Literate Cultures

Intelligent beings might build and live in a literate and technological society that is not urban, therefore not describable as a civilization. Poul Anderson maybe presents more examples of this than we might realize:

In the Technic History
Ythrians;
Freeholders;
nomadic Altaians.

In the "Star Time" Diptych
Staurni;
Ishtarians.

(Another list that grew in the writing.)

Ishtarians are not only townless but even stateless. Rarely violent, they recognize just one criminal act: "...failure to obey the judgment of the jury that tried a lawsuit." (Fire Time, p. 107) Public services provided by the "legions" include arbitrating disputes, maintaining records and lighthouses, policing (slight) and a fire service (rarely needed since most buildings are stone or adobe). Sehala is not a capital city but a convenient rendezvous point because it is a prosperous area where certain activities are concentrated. Buildings are spread about with no streets between them. The Ishtarian physiology has little need of sanitation but anyone who runs an establishment disposes of whatever wastes there are as necessary because otherwise his neighbors would sue him.

Freehold Miscellanea

(i) "Warm outfits were kept for travelers at the foot of the pass, to be returned on the other side, with a small rental paid to the servant of the landholder."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 41.

That is neat. Something, in this case warm clothing for travelers, is organized for the benefit of everyone. The service is not exorbitant, "...a small rental...," although the reference to a rental fee reminds us that the outbackers operate a money economy while the reference to a landholder's servant reminds us of the property differences that still exist in this part of Freeholder society despite the abundance of free food.

(ii) No one owns Moon Garnet Lake, which is "...the heart of the Upwoods..." (p. 50) and "'...too basic to the whole country. Anyone may use it.'" (p. 51) It is a natural site for head of household meetings and for an army rendezvous. Outbackers violently and successfully resist a City dwellers' attempt to found a town beside the lake.

(iii) Outbackers use horses, stathas (green and hexapodal although not described here), wagons, boats and rafts. The reference to naturalized horses and stathas provides a strong background link with the following "Outpost of Empire" work, The Day Of Their Return. Also, there is Merseian influence on both Freehold and Aeneas.

(iv) John Ridenour thinks: "If we ever fall, [the outbackers]'ll carry on something of what was ours. But I'd better not emphasize this [to a fellow Imperialist]." (p. 69)

Something of Freehold itself survives because a "'...neo-Freehold technique...'" is used nearly a millennium later during the Allied Planets period. See Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 689.

Skills

An outback woman on Freehold may be a Mistress of a Skill:

"A special ability, inborn, cultivated, disciplined."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 45.

Mistresses are not bred because outbacker women prefer to become pregnant by landholders. However, female biochemistry is more complex and psychic. A girl with an ability is trained, e.g., drugs might change her body secretions. A woman who either ingests certain trace chemicals or generates them with her glands can use appropriate stimuli to control organisms bred to respond, a practice learned from the Arulians.

(i) A Mistress of War can deliberately induce in herself instant hysteria with heightened perception and recollection.
(ii) Mistresses of Love are called "aphrodites."
(iii) Another kind of Mistress activates signal plants.
(iv) Mistress Jenith controls fire bees.
(v) Mistress Persa's buzzer-wave bugs jam radio.
(vi) Mistress Randa's insects drink and exude dew, thus generating a camouflage fog, but is her chanted spell necessary? (Mistresses keep secrets.)

Men lack Skills but can be trained to use certain animals:

(i) Messenger birds, having heard information or orders spoken in Anglic, repeat them in bird language, which military leaders and scouts can understand.
(ii) Weasel-like intelligencers report what they see: men talking to their wrists must have radiocoms etc.
(iii) The Grand Packmaster leads "...two great hellhounds..." (p.. 2)
(iv) "...monitors..." (p. 21), large and crocodilian, can be given orders and aimed but not redirected or recalled.

A Mistress of War overhears and apprehends an Imperial spy. A landing spaceship and its accompanying aircraft are disabled by strategic use of camouflage fog, buzzer-wave bugs, fire bees, monitors and aphrodites. The Avalonians had lured an Imperial task force to a beachhead where hostile organisms overwhelmed them but, on Freehold, the hostile organisms are controlled by the outbackers.

Outbackers

On Freehold:

"...the forests bear ample food the year around."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 30.

