The idea of a primordial, pre-cosmic, void connects mythology and science - and preeminently so in Poul Anderson's works, as the previous blog posts demonstrate.
In our current rereading, Svoboda and Coffin are still climbing down that Cleft but we will accompany them no further tonight. I will shortly switch on the TV to learn whether - in our timeline - World War III has started yet.
("pov" = point of view.)
I said before that Svoboda remains the viewpoint character in section 5. Careful reading confirms this. A single sentence:
"Svoboda was glad to oblige." (p. 126)
- is ambiguous. It could mean either that Svoboda felt glad (Svoboda's pov) or that he was visibly glad and obliging as observed by his companion (Coffin's pov). However, the immediately preceding sentence is:
"Coffin seemed eager to talk impersonally." (ibid.)
Here we are not told directly what Coffin wanted (Coffin's pov) but what he seemed (to someone else) to want (Svoboda's pov). And this confirms that "Svoboda was glad..." is also Svoboda's pov.
A friend who reads a lot of fiction told me that he never notices points of view but surely he must be aware of them without realizing that he is?
All of this matters. When two people, A and B, disagree and argue about what happened during an incident at which both were present, they can be insufficiently aware of the distinctions between (i) A's pov, (ii) B's pov and (iii) the total event which is more complex than either person's perceptions. Communication can fail completely. How often does this happen?
Physical features of Coffin's and Svoboda's descent into the Cleft are wind, water and lifelessness:
quick, violent, booming winds dash the rising, roiling fog against the men but do not disperse it;
there are trickles, rivulets, springs and waterfalls but no plants.
Regular Anderson readers expect the wind but should also notice the other features!
When Svoboda says something that his companion does not appreciate:
"Coffin clamped his jaws. There was stillness except for the rush and whistle of wind, the dripping and chuckling of water. When he had himself under control, he said in a flat voice, 'Why?...'" (p. 124)
As ever, wind underlines a conversational silence although this time it is accompanied by water. Coffin getting himself under control might read as though the narrative point of view has shifted to him but it has not. Coffin's effort at self-control is visible to Svoboda who remains the viewpoint character of this section. I prefer Svoboda's perspective to Coffin's but that is my judgement speaking. Poul Anderson shows us very different characters for us to assess or argue about.
At the end of section 4, Joshua Coffin:
longs to be back in space;
experiences burning eyes;
tries to stand but lacks will and strength;
feels that nothing matters;
overhears a conversation behind a closed door;
stands on the second attempt;
goes to a window and stares out;
hates Rustum;
despises Jan Svoboda;
feels guilt;
is baffled by Svoboda's merriment with his accuser, Wolfe.
Thus, Coffin is the viewpoint character of this passage.
The opening paragraph of section 5 describes:
"The east side of the tableland called High America..." (p. 12)
At the end of the second paragraph, Svoboda looks with awe. Thus, we are now in the viewpoint of the man whom Coffin had despised even though the two men are now walking together down into the Cleft that splits the cliffs. Coffin's voice is loud and ugly to Svoboda. This happens all the time. We perceive others who perceive us. However, in real life, each of us is directly acquainted with only one viewpoint, his own, whereas, in fiction, the omniscient narrator can show us Coffin's viewpoint in section 4 and Svoboda's in section 5. Novelists have been developing these techniques since the seventeenth century.
What details have we already noted? See Some Details On Rustum. (I was bound to have noticed Joshua Coffin's reference to Lazarus.)
Although Jan Svoboda thinks of the airbus that he flies as "...this old rattletrap...," (p. 97) it and others like it are:
"...still so scarce and expensive as to be publicly owned..." (p. 100)
Svoboda, an engineer on Earth, is an iron miner on Rustum and has built his house beside the line that carries ore from his pit to the steel mill. In his garden, a phoenix nest lit by luminous fungi is "...like a goblin lantern." (p. 114). I am picking out colourful or notable details but there is much more where this came from.
"The wind, slow and heavy, rustled withering leaves with a sound which was not like October in New England, nor like anything Earth had ever heard." (ibid.)
