Echoes Of WWII

In We Claim These Stars!/"Hunters of the Sky Cave," Poul Anderson shows us alien invaders occupying the human colony planet, Vixen, and redirecting Vixenite production to support their own interstellar war against the Terran Empire. Dominic Flandry of Terran Intelligence lands secretly to work with the Resistance.

In Under The Yoke, SM Stirling shows us the Draka occupying post-War Europe and redirecting production both for their own consumption and for their nuclear arms race against the US. Frederick Kustaa of the OSS lands secretly to work with the Resistance.

In the Domination of the Draka, money circulates only among the Citizen minority. Even in conquered France, production and transport workers no longer:

receive a wage or salary;
buy consumer goods;
live in owned or rented properties.

Instead, they are confined to curfewed Compounds and continually threatened with physical brutality. Not a post-War settlement but a war-time Occupation continues indefinitely. I hope, and suspect, that it is impossible to manage a complex industrial society on such a basis. When a Citizen supervisor sees that the output of a factory is too low, he informs a born-serf manager who informs a local gangboss who tells the factory serf-drivers to kill a production worker slowly by hanging him from hooks in full view of everyone else. If the slowly dying man is removed or mercifully killed, then he will be replaced by two others. But output is higher when workers are paid and can buy goods produced by themselves or others! However, this is not the sort of society that the Draka want...

The Resistance includes a Catholic nun and a former Communist Party member. What of other defeated groups? The text has not so far raised this specific question but it is worth considering: in what circumstances, if any, would you cooperate with an unrepentant Nazi? My answer is: not many, but Resistance to the Draka would probably qualify. However, the Nazi should have no say in framing any post-Draka society.

I would have far fewer problems in working with Communist Party members - in fact, I have worked with them in trade unions where Nazis would not have been welcome - but they would have to be watched because of their history. The purpose of Communism was to end exploitation, not to build a bureaucratic - and exploitative! - dictatorship. It was a historic tragedy that so many well-intentioned Party members were misled into defending that regime for so long but history has left them behind and hopefully can be learned from. Lesson One: make sure that any Party you belong to remains internally democratic. Lesson Two: always ask questions.

I said that I might work with a Nazi in the anti-Draka Resistance. However, I would prefer to destroy the Domination  from a safe distance. I never thought that I would contemplate the use of a nuclear weapon but, if the majority of the Race could be persuaded to congregate in Archona...

Nearing the end of Under The Yoke, I am not sure what the good guys' plans are and am also not confident of a happy ending. I might resort to some lighter reading for the remainder of this evening.

Longevity And Memory

(i) In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, mutant immortals must find within themselves an inner discipline to stave off insanity caused by endlessly accumulating memories.

(ii) In Anderson's World Without Stars, immortal beneficiaries of an antithanatic regularly have their memories artificially edited. Thus, at any one time, an immortal retains the general pattern of his identity and a single lifetime's worth of memories but nothing more. This may be why they write journals.

(iii) In Anderson's Time Patrol series, Time Patrol agents have anti-senescence treatment and can also have selected memories erased:

"When this hunt ended...the Patrolman would be almost sorry to have those trills and purrs [of the Exaltationists' language] scrubbed from his brain." (The Shield Of Time, p. 83)

"Eventually, when they had no further use for the knowledge, it would be wiped from them to make room for something else." (p. 203)

In both these cases, the reference is to linguistic knowledge that has been artificially implanted in the first place. Nevertheless, if some memories can be erased, then why not others? Thus, the Time Patrol might have the same solution to the problem of accumulating memories as one set of Anderson's immortals, which would make their perception of time even weirder.

Donarrians And Ymirites

When Poul Anderson's Mirkheim was published in 1977, it not only tied together multiple strands from earlier installments of Anderson's Technic Civilization future history series (see here) but also made anticipatory references to two alien races that had already appeared but in installments set later in the fictitious history.

"...oxygen-breathing mercenaries, human, Merseian, Gorzuni, Donarrian - adventurers, the scourings of space..."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 181.

(I am reminded of a Doctor Who episode that contained the memorable dialogue: "You should have seen them, the scum of the galaxy!")

As already noted, Merseians and Gorzuni had been introduced in earlier installments. A Donarrian had appeared in "Sargasso of Lost Starships," published in 1952 but set centuries later. This post about intelligent quadrupeds lists three Donarrians and also three Wodenites although it misses the Wodenite Nadi who appears in "Lodestar" and Mirkheim. The travelers in A Game Of Empire would have visited a Donarrian settlement on Daedalus but, unfortunately, their itinerary changed.