"'...we've got abundant free food and stuff. No special effort involved in satisfying the basic needs.'" (op. cit., p. 39)

Edible plants grow everywhere all year;
meat animals are bred to come when summoned in various ways;
the climate is mild;
outbackers move in search of food, sleeping in temporary shelters or bedrolls -

- although each territory has one house for shelter during heavy rainstorms with outbuildings for immobile equipment.

Imagine what a difference the abundance of free food would make to social organization! For mere physical survival, no organization would be necessary. However, human society transcends mere physical survival. Outbackers cooperate, for example, to build roads and to resist encroachments from the Nine Cities. Their own society is organized as follows:

"'A man claims a certain territory for his own, to support him and his family and retainers. He passes it on to one son. How he chooses the heir is his business. Anybody who kills the owner, or drives him off, takes over that parcel of land.'" (ibid.)

In this case, "A man..." does not mean any man: every man cannot have retainers! Somehow, at an earlier stage, landholders were differentiated from the landless. But the latter do not starve. And they can become itinerant laborers, entrepreneurs or scientists studying, e.g., animals and how to control them. Alternatively, they can be employed by landholders as servants, assistants, guards etc. Currency is iron and copper slugs.

The ancestors developed plants with leaves that become paper and juices that become ink. Many landholders keep wind- or water-powered printing presses. Books and magazines proliferate without electronic competition. No one collects books but copies are cheap. There are schools and arts: music, dance, scrimshaw, jewelry, weaving, painting, carving, drama, literature, cuisine and some that the Empire does not have.

Territorial battles have become less common but, by succeeding in such a conflict, a man proves himself fit to have children and women choose to become pregnant by a landholder because they want their children to have some claim on him.

A Short Break II

Hi. I am back, using a borrowed, second hand lap top. There is more to post about the colony on Freehold (in Poul Anderson's "Outpost of Empire"). Then, more about earlier sections of the Technic History. Then I still have to track down the NESFA Collections from Vol 2 up. After that, who knows? I keep thinking that I must have come to the end of Poul Anderson Appreciation but so far not.

On Tuesday, most of us here are going away for a week but we take our lap tops with us.

Colonizing Freehold II

The floor of a valley on Freehold is:

"...covered...with a thick blanket of silvery-green trilobed 'grass' and sapphire blossoms."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 27.

Anderson never fails to describe the local equivalent of grass on another planet. But there is another ground cover on Freehold:

"The path crossed a high hillside, smoothly graded and switchbacked, surface planted in a mossy growth so tough and dense that no weeds could force themselves in." (p. 38)

I do not find this clear. Is the growth planted on the path, the hill or both? In either case, this specially bred growth requires traces of manganese salt which are supplied by maintenance gangs who thus keep the "moss" within appointed bounds. The outbackers, calling themselves "the Free People," construct through the forest not a single broad highway but several small interconnected parallel roads which are:

easier to make;
enough for the traffic;
less ecologically or scenically harmful;
invisible from the air.

Other mutant plants are designed to mask human chemistry from technological surveillance. Outbackers do not conduct censuses but Karlsarm, war chief of the Upwoods, guesses a population of either forty or sixty million. (He guesses twenty million for his continent "'...and about the same for the others.'" (p. 39) There are two other continents but I do not know whether he means twenty million for each or for both together.)

I think that there are two other continents but I need to reread some more.

Colonizing Freehold

Mutated plants and animals able to survive on Freehold were introduced so that human beings would be able to live there without synthetics. It was necessary to import vitamin-generating organisms able to concentrate essential trace minerals, including the little iron in the soil. With such organisms in place, it became easier to colonize and exploit the wilderness. However, the new organisms, with no natural enemies, upset the ecology, destroying forests and generating deserts, like the one south of Startop. Consequently, early outbackers had to work hard to restore balance and fertility.

The outbackers were helped in this by the F-type sun's actinic and ionizing radiation penetrating the dense atmosphere. Because of such stellar radiation, the highly energetic biochemical compounds are more vigorous and evolve faster than their counterparts on Earth. The outbackers live in and with the Freehold environment instead of cultivating or domesticating it to support cities. This brings them into conflict with the Nine Cities whose citizens aim to re-civilize the "savages" and reclaim the land in order to practice traditional agriculture. However, the outbackers, who are not mere savages, possess not only scientific knowledge but also new "Skills" and techniques enabling them to destroy cities.