Poul Anderson always tells us what the wind is doing: "...slow and heavy..." matches the mental states of his characters at this stage of the narrative. Although this wind is not October in New England, merely mentioning this does evoke October in New England! (Ray Bradbury, very unlike Anderson, has an evocative title, The October Country.)
There is more pathetic fallacy with the wind:
"The wind ruffled a loose lock of Mother's hair and made the trees sigh around her voice. She talked low and carefully..." (p. 103)
Appropriately, this wind, not heavy, makes the trees sigh around Mrs Coffin's low voice. Even casual readers must be subliminally affected by Anderson's fully integrated texts.
For this universe that was to be used by other authors, Asimov specified five intelligent extra-solar species:
Also in Poul Anderson's Technic History and first published in an anthology of original stories:
"The Dipteroid Phenomenon" IN Four For The Future, ed., Harry Harrison, 1969.
In the Technic History, we know "The Dipteroid Phenomenon" as "The Sharing of Flesh."
Four authors each wrote two stories for Four For The Future:
Anderson's other story, "High Treason," is non-series;
James Blish's first story in this anthology, "A Hero's Life," was later expanded as "A Style in Treason" and incorporated into his Haertel Scholium, a non-linear future historical sequence;
although Brian Aldiss never wrote series, he made his second story a sequel to the first;
Harry Harrison was not only the editor but also one of the authors.
Of course, Anderson contributed to other original anthologies covering:
On Rustum:
Jan Svoboda, who had assaulted his son's teacher back on Earth, flies the school bus;
other children bully Danny Coffin because he is the first exogene pupil;
most native life is inedible and the ecology to support Terrestrial crops is not yet firmly established so most colonists are isolated farmers, needing air transport provided by people like Svoboda who have other professions;
Danny's foster mother, Teresa, also has four natural children of pre-school age and is pregnant again;
Svoboda's daughter, Jocelyn, will soon marry Colin Lochaber;
Jan and Judith Svoboda have Jocelyn and David, both born on Earth, and Anton born on Rustum and have adopted the exogene Gail and have lost one child;
there has been high infant mortality, for example during the Year of Sickness;
Teresa will bring cookies for the wedding.
Life continues on Rustum.
When Buddhists practice "just sitting" meditation, they enter the presence of that which theistic contemplatives call "God." Practitioners of the Abrahamic faiths identify ultimate reality with the deity that is described or "revealed" in their scriptures whereas many - although not all - contemplatives in other traditions think that personification of reality is anthropomorphic. But we can meditate in any case. When some of us say that we must sit with whatever comes up in meditation, theists say that God wants us to sit with whatever comes up: same practice, different understanding.
I am using these Andersonian characters as a hook to hang one of my personal hobbyhorses on but I think that it is a legitimate hobbyhorse nevertheless. We can find much in Anderson's works.
In Poul Anderson's works, the novelistic interactions, so to call them, are more closely incorporated into the sf:
Christopher Holm joins an Ythrian choth and becomes estranged from his father even though the latter identifies with the Domain of Ythri and speaks of "deathpride" when confronting a Terran;
van Rijn and Falkayn clash over Mirkheim;
Aycharaych appeals to Flandry to help him to preserve Chereion;
Commonalty Ranger Daven Laure learns that he cannot marry a Kirkasanter...
New blog readers might not understand many of these references. However, explanations can be found by searching this blog and also by reading Poul Anderson's works which the blog urges all its readers to do.
A school bus on Rustum is a flying vehicle. When it takes off, its driver, Jan Svoboda, sees:
"Lodestar" by Poul Anderson, intended when written to be the last Nicholas van Rijn story although Anderson subsequently added Mirkheim;
"Epilog" by Clifford Simak, one last City story, included in later editions of City;
an addition by Isaac Asimov to his very obscure "Thiotimoline" series.
For these and other contents, see the above link. I have not checked whether any of the other stories are additions to series by their authors.
"Lodestar" is both a van Rijn story and an Ythrian story. Of Anderson's seven Ythrian instalments, the first, "Wings of Victory," was published in 1972 and the rest in 1973: a rare burst of creativity.
In my estimation, "Lodestar" has to be the jewel in the crown of the Astounding Memorial anthology although it is interesting to learn that there are at least two other series stories.