The other race anticipated in Mirkeim is the Ymirites. I think that otherwise they are mentioned only in "Hunters of the Sky Cave"/We Claim These Stars!, which is where they appear. Since the Baburites are hydrogen-breathers, Anderson's characters naturally wonder whether the hydrogen-breathing Ymirites are also involved if only in conflict with Babur. However, the Wodenite Adzel points out that Ymirites, inhabiting Jovian planets, are as unlike Baburites, inhabiting a subjovian planet, as they are from oxygen-breathers inhabiting terrestroid planets.

This does not prevent the organizers of a secret army from hinting to their mercs that the Ymirites have an interest... Disinformation: the Ymirites, also suspected in "Hunters of the Sky Cave," genuinely have no interest in the activities of inhabitants of small planets.

How Aliens Fight

Body shape and environment determine combat skills. On a proto-planetary asteroid, Dominic Flandry leads a four-species Terran crew against about twenty Merseians and one Chereionite. One of the Merseians:

"...made a low-gravity leap towards his opponent, whipped about, and slapped with his tail."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 292.

- like one of ERB's Barsoomian plant men.

A quadrupedal Donarrian:

carries on his back a nuclear howitzer with the man who will fire it;
hurls, tosses, kicks and stamps Merseians.

Two Gorzuni, standing shoulder to shoulder, fire blasters held in each of their four hands, thus penetrating any metal armor. An inhumanly quick Scothanian wields a wrecking bar. Human beings use blasters, slug guns, grenades and karate. Flandry captures the Chereionite because he is from a larger planet and therefore has stronger muscles.

This is not just another fight scene but one that takes account of the different physical characteristics of all the participants.(See also here.)

The Sky Cave As Seen From Within

I wrote in the previous post that there is not much more to be said but, of course, I cannot do better than to quote directly from Poul Anderson's own description of the nebula where a star and its planetary system are condensing:

"Flandry himself saw sinister grandeur: great banks and clouds of blackness, looming in utter silence on every side of him, gulfs and canyons and steeps, picked out by the central red glow. He knew, objectively, that the nebula was near-vacuum even in its densest portions: only size and distance created that picture of caverns beyond caverns. But his eyes told him that he sailed into Shadow Land, under walls and roofs larger than planetary systems, and his own tininess shook him."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 284.

- as when, millennia later, Daven Laure sails into the Cloud Universe nebula (see also here, here and here), except that that one is many times bigger, containing over a quarter of a million stars, some condensing, some going nova, others at every intermediate stage.

It is the "...walls and roofs larger than planetary systems..." that are truly awesome, generating the impression that this is not interstellar space but a vast three-dimensional material structure, like a cathedral explored by a fly.

To its credit, the very first Star Trek feature film showed the Enterprise dwarfed by some sort of interstellar cloud that it had to pass through.

The Sky Cave Revisited

Rereading Poul Anderson's "Hunters of the Sky Cave"/We Claim These Stars!, I want to post about the cosmic setting of its dramatic conclusion but find that I have already done so here and here. There is not much more to be said.

This book cover illustrates the battle on the surface of the proto-planet but a more interesting image would have been that of a spaceship dwarfed by the caverns of the Sky Cave as it finds its way through and between them.

Reading some of his earlier and later stories in quick succession demonstrates Anderson's maturation as a writer. I think that "Duel on Syrtis," describing single combat between two beings in the Martian desert, is a better written work than its sequel, "War-Maid of Mars," with its chase scenes, escapes, armed agents in cars etc.

"Lord of a Thousand Suns" has features in common with the History of Technic Civilization - an interstellar civilization overthrown a million years ago, the idea of a helmet which, when worn, imposes the recorded pattern of a long dead personality onto a living brain. However, this story's Flash Gordon action-adventure fiction contrasts sharply with the subtlties of The Day Of Their Return, a novel that evokes the religious yearning of a planetary population awaiting deliverance by the Ancients when They return, soon...

Captain Flandry, Parts I-IV

The first four Captain Flandry stories:

(I) "Tiger by the Tail"
(II) "Honorable Enemies"
(III) "The Game of Glory"
(IV) "Hunters of the Sky Cave"

are a perfect tetralogy.

(i) Flandry defeats the Scothanians in (I), is described as the single-handed conqueror of Schothania in (II) and commands a crew that includes a Scothanian in (IV). (His crew also includes two Gorzuni and one Donarrian - two other species that had been introduced earlier in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization.)