Here is a conflict completely independent of that between the Empire and the Merseians or the Arulians.

Nordyke

Poul Anderson describes many dynamic towns and cities in Technic Civilization, notably the two on Avalon. Here is another. War on Freehold has not damaged Nordyke but has filled its airport and seaport with ships and its "...streets with young men from every corner of the Empire." -Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 11.

Nordyke factories use raw materials from the other continents. On the heights are old castle-like buildings and, along the Catwick river, a modern town with blooming parks and brawling taverns where the locals spend the money brought by the Imperialists.

Admiral Fernando Cruz Manqual and Terran military headquarters are in Nordyke, where Ridenour, the xenologist sent from Earth and billeted in a float-shelter on the bay, is able to interview an Arulian prisoner, although he must travel to another of the Nine Cities, Domkirk, to meet human outbacker prisoners.

More On Freehold

See Freehold, Freehold II, Aruli, Why Freeholders Leave The Cities and Arulians And Outbackers.

The opening paragraph of Poul Anderson's "Outpost of Empire," set on the humanly colonized planet of Freehold, states that the star Betelgeuse is nearby. That alone informs knowledgeable readers not only that this colony is on the edge of the Terran Empire but also that it is on the side that faces towards the enemy, the Roidhunate of Merseia.

I was puzzled by the passage that introduces John Ridenour:

"John Ridenour had arrived that day. But he had made planetfall a week earlier..."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 4.

What is the difference between arriving and making planetfall? However, this introductory sentence means not that he had arrived on the planet but that he had arrived in Domkirk, having made planetfall in Sevenhouses, then gone to military headquarters in Nordyke before visiting Domkirk to interview prisoners there. It takes a while for the reader to unravel events because, immediately after telling us that he "...had arrived that day...," the text backtracks to Ridenour approaching Freehold in the merchant spaceship, Ottokar.

Anderson expounds to the reader by creating opportunities for the characters to expound to each other:

Ridenour expounds on the Freehold environment to the steward's mate;
Ridenour internally expounds to himself on the smallness of the Terran Empire when contrasted with the galaxy and the universe;
Lieutenant Sadik expounds on the current war to Ridenour;
Ridenour expounds on Freehold politics to an Arulian prisoner;
the mayor of Domkirk expounds on the outbackers to Ridenour, who thinks, "Good Lord...I have found a man who can out-lecture me." (p. 16)

(Thus, Anderson acknowledges to the readers that they have been lectured for a few pages - but it is all interesting subject-matter.)

Ridenour And The Arulian

John Ridenour conducts a curious interview. First, his interviewee and he are of different species. Secondly, neither is a native of Freehold, the planet where the interview is conducted. The blond-haired, hatchet-faced interviewer is from Earth, here known by its Latin name, Terra, whereas the blue-feathered, sharp-snouted interviewee is from Aruli, which he calls "Eternal Aruli." -Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 12. Thirdly, neither speaks the other's language. However, both are fluent in the principle language of another space-traveling race, the Merseians, although the Arulian has difficulty with some Eriau phonemes.

To summarize, a Terrestrial interviews an Arulian in Eriau on Freehold. Thus, the Earthman interacts in different ways with three other planets. Might such colorful cultural combinations occur in our future? Yes, if, like Ridenour, we inhabit "...a universe that produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes." (p. 7) But I doubt that. If it were true, then the extinction of a rational species, although tragic, would not be as great a tragedy as if that species were the only intelligent race in existence.

John Ridenour

We see John Ridenour from Dominic Flandry's point of view on Starkad, then as one of the viewpoint characters on Freehold - see also here.

Ridenour:

is a civilian xenologist, working for the Navy;
is tall, wiry, blond and hatchet-faced;
dresses more serviceably than fashionably;
smokes a pipe;
is married with children, at least one of them grown up;
is standoffish by nature;
learned about Freehold from conversation, reading and "...machine-enforced mnemonics..." -Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 4;
travels to Freehold on the Germanian merchantman, the Ottokar;
is annoyed when a crewman insists on talking as they get their first view of the planet but then cannot be ungracious to the younger man.

The passage introducing Ridenour includes the phrase "...wilderness of suns..." (ibid.), a slight variation on the appropriate and evocative "...wilderness of stars..." that we have noticed several times previously. See here, here and here.