Poul Anderson Appreciation

Still on the Nile - not yet out at sea - Thoas' crew, led by the wrathful Cyprian, Megacles, begins to mutiny:

"They stirred uneasily on the benches, growling, reaching for the knives at their belts, and some glared at Thoas and some at Megacles." (p. 142)

Ok. What do the Andersonian elements do on such an occasion? In the very next sentence:

"The sun wavered in its veil of heat, and the wind mounted, and the ship drifted idly on the river." (ibid.)

The ship drifts because the men have stopped rowing and the wind mounts as their hostility does. We can usually count on a one-to-one correspondence between wind and human activity. There follows another Andersonian fight scene, the second in this story, although this one we are not going to summarize here! (Read it, though.)

Can Anyone Help With This?

See Krishna.

On this blog, we quite often link to earlier posts on the same blog. When we do, we frequently find minor errors requiring correction, e.g., a name misspelt etc. In the post linked above, we have quoted from SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers but have omitted the page reference. My copy of this novel encompasses 458 pages of text. I might reread them all anyway - not a bad idea - but, meanwhile, does any other reader out there know the page reference for Athelstane King's reflection on the god Krishna?

The Peshawar Lancers and Conquistador are my two favourite SM Stirling novels, each conveying a sense of adventure on a new (to us) parallel Earth. These works are culminating peaks of an alternative history tradition that also includes both HG Wells and Poul Anderson. What's not to like?

And, For The Third Time...

Somewhere in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting Of The Snark: If a man says something three times, then it is true! (This is not a serious suggestion but let's just stay with it for a while...)

The opinions of a character are not necessarily those of the author but sometimes they are, sometimes it is reasonably clear that they are and they definitely are when the author himself expresses that same opinion elsewhere. Thus -

Max Abrams (a character):

"'I say [Aknhaton's pacifism] stinks.'"

-see here.

Thoas (a character):

"'Cities stood ablaze for want of the troops [Akhnaton] could have sent.'"

-see here.

Poul Anderson (the author):

"Sometimes we are disillusioned, of course. Akhnaton, the Egyptian Pharaoh who preached monotheism, turns out to have been a dreadful wimp and a disaster to his country..."

-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, November 1984), pp. 182-206 AT p. 201.

We remember a favourable reference to the monotheist Pharaoh in a book by CS Lewis, a man strong on theology, less so on politics.

Pirate Of Space

Résumé :

Planète lointaine, la Nouvelle-Europe est l'objet d'une guerre avec les Alérioniens, un peuple extraterrestre qui y a massacré de nombreux colons humains. Parmi les survivants, certains ont choisi de prendre les armes et de résister à l'envahisseur. Néanmoins, la Fédération mondiale est disposée au dialogue... voire à l'abdication de ses revendications sur Nouvelle-Europe, quitte à laisser ses derniers habitants aux mains des Alérioniens.
Cela, Gunnar Heim, ancien soldat désormais à la tête d'une puissante compagnie, ne peut l'accepter. Comme le dit le proverbe, on n'est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même : Gunnar obtient du gouvernement les autorisations nécessaires pour affréter un astronef, le Star Fox II, et guerroyer contre l'ennemi.
Face à lui se dresse Cynbe ru Taren, maître de guerre d'Alériona, formé aux méthodes de la pensée humaine au point de s'aliéner sa propre race. Tout au long du roman, Heim et Cynbe développeront un respect mutuel pour leurs compétences respectives. L'issue finale du conflit n'en sera que plus tragique...
Roman d'aventure mené tambour battant, Corsaire de l'espace est un space opera questionnant les limites de la paix comme celles de la guerre...

-copied from here.

How good is your French, anyone?

I am having breakfast before going out and did not intend to post but found Corsaire De L'Espace online.