(ii) Admiral Walton, introduced in (I), reappears in (IV), where he is described as "...one of the last brave and wholly honorable men in all Terra's Empire." (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 272)

(iii) Flandry learns how to lie to the telepath Aycharaych in (II), this incident occurs between some of the events in (III), which is mostly set on Nyanza, and Aycharaych congratulates Flandry on his handling of l'affaire Nyanza in (IV).

(iv) Flandry first meets Aycharaych in (II) and captures him in (IV) - but the Merseians arrange a prisoner exchange.

(IV) reveals a curious effect of the Technic History version of hyperspace. Flandry's ship, the Hooligan, while pursuing an Ardazirho craft, briefly interpenetrates it so that Flandry sees into its turret and even recognizes its pilot. Then the Hooligan matches phases and captures the Ardazirho.

(IV) is the only installment of the History to feature the Ymirites. Flandry encounters them on Jupiter before traveling to the colony planet Vixen, which plays important roles both earlier and later in the History, as does the Vixenite family, Kittredge.

Vixen

In the Cerulian system, resonance with the jovoid planet Ogre has multiplied perturbation and brought the eccentricity of the terrestroid Vixen's orbit close to one-half so that, with a 24 degree axial tilt and midsummer nearly at periastron, once every eighteen month year the northern hemisphere is scorched with four times the radiation that Terra receives from Sol - snow melts, rivers overflow, lakes bake dry, storms rage, fires break out, erosion prevents mountain formation, hot wind blows dust and ash across dry plains.

-copied from here. 

Dominic Flandry expects frontier planets like Vixen to outlast the Terran Empire. See here. 

He resists Ardazirho invaders of Vixen. See here, here and here.

I am currently finding new details in Poul Anderson's "Hunters of the Sky Cave." It is helpful to gather together information already posted.

Fight Scenes

When I was only a few years old, I was a great admirer of fight scenes in films and on TV, realizing that such scenes always had to be carefully choreographed. (There were many "Western" series on TV in the early 50's.)

Anyone filming Poul Anderson's works would find that many of the fight scenes had already been choreographed for them. For example, while the Terran agent Flandry tries to capture the Ardazirho Clanmaster Temulak alive, the Vixenite hunter Emil Bryce must quickly and efficiently kill Temulak's escort. Anderson takes two pages to describe every move in the fight:

Flandry glides from an alley behind some Ardazirho who are returning from HQ to barracks but they immediately turn;
he tries to punch Temulak's face with a knuckleduster but Temulak ducks, so that the steel hits his helmet, and draws his blaster;
Flandry chops Temulak's wrist, making him drop the blaster;
Temulak's howl will be heard in both HQ and barracks;
Flandry karate kicks Temulak's jaw;
Temulak staggers but grabs Flandry's ankle and they go down together;
Temulak's steel-reinforced fingernails go for Flandry's throat;
Flandry fights back and Temulak bites his wrist;
Flandry rabbit punches and throttles him;
Bryce has been firing cyanide darts into exposed flesh but one Ardazirho has jumped him;
Flandry shoots that Ardazirho with Temulak's dropped blaster...

I have skipped over some details here but I am sure that you get the idea! It is well after midnight and I must get to bed.

Flandry On Vixen

Dominic Flandry, organizing Vixenite resistance to Ardazirho invaders, knows that an effective "underground" needs cells, frequently changed passwords and widely separated hiding places. (Here is a different meaning of the word "Underground" from the one quoted in a recent post.)

I recently mentioned World War II (WWII). The Ardazirho occupation of Vixen puts Flandry very much into a WWII scenario without going as far as to transport him to Occupied France via time travel. But there are always science fictional elements:

Flandry is "...trained to tell faces apart, even nonhuman faces -" (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 223);

the invaders have a keener sense of smell than man;

they control crowds not with hounds but with "...batsnakes..." (p. 219);

they walk differently, not hitting the ground with boot-heels but clicking with metallic toes;

their chief officer is not a Commandant but a Clanmaster;

the Ardazirho have no discernible uniforms because their recently unified planet still has disparate clans;

to capture the Clanmaster in Garth alive, Flandry must knock him out with a knuckleduster because an anaesthetic might be fatal.

(With ten minutes still to go, today has nearly as many (133) page views as yesterday (138) although this is the first post for today. I have been busy with other activities and will be increasingly so till Christmas.)

