

I automatically think of a "collection" as an arbitrarily chosen assortment of stories but this is far from being the case. Many of Anderson's collections have a theme. Homeward And Beyond was intended to explore and extend the range of sf. For this reason, the stories are presented in a certain order and each is preceded by "...a brief commentary..." (p. viii) which can be skipped by anyone who just wants to read the stories. 

"Wings of Victory" (pp. 1-21) is introduced as being "...clearly identifiable science fiction..." (p. 1) John Campbell suggested an answer to a speculative question in the science of biology and Anderson based several narratives on this suggestion. "Wings of Victory" is also the opening story of The Earth Book Of Stormgate because it describes First Contact with Ythrians.

"The Long Remembering" (pp. 22-36) is based on the science of prehistory and, as published in this volume, incorporates corrections to errors that had been pointed out by Anderson's friend, Francois Bordes, Professor of Prehistory at the University of Bordeaux.

There are seven more stories in this volume but it is getting late here...

Laterz. 

Miscommunication

"Conversation in Arcady." 

Interstellar explorers must cope not only with extra-solar aliens but also with Terrestrials of later periods. In this respect, interstellar space travellers resemble futureward time travellers, like Wells' Time Traveller and Poul Anderson's Martin Saunders. "The Star Beast" and "Conversation in Arcady" both address this issue with respect to space travellers.

The Explorers

Earth became overcrowded.

Explorers departed, watched by billions.

With great difficulty, they discovered a colonizable planet and returned with this news.

Meanwhile, On Earth

Robotic technology was developed.

A Bio War killed most people but did not damage either buildings or technology.

The few survivors had everything that they needed and did not need to work and their descendants, still enjoying all the benefits of advanced technology, have no interest in extrasolar colonization.

One big culture clash.

This is what sf writers do: think of a premise, then think out its consequences.

Dissatisfaction

A whole agenda of new blog posts opens before us but they will have to be written and published as and when time allows. "...if time allows..." is a brilliantly appropriate phrase spoken by the Emperor Frederik in a divergent timeline and quoted more than once on this blog. See here.

Why Joel Is Dissatisfied With The Company Of Human Beings

Peggy:

"...had been one of the few humans with whom he could talk at all.

"Had been. He exhausted her possibilities in a year, as he drained most people in a month. He had known how she would react to any situation, what she would say to any remark of his, he knew her feelings with a sensitive perception beyond her own knowledge. And the loneliness had returned." (p. 36)

At University:

lectures about the obvious were pointless;

assignments were about problems that had been addressed many times before;

he could anticipate the professors' replies;

and those replies were increasingly trite!

Only when he has hypnotically changed Peggy's feelings does she become unpredictable but that would not have lasted.

By the same token, he has been feral too long to be incorporated into the society of his own species. Personality is determined in early childhood. Unused attributes have atrophied. Induced amnesia is the only humane (kind and wise) treatment.

Joel And Dupin

 

I missed something in Poul Anderson's "Earthman, Beware!" Let's backtrack.

When Joel asks Peggy a question:

"From her first word, his mind leaped ahead to the answer, but he let her say it out." (p. 31)

When she starts to think that he might be partly telepathic:

"He nodded. 'I'm partly telepathic,' he said, 'and I can fill in the gaps for myself - like Poe's Dupin, only better and easier." (p. 34)

Here Poul Anderson refers not to Sherlock Holmes but to another character referred to by Holmes!

Here, we are about to set out on a river walk on so I will quote some further relevant passages from "Earthman..." later. Have a good day, everyone.