"Lodestar":
signals the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League;
introduces van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, who will marry David Falkayn;
shows the dramatic confrontation between van Rijn and Falkayn and also the generation gap between van Rijn and Coya;
brings together van Rijn and his trader team (including Falkayn) and the Ythrians;
is included in that ultimate future history collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate;
presents a brief sense of life and work in the Solar Commonwealth through Coya;
refers back to the Satan affair and became the precursor of Mirkheim.
What's not to like?
This post is an explanation and partial apology but any departure from the blog will only be temporary.
Laterz.
A guy that I knew fell from the roof of his cottage: multiple fractures, both legs; never fully recovered. If he had fallen head first, then he would not have recovered, period.
Jan Svoboda reflects that a man who fell off a roof on Earth might just have broken a leg. However, Rustum has 1.25 gravity. A man whom Svoboda sees fall off a roof has a smashed pelvis and his ribs driven into his lungs.
Colonists face hardship. Every terrestroid planet is different and its environment is not the one that human beings have evolved in and for. Poul Anderson always makes it clear that extra-solar planetary surfaces are not just stage-sets where human beings can land and carry on business as usual which is the impression that we get of all the colonized planets in Asimov's Galactic Empire.
I did not set out to take a side-swipe at Asimov but I did it anyway.
My friend from the Birmingham Buddhist Centre should arrive for a visit soon and I have some videos to watch about current events. (Anderson's characters have their crises and we have ours.)
This line of thought has been occasioned by reading an sf work not by Poul Anderson but by Clifford Simak. However, there is an underlying issue here that Anderson gets right but that most people most of the time get wrong and the people who get it wrong include not only Simak but also HG Wells and James Blish! - so let's stay with the line of thought for a while. (N.B.: Neither Wells nor Blish confuses the nature of time as much as Simak.)
Should we devote some time to addressing glaring errors about the nature of time in works by other sf authors? Not too much time.
I try to avoid lengthy quotations but sometimes they are unavoidable:
"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is to-morrow and to-morrow is the past.
There are:
This is yet another story built around:
a seemingly insurmountable technical problem;
what I have come to call an Andersonian moment of realization - in this case, one character leaps up, startling another, when he suddenly realizes what the solution must be;
a later disclosure of the solution to the readers;
meanwhile, a human problem that must also be recognized and overcome before the technical solution can be implemented.
However, since, in this case, both the technical problem and its solution are even more complicated than usual, I will not attempt to summarize them here but instead will advise blog readers to read or reread the story - which I always do anyway.
Meanwhile, in parallel reading, in the "FIRST TALE" in Clifford Simak's City, rapid transportation for commuting, replacement of agriculture by hydroponics and new easy building techniques enable populations to move to the countryside, making cities redundant. In Poul Anderson's The Peregrine, a similar situation is described as making the entire Earth a single city.
(If City continues to display such parallels, then I might continue to reread it.)
"...echoes down long resonant passageways. It was like being swallowed alive by some giant fish, he thought, and hearing its metabolism close in. He strangled on the wish to escape." (p. 82)
Again the paradox of travel through infinite space contrasted with enclosure. However, this time, the image is not of a metal coffin but of a giant fish which can only recall Jonah - and Anderson, writing this, must have thought of Jonah?
Jonah refused to travel to the ends of the Earth because he did not accept that the Word of God should be taken to foreigners. Svoboda and his companions have had to travel away from Earth because of the intolerance of its current rulers. Maybe there is some common message there or maybe I just see messages where they aren't?
But it is time for us to return to Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited which has given me a new insight into the potential depth of state corruption. Jan Svoboda dislikes what a state school is teaching his son so he goes and beats up his son's teacher, Mr. Tse, and is arrested. When Svoboda's fellow philosophical dissident, Theron Wolfe, intervenes, a respectful policeman not only apologizes for the mistake of arresting the son of a Federation Commissioner but also asks Wolfe, a civilian:
"'Do you wish to file any charges against the Tse person?... We'll take care of him, sir.'" (p. 31)
Tse, beaten up for doing his job, might now be "taken care of" by the police! Fortunately, Wolfe wants his friend out of police custody but not to perpetrate any further injustice. But just think of the attitude of that policeman! And then think about how often such an attitude is reproduced on Earth Real.