Tuesday, 29 September 2026

Thoas, Abrams And Christie On Akhnaton

Thoas criticizes Akhnaton:

"'Rather than fail in his love for all mankind, he let those men who loved him be hacked down and their wives and children be sold into slavery. Cities stood ablaze for want of the troops he could have sent. But no, he loved everyone and Aton forbade killing.'" (p. 139)

So Thoas agrees with Dominic Flandry's mentor, Max Abrams. See Pacifism And Reformism.

Abrams says that we have a duty to act and thus connects with SM Stirling's Athelstane King. See Krishna.

We find that Agatha Christie has inserted herself again. See Akhnaton.

That is enough for this evening but the connection between Thoas and Abrams was a good one.

Philosophy On The Nile II

Death is an issue in religion, philosophy and detective fiction.

Thoas to Ankhsenamen:

"'...you Egyptians think too much about the next life. You should cling to this one and enjoy it as best you can and forget about the rest.'" (pp. 133-134)

Enjoy, yes. Forget? Explore everything beyond our lives including any alleged evidence for survival. Genuine objective research into the paranormal is almost impossible in the present climate! The Society for Psychical Research did a good job on the deceased CS Lewis' appearance to JB Phillips. (Mrs Phillips confirmed that her husband spoke as if conversing with someone but also that she herself neither saw nor heard Lewis.)

One of the worst features of religion is Christians gloating at the supposed fates of unbelievers and even of heretics in the hereafter. Milton did it in Paradise Lost. An American Evangelical told me online that she would love to see my face on the Day of Judgement... Right. Let's all keep trying to find the truth for ourselves. If the ultimate reality is after all a person, then He or She will sort everything out.

Philosophy On The Nile

Thoas is alone on deck on the Nile:

false dawn

moonset

darkness

vaulting sky

wheeling stars

unseen banks

glimmering fires

gleaming river

lapping wavelets

cool, wet, low, sad, murmuring wind

howling dogs or jackals

slapping crocodiles

splashing hippopotami

sleeping men

dream whimpering

Ankhsenamen joins him and says in part:

"'...I don't know what to believe. Was Amen or Aton the false god, or were all gods a lie and this life a brief meaningless accident...'" (p. 133)

How the question is put is culturally conditioned. We do not now speak about Amen or Aton but the names do not matter. Gods are lies when used to oppress but not when they delight or enlighten. Life is a brief accident but not meaningless. It alone bestows meaning.

Thoas says that he has:

"'...heard nothing from the lips of any who have themselves died. So I will wait and see.'" (ibid.)

Or not see.

Wind And The Crew

One factor in whether Thoas' ship can escape to Cyprus is:

"'...whether we get a wind or not.'" (p. 130)

Egyptian slaves can outrow Thoas' mixed crew but, with a good breeze or in the open sea, the latter can outrun the former.

Consequently, we are reassured when the following narrative passage opens with:

"Toward morning the breeze stiffened to a murmuring wind that filled the sail, and Thoas let his weary oarsmen sleep." (p. 131)

Poul Anderson's winds nearly always mean something. This wind murmurs, so it maybe comments on the action, but it does not roar or threaten and might confirm their escape.

That mixed crew - described as barbarians, as port sweepings and as "...a mixed and ragged band..." (p. 127):

Syrians

Cretans

Cyprians

Nubians

Phoenicians

indescribables

robbers

paupers

runaway slaves

- all armed with edged metal.

Thoas might not be safe captaining them.

An Acknowledgement And A Contrast

Before we return to our usual topic of Poul Anderson, let me record that I have received an acknowledgement from British author, Alan Moore, although it was not addressed just to me. At the end of three pages of ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

"And thanks to the tiny percentage of you readers who have read to the end of these acknowledgements. To be honest I usually skip them, so your efforts are truly appreciated.

"Alan Moore

"Northampton

"January, 2022"

-Alan Moore, Illuminations (London, 2023), p. 456.

