Fantasy And SF

Poul Anderson," Fantasy in the Age of Science" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, September 1981), pp. 265-286.

Paraphrase: sf makes the scientific assumption that the universe is comprehensible whereas fantasy is free to assume "...the completely supernatural...forever unamenable to the scientific method." (p. 271) It is necessary to explain teleportation or faster-than-light space travel but not the powers of magicians or gods.

However, in quantum mechanics and in possibilities like naked singularities, science approaches the bounds of comprehensibility. Furthermore, fantasy is rooted in prehistoric traditions stemming from ancient times when human beings marveled at nature and stood in awe of the unknown. We cannot return to our earliest state but nevertheless should remember our origins.

Hugi's Mule

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

When the Saracen, Sir Carahue, had joined Holger and his companions, he:

"...added they had better acquire a mule, on which Hugi could ride with ample food supplies." (p. 113)

- and the following chapter confirms that this has been done.

Thus, I am paid back for suggesting here that the attached cover illustration was inaccurate: a price to be paid for posting while reading although I willingly pay it.

However, surely, to be fully accurate, this illustration should show Carahue now travelling alongside Holger, dwarf and swan?

In any case, that is my lot for this evening. I relax by returning to other reading that (usually) does not require me to think about posting.

Tomorrow is another day and all that.

Some Other Titles

My copy of The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, a 1982 Fontana Religious paperback, advertises some interesting other titles in its concluding pages -

Peter Abelard, a novel by Helen Waddell. (For Abelard in a short story by Poul Anderson, see: Open To Everything.)

The Religious Experience of Mankind by Ninian Smart (who was my thesis supervisor).

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections by CG Jung.

The Holy Spirit by Billy Graham (a very different approach).

Audacity To Believe and Prayer for Pilgrims by Sheila Cassidy (who was tortured in Chile; some Catholic Lancaster University students attending a religious house for a retreat found that Sheila Cassidy was staying there and she joined in their retreat).

And there are more.

I was surprised to find the title of a novel about Abelard, then to remember his Anderson connection. None of the others are directly Anderson-related but they are all of interest (I think).

This Sunday

Today, my wife and daughter have embarked on a day-long coach trip to Holy Island. Having meditated, breakfasted and blogged, I will walk by Lancaster Canal to a Hospice cafe for lunch and will then return home, again to meditate, read, blog and eat. Tomorrow evening, Zen group. Tuesday, the monthly visit to (male) Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

Reading involves noticing the multiple parallels between Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman. In Three Hearts And Three Lions, Alianora somewhere refers to Queen Mab who appears as a character in both authors' works.

OK. It is time for me to move.

Laterz.

From Anderson To Heinlein And Back

In Wars Of Religion, we began with Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions and wound up unexpectedly with Robert Heinlein's Future History, the link being wars of religion. If we had stayed with that line of thought, then we might have immediately returned to Anderson because:

Anderson modelled his first future history series, the Psychotechnic History, on Heinlein's Future History;

Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, became a larger scale Heinleinian series;

the Psychotechnic History presents a Cosmic religion, about which we are told virtually nothing, whereas the Technic History addresses religious issues in several instalments;

in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume VII, Fr Axor seeks the Universal Incarnation and the Gwydiona develop an elaborate symbolical mythology to conceal from themselves their periodic psychosis and violence.

All human life is there.

Wars Of Religion

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

The man who is described as "the Saracen" tells the disguised Holger:

"'I am a Christian like yourself. Once, true, I fought for the paynim, but the gentle and chivalrous knight who overcame me also won me to the True Faith. Though even were I still a follower of Mahound, I would not be so discourteous as not to drink your most beautiful lady's health.'" (p. 106)

(Every faith is believed to be "true," of course.)

Incredibly, there is a small minority that wants to make this an issue now. I was amazed to hear men on a demonstration in London shouting, "Christ is king!" The leader of that same small party led a demonstration against a new mosque and Islamic Centre near here. His speech included the remarks that he and his fellow patriots did not want to be informed about Islam because they already have the True Faith. He led prayers and some of his marchers carried crosses. Meanwhile, clergy from several Christian denominations were among the larger crowd which had assembled to welcome the mosque. They were denounced as heretics.

When the Cold War ended, a work colleague told me that people would soon return to fighting about religion! Society can go backwards as well as forwards. See Robert Heinlein's Future History for technological advances and an American theocracy. (And I did not know that that was where this post was going when I started it.)

Fantasy and sf are about the real world.

Knight And Vigilante

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

This is a frivolous comparison between dialogues in two works that I have reread recently.

