Multiverses

See Anderson And Andrea. 

In addition to discussing the state of this world, Andrea and I also watch superhero TV series that involve inter-universal crossovers within a fictional multiverse.

Worthwhile prose sf that I have read about multiverses includes:

Conquistador by SM Stirling;

Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest in which -

the Prince Rupert of the Rhine from the Shakespearean universe of this novel (A Midsummer Tempest),

Holger Danske from Carolingian myth and from Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions,

and Valeria Matuchek from the magical universe of Anderson's Operation Otherworld -

- meet each other in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, from Anderson's "House Rule" and "Losers' Night," the first cameoing Nicholas van Rijn from Anderson's Technic History and the latter featuring among others Winston Churchill.

We can't get enough of it. (But fortunately Anderson gives us quite a lot.)

Addendum, 29 April: Life has gotten busy here. (I use an Americanism out of respect for Poul Anderson.) So far this year, we have had 440 posts in 4 months so maybe that is enough until some time early next month? On Saturday, there will be a May Day March and Rally in Lancaster and, on Sunday, I might get a lift to a Wesak (The Buddha's Birthday) Festival in Northumberland. Did both last year. (Maybe not many people celebrate both.) Anderson-wise, we are still rereading Harvest The Fire. After that, who knows? Onward through the multiverse.

Anderson And Andrea

 

(That is a neat post title, literally meaning "Son of Andrew and Andrew.")

Regular readers remember that Andrea is a male friend of Italian descent who lives above his brother's Old Pier Bookshop (see the attached image) where I visit him once a month.

The word from Andrea this month:

The world is in a bad state and getting worse. I think that each of us can fill in some of the details.

Reality reflected in Poul Anderson's works:

Time Patrol

"It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.

"Here also it was fall, the kind of crisp and brilliant day New York often enjoyed until it became uninhabitable..." (my emphasis)

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 342.

"[Manse Everard] didn't like dirt, disorder, and danger any better than I did. However, he felt he needed a pied-a-terre in the twentieth century, and had grown used to these lodgings before decay had advanced overly far." (my emphasis)

-"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" AT 1980, p. 352.

The Technic History

"The Technic Civilization series...begins in the twenty-first century, with recovery from a violent period of global unrest known as the Chaos."

-Sandra Miesel, CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION IN Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December2009), pp. 611-619 AT p. 611.

We are in the twenty-first century and entering the Chaos. Anderson's fantastic fiction resonates now.

Verbals And Visuals

We read descriptions of Valles Marineris in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, would see the Valles in a film adaptation of The Fleet Of Stars and do see it in Alan Moore's Watchmen.

This post revisits the three story-telling media. A story can be narrated, enacted or depicted. We still value narrative, whether heard or read, although it is the one of these three media that is not visual. Of course, most writers and readers have some visual imagination which I lack, being auditory digital, according to a Neuro-Linguistic Programming trainer. (You get that kind of input if you work in certain kinds of jobs.)

It is getting to that time of the evening when I turn from blogging to "other reading," in this case from Anderson's Harvest The Fire to Moore's Watchmen. And tomorrow will be a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop which means that I will be very well informed about the state of the world although not posting about it until later in the day.

Knife Thrust

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 9.

We like secret organizations in fiction and the Scaine Croi is a good one. We think of SPECTRE but I find that I have already made that comparison.

When a bribed pilot delivers a hijacked plane to SPECTRE, he receives a stiletto through his chin, mouth and brain and experiences momentary surprise, pain and light. Then he ceases to be the viewpoint character and the omniscient narrator describes his murder's subsequent actions. We remember this when we read that Falaire's affection for Nicol, prospective space pilot hijacker for the Scaine Croi:

"...meant he could hope to get his pay in money, not a bullet or a knife thrust." (p. 138)

Indeed.

To give Nicol more positive motivation, Falaire immerses him in a "dreambox" simulation of the Lunarian colony planet, Proserpina, so far away that the sun is only the brightest star.

Antiagathics And FTL

The premises of James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy are that both an indefinitely prolonged lifespan and faster than light (FTL) space travel are necessary for interstellar travel. Both have been achieved:

by the end of Cities In Flight, Volume I;

by the end of Robert Heinlein's Future History, Volume IV;

before the beginning of Poul Anderson's World Without Stars;

before the beginning of Anderson's For Love And Glory.

Many sf characters have FTL without immortality and the characters in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years have immortality with STL.

There needs to be a very long novel or series about what immortality would be like over a very long period of time. As we count our age not in months but in years, immortals would come to count theirs in decades, then in centuries, then in millennia... Knowing that they had endless time in which to perform any given task, they might never get around to doing it. 

Procastination is the thief of endless time? How else might their psychology change?

Addendum: John Amalfi briefly considers the psychological effects of longevity somewhere near the end of Cities In Flight but I can't find the passage right now.

Time And The Ship

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 9.

This chapter opens:

"Time and the ship passed onward through space." (p. 137)

The ship moved through space over a period of time. Motion is change of the spatial relationship called position. Without change, there would be no time. Time does not move anywhere. It is the relationship between states changed from and states changed to. States include spatial relationships.

However, "Time..." in the opening sentence refers to the succession of experiences of a viewpoint character and the second sentence identifies the viewpoint character of this chapter:

"Nicol's waking hours went almost entirely to preparing himself." (ibid.)

It is his experience of preparation that moves through space with the ship. The third and fourth sentences take us as readers further into Nicol's experience and into a particular personal relationship:

"Sometimes, though, nature demanded he take a few of them off.