Back to "Son of the Sword":

Unusually, Thoas has the same memory twice in the space of a few pages:

"He thought of the timber hall that was his, that his father had built in the wild hills of Cyprus, and of the windy trees and the long slope of mountain down to the sea, salt air and anchored ships and gulls flying overhead." (pp. 116-117)

"Thoas remembered again the great draughty hall on the heights of Cyprus and the far blue sea and sunlight streaming down windy slopes to shatter in a million pieces on its waves." (p. 126)

Deja vu. We're like "Have I already read this?" The Cyprian scene is well worth describing twice in different words.

Each time, the memory has both a context and a corollary.

First context: Thoas has just reflected that the Egyptian palace is built of mud that could crumble after one or two generations of weather.

First corollary: "Suddenly Egypt was stifling." (p. 117)

Second context: Thoas has just reflected on the strangeness of Egypt, "...riotous with life..." (p. 125) but brooded over by death, and the Nile of laughing lotuses where crocodiles eat murdered corpses.

Second corollary: "Aye, it would be good to come home, if ever they did." (p. 126)

Monday, 28 September 2026

Escape, Fight And Flight

"Son of the Sword" presents an early Anderson escape and fight scene. As Thoas and his men leave the palace, the guard captain pulls the veil from the face of the woman who accompanies them and sees that they are smuggling out Ankhenamen. Thoas kills the captain and another guard with his sword. One of his men kills a third guard by crashing the loaded treasure chest that he carries onto the guard's head, thus losing the treasure which spills out onto the street. Ankhenamen's Kushite dwarf slave, Pepy, who is accompanying the escape, kills the fourth and last guard with his dagger. Abandoning another treasure chest which now would be too much to carry, they run, the two remaining chests each carried by two of the men. People scatter and a horn sounds behind them but Pepy knows which way to go and I must now go to the kitchen, leaving Poul Anderson's characters in flight until they next time that we open their book.

Good night, folks.

Two Mid-Narrative POV Shifts

Regular blog readers know that we study Poul Anderson's texts very closely because such study is rewarding.

In "The Star Beast":

Avi, already distraught, comes face to face with a tiger and almost screams but then realizes that this can only be her friend, Harol, who had become a tiger and whom she had fed raw meat when he had visited her in this form. This is Avi's pov (point of view).

Without any break in the narrative, she addresses him and he remembers sounds which we, the readers, recognize as words although they have become meaningless to him. This is his pov.

In "Son of the Sword":

Thoas looks at Ankhsenamen and finds her:

"...lovely to behold." (p. 117)

This is his pov. In the next paragraph, Ankhsenamen looks at Thoas and his men. She is not used to the hardness that she sees in his face and, as for the men, they are:

"...uncouth and ill-favored, and she wondered with a brief chill if this was the best way after all." (pp. 117-118)

This is her pov.

OK. We notice this, or at least some of us do, but we also know that povs are nearly always fully controlled in Poul Anderson's later works.

The Old Days

Son Of The Sword Spoilers

In ancient Egypt, someone thinks:

"Truly the old days were gone." (p. 116)

Has that been thought in every age? In 464 AD, another character thinks:

"All these newfangled notions!"

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 5, p. 36.

A local Asian businessman remarked, "The younger generation have a different attitude." I replied, "Usman, I am seventy-three [or whatever age I was at the time] and people have been saying that since I was seven!" However, I think that he had a point. He was of the generation that had come to Britain and had set up businesses and established themselves. Of course the next generation who grew up here had a different attitude! But that is a one-off case.

But nevertheless we are always remembering the old days and the times:

"...when all the world was young." (p. xiii) (See here.)

Sunday, 27 September 2026

Revisiting "Son of the Sword"

Poul Anderson," "Son of the Sword" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993), pp. 103-160.

After Pharaoh's burial, his widow stands in what had been their bedroom and wonders how long she has to live. She thinks:

"He has not come..." (p. 103)

Does she expect an apparition of the dead? No. The text clarifies that she has sent for someone living who has not yet responded - also that her husband was Tutankhamen.

A breeze enters the room - winds or breezes are constant companions of Poul Anderson's characters - and she thinks:

"I am afraid to die..." (ibid.)

- echoing a sentiment expressed in "The Star Beast," which we have just reread.