First, when Holger and his companions ride into the city of Tarnberg, Alianora is recognized and asked questions, including:

"'Hoy, there, swan-may, what brings you hither?'

"'Who's that knight?'" (p. 98)

Secondly, when a woman nicknamed "Fever" rides on the back of the costumed crimefighter, the Vigilante's, motorcycle, her friends respond:

"Wooooo-OO!

"Hey, new boyfriend! Is he G.I.B. Fever?

"Hey! Fever! Hubba hubba!"

- and she replies:

"Yeah, I guess so...

"...if you put a paper bag over his politics..."

-Alan Moore, Vigilante: "Father's Day" IN Moore, Across The Universe (New York, 2003), pp. 73-121 AT p. 92, panels 4-5.

OK. Diametric opposites. A medieval knightly code and late twentieth century street life. That is how much our fictional heroes differ.

Uldwyr And Worlds

A conversation between Chunderban Desai and his Merseian opposite number, Uldwyr, impresses me with its future historical content. However, on searching the blog, I find that I have posted about this passage several times before! See here. I have also (just now) corrected an error. In one post, I had misnamed Uldwyr as "Ydwyr." The latter is a different character.

Maybe there is one additional point to be made. Uldwyr says:

"'So many traditions, works, mysteries - so tiny a lifespan to taste them -'"

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 3, p. 85.

Should "works" have been "worlds"?

Check another edition:

"'So many traditions, works, mysteries...'"

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return (New York, 1975), III, p. 15.

"...works..." again. But surely "worlds" would have made more sense? A very small point - but read the whole book, of course.

Werewolves

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

We are closing down for the night but first:

Holger and his companions have just entered a neighbourhood that is terrorized by a werewolf;

in a later volume, Holger will meet Valeria Matuchek whose father, Steven, is a werewolf;

we - I mean we here at Blog Central; everyone's reading experience is different - have just reread "The Hunt," a Sandman story by Neil Gaiman.

In "The Hunt," an elderly immigrant to the US tells his teenage granddaughter a story. They refer to themselves as of "the People," which means, we learn, that they are werewolves living in New York.

It all feels like one long, broad series especially since the multiverse idea easily explains away any discrepancies.

Just One Word: "Brant"

Brant whirr from rushes. I googled "brant" when I quoted it from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER FIVE, because I was unfamiliar with the word. Today we find Neil Gaiman explaining why he had named a character "Brant":

"He's 'Brant' because it's the name of a wild goose, and I liked the idea of him being a wild thing migrating across America. Also, it's one of those strange, monosyllabic American names."

-Neil Gaiman interviewed in Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 13, p. 247.

Thus, here is another, albeit minor and coincidental, Anderson-Gaiman parallel. The closer we peer, the more there is to be seen. We at Blog Central have not yet reread all the way to the end of Three Hearts... Fortunately, we are out during the day, not back at home reading. Nevertheless, the rereading continues and much of it is like reading for the first time.

"Time Travel"

"Time travel" means many things. Decades ago, a guy saw me reading what I told him was a time travel novel and he thought that it must be about a group of people who had travelled into a past period and then encountered some difficulties in returning to their present! (He must have go that from somewhere.) "All" time travel books were like this... I tried to explain the concept of causality violation which apparently he had never heard of. 

Some Kinds of "Time Travel"

(i) There is a curious sub-sub-genre of juvenile fantasy novels by English women writers whose protagonists are transported back and forth between their present and a particular past period. (See The Time Travel Archives.)

(ii) Circular causality paradox narratives, perfected by Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson.

(iii) Narratives about time travelling organizations. The only one that I know of that makes any sense, although it remains extremely paradoxical, is Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series.

(iv) Personal relationships of time travellers:

Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 

(v) Travellers exploring the future:

The Time Machine by HG Wells

"Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson

"Welcome" by Anderson

"Time Heals" by Anderson

(vi) Characters transported into a past period when they either make some changes or fail to:

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp

Bring The Jubilee by Ward Moore

"The Man Who Came Early" by Anderson

"The Little Monster" by Anderson

and a current series -

Make The Darkness Light by SM Stirling

I. To Turn The Tide

II. The Winds Of Fate

III. TBA

Stirling's series title seems to follow from de Camp's novel title. Stirling's characters are time travellers by design, not by accident. They have read the sf. They know what to take with them into the past and how to conduct themselves then - insofar as anyone can. This is not Anderson's Time Patrol. These are travellers who do change history for the better - so far.

Forward march.

The Experience Of Reading

Everyone's experience of reading must be unique. 