Blue Star

According to my information (see here), F-type stars are yellow white and are separated by white A's from blue B's and O's. However, in Poul Anderson's "Hunters of the Sky Cave," the F-type Cerulia:

"...glistened keen and blue ahead." (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 204)

Maybe Cerulia is blue-shifted because Flandry's spaceship, the Hooligan, is moving towards it? No, after the Hooligan has entered the Cerulian System and is falling towards the planet Vixen, Cerulia is still being described as "...the harsh blue sun..." (p. 212).

Poul Anderson always describes extrasolar planets and their primaries in meticulous detail but I have never until now paid any attention to spectral types or to whether what is said about them seems to be accurate.

Anderson usually makes clear how a landscape on an extraterrestrial planet differs from any of its Terrestrial counterparts - different colors of vegetation for a start. The Shaw on Vixen is merely described as "...tall trees..." (p. 216). However, it does have at least one unEarthly feature:

"...here and there on the high trunks glowed yellow phosphorescent fungi, enough to see by." (p. 217)

While reading Anderson's speculative fiction, we always remember that the environments of other planets do not simply reproduce what is to be found on Earth.

Coterminous Realms

Stellar Spectral Classes

O   Blue
B   Blue
A   White
F   Yellow White
G   Yellow
K   Orange
M   Red

O   30 to 60 thousand degrees Kelvin
B   10 to 30
A    7,500 to 10,000 degrees kelvin
F    6,000 to   7,500
G    5,000 to  6,000
K    3,500 to  5,000
M   2,000 to  3,500

The seven classes are each subdivided into tenths from 0 to 9. Sol is G2. Korych, the sun of Merseia, is Sol-like. Cerulia, the sun of Vixen is F-type. The eye structure of the Ardazirho invaders of Vixen suggests that their sun is about A5, which would be no good for human beings. F is probably as cool as Ardazirho would want.

Flandry thinks that the Ardazirho "'...may well have built up a little coterminous kingdom, a number of B, A and F suns...'" (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 201), before invading Vixen.

The Dispersal of Ymir interpenetrates the Terran Empire and the Merseian Roidhunate because the Ymirites occupy not terrestroid planets but gas giants, including Jupiter in the Solar System and Ogre in the Cerulian System. Thus, the Dispersal probably continues to exist after the Fall of the Empire and the collapse of the Roidhunate but might there also be other coterminous realms in the systems of stars with different spectral types?

Underground On Terra

I am always alert to any details of life on Terra during the League or Empire periods of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization. See here for the League period.

And here are two from a single day during the Empire period. First, Dominic Flandry's superior, Admiral Fenross, says:

"'If I didn't oblige the peerage,...I'd be begging my bread in Underground and someone would be in this office who'd never tell them no.'" (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 192)

And:

"...rhododendrons bloomed like cool fire in Terra's parks, and the laughing youth of Terra's aristocracy flew past on their way to some newly opened pleasure house." (p. 197)

Other Anderson sf novels, e.g., The Long Way Home and The Corridors Of Time, present high tech futures in which a large percentage of the population is permanently unemployed and either impoverished or minimally subsidized. This single reference to "...Underground..." implies a similar lowest social stratum in the Terran Empire although it does not tell us how many Undergrounders there are. Are they literally underground or does "Underground" just mean "the under-class"?

We are used to societies in which wealth is unequally distributed but this does seem to be an extreme case. An able individual like Fenross could be impoverished at the whim of a "peer" while at the same time youths who have done nothing to generate any wealth fly to a pleasure house even though Terra is now at war on two fronts.

Flandry reflects:

"...when the bombs finally roared out of space, when the barbarians howled among smashed buildings and the smoke of burning books hid dead men in tattered bright uniforms - when the Long Night came, as it would, a century or a millennium hence, what difference? - something of beauty and gallantry would have departed the universe." (p. 190)

Maybe, but the Long Day will last much longer if more people have a stake in defending it. How many Undergrounders will join with extraterrestrial barbarians in smashing buildings, burning books and killing anyone wearing a uniform?

A Vast, Multi-Faceted Fictitious Universe

I think that it will be worthwhile to analyze what went on in the previous post. I began by listing kinds of ice because this was an interesting technical detail in the short Dominic Flandry novel, "Hunters Of The Sky Cave." I was not sure how far this would take us but was prepared to find out.