This widow might have become superfluous now that her husband is dead. Someone enters the room.

OK. The scene is set. That is the first page of the text. Let's take a break and do something else before proceeding any further.

For more on this story, see also:

Alight In The Void

Forwards And Backwards In Time

In Poul Anderson's Alight In The Void:

on p. 102, a man who has been transformed into a tiger confronts a woman, many centuries in our future;

on p. 103, "They had buried Pharaoh..."

p. 102 concludes an sf story whereas p. 103 opens a historical fiction story. In a Poul Anderson collection, we can jump forwards or backwards by many centuries just by concluding one narrative and commencing another. The next story after these two, "Flight to Forever," is again sf and is about time travel, which enables the characters themselves to traverse centuries and millennia. Anything is possible.

See:

Street Life

History And Monotheism

The Past

Past And Future

- as preparation for another rereading of "Son of the Sword," the story that begins just after Pharaoh's burial.

Onwards (and sometimes pastwards).

Two Texts Worth Rereading

We regarded "Terminal Quest" and "The Star Beast" as unpromising texts but reread them anyway. There is always more to be found in any Poul Anderson work.

In "Terminal Quest": Psychology

The dispossessed of Earth became exterminators on New Terra. (Parallels in Terrestrial history?)

Rugi:

is not human;

was orphaned when very young;

is ignorant of his own cultural heritage;

has been deprived and persecuted;

displays less resentment and hostility than we would usually expect from a human being - although our species varies considerably;

has become the last of his species;

dies saving the life of a human child that had tormented and wonders why he is doing it.

Will New Terrans respect Rugi after his death or deliberately forget him?

"The Star Beast": Psychology

Two cultures: militaristic and leisured.

Two attitudes to death: fear and acceptance.

The militaristic Procyonites are defeated by their own contempt for decadent Terrestrials. The Terrestrial Coordinator, Ramacan, easily disarms and stuns his single careless guard. This is yet another Andersonian "escape" sequence but a plausible one.

Saturday, 26 September 2026

Military Virtues

Responding to the Procyonites, Ramacan reflects that:

nations that have known only war glorify military virtues;

a militaristic state avoids peace, leisure and prosperity but instead controls its population and maintains its rule by further conquests;

the Procyonites, now capable only of fighting, have become beasts of prey.

My reflection is that it is not only militaristic states that control their populations by directing their attention outward against an external enemy!

Conflicts against external enemies are reflected in popular fiction. James Bond must fight SMERSH, SPECTRE, Blofeld as an individual, then the KGB. Full circle. There would have been no shortage of new villains if the series had continued after the Cold War although Bond himself was approaching retirement age. Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner and Alan Moore in V For Vendetta turned their attention towards enemies that were not external, an idea that would have been both incomprehensible and antithetical to a regime like that of the Procyonites.

Cold And Gloom

Bombardment from space has destroyed the advanced technology that had sustained a leisured global civilization and has instantly reduced Terrestrials to savagery:

"Avi's feet were bleeding. Her shoes had finally given out, and rocks and twigs tore at her feet. The snow was dappled with blood.

"Weariness clawed at her, she couldn't keep going - but she had to, she was afraid to stop in the wilderness." (p. 99)

"...the machines were dead, there was only cold and gloom..." (ibid.)

Could that be us soon? Ecological, economic, military, cybernetic or cosmic forces could stop our machines. Will a near-future sf dystopia be actualized in our lifetimes?

(By "cosmic forces," I have in mind a comet on a collision course as long as we have no adequate laser defense system.)

Memories And Time

There is a lot more in this story than we had realized on a first reading.

The Procyonite, Felgi, quizzes Ramacan about some practical aspects of immortality:

"'Don't you have trouble keeping your memories straight?'" (p. 76)

This question is discussed at greater length in some later novels by Anderson. Ramacan and some later characters have their memories edited but it has been suggested in our combox that a brain might just forget chunks of its memories naturally.

"'How about the apparent acceleration of time with age?'" (ibid.)