A Conversation Half Way Through Secondary School

A Friend: How many books have you read?

Me: How could I possibly know how many books I have read?

Him: I know how many books I have read.

Me: How Many?

Him: Two.

The member of staff in charge of academic development become concerned that not enough general reading was being done so he required that each pupil submit a monthly report on a book that they had read that month. Some of us enjoyed writing a summary of a book that we had enjoyed reading not necessarily that month - I submitted a second or third draft - whereas others had to find a book to read, asked teachers for advice and disliked whatever book they "had to" write about. Ye gods!

Most of my leisure reading was sf. Trying to reread some of those books now, I realize that what I wanted then was the sf trappings. It was sufficient for me if a novel was about people travelling through space and colonizing other planets and so on. Now that would be nowhere near enough. I have been unable to reread some of those old books to their conclusions.

CS Lewis, who became a Professor of Literature, wrote somewhere that it was possible to read all the way through English literature - not every work, of course, but nevertheless all the major poems, plays and novels. I am nowhere near doing that and would not want to try. Apparently, Neil Gaiman read everything in the juvenile section of his local Public Library, then started reading through everything, starting from A, in the adult section - but preferred fantasy. In his place, I would have sought out the fantasy, not read everything starting from A.

The morals of this story:

I still read continually but now also blog about it;

I do a lot of rereading of certain favoured authors;

Poul Anderson gives us all that sf stuff - space travel, extraterrestrial colonization etc - but also a lot more than that and that makes him endlessly rereadable.

(Back from the meeting with enough time to add one more post.)

OROSZLANSZIV And Reading

Apparently "Oroszlansziv" means "Lionheart" which makes it an inaccurate translation of "Three Hearts and Three Lions." (I think.) But it is an interesting alternative cover.

I am drafting a slightly longer post on the experience of reading in general and on how this relates to Poul Anderson in particular. However, having returned home from the gym, I must now go out to a meeting so that post will probably be deferred until tomorrow.

There is no end in sight. 

I also must catch up with recent novels by SM Stirling whom this blog recognizes as a worthy successor of Poul Anderson as well as a writer in his own right. But that is one of a number of other stories.

Good evening or good night.

Trois Coeurs, Trois Lions; Trzy serca i tryz lwy; Tre cuori e tre leoni; Tres Corazones Y Tres Leones; Tri srdce, tri lvi

It is late here so let's just appreciate some translated titles and their covers.

How Much Rationalization?

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWELVE.

(An inaccurate cover illustration, unless the dwarf gets a donkey later in the novel. (I post as I reread and can't remember everything.)) (Addendum: See here.)

A giant cannot just be a very big man with normal human bodily proportions:

"...the creature was humanoid, though grotesquely squat and short-legged in proportion to height. Well, [Holger's] thought flashed, even if the law of proportion doesn't work quite the same here as at home, he needs enough cross section to bear his weight." (pp. 73-74)

More scientific rationalization. 

See:

Rules, Riddles And Radioactivity

If all the fantasy ideas are scientifically rationalized, then the narrative becomes sf. But there are some genuinely supernatural agencies in the Carolingian. Holger thinks so. He converts to Catholicism. Does the force that unites the multiverse have a personal aspect in some universes but an impersonal one in others? 

Sunlight

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWELVE.

If I post about some obvious point in a text by Poul Anderson, then there is a good chance that I have posted about it before. However, there remain many unobvious points. Some legendary supernatural beings are vulnerable to sunlight so what would it feel like for them to be caught in it?

"As the first beams touched him, Balamorg screamed. Holger had never heard such agony before... He writhed and changed, gruesomely." (p. 79)

CS Lewis dreams:

"'The morning! The morning!' I cried, 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.' But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head."

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), pp. 117-118.

Then he woke up.

(Those were imaginative accounts of the fates of a giant and a ghost.)

Coventry

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWELVE.

Alianora:

"'As evil waxes, the very man who stand for good will in their fear use ever worse means o' fighting, and therefore give evil a free beachhead.'

"Holger thought of his own world, where Coventry had been avenged upon Cologne, and nodded." (pp. 71-72)

But people can create symbols for completely contradictory circumstances. St Paul's Cathedral surviving the Blitz boosted morale and symbolized proud resistance whereas Coventry Cathedral destroyed but later rebuilt came to symbolize peace and reconciliation. In Britain, the Dunkirk evacuation symbolizes not defeat and retreat but rescue and survival - waxing evil transfigured.

The Unicorn

Three Hearts And Three Lions.

I am back home from the Gregson. It is getting late. I am not going to research this post, just write from memory. 