Svoboda, Wolfe and their fellow Constitutionalists leave Sol.
We imagine that we are living in the Chaos of Anderson's Technic History although without believing that this is going to be followed either by a Solar Commonwealth or by a hyperdrive. But how will we, in our timeline, get through our version of the Chaos? At what point will the two timelines diverge?
Wisdom from Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today:
US politics - everything has already been said about this so now we can only wait and see;
despite all the current escalation, no one wants to start throwing nukes around because of the uncontrollable consequences.
We must hope that that second point, which has held since 1945, remains valid. Of course, Anderson created fictional futures both with and without nuclear wars. For every conceivable option, read Anderson.
Last night, unable to sleep, I wanted to sit up and read but not to return to the prose text of Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited. I needed a visual medium but not TV, something to see and read on a page, not to see and hear on a screen. The perfect answer was Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid (1988-1989) in three volumes which, fortunately, was easily to hand on a bookshelf.
Gaiman does not write sf but we need a break from sf which I also find in contemporary thrillers by Stieg Larsson. Apart from stunning art by Dave McKean, Gaiman's script gives us the kind of texture that we find in Anderson's prose texts, e.g., skillful deployment of already existing characters and settings:
the "Principle" of a criminal organization turns out to be Mr. Lex Luthor;
a train departs to Gotham City...
After visiting Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today, we will return to Orbit Unlimited this evening.
Sometimes we appreciate a complicated passage in a work by Poul Anderson by summarizing it in a blog post but this passage is extra complicated so please bear with us.
The fleet of spaceships enters planetary orbit at a safe distance from the planet, Rustum. Winged, thermally propelled ferries take some of the crew and all of the colonists to High America, the habitable plateau on Rustum. Some of the crew on the planet refine reaction mass for the return journey while the others help the colonists to get settled.
To unload cargo, each ship in turn is brought to a lower orbit and therefore spirals down through a radiation belt in the planetary magnetic field. To save time, colonist Jan Svoboda, ferried back up, begins preparing cargo for discharge in the flag ship, the Ranger, while it is still descending. The autopilot gives a few seconds of 5G blast to avoid an approaching meteorite just as Svoboda has unslung an object massing more than a ton. Crashing through a deck and smashing a hole in the engine room wall, the object activates the fail safe system of the nuclear plant, thus stopping fusion reaction. The radiation screen goes off and it becomes immediately necessary to:
"'Abandon ship!'" (p. 71)
Maybe that was easier than I had expected.
Tomorrow, once more: a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. That means hours away from the computer but probably something worth reporting later.
I apologize for brevity but I am suddenly in a rush. Laterz.
(Meanwhile, think about North Americas and Federations.)
In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the spaceship Astra has only just set out towards Alpha Centauri.
In Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, there are four parts:
at the end of part one, it has been decided that a dissident group will be exiled to an extra-solar planet, Rustum;
in part two, the group is in interstellar space and must decide whether to turn back;
in part three, they are in orbit around Rustum;
in part four, they are finally settling the surface of Rustum.
In later volumes, there are four more stories set on Rustum and a ninth set on a second extra-solar planet, Roland, in the same timeline.
A spaceman returns to Earth to find an idol where a church had been. To him, the idol is an abomination. To some of us, the church and the idol are alternative approaches to the eternal.
I read about a Hindu religious leader, name forgotten, who, as a child, was taken to a Shiva temple where he saw a mouse eating food offered to the deity. He thought, "This god cannot even protect his offering from a mouse," and became an iconoclast, like the Hebrew prophets, whereas the normative Hindu vision is of God in the idol, the food, the mouse and the congregation.
See:
Breakfast post before real world activities.
There is a technical problem in the not-yet-launched interstellar spaceship, Astra.
While his friend is in mid-sentence, the first person narrator, Winston Sanders, starts:
"The drink leaped from my hand and splashed across my lap." (p. 244)
Sanders' first moment of realization: the problem might be not technical but human, indeed criminal.
Second moment:
Poul Anderson has a spaceship named the Astra. James Blish has a spaceship named the Per Aspera.