We usually give our age in years and do not specify additional months, e.g., "I am 76," not "I am 76 and 9 months." Some Asimov characters living well into their second century say, e.g., "I am in my twelfth decade," and leave it at that. To someone who lives for millennia, even the passing centuries would come to seem unimportant. However, Ramacan's reply is unexpected and interesting:

"'That was bad after the first couple of centuries but then it seemed to flatten out, the nervous system adapted to it.'" (ibid.)

- which seems plausible. Nevertheless, the immortals procastinate and feel that:

"'...a day seems too short a time to get anything done.'" (ibid.)

Sf writers anticipate what life might be like in future.

A Last Word On Death?

Only the last man or woman on or off Earth will have the last word on anything but we can each have our own last word. Moments before his death, Ramacan thinks:

"As for him, he had had many centuries of life, and he realized now what a deep inward weariness there had been in him. Death, he thought, death is the longest voyage of all. Without death there is no evolution, no real meaning to life, the ultimate adventure has been snatched away." (pp. 98-99)

Without death, we would eventually forget our earlier lives and effectively become different people in any case. This is the unique and unexamined predicament of Edgar Rice Burroughs' character, John Carter.

Meanwhile, Avi, whom we quoted before, remains in denial:

"...was this a dream, a sudden madness of horror and death?

"Death - no, no, no, she couldn't die, she was one of the immortals, she mustn't die!" (p. 99)

And what occurs in the very next sentence after Avi has thought this? Poul Anderson readers should be able to anticipate it:

"The wind blew and blew." (ibid.)

By blowing while she thinks and then continuing to blow, this wind expresses the indifference of nature to any organism that thinks that it should live forever. Death waits faithfully whether we are Ramacan or Avi which is why I disagree with Dylan Thomas who wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-copied from here.

Chapter Titles

A convention of pulp magazine publishing seems to have been that even a narrative much shorter than a novel (my rule of thumb: 100+ pages) could be divided into chapters with dramatically worded titles which can be omitted when the works are republished in collections or anthologies. Poul Anderson's collection, Alight In The Void, preserves the following examples.

"The Star Beast"

Chapter I Therapy for Paradise

Chapter II "Tiger, Tiger!"

Chapter III Dark Victory

"Son of the Sword"

Chapters I-III (unentitled)

"Flight to Forever"

Chapter I No Return

Chapter II Belgotai of Syrtis

Chapter III Trapped In The Time-Stream

Chapter IV End of Empire

Chapter V Attack of the Anvardi

Chapter VI Flight Without End

"Flight to Forever" is about futureward time travel through many periods including that of a Galactic Empire as its chapter titles partly indicate. In fact, should we reread this work shortly, remembering that it is a precursor of Anderson's Time Patrol series?

A Timeline And A Forest

Four stories collected in Poul Anderson's Alight In The Void could be set in a single timeline:

"Son of the Sword" is set in the past;

"Earthman, Beware!" is set in the present with aliens using the ultrawave;

"Terminal Quest" is set in the future with slower-than-light interstellar travel and extra-solar colonization;

"The Star Beast," as in "Terminal Quest" but with people on Earth now using the ultrawave.

(British sf author, Bob Shaw, once told another fan, "Paul sees order where it isn't.")

In "The Star Beast," when Harol has become a tiger:

green mystery;

sunlight and shadow;

rioting ferns and flowers;

huge, old trees;

tinkling brooks;

mossy banks;

leaping fish;

wind in grass;

dimmed eyesight;

humming, chirring insects;

rustling leaves;

warm breeze;

owl's wings;

small scurryings;

fragrant grass;

pungent decay;

wild fur;

spilled blood;

quivering whiskers;

strong muscles;

cold moonlight;

luminescence;

damp earth;

etc.

Friday, 25 September 2026

Star Beasts

After many years, we are rereading Poul Anderson's "The Star Beast." There are others. See the attached image and here.