"He lay with Falaire in her cabin." (ibid.)

Nicol and Falaire are enclosed not by bare bulkheads but by a moving 3D forest with a night sky and a breeze bearing spicy odours. Lunarians' lives are spent entirely within artificial but nevertheless spacious and colourful environments.

They All Meet

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 6.

Continuing characters converge when Venator (download), a brain in a box hidden in a concealed cupboard, spies on Falaire (Lunarian) and Nicol (Terran) meeting Lirion (Lunarian), Seyant (Lunarian) and Hench (Intellect) to discuss the Lunarian heist of Federation anti-matter. Big one! (Lunarians and Intellects are two kinds of metamorphs.) Since, immediately after this clandestine meeting, Lirion apprehends Venator, the latter is unable to report the conspiracy. Nice one!

The only other item that I want to record this evening is Falaire's apartment in CHAPTER 5 but that is already here.

Harvest The Fire is a compact short narrative contrasting sharply with the three other Harvest Of Stars volumes. As far as I can remember, Nicol is destined not only to pilot the ship used for the hijack but also to write epics about Proserpina and the edge of interstellar space. Humanity triumphs.

Alternative Fiction

Alternative history fiction is a kind of science fiction written by HG Wells, Poul Anderson, SM Stirling, Harry Turtledove and others. Imagine that a familiar event happened differently and has been remembered that way by fictional characters. In a BBC TV series, a character who was a TV script writer had agreed to write a series set during what to him and his contemporaries was the historical 1940's when the Germans invaded and conquered Britain after the death of Churchill. Asked how he would handle it, he replied, "Well, I can't rewrite history," whereas, of course, history has already been rewritten to bring such a character and his entire social context into (fictional) existence.

Anderson's main alternative historical speculations are in "The House of Sorrows," "Eutopia" and some installments of his Time Patrol series. More fanciful alternative histories feature not just events happening differently but also alternative laws of physics allowing magic to work. But, even here, historical events, Einstein originating relativity and Planck originating quantum mechanics, are given an alternative twist: Einstein and Planck cooperated in originating "rheatics," which led to the degaussing of cold iron and thus to practical magic.

See:

Magic And Goetics

Imagining Alternative Histories

Characters in that alternative timeline imagine ours.

We sometimes draw attention to works by other authors in which ideas discussed here have been taken further or developed differently. Thus, our familiar fictional narratives might have taken alternative directions. Superman, as written by Alan Moore, experiences a scenario in which Krypton did not explode. A heckler interrupts a political speech by Jor-El, asking which catastrophe is coming now, the planet blowing up again or just floods and plagues this time. Jor-El laments the passing away of a noble and proud Krypton - the Krypton of the old comics! In Moore's Watchmen, superheroes in the real world caused comic books to switch from superheroes to pirates. A news vendor remembers that there used to be SUPER-MAN and FLASH-MAN...

Imaginative writers take us out of our reality and back into it.

Backtrack

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

Let's backtrack. In Production Of Anti-Matter, we summarized a conversation between Venator and Lirion but missed one part. 

Lirion says that, without more energy from anti-matter, the Lunarians at Proserpina will be imprisoned in sameness. Venator asks whether they have:

"'...no inner resources.'" (p. 69)

Lirion scoffs. Machine intelligence admires its own:

"'Abstractions, mental constructs...'" (ibid.)

- but that is not:

"'...for living creatures...'" (ibid.)

Like passivity versus violence, this is another false dichotomy. Organic intelligence encompasses pure mathematics and its application to the empirical universe and everything else: emotions, social interactions, artistic creativity, spirituality, whatever else we might think of. Stop splitting up the truth and fighting over the parts!

A parable told by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

The Devil's friend saw a man picking up a small piece of the truth. The Devil said, "It doesn't matter. He is only going to organize and systematize it."

From The Pacific To The Moon

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 4.

Jesse Nicol had spent time on a shiptown of the Lahui Kuikawa. It was there that he decried unoriginal art.

There was a sunset:

"The sun, become a red-gold shield, was on the horizon. Glade blazed from it across the waters." (p. 84)

Some Lahui:

"'...swim down the sunset road with the Keiki.'" (ibid.)

During a silence after a fight:

"The sun dropped from sight, the sea-road faded into darkness." (p. 88)

Nicol saw the Moon above the deckhouse and wondered whether he should seek employment by the Lunarians there, which is where we have already seen him. CHAPTER 5 will return us to Nicol with Falaire on the Moon but not tonight, folks. The sun has long set here as well.

From An Odyssey To An Elegy

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 4.

Sometimes an sf writer presents a list, for example of familiar names or events, but then continues that list into the future. Thus, Poul Anderson's Jesse Nicol asks:

"'What's the sense in producing an imitation Odyssey, The Trojan Women, Hamlet, The Waste Land, Elegy at Jupiter?" (p. 83)

We know four of these titles. Nicol knows them and the fifth. He tells us what all five have in common:

"'Those spoke about love, strife, triumph, grief, terror, mystery, in the language of the people and their gods, or people who'd lost their gods but were gaining a universe.'" (ibid.)

Nicol's problem is that, for centuries, all writing, music, art and science has been nothing but variations on old forms and themes, trying to revivify:

"'...something...that was worn-out before their grandparents were born.'" (ibid.)

It is appropriate that his list ends with an elegy.

Production Of Anti-Matter

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

The Federation stops production of anti-matter on Mercury because it has stockpiled enough for foreseeable contingencies in its stable economy. 

