Lord Of A Thousand Suns: Conclusion

At the climax of the story, Laird, in an enemy spaceship, saves the day by acting in accordance with a posthypnotic command. And exactly this happens to the hero of which other Poul Anderson short story?

I was slow to finish reading "Lord Of A Thousand Suns," discouraged by pulpishness. However, as with "Swordsman Of Lost Terra," interesting points emerged from the text. In this case:

science fictional rationales for fantasy ideas;
a science fictional answer to what killed the dinosaurs;
novae;
unified field theory;
how to record, preserve and reactivate a personality;
kinds of fictional immortality.

What's not to like? The Poul Anderson Planet Stories Ebook includes two other stories that I have not yet read. These will be read for any interesting features although not necessarily immediately. I still spend more time rereading known works in the sure and certain hope that new facets will be found within them.

Laird Of The Universe

The Vywrddans understand and utilize "sub-spatial flows."

Daryesh can set up a life-tank, make a new body with Vywrddan intelligence and abilities, immortalize that body and transfer his and Laird's linked patterns to it. Here again we encounter fictional "immortality."

Such immortality is either weak or strong. A weakly immortal organism is immune to illness and old age but not to accident or violence. Most sf immortality is weak. Antiagathics preserve James Blish's Okies only until the end of this universe. Darvesh's immortality is also weak. He has already died once. So he is wrong to tell Laird, "'Man, you'll never die!'"

(I think that) John W Campbell once made the deliberately provocative statement that "The first immortal man has already been born," meaning that advances in medical technology in our lifetimes should cause someone's life expectancy to keep ahead of his age. Larry Niven's Lucas Garner, born in 1939, lives to - two hundred and fifty?

Captain Jack in Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off, is strongly immortal. Even if burnt to death, he pulls a Lazarus act and is suspected of demonology by the superstitious. In one Torchwood episode, he says, "I am a fixed point in time. That's what the Doctor says." The Torchwood (anagram) organization, founded by Queen Victoria to defend the British Empire against supernatural and extraterrestrial threats, coexists with UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, with which the Doctor works when he happens to be around.

Neil Gaiman's immortal Englishman, Hob Gadling, survives drowning and starvation because Death has agreed not to come for him. Hob meets an Indian who ate the fruit of immortality, the efficacy of which was demonstrated when an experimental animal survived a fire.

All this imaginative reminiscence over breakfast!

Planets And Brains

The Vwyrddan civilization lasted for fifty million years, used nucleonic disintegrators, magnetic shield projectors and life-energy detectors and moved planets.

Each Vwyrddan was trained in psychosomatic coordination with control of involuntary functions and subcellular components and had a telepathy transceiver lobe in his brain. Daryesh's ghost must manage without such a lobe when it is reincarnated in Laird's brain which, furthermore, cannot hold Daryesh's reasoning powers. However, Daryesh should be able to exercise enough nerve control to deceive a lie detector.

The immortalized noble, Daryesh of Tollogh, had ruled a thousand planetary systems, led the Vwrddan fleets and lived a thousand years but died fighting Erai rebels. However, before his death, a molecular scanner had recorded the pattern of synapses comprising his memory and identity and transferred that pattern onto the crystalline electronic structure of a helmet that will impose the pattern on the neurons of whoever dons the helmet.

I have not yet reread "Lord Of A Thousand Suns" beyond the point that I had reached on the first reading. However, I have this time retained much more information by dint of posting while reading. And I must now desist at midnight, having risen at 5.30 AM.

Language and Natural Forces

See here.

A million years ago, the ancient race of "Vwryddans" had weapons that "'...novaed suns...'" That is an interesting linguistic development. Nova is a Latin adjective meaning "new." Stars that had not been visible from Earth but that suddenly became brighter, in fact exploded, and therefore did become visible were mistakenly called stellae novae, new stars. Thus, in English, a "nova" is a star that explodes. And to cause a stellar explosion would indeed be to "nova" the star. Thus, nova has evolved from a Latin adjective into an English noun and could also become an English verb. Although we hope not.