Alianora rides a unicorn. Holger does not understand her affinity with it. I think that readers are supposed to understand that virgins have an affinity with unicorns?

In Larry Niven's The Flight Of The Horse, a male character describes a female character who has not come on-stage yet as a "frigid bitch." When this young woman does come on-stage, she is a cheerful and sympathetic character - and has an affinity with a unicorn.

When Holger and Morgan le Fay embrace, Alianora approaches on her unicorn which throws her and bolts, never to return! The two women insult each other like fishwives and Holger must choose between them. He does not side with Chaos.

There. That is a short post before returning to late night other reading. There is always something to write about although it is never predictable what it is going to be.

Valduma

We find that we have compared the legendary Morgan le Fay and the Andersonian villainess, Raor, twice.

See:

Raor And Morgan Le Fay

Morgan Le Fay And Raor

An earlier Andersonian villainess named Valduma is also of their ilk.

See:

Whimpering Wind, Different Species And Primeval Chaos

Wildness And Domesticity

Sargasso: Some Details

Ambiguity

Jansky, Valduma And Morzach

Wildness And Un-Men

Freedom And Chaos

Rereading "Sargasso of Lost Starships" would probably give us some appropriate quotation from Valduma. However, I am on my way out to the Gregson which is why I have resorted to a few blog links. And I am amazed at how much completely forgotten information is to be found in earlier posts.

Morgan Le Fay And Raor

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Queen Morgan le Fay tries to win Holger for Chaos:

"'What is there about dull Law that drives you to defend it?...

"'...the mirth and thunder and blazing stars of Chaos would be yours...

"'You could hurl suns and shape worlds if you chose!'" (p. 68)

She sounds like Raor of the Exaltationists:

"'We would have made [the universe] what we chose, and unmade it and remade it, and stormed the stars as we warred for possession, with an entire reality the funeral pyre of each who fell and entire histories the funeral games, until the last god reigned alone.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART TWO, 209 B. C., p. 118.

The former reminded me of the latter.

It is time to eat and drink something and to say good night until tomorrow.

Holger Philosophizes

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

"The symmetry was suggestive. In Holger's home world, physical forces were strong and well understood, mental-magical forces weak and unmanageable. In this universe the opposite held true. Both worlds were, in some obscure way, one; the endless struggle between Law and Chaos had reached a simultaneous climax in them. As for the force which made them so parallel, the ultimate oneness itself, he supposed he would have to break down and call it God. But he lacked a theological bent of mind. He'd rather stick to what he had directly observed, and to immediate practical problems. Such as his own reason for being here." (pp. 66-67)

No, he does not have to call ultimate oneness "God." 

See:

Words And The Word II

The One

Metaphor And Myth

Two propositions seem intuitively valid: first, that all is one; secondly, that change occurs because opposed forces interact. However, I suggest that energy and inertia are more fundamental than Law and Chaos - and they are definitely preconscious. 

See:

Energy And Inertia

Energy And Inertia

Ultimate Social And Cosmic Developments

Philosophy

Philosophy II

How to deal with a dragon: throw water in its mouth. (CHAPTER TEN.)

Inspired By MAGIC, INC.

(i) In the introduction to his collection, Operation Chaos, Poul Anderson writes that Robert Heinlein's Magic, Inc. is set in a world where magic not only works but also is treated matter-of-factly as a set of technologies but that Heinlein did not develop all the possibilities of this idea so Anderson himself developed some further possibilities in his Operation... series.

(ii) Anderson adds that Harry Turtledove has also presented a treatment of the same idea.

(iii) "The double-page spread on pages 12 and 13, by the way, is a direct steal from Robert Heinlein's novel Magic Incorporated."

-Neil Gaiman discussing The Sandman, issue 4, in Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 3, p. 35.

That double-page spread depicts a gathering of all the demons in Hell.

We keep finding Anderson-Gaiman parallels: two great imaginative writers in different media: verbal and visual-verbal.

Again The Two Inns

In Poul Anderson's "Losers' Night," people from different historical periods converse in the Old Phoenix.

In Anderson's "House Rule" and A Midsummer Tempest, people from different histories converse in the Old Phoenix.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End, people from different histories tell stories in the Inn of the Worlds' End. Thus, the Worlds' End sequences are both a framing device and an additional story.

In A Midsummer Tempest, the Old Phoenix is almost a framing device although it appears in the middle and at the end instead of at the beginning and the end.

Both series could have been extended indefinitely, the Old Phoenix as short stories, Worlds' End as very high quality monthly comic books, with some of the same historical characters visiting both.

Happy June.