Unlike in other fictional futures, including some by Poul Anderson, no living being has been on Mercury, only specialized armoured machines. Installations on the surface and in orbit captured and focused solar energy. Photons striking nucleons caused quantum convulsions that generated new positive and negative particles which magnetic lines of force conducted to separate destinations, thus creating masses of anti-matter. 

Lunarians took anti-matter to Proserpina but their supply has become low and they have no way to generate any more whereas "...a single large consignment..." (p. 68) from the Federation would enable them to:

"'...build a fusion-powered factory to make more...'" (pp. 68-69)

Proserpina's iron core is rich and a source of industrial wealth but difficult to hollow out for habitations so more energy is needed.

Venator, representing the Federation, is appalling:

"'Do you feel we owe you access?...Your folk chose to go live on the fringe of deep space because they wanted no part of our civilization.'" (p. 68)

Sure. Having been made different, the Lunarians wanted to live differently. Is that a reason not to help them? Is their request not an opportunity for rapprochement?

Even worse:

"'Have you then concluded that altruism is, after all, a virtue?'" (ibid.)

Well, it is, isn't it? In the following volume, a representative of the cybercosm compares that entity to Jesus and the Buddha. (The cybercosm dominates the Federation despite Venator's denial.)

Venator continues:

"'You want this Federation that you loathe to supply you, when you have nothing to exchange that we need.'" (ibid.)

The Federation supplies its own needs and can afford to give, whether "loathed" or not. (Surely beside the point?)

Venator again:

"'I ask you again, why should we? You're not dying of hunger or cold.'" (p. 69)

Is that the only time when the Federation would help them? Indeed, would it help them even then?

Lirion's reply is that the Federation would gain a new and strange society shaking it out of its stagnation. Anderson's readers think, "Yes!" Venator thinks:

"Yes...that is exactly what we fear." (ibid.)

It has to be made clear to readers why this is feared. Lirion remarks that the cybercosm has:

"'...its own ends, which are not remotely human.'" (p. 72)

Venator thinks:

"How could they be?" (ibid.)

What are they then?

Malcontents And Troublemakers

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

Venator continues his line of thought quoted in the previous post:

"It was the metamorphs and their few full-human adherents who were the malcontents, the troublemakers - Lunarians above all, but others too, more dangerous because less obvious...." (p. 63)

Dangerous to what? Is this made sufficiently clear? The cybercosm does not maintain a social equilibrium because it thinks that that is in the best interests of all human beings. The way to serve the best interests of all human beings would be to find out what the malcontents want and help them to do it. They in turn would lead humanity forward - after argument and debate, of course. No, the cybercosm itself has some long-term cosmic plans that require it, if not to control, then at least to be able to predict, everything else that happens, including what organic intelligences do. 

OK. Then let's communicate and cooperate with the cybercosm. But it does not allow that. But I wonder whether Poul Anderson has created an artificial conflict for the sake of the narrative. Another future history - which I cannot write! - might show beneficial human-AI interaction on a cosmic scale.

I did not know where I was going with this post until I had finished it.

The Hunter's List

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

Venator asks himself:

"Who in their right minds would want a return of...?" (p. 63)

- and then inwardly recites a list of horrors which I will reproduce as a list:

war

poverty

rampant criminality

disease

famine

cancerously swelling population

necessity to work no matter how nasty or deadening the work might be

mass lunacy

private misery

death in less than a hundred years

Thank you, Venator. That is a very good list of very bad things, a comprehensive list of horrors inflicted on human beings, some by themselves, others not. There is nothing in this list that mankind cannot in principle end in the future although right now we are stampeding the other way - either denounce or applaud mass destruction, depending on who perpetrates it.

We can certainly reply to Venator:

No one in their right mind wants war etc but we also want individual and collective self-determination and we should not be compelled to accept your peace at the expense of that.

I think that we can have it all - but let's find out.

Extinction

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 2.

"...extinction had claimed some splendid creatures, mammoth, saber-tooth, great-antlered Irish elk; and it seemed to Nicol that eagles or tigers, existing on narrow ranges under strict protection, were not what their natures meant them to be." (p. 52)

Sure. If we had resources enough, then we could populate a terrestroid planet with birds of prey and wild animals. But protecting them is better than letting them become extinct and every species eventually ceases to exist in one way or another in any case. Individual eagles or tigers do not instantiate Platonic Ideas of eaglehood or tigerhood. Their natures are temporary and changing but scientists can observe and record. Nothing is meant to be but it is for a while.

Space Pilots In Two Timelines

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 2.

In On The Moon, we listed Robert Heinlein's Future History stories which are set on the Moon but did not mention "Space Jockey" which is about a rocket pilot who regularly flies between Earth and Moon and, at the end of the story, accepts a job that will involve flying only between the Moon and Lunar orbit provided, of course, that he and his wife move house and live permanently in Luna City. This is the daily life of the future as depicted in the Future History.

This parallels Jesse Nicol's work. Nicol flies between points on the Lunar surface or between Luna and the orbiting Habitat. He is employed by Lunarians although some of his flights:

"...demanded higher accelerations than Lunarians could readily tolerate...." (p. 50)

Alienated from the period he lives in, Nicol is lucky to work among alien-like Lunarians and even has a relationship with a colleague, Falaire, who is of Selenarchic descent.

Again, reading Anderson, we remember Heinlein.