Sure enough, there were two interesting outcomes. First, a routine google search for the Great Red Spot on Jupiter disclosed that current understanding of this phenomenon differs from Flandry's, published in 1959. The Red Spot is not after all a red kind of ice. Secondly, something said by Flandry while on the Red Spot initiated a discussion of attitudes to death and even to me quoting Dylan Thomas.

The moral of this story is that Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is a vast multi-faceted fictitious universe and that, as with the real universe, it is possible to reflect on reality and life as they are focused through historical events and through the biographies of historical figures.

Two further points about death:

I prefer Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."

"And death shall have no dominion.
"Dead men naked they shall be one
"With the man in the wind and the west moon;
"When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
"They shall have stars at elbow and foot..."

This is relevant here because that last quoted line gives us the title of Volume I of James Blish's future history.

Secondly, I recently referred here to a conversation between Flandry and Aycharaych. I could have added that this conversation discloses Aycharaych's attitude to death: it is "'A completion.'" (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 164)

"Call no man happy until he is dead" (see here) I think means that a life must be complete before it can be evaluated although, in Volume I of James Blish's theological trilogy, a medieval monk presents the safer Scholastic interpretation: the dead man is happy in Heaven.

Aycharaych's philosophical cynicism is displayed yet again when later he sets out to "complete" Flandry's life.

Kinds Of Ice

Familiar white or transparent ice;
a black allotrope on the Jovian surface;
super-dense ice in the mantle around the Jovian core;
red crystalline ice floating in the Jovian atmosphere.

The Red Spot is a storm according to Wikipedia (see here) but "'...a mass of aerial pack ice...'" (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 185) according to Dominic Flandry. Hence, the fourth kind of ice listed here.

In the Technic History:

"'...always, Chives, the Red Spot is a pack of flying glaciers, stretching broader than all Terra. And we've been crashed on one of them!'" (ibid.)

- crashed in a vehicle protected by a force-field although the field may fail in the dense, violent atmosphere and, in any case, food and air will run out unless Flandry and Chives can attract help which, of course, they do.

It was interesting to find a link to the Red Spot only to discover that it gives a different account of this phenomenon but that is the relationship between science and science fiction. The science moves on. The fiction moves with it but, if earlier fictions were worthwhile, then they are still appreciated, with their earlier versions and visions of the Solar planets.

It is on this occasion that Flandry says:

"'I don't want to die so fast I can't feel it. I want to see death coming, and make the stupid thing fight for every centimeter of me.'" (p. 184)

For those of us who disbelieve in a hereafter, this is an intriguing thought. We can die in our sleep or can be killed instantaneously by an explosion. In these cases, we do not realize that our last moment of consciousness is our last. Like Flandry, I would prefer to see death coming but would not, at the very end, want to fight it. Life's limits, its beginning and its end, are not "stupid."

Dylan Thomas wrote, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." I do not want to die enraged.

Art And Horror

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization includes two revealing dialogues between Dominic Flandry and his adversary, Aycharaych of Chereion. In the first, at the Crystal Moon, Aycharaych admires a (to him) black orchid against a quicksilver zero grav globe of water with "'...the universe black and cold beyond both...'" and comments:

"'A beautiful arrangement, and with that touch of horror necessary to the highest art.'"
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 162.

Tragedy is a higher art form than comedy but horror necessary for high art? I disagree, although Aycharaych's association of beauty with horror probably tells us something about his ruthlessness. Later, Flandry speculates that Aycharaych himself is an artist and Chunderban Desai completes the thought:

"'An artist of espionage and sabotage, whose materials are living beings?'" (p. 391)

If Aycharaych's idea of high art incorporating horror includes what he does to living beings, then we must certainly assert that morality overrides art. Desai goes on to make another interesting remark:

"'We have not had the good fortune to be born in an era when our society offers us something transcendental to live and die for.'" (ibid.)

Do we need our society to offer us this? Since the invention and free use of the printing press, we have become the heirs of all the traditions. Meditating in the Quiet Room of a Youth Hostel, I was joined by a Japanese man reading his Bible! Desai, from the planet Ramanujan, says:

"'I hope to do more than read sutras in my retirement...'" (p. 390)

Buddhist and Yoga Sutras point towards practices for the realization of transcendence. It is not necessary to die for them - unless, maybe, a future dictatorship persecutes unorthodox religious practices.

I cannot resist one concluding reference to horror in futuristic sf. In Alan Moore's Halo Jones, horror fiction and philosophy have been synthesized in works with titles like Frankenstein Meets Wittgenstein...