That might not look like much of a post but a certain amount of research went into it. I remembered (so I thought) recently rereading a Blish text about the Per Aspera so I spent quite a while looking through The Seedling Stars before I thought instead to look in They Shall Have Stars and there it was.
Stars and Mars are the two commonest words in sf titles, I think. I have somewhere listed the Anderson and Blish titles with Stars in them but tonight I leave that as an exercise for blog readers or you could google their bibliographies.
I will be elsewhere for a while early tomorrow.
(Mostly) different characters in each story; a team of continuing characters in the Prologue, six Interludes and Epilogue.
"Say It With Flowers" is set during the war of asterite independence.
"Ramble With A Gamblin' Man" recounts one remaining territorial adjustment after the war.
"Sunjammer" shows that (i) resentments persist after a war but also that (ii) people move on and can view events from different perspectives. Not all Earthmen are North Americans... And so on.
Only one more story and the Epilogue to reread. There is no sequel about extrasolar colonization but there are other works by Poul Anderson on that theme.
The usual range of extracurricular activities looms ahead this coming week. Rereading continues in the gaps...
"Sunjammer," like "Que Donn'rez Vous?" before it, is a highly technical story. The single sf premise, apart from the gyrogravitics which are basic to the entire series, is isonitrate.
Several characters race against time to prevent a disaster. By now, we know in advance that it is only a matter of time before one of these characters has an Andersonian moment of realization and devises a quicker and more economical solution. Sure enough, Golescu stops speaking in mid-sentence:
Fictions refer to earlier fictions. References accumulate. Many works are remembered although many more are forgotten. We all know Sherlock Holmes but not Cyril Saunders. (In fact, we recognize Holmes even when he appears unnamed in Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol.")
Here is a beautiful literary reference:
Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, which features Ythrians, is what Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune series should have been: a detailed history of interstellar civilizations with a vast cast covering multiple periods. What matters is the details of personal lives in planetary environments, not political manipulations by powerful cliques. James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume III, Earthman, Come Home, shows us the Mayor and City Manager but not the population of New-York-in-flight but Blish - partly - made up for this in the later-written Volume II, A Life For The Stars.
Cities In Flight, like Robert Heinlein's Future History, would have matched the Technic History if lengthened whereas the Foundation series and the Dune series would have needed total rewrites. Thus, this blog ranks sf works.
Blish's major disadvantage vis a vis Anderson is a much smaller output.
"'The equipment in orbit, man! There're a couple of hundred assorted devices near Earth these days.'" (p. 199)
There are 16,400 active satellites today.
No sf writer predicted our future in 2026 with an International Space Station, 16,400 satellites, some unmanned interplanetary probes and massive new knowledge about exo-planets. What is a plausible extrapolation from our 2026? One without sf cliches? I do not have the slightest idea. Posts will be sparse tomoz because of a coach trip.
Characters express opinions which are not necessarily those of the author but sometimes are. I have just had that by now familiar experience of thinking that Don Bell had said something derogatory about the name of the Social Justice Party, then rereading dialogues in "Rambles With A Gamblin' Man" and not finding the derogatory remark. Maybe someone else will find it or it will come to light.
The following story, "Sunjammer," contains two characters' opinions that might be said to balance each other.
Sam Storrs:
"There isn't a government of any importance on Earth these days that isn't based on some version of 'social justice.' So of course independent thinking, conscientiousness, ordinary competence have gone by the board." (p. 191)
Social justice is incompatible with independent thinking, conscientiousness and competence? We know that there are people who think like this so it is an authentic opinion.
Edward West:
"That's another thing I don't like about the Republic. They can brag as much as they want about free enterprise, but it still amounts to the rawest, most cold-blooded kind of capitalism. Maybe the welfare states on Earth have gotten stuffy and overbureaucratized - nevertheless, we don't let the devil take the hindmost!" (p. 195)
A Brit thinking "gotten"? Well, this is the future. But a nineteenth century Englishman says it in "Time Patrol."
Poul Anderson's attitude to the asterites is generally positive so it is good to read another perspective. People always compare societies, in this case, the Republic versus the welfare states. Why compare? Assess each in its own terms. Both address survival but in very different environments.
Tomorrow: a coach trip to Southport Flower Show.
This story begins and ends with two men playing chess.