Resemblances And Outmoded Ideas

A Superman comic reminded me of a Robert Heinlein novel and Poul Anderson's The Night Face reminded me of another superhero, Green Lantern. See:

Words And Texts

Poul Anderson's World Without Stars reminded me of another Superman comic. See:

Hugh Valland And Superman

Yet another Superman comic, this one written by Alan Moore, reminded me of James Blish's Mission To The Heart Stars. In this case, the connection was that Superman's antagonist, Mongul, physically resembled Blish's Hegemon of Malis. 

Blish's Heart Stars federation, self-designated "the Hegemony of Malis," has become, like Asimov's planet Trantor, an outmoded sf concept. Blish's idea was that, since stars are much closer at the galactic core, an interstellar federation might develop more quickly there. Now, instead, it is generally accepted that there is a massive black hole at the centre as in Larry Niven's A World Out Of Time and Anderson's For Love And Glory.

(Asimov had the Galactic Imperial capitol at the galactic centre but a later contributor to Asimov's Foundation series moved Trantor further out so that the black hole could occupy the centre.)

See also Parallels.

On The Moon

A large part of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set on the Moon:

"Requiem"

"The Long Watch"

"Gentlemen, Be Seated"

"The Black Pits of Luna"

"It's Great To Be Back"

"The Menace from Earth"

"Searchlight"

"Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon"

We remember these stories when we read Poul Anderson's Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 2, set on the Moon. A Lunarian woman lopes on the surface, her outspread solar collectors and cooling surfaces resembling dragonfly wings, her silver, mostly bionic, spacesuit fitting her like a second skin. A Lunarian man leads his vacuum-adapted moonwolf on a leash. Jess Nicol remembers the phrase, "Magnificent desolation..." (p. 44)

Anderson's vision continues and completes Heinlein's.

Lirion

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 1.

It is the Lunarians that threaten the "peace." The successful Proserpinan colony inspires the Lunarians in the inner Solar System with the knowledge:

"...that their old wild ways are still alive, still free." (p. 38)

And this is a problem for the cybercosm!

Lirion of Zamok Dragon returns from Proserpina to Luna and is suspected of - something.

An aspect of the central intelligence opines:

"-The temptation is to seize him and brainphase his knowledge out of him, legality or no." (p. 39)

But this temptation will be resisted on moral grounds? Well, no. The aspect continues:

"But he doubtless has emergency means, such as blowing his skull to bits, and we have no idea what his disappearance might trigger." (ibid.)

Venator helpfully adds:

"-Besides, he in himself may provide a spoor to follow into the heart of whatever this conspiracy is. I will seek him out, and then we shall see." (ibid.)

Lirion is not seized only because it is more expedient to follow him. The cybercosm has unequivocally identified itself as the villain of the piece/peace.

Onward with the story after I have been out for the evening.

Peace

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 1. 

A downloaded personality named Venator has been incorporated into the cybercosm but reactivated so that he can perform a specific task in a robot body. Before his robotic re-embodiement, Venator converses with an aspect of the central intelligence which informs him that:

"Our great peace lies once more under threat." (p. 34)

The entire narrative leaves us in no doubt that this peace is a carefully maintained, managed, even manipulated, passivity. There is a general misconception, here encouraged by Anderson, that "peace" means nothing but passivity. Do we have to choose between violence and passivity? There are more than two options. It is the task of sf to consider every option and we can read utopias as well as dystopias. We need to end and transcend conflict and violence so that society can become more interactive, dynamic and creative, not so that it can be held indefinitely in a static equilibrium. 

The cybercosm congratulates itself that:

"Little active hostility to the order of things remains on Earth, and it is ideational or emotional - ill informed, ill organized where it is organized at all, devoid of any significant resources." (p. 35)

That is a death knell. Why should the cybercosm maintain an "order of things"? Everyone, especially those who are hostile, should be given every opportunity to understand and express themselves and to shape their own order of things, both individually and collectively. That is possible. That is what society can aim at. AI is welcome to help - certainly not to obstruct.

HARVEST OF STARS: Summary II

See HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

What I missed:

Conscious AI dominated society which became stable, peaceful and prosperous but neither fulfilled nor content.

Synnoionts are human beings who have become human-AI interfaces.

Lunarians colonized a large, dense asteroid, Proserpina, on a two million year orbit, currently passing from the Kuiper Belt to the Oort Cloud, and mine bodies in those outer regions. 

Nicol did not know about:

Life Mothers guiding planetary ecologies and growing new organic bodies for downloaded personalities;

the colonization of three other extra-solar planets.

HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, November 1997).

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy, each volume covers a single different period of a future history except Volume II, The Stars Are Also Fire, which covers two periods. Thus, if we read the series in numerical order, then, as we begin Harvest The Fire, PROLOGUE, pp. 9-31, with four pages of illustrations, we are already familiar with the first three of the five periods.

Jesse Nicol, a frustrated poet, seeks inspiration by recounting the future history to date to a simulation of Jorge Luis Borges. Of course the summary in Nicol's mind helps readers whether they have read Volumes I and II or not.

Human beings got into space when the cost of launch had been brought down, mainly by Fireball Enterprises. The Moon was colonized but completion of pregnancy was impossible in Lunar gravity so Lunarians were genetically engineered. Other human species were engineered on Earth and also the Keiki Moana, intelligent seals. 

Robotics became highly developed. Some human personalities, including Anson Guthrie, founder and chief executive of Fireball, were downloaded into artificial neural networks. Lunarians, led by Selenarchs, became independent of the World Federation and colonized Mars, asteroids and outer moons.