Despite its being a pulp magazine short story, Anderson's "The Star Beast" is proving to be more complicated a text than I want to continue rereading this late into the evening. An extended passage without dialogue recounts the experience of a man who has become a forest-dwelling tiger through a summer and into a winter. Then the matter of an attempted military conquest of Earth has to be addressed. And finally the story will culminate not in a conventional victory but in an unresolved dilemma... This is not just "pulp" fiction and will be returned to with refreshed attention at a later date.

Regular blog readers know by now what else I read in the evenings that I do not have to blog about and, of course, it is also advisable to catch up with the madness of Earth Real on the TV news.

Every fictional future had a turbulent twenty-first century in its past and we will have a future, hopefully.

Forest And Death

Like Poul Anderson's The Peregrine and World Without Stars, this is a future when Earth is sparsely populated and:

"...the immense forest...had returned with the end of agriculture." (p. 79)

And death returns as an issue. Avi reflects on what life was like before human bodies could be endlessly duplicated and rejuvenated:

"'A few years, and then age and feebleness and death.' She shuddered. 'Death! Nothingness! Not even the world can exist when one is dead. Not when you've no brain left to know about it. Just - nothing. As if you had never been! Haven't you ever been afraid of the thought?'" (p. 81)

The world does exist when we are dead and when we do not know about it. We do not fear the thoughts either that we did not exist before we were born or that we do not exist in most places now! Surely someone who has been is different from someone who has never been? We are neither fictional characters nor unrealized genetic combinations. Can anyone calculate the number of the latter? We exist where and when we exist. There is nothing to fear about the times and places when/where we do not exist.

But "To be or not to be..." is an ultimate question, the beginning of Hegelian philosophy - and maybe of quantum mechanics?

The Future History In "The Star Beast"

Poul Anderson, "The Star Beast" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993), pp. 61-102.

See Procyon in:

Wikipedia

Poul Anderson Appreciation (scroll down)

Procyon is 11.46 light-years from Sol. In this fictional future, interstellar spaceships can travel at only half light-speed. The journey between Sol and Procyon takes twenty years.

Nearly nine hundred years ago, human beings colonized the Procyonite System where their long and bitter struggle for survival has involved a centuries-long war of extermination against the Czernigi. During that time, the Procyonites, as they now are, have had no contact either with Earth or with any other extra-solar colonies. However, a warship of mutated human beings from Procyon has just arrived in Earth orbit. Its captain, Felgi, and a squad of blaster-wielding guards descend in an armed boat. Felgi converses with Coordinator Ramacan who constitutes the sole government of an unarmed and undefended Earth. When Ramacan has confirmed Earth's defenselessness, Felgi announces that he and his men are taking over.

What Has Happened On Earth During Nine Hundred Years

Seven or eight centuries ago:

"'The ultrawave was discovered...'" (p. 72)

The ultrawave transmits solar power to the whole Solar System and can also transmit matter. Hence, teleportation. From teleportation, duplication, including duplication of rejuvenated, healthy bodies onto which memories can be electronically superimposed. Duplication and transmission enable individuals to live far apart. Robot ships can transport recorded personalities to extra-solar colonies with which there is no contact except through occasional curious wanderers.

Thus, yet another STL (slower-than-light) future history is summarized in a single short story.

Thursday, 24 September 2026

"The Star Beast" And "Son of the Sword"

Poul Anderson's collection, Alight In The Void, also includes "The Star Beast" which we read so long ago that maybe we can now reread it with fresh eyes and a fresh mind while at the same time not repeating anything that we have posted about it before in:

blog search result for "The Star Beast"

- and for Issues In The Star Beast

- but we are not about to do any of that this evening!

The same remark applies to "Son of the Sword," which we discussed in a few posts back in July, 2013.

For now, we wish you all good night at least in this part of the world.

Rugi And Human Beings

We feel that Rugi deserves to go somewhere but he can't. He exists only in this single short story and dies before it ends. His life is complete, as Aycharaych would say. (This is an esoteric reference to the Dominic Flandry series within Poul Anderson's Technic History. Search this blog for "Aycharaych." More specifically, Reflections On Death.)