What else were the Vwryddans capable of? When a human crew restored the Vwrddan gravitomagnetic generator, it taught the Solarians half of what they now know about g-m fields.That is the sort of scientific jargon that most of us skip over in sf. However, it is highly significant. The four forces of nature are the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity. One intuitively plausible idea is that there is one force that has split and appears as four, just as water, ice and clouds appear to be three distinct phenomena but are all hydrogen oxide.

Einstein failed to unify the forces of nature but the Vwryddans succeeded in generating a field that united gravity with magnetism, thus with electromagnetism. Ghosts, exterminated dinosaurs, novas and a unified field: what will they think of next?

Ghosts And Dinosaurs

See here.

Laird amends his description from "genie in a bottle" to "ghost in a bottle." This is even more appropriate. What Laird had released was the technologically recorded personality of a long dead humanoid being. That is a respectable scientific rationale for the idea of a ghost. (In Biblical language, a humanoid being is "one like a (son of) man," but we do not go down that road here.)

Then Anderson, through Laird, casually introduces a clever sf idea that I had encountered on my first reading of this part of the story but, of course, had completely forgotten until I started to reread with a view to blogging. I suppose anyone with the right kind of imagination can do this. Start with a familiar question like "What killed the dinosaurs?" Then think of an unexpected but logical and meaningful science fictional answer.

Thus, in an Isaac Asimov short story, a drunk claims to be a time traveler although he might be a delusional drunk. Asked "What killed the dinosaurs?," he replies, "The little ones," then elucidates, "The little ones with guns killed the big ones, then each other!" (All my quotes here are from memory but the point of such a story is that its essential message can be retold in this way.)

Thus, Laird informs us that an ancient humanoid race "'...had a policy of regularly exterminating the great reptiles of terrestroid planets with an eye to later colonization...'" Well, they would do, wouldn't they?

Back To Lord Of A Thousand Suns

"'...you'll find almost anything man has ever imagined out in the Galaxy,' I said."
-Poul Anderson, "Lord Of A Thousand Suns" IN Poul Anderson Planet Stories Ebook.

This opening sentence immediately establishes that the story is science fiction. I posted about "Lord..." here and here but have yet to finish reading it.

The first person narrator goes on to use his sf setting to present scientific rationales for some standard fantasy ideas. First, he elaborates his Galactic background. There are:

many millions of planets;
fantastically varied planetary environments;
diverse life forms adapted to those environments;
intelligences and civilizations emerging among those life forms.

These include:

fire-breathing dragons;
dwarfs fighting beings resembling goblins;
"witches," using telepathic psuedohypnosis;
no doubt some counterpart for every other tall story or fairy tale.

I would have appreciated more of a rationale for the fire-breathing dragon, though. (I have just read Tolkien's translation of Beowulf.)

The narrator's companion agrees, affirming that he once let a genie out of a bottle and, further, that it killed him. I was going to comment that the phrase, "...genie out of a bottle...," is used metaphorically. However, it is not far from the mark. Laird (Scots for "Lord") released a powerful intelligence that had lain dormant for ages so maybe it can be classified as a counterpart of a genie.

Lord Of A Thousand Suns

I am reading "Lord of a Thousand Suns" in Peter Mansfield's recently created Poul Anderson ebook, which also contains "Sargasso of Lost Starships," "The Star Plunderer" and two early Dominic Flandry stories (see here and here). In 2011, "Sargasso..." was collected, for the very first time, in Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga, because, like "The Star Plunderer" and the Flandry series, this story counts as an installment of Anderson's History of Technic Civilization whereas "Lord of a Thousand Suns" does not.

However, "Lord..." and "Sargasso..." have certain features in common: an Imperial Solar Navy and a visit to an ancient, mysterious, powerful planet. To the original readers of Planet Stories, there was not as yet any Technic Civilization future history but there were several space operas set within an interstellar Empire and "Lord..." might have been perceived as just another of those.

For a full listing of Poul Anderson's Planet Stories stories, see here.