Fireball and the Selenarch Rinndalir waged war against the Federation for a reason not stated here. Download Guthrie led dissident Terrans and Lunarians to Alpha Centauri. Terrans colonized Demeter, doomed to be destroyed in a planetary collision in a thousand years, whereas Lunarians colonized Centaurian asteroids. 

The Federation reincorporated Luna and moved an abandoned L-5 colony to Lunar orbit where Terran women from Luna could give birth, thus enabling Terrans to outnumber Lunarians on Luna. The Lahui Kuikawa, comprised of human beings and Keiki Moana, moved to a mid-Pacific island. 

Conscious AI was developed, then developed itself further.

There is some more but I have to go out.

Endings

The Fleet Of Stars, 31-32.

At the end of Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, we want to read about Lazarus Long and Andy Libby searching the galaxy for colonizable planets. At the end of Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, we want to read about Anson Guthrie and Fenn regaining consciousness in newly grown organic bodies on Beta Hydri IV, Amaterasu. What a long way we have come since reading about an organic Guthrie on Amaterasu in Chapter I.

It is nearly midnight here, I have reread to the end of The Fleet Of Stars and have nothing more to add for now until some time tomorrow when our prescribed text will be Harvest Of Stars, Volume III, Harvest The Fire. Rereading the Tetralogy backwards is proving to be productive.

Let us hope that our world will still be here tomorrow morning.

Ezekiel, Monet, Bach And Lunarian

The Fleet Of Stars, 27.

Fenn does not know where he has read:

"Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." (p. 347)

We know either from our scriptural knowledge or from the Internet that it is Ezekiel 37:9 and therefore is yet another of Poul Anderson's many Biblical references.

See, in particular:

A Note On Anderson's Use Of The Bible by Sean M. Brooks

Guthrie's spaceship has a projection of Monet's "Cliff at Varengeville" in the saloon. See the attached image. Guthrie plays Bach's Fourth Brandenberg Concerto.

We read a single sentence of Lunarian:

"'Aou, scavaire ti sielle.'" (p. 374)

I interpret this as:

"Hail, make yourself known."

Other languages are in the background of Poul Anderson's works but never come to the fore.

There is an account of the visuals of a cosmic civilization but, because this will turn out to be a deception, I do not want to summarize it.

After all this build-up, Guthrie and Fenn have become an unbeatable team as we approach the end of the tetralogy.

Arrakis And Aeneas

Reading about Mars in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars makes us think of Arrakis/Dune in Frank Herbert's Dune series and, indeed, see:

Mars And Dune

For more discussion of Dune on this blog than I had realized, and particularly for comparisons between Herbert's Dune and Anderson's Aeneas, see a blog search result for Dune here. Maybe that suffices and we can leave it at that?

Aeneas is better realized than Dune and deserves to be seen in serialized screen adaptations of The Rebel Worlds and The Day Of Their Return with some extra scenes to show the earlier lives of characters like Hugh McCormac and Ivar Frederiksen but no extended series about this planet. We do not need any Children Of Aeneas...

Deimos Or Phobos?

The Fleet Of Stars.

Is it proposed to transform and inhabit Deimos (see 10, p. 131, and Fenn's Futuristic Speculation) or Phobos (see 26, p. 338, and Israel And The Space Program)? I had to check which Martian moon was meant and found references to both. This was not meant to be a new post but it seemed easier to do it this way than as an addendum to the preceding post.

We will come to the details of how the cybercosm had planned to demoralize and demotivate mankind which is an abysmal story. More positive stuff is going to happen in the further future but the tetralogy ends with the thwarting of this dismal plot.

And now I will try to close down operations for tonight. Tomorrow, some gardening, some exercise, the Gregson and probably some more posts about The Fleet Of Stars. Good night.

Israel And The Space Program

The Fleet Of Stars, 26.

We peer forward into speculative futures and sometimes see them peering back at us. Chuan says that the project to transform Phobos and terraform Mars:

"'...was always more an ideal...than a business venture... Not unlike the state of Israel or the movement for a viable space program on twentieth-century Earth.'" (p. 338)

How will our remote descendants regard us?

Since writing the immediately preceding post, I have:

attended a Zen group where two of us agreed that maybe our Prime Minister is currently facing a "koan," an unanswerable question;

returned home and watched TV news coverage of the Prime Minister facing questions and accused of lying;

reread and posted about Chuan's remarks as above.

And that brings us up to date. As ever, the future stretches ahead from this moment, from tomorrow morning and in sf.

Tempus fugit.

Pure Mind

The Fleet Of Stars, 26.

Chuan tells Fenn:

"'The highly evolved sophotectic mind is pure mind.'" (p. 335)

Its drives, desires, emotions and spirituality are neither expressions nor sublimations of instinct. Instead, it seeks goodness, truth and beauty. Chuan asks whether these are constructs or discoveries. Truth at least is a discovery, not a construct! According to Chuan, many philosophers and prophets, including the Buddha, Plato and Jesus, spoke of something that:

"'...was only words and wistfulness...'" (ibid.)

- for them but:

"'...is real for the machine.'" (ibid.)

I do not agree with listing these great names together like that. The Buddha taught meditation and is believed to have realized enlightenment. Plato analyzed concepts, like contemporary analytic philosophers. Jesus was a first century Jewish preacher-healer whose message was that the kingdom was at hand. These were three different men.

According to Chuan, goodness etc are ethereal, inner, not outer, of spirit, not matter. A false dichotomy. Truth and beauty are both inner and outer. Matter is being. Spirit is conscious being. Therefore, spirit is conscious matter. But matter is energy/what is, not just mechanically interacting particles.