Rugi reflects that human beings:

"...felt guilty for what their grandparents had done, as if that could change matters." (p. 24)

It can't. Guilt for what our ancestors did is pointless (bad) or self-indulgent (worse). But something practical could have been done about compensation while even one member of the exterminated species remained alive.

What will the New Terran colonists do now that Rugi has drowned? Will they erect a monument to the last native, especially since his dying act had been to save the life of a human child who had tormented him?

"'...your ancestors...killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.'" (Lk, 11:48)

(A Biblical text can be pertinent even when Anderson does not quote it.)

Learning To Appreciate Collections

I am beginning to appreciate short story collections as something more than just arbitrary and overlapping groupings of stories. "Terminal Quest" belongs in a collection of pulp magazine short stories, Alight In The Void, and also in a collection mostly about time travel, Past Times. "The Saturn Game" and "Starfog" are the opening and concluding instalments of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization and also, appropriately, the opening and closing stories in a collection entitled Explorations. Anyone reading only Explorations would be unable to tell that these two stories belonged in a single series but nevertheless both are about space exploration.

Some Fictional History

There are very few future historical "facts" in this story but let us gather together any that we can find:

the colonized planet has been named neither New Earth nor Terra Nova but New Terra;

it is in the Tau Cetian system;

the voyage from Earth took forty years;

those who left Earth were among the poor and disinherited and were prepared to die in the ship so that their children could live in a new world;

the colonists have exterminated the natives;

the viewpoint character, Rugi, is the very last native and the concluding paragraph of the story is set immediately after his death;

Rugi's people had had a great non-technical civilization and had built the Temple of Otheii;

however, Rugi, orphaned in childhood, has inherited none of his people's culture and has to ask a human being what the Temple is.

Wednesday, 23 September 2026

Rugi's Thoughts

Poul Anderson Appreciation

Rugi's inner thoughts as human children and their dogs torment him:

"Night and rain and the west wind crying in high trees, a cool wet softness of grass and the wavering little fire, the grave eyes of my father and the dear lost face of my mother - Out of the night and the rainy wind and the forest they hewed down, out of the years and the blurring memories and the shadowland of dreams, come to me, mother, come and take me in your arms and carry me home." (p. 12)

Points To Note

(i) Two references to wind.

(ii) "...grass...," not pseudo-grass etc on another planet, as in many later texts.

(iii) Dreams are a shadowland. Rugi does not know the difference between "I dreamed about my mother last night" and "My mother came back last night."

(iv) He prays to his dead mother.

(v) Anderson writes in the introduction that:

"Times change, you can't go home again..." (p. xiii)

Pulps

Poul Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993):

Acknowledgments, p. v

Contents, p. vii

Introduction: "Tell Me a Story" pp. ix-xiii

OK. I got confused but then got straightened out by googling.

According to the Acknowledgments:

"Terminal Quest" (1951)

"Earthman, Beware!" (1951)

"The Star Beast" (1950)

"Flight to Forever" (1950)

- were published in Super Science Stories and:

"Son of the Sword" (1951)

- was published in Adventure Magazine.

The Introduction names several pulp magazines:

Thrilling Western Stories

Black Mask Detective Stories

Astounding Stories of Super-Science

- and informs us that this volume collects some of Poul Anderson's contributions to pulp magazines.

My confusion became: what is the relationship between -

Super Science Stories

Astounding Stories of Super-Science

John W. Campbell's Astounding/Analog?

The answers are that:

in January, 1930, Astounding Stories of Super-Science began publication;

in February, 1931, the name was shortened to Astounding Stories;

in March, 1938, John W. Campbell, Jr., became editor and changed the name to Astounding Stories of Science-Fiction;

between January and October, 1960, Campbell changed the name to Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction;

Super Science Stories was a different and unrelated magazine.

See also the relevant Wikipedia articles:

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Super Science Stories

I did not know that this was going to become that complicated.

Death And Tau Ceti

In the recent post on Death, we should have added that, in Plato's Phaedo, Socrates says that dreamless sleep is the greatest happiness (?) and that, if there is no hereafter, then eternity is a single night (Yes!).

Not to be confused: Tau Zero is a novel by Poul Anderson whereas Tau Ceti is a star.

Tau Ceti on:

Wikipedia

James Blish Appreciation

- and in Anderson's "Terminal Quest," it took human beings forty years to travel to Tau Ceti which is twelve light-years away so this story is set in an Andersonian STL (slower than light) future like at least three others that we have discussed recently.

(Lessons in Lancaster history continue: there was a controversial murder trial in the family of a local Councillor just over a hundred years ago.)

Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Immediate Speculative Anticipations

What is going to happen in the immediate future is of concern to everyone on Earth and also is of particular interest to sf writers and their readers because what can happen and what might happen affect the premises of works of fiction. We used to think that regular interplanetary space travel was in our immediate future. We are still living in the Chaos of Poul Anderson's Technic History although real world events have probably already diverged from that timeline.

Questions raised by Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop whom I visited today:

Is it possible to win any current major war without deploying nukes and would anyone do that?

Will a state of emergency be declared in any major country soon?

He thought that, since we know neither what AI companies are doing nor what AI itself is doing, it is impossible to make any predictions about that.

We are definitely living in an unstable future - from the point of view of our younger selves who used to read fiction set in the early twenty-first century.

Death

Addendum: See also Plato on death here.

When I was at school, an English teacher quoted a poem which described sleep as "...our little daily death..." The teacher asked, "Why do we fear death? We do it - lose consciousness - every day." Of course we expect to wake up again but that thought is usually not in our minds on those all too familiar occasions when we have become so tired that we just want to relax, to rest and to become unconscious as quickly as possible. Perhaps someone who is very old reflects as he falls asleep that he might not wake up again and really does not mind? (CS Lewis, not expected by a doctor to regain consciousness, did wake up and asked for a cup of tea!)

Sometimes the feeling of not only not fearing but even welcoming death is expressed in fiction and literature. We find it in Poul Anderson, in Stieg Larsson and in Robert Louis Stevenson quoted by Robert Heinlein.

"He was not afraid to die, he thought sickly, he would welcome the darkness when it came -..."

-"Terminal Quest," p. 11.

(It was this opening part of a single sentence that occasioned the present post although, as sometimes happens, it has led us to longer quotations from other authors.)

"I have to sleep for a while, she thought. And suddenly she realized that if she closed her eyes and let go there was a good chance she would never wake up again. She analyzed this conclusion and gradually came to understand that she did not care. On the contrary. She felt, stealthily, attracted by the thought. To rest. To not wake up."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 32, p. 565.

When this character, Lisbeth Salander, has regained consciousness after an operation to remove a low-caliber bullet from just inside the back of her skull:

"She was surprised to be alive. Yet she felt indifferent. If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about. She would hardly notice the difference. With which esoteric thought she closed here eyes and fell asleep again."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (London, 2010), CHAPTER 3, p. 61.

Stevenson wrote a poem called "Requiem," which Heinlein quoted at the end of a Future History short story entitled "Requiem":

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

This poem is in the public domain.

-copied from here.

Monday, 21 September 2026

Waking Up

Rugo wakens to sunlight, birds, wind, chattering leaves, a receding dream, dew, mist, dales, a conveniently low branch for pulling himself erect, green bushes and trees on a hillside and dead leaves underfoot. My point here is that, judging from this description, he might have been on Earth although he is not. This story published in 1951 shows us none of Poul Anderson's extraterrestrial plants or other environmental details.

However, Rugo himself, while clearly intelligent, has four feet and a large scaly head so it is established very early in the narrative that he is not human.

As to what happens next, I have reached that point in the evening - nearly midnight - when, as regular blog readers know, I am disinclined to blog any further! But we have covered some ground today.

Rugo's Mother