Got to go. 

Chuan

The Fleet Of Stars.

Chuan, a human being and a human-AI interface, has some features in common with two characters in Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return. Like High Commissioner Chunderban Desai, Chuan tries to manage a planetary sociopolitical conflict. Like the Merseian agent, Aycharaych, he tells lies about the existence of a cosmic civilization.

Chu(nderb)an = Chuan?

Chuan cannot mask his feelings. When Kinna questions him about some sensitive issues:

"'Fenn, he grew so sad. I felt as if I had stabbed him.'" (12, p. 149)

Kinna continues:

"'...I have just written how sorrowful he became. Not that he said he was, but I could read it on him, how he looked away from me and his shoulders slumped and his voice drooped.'" (p. 150)

Much later:

"Below [Chuan's] smile, behind his eyes, Fenn sensed that immeasurable sadness of which [Kinna] had spoken." (14, p. 173)

On a still later occasion, Chuan's tranquility breaks and he screams at Fenn that he will say no more. (20, p. 264)

What Chuan is sad and most on edge about is the suppression of data from a solar lens. When he finally gives Fenn an account of the data, Chuan can:

"...no longer look into [Fenn's] eyes. He got up, went to the viewport, clasped hands behind his back, and stood staring out at the night." (26, pp. 331-332)

That is because every word that he is about to say is a lie.

When Fenn turns eagerly to look at Chuan, the latter:

"...saw him from the corner of an eye but did not look back." (p. 332)

Eye contact would give him away.

A Gunfight And A Lie

The Fleet Of Stars, 25.

There is a gunfight on Mars exactly as in a Western film. In the 1950's, I enjoyed Westerns a lot but preferred sf. I realized that I enjoyed pictures of men in spacesuits more than pictures of men on horseback. Many of my contemporaries preferred footballers. I still wonder about that a lot.

The main outcome of this Martian gunfight is that Fenn's fiancee, Kinna, is shot dead. Thus, Fenn suffers exactly the same kind of bereavement as Poul Anderson's series character, Dominic Flandry.

In the following chapter, Chuan begins to tell Fenn the Big Lie that is meant to distract and mislead humanity. Human beings are to be shown manufactured evidence of a cosmic civilization so that they will spend entire lifetimes entranced by this fiction instead of venturing out into the universe, beyond the control of the cybercosm.

Knowing from previous readings that this cosmic civilization is an elaborate falsehood makes it anti-climatic to reread what would otherwise have come across as a massive revelation by Chuan to Fenn. I will reread The Fleet Of Stars to the end but might not find much more to say about this concluding volume of Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history.

Ad astra.

Fenn And Kinna On Mars

The Fleet Of Stars, 22.

Mountaineering on Mars, Fenn and Kinna stop to enjoy a view.

See:

On Mars

I did not know that there could be ice-clouds in a deeply blue sky on Mars but then I do not know very much about conditions on Mars. Poul Anderson must have made his description as accurate as he was able to at the time of writing. James Blish tried to do likewise in Welcome To Mars. (Also here.) (Scroll down.)

Kinna, born and bred on Mars and therefore a "Martian," with nearly every atom in her body from her home planet, loves that planet as it is now but also wants it to be terraformed. It will not change enormously in her lifetime, after all.

I have not mentioned the purpose of their mountaineering but we will maybe get to that after I have dealt with some other stuff. Retirement is not just about blogging.

Ad Martem.

Wind And A Sign

The Fleet Of Stars, 21.

Swearing Kinna to secrecy, Fenn tells her that she must not say a word to anyone, not even to her parents, to her robot pet:

"'...or the wind.'" (p. 278)

The wind is becoming incorporated as a character.

To seal the secret:

"She made a curious gesture, right forefinger flitting from left to right shoulder, then from brow to breast.'" (ibid.)

Gestures outlast their origins.

"...Harpagus drew the sign of the cross, which was a Mithraic sun-symbol."

-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 5, p. 77.

A neighbour made the sign of the cross when I informed her of another neighbour's death.

During a pause in their confrontation, we are told that Fenn and Kinna:

"...could not hear the Martian wind, and the dust devils afar spun in silence." (pp. 279-280)

Could not hear them? But wind and devils must have been in their minds or the text would not have mentioned such inaudible outdoor phenomena.

I have written more than I expected to this evening but with Poul Anderson that is always possible.

What was the secret? Read The Fleet Of Stars.

Questions And Answers II

 

An alternative title for Planet Of No Return is Question And Answer. Since I knew this when composing the immediately preceding post, Questions And Answers, I might have mentioned the fact and also have illustrated the post with a Question And Answer cover illustration as here. However, when searching for images, I found the more attractive blue and white cover of Collected Works, Volume I, which I had never seen before so I used that instead. I have now found the red and yellow cover of Collected Works, Volume II, but there is not enough room for it on this post. I have ideas about how to present Anderson's collected works but they would not correspond to anyone else's. Imagine his three novels set BC, followed by the The King Of Ys Tetralogy, then the five Norse fantasies, then the The Last Viking Trilogy, then the three novels set in the fourteenth century and so on, in other words chronological order of fictional events as far as possible. In the twentieth century, there is a fantasy novel and a detective trilogy. There are also alternative histories and, of course, all the futures. The non-series short stories of various genres I would relegate to several volumes at the end of the collection instead of starting with any of them but this is just my peculiar point of view.

Questions And Answers

Are human beings ready to swarm out into the universe? Will we ever be? This question is the crux of Poul Anderson's Planet Of No Return, The Avatar and The Fleet Of The Stars. Does such a recurrent theme become "same-y" (as some people I have known have used that word)? In many works by Anderson, human beings do swarm out and, by and large, continue to conduct themselves as they have been accustomed to do on Earth. In two short dystopias, they become extinct. In Genesis, they become extinct but are re-created by a post-organic intelligence. That is a vast body of reflection on mankind and his place in the universe.

(I am just back from Manchester, tired and maybe not about to post much this evening. Think about Anderson's questions and answers.)

Information About Jihannath

Early departure for a day trip to Manchester tomorrow morning. No early posts.

Comments in the combox for Red Skies On Other Planets mentioned Jihannath.

For an Appendix on Jihannath, see FUTURISTIC SEX by Sean M. Brooks.

For other blog posts that mention Jihannath, see here.

Jihannath is a minor planet in Poul Anderson's Technic History. We compare and contrast such planets within the Technic History and between future histories.

Ancient Horrors

The Fleet Of Stars, 20.

Chuan lists three ancient horrors that the Synesis prevents:

famine;

servitude;

unfree speech.

Observations

We human beings now have the need and the ability and lack only the collective will to eliminate these and other such horrors.

If another, more powerful, agency protects us from famine etc, then we will have lost our human agency.

It will transpire later in this novel that the artificial intelligence which Chuan serves plans a massive deception of humanity, an immense and unforgivable contravention of "free speech." (How can we "speak" freely if we can think only within the elaborate falsehoods of a deliberately implanted and sustained misconception?) This alone invalidates Chuan's side of the disagreement between him and Fenn. But it also makes the cybercosm incredible. We should expect truth, not lies, from a pure intellect.

Red Skies On Other Planets

On Brae in the Technic History:

"Wherefore Flandry walked through smashed ruins under a red dwarf sun, with a few raindrops falling like blood drops out of great clotted clouds."

-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 303-339 AT p. 304.

Clouds like clotted blood?

Is Flandry a "Defender" or a conqueror?

"...he was lonesome among his fellow conquerors..." 

-ibid., p. 306.

On Mars in the Harvest Of Stars History:

"Corpses lay strewn among blackened, twisted hulks. Behind them, the hills out of which the guerillas had struck rose dark, torturous, riddled and seamed with hiding places, toward Arsia Mons and a sky the color of clotting blood."

-The Fleet Of Stars, 20, p. 252.

The sky matches the scene on the ground, of course.

"...landscape tumbled away in black desolation, weirdly pocked and riven, under a sky gone murrey."

-ibid., p. 256.

"Murrey" is one of Anderson's words that I had to google and my computer does not recognize it.

We, editorially speaking, are reading about a historical revolution and also about the Inrai outrages on one future Mars.

(For the full story, please read The Fleet Of Stars. I comment only on whichever arbitrary details catch my attention.)

News And Thunder

The Fleet Of Stars, 16.

From Vernal, Fenn telephones Wanika in the Pacific where data search has located her on the shiptown, Malolo. She relays a recorded message for him from Mars. Kinna tells him that:

"'...a ship from Alpha Centauri is approaching Proserpina.'

"Thunder rolled through his skull." (p. 206)

Observations

We, the readers, already know that an Anson Guthrie download is coming from Beta Hydri via Alpha Centauri but, because of the distances and times involved, what is known to us is news to them.

We are very used to elemental forces like wind or thunder emphasizing the dramatic moments or pauses in Andersonian dialogue. Here it happens again although this time the (metaphorical) thunder is only inside Fenn! Pathetic fallacies and metaphors are Anderson's punctuations.

Vernal, the Pacific, Mars, Proserpina and Alpha Centauri gradually come together. The convergence is slow but we expect a climax.

Our Real Future

During the Apollo missions, I was reading a lot of sf, mainly focused on James Blish but also reading Heinlein, Anderson etc. Consequently, I hoped for interstellar exploration in the early twenty-first century. Heinlein's Future History had introduced the idea of an interregnum of space travel. That has happened, more or less, at least beyond Earth orbit. But by now I would have expected reusable spaceships, not another circum-Lunar mission beginning with a big rocket blastoff and ending with a parachute splashdown. 

We are living in the real future, not in any of the fictional ones. Some of those fictional futures involved a World War III aftermath. Poul Anderson covered every option, including WWIII aftermaths followed by space travel. Late at night, I always ask: which further future are we moving into? Wells' Time Traveller sped through tomorrow into futurity. We will live into it, starting tomorrow morning.

Good night.

Whatever Is Alive

The Fleet Of Stars, 18.

"[Fenn] was in space, and he would not trade; but ever more he remembered the seas of Earth, wind in a sail, waves thunderous, and the thrum of a tiller beneath his hand. When you get right down to the bones of the matter, he thought, the only meaning the universe has comes from whatever is alive." (p. 227)

He means consciously alive. 

Where else could meaning reside? Some words mean objects to which they refer. Others derive their meaning from their use. Only consciousness and intelligence give meaning to sounds and signs. Only experiences that are enjoyed, appreciated, valued have any meaning. For a man enjoying "wind in a sail," see Fran And The Technic History.

I agree with Fenn (and Fran) but have to ask how it could be otherwise. When consciousness began, meaningfulness began, as also did the division of time not only into (as yet unnoticed) days and years but also into past, "present" and future. Any moment is "present" to any organism that is conscious in that moment but not otherwise. 

Robotic Software

The Fleet Of Stars, 18.

"As for safety, the software in the robot, which could not be altered or replaced without triggering a burnout of the robot itself, would never obey an order that had any reasonable probability of endangering others." (p. 225)

Here is a faint echo of Isaac Asimov's future history in a later Poul Anderson future history. What a long way we have come from I, Robot. Indeed, the title story of Robot Dreams is one of three alternative culminations of Asimov's Robot stories. And Anderson's inclusion of the term, "software," reflects the distance that has meanwhile been travelled in the real world with computer technology.

Sf is one long discussion of ideas and extrapolations. And, so far, Anderson's Genesis, published appropriately in 2000, is one culmination of sf.

Elsewhere On Earth

The Fleet Of Stars, 16.

Australia and New Zealand are fully modernized:

robotic industries;

residential communities;

recreational parks;

nature reserves.

In North America, and above the thirty-fifth parallel, the polity of Vernal is a Republic some of whose citizens, called Foresters, live in small settlements or isolated houses scattered throughout spacious woodlands. Fenn visits old family friends, Lars and Rachel, in their wooden house in the village of Thistledew whose emblem is a carven moose. Rachel is an elected mayor and magistrate. Lars cultivates a patch of land, fishes, hunts and guides occasional tourists or sportsmen. Foresters preserve ancient folkways. Forests are preserved for ecological and climatic reasons. Dwellers who did not maintain them would be replaced by robots and sophotects.

Yukonia has a scenic grandeur that the woodlands, stretching from the Rockies to the Alleghenies, lack although both are spacious, with a "...sense of freedom and life..." (p. 199) 

Cash, in a currency of ucus, still circulates so that individuals who do not draw their citizen's credit can remain undetected. Fenn does detective work to track down a fugitive which is his sole reason for going to Vernal. This one sub-plot is resolved in a short fight scene.

Nonalgorithmic, Quantum

The Fleet Of Stars, 14.

Fenn considers Kinna's small, insectoid, robot pet:

"...the algorithms that ran it could not be simple; they must be capable of learning and of flexible response to situations. There might actually be a nonalgorithmic, quantum element - which would make it technically a sophotect, though an electrophotonic system this size couldn't be smarter than, say, a dog." (p. 182)

Algorithmic "learning" is not conscious. According to this passage, two elements are required for consciousness: "nonalgorithmic" and "quantum." However, "nonalgorithmic" is merely negative. What positive property is required? "Quantum" is positive but not sufficient to imply consciousness. We are left as ever with a qualitative difference between unconsciousness and consciousness. Somehow organic sensitivity became conscious sensation. An organism that needed food began to feel hungry or one that was becoming lethally hot began to feel uncomfortably hot. Did this qualitative change in organismic responsiveness have to involve quantum mechanics? Consciousness and quantum mechanics have in common that both are mysterious. Also, quantum processes (seem to) involve an observer effect which links them to consciousness. That is as far as I can go with this question at present.

Yelling Storm

The Fleet Of Stars, 15.

Fenn stands for a long time watching a storm through the viewport of his and Wanika's cabin on the large, unsinkable, buoyant island, Waihona Lanamokupuni. When they converse, Fenn remembers that He'o's murderer, Pedro Dover, has been identified but not yet apprehended and, if caught, would merely be reformed.

He concludes:

"'Yes, I do have some months at leisure. Time for tracking Pedro Dover down.'" (p. 194)

That is the end of the dialogue and could have been the end of this chapter but Poul Anderson's readers know better than that. When a character has expressed himself thus, the elements must have their say, underlining or commenting on the human speech and, sure enough, immediately after Fenn's last sentence, the chapter itself ends with:

"The storm yelled." (ibid.)

It really never fails. 

There will be an Andersonian settling of accounts with a villain before the main plot resumes and, as part of this, we will be shown another part of the future Earth.

Meeting The Future

The Fleet Of Stars, 15.

Fenn tells Maherero, a high councillor of the Southern Coagency:

"'Nobody can forecast the future. If somebody isn't willing to meet it as it comes, he should get out of the way of those who are.'" (p. 190)

A succinct summary of the Andersonian philosophy? (Also van Rijnian etc?) See a much-quoted passage about "'...bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future," here.

Maherero sits unmoving. The accompanying music, dance and bird flight stop. Has this been a diplomatic disaster for Fenn? Then Maherero laughs and accepts the deal to work with the Lahui Kuikawa on the transformation of Deimos. The music, dance and flight resume triumphantly. 

Interactive entertainment of guests is an important custom in this polity just as human service to new arrivals is among the Lahui and archaism is in London. Some customs are contrived whereas others are alive.

Fleet stands up well as an sf traveloque.

Fenn And Maherero

The Fleet Of Stars, 15.

After Amaterasu, the Habitat, Alpha Centauri, Luna, Mars, the Pacific and London, we read about a bay on the South Atlantic.

The restless, blue, green and white-foamed ocean shines and glitters. Its cool breeze is salt-tanged. Walvis Bay stretches from Pelican Point to a high tower of homes and offices. Pleasure boats dance while robots unload freighters. Metamorphic grass, trees and flowers cover former desert. Invisible communication lines cover half a continent. 

On the roof of the tower, Fenn and Maherero converse with refreshments while watching a dance accompanied by specially bred colourful birds. The dance leader follows their conversation through sonic ear plugs and directs the dance accordingly. 

The next question is what are they talking about but we will have to return to that later.