Films

A visit to the cinema can simultaneously update us on several familiar series. The other day:

a showing of Star Wars VII;

trailers for Star Trek, Captain America and X Men;

a poster advertising Batman v Superman.

While watching Star Wars, I tried to imagine that we were instead watching a film dramatization of Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return. In fact, imagine a serial adaptation of the entire History of Technic Civilization from "The Saturn Game" to "Starfog." There would have to be two actors for Dominic Flandry because he changes his face by biosculp between his second and third novels. Earlier, I posted suggestions for filming two small parts of the Technic History. See here and here.

The Star Trek and Star Wars series prove that hard sf series like Anderson's Technic History or James Blish's Cities In Flight could be filmed without encountering any insuperable technical difficulties. So let's see it.

(See here and here for discussion of proposed films based on works by Blish.)

Texts And Contexts

Each story can be considered from more than one angle. For example, I regard "The Saturn Game" and "The Problem of Pain" as the first and third stories in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization and "The Master Key" as a later story in that same History. However, in the retrospective collection, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), these stories are presented among others and in a different order:

"The Saturn Game" reflects Anderson's life-long interest in astronomy and, in particular, the fact that Voyager One was about to scan Iapetus shortly before this story, set on that Saturnian moon, was due to be published;

"The Master Key" is included because "This book would be incomplete without a van Rijn yarn..." (p. 153);

"The Problem of Pain" is included to showcase the Ythrians, a fictional species that had resulted from a suggestion made by John W Campbell.

When introducing "The Problem of Pain" in Going For Infinity, Anderson does at last mention that:

he had been writing stories about Flandry of the Terran Empire;

he had realized that van Rijn could have lived centuries before Flandry;

this generated further stories about how the libertarianism of the earlier period had devolved into the decadence of the later period and about what came after that;

in this history, human beings and Ythrians jointly colonized a planet which some of them explore in "The Problem of Pain."

Thus, much of the History is briefly summarized but almost as an afterthought and the involvement of "The Saturn Game" is not mentioned, nor is Flandry included in this volume. These three stories could also be reprinted in anthologies covering, respectively:

exploration of the Solar System;
alien species;
treatment of theological issues in sf.

Fictional Games

Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game" focuses on a role-playing game. Anderson mentions chess twice, in "The White King's War," incorporated into A Circus Of Hells, and in "The Immortal Game," although only the latter describes the moves of a game.

(Addendum: Of course, Anderson "mentions" chess more than just twice. See comments.)

Science fiction provides opportunities for imagining new games or variations of games in the future or on other planets, although Anderson did not do this. We would expect the Merseians to play a combat-based board game. However, the winged Ythrians would not think in two dimensions.

Reading on, I have learned that SM Stirling's Martian board game, atanj, the Game of Life, can be played by up to eight and that its board is octagonal with sixty two squares on a side. These and other differences remove it far from any real comparison with chess. Another difference is that the Martians play it virtually all the time, hardly the case with chess. These Martians are unempathetic characters and I much prefer Stirling's Venus.

Iain M. Banks Culture novel, The Player Of Games, centers on extremely elaborate board games but we are not told any of their rules which I think we should be.

The City Of Ice

If a short story about Kendrick, Ricia and Alvarlan in the City of Ice were to be published in a fantasy anthology, then it would be accepted as a fantasy short story. However, if exactly the same story, without any textual alterations, were to be published in a volume of Poul Anderson's hard sf Technic History series, then in that different context, it could be read as a "play within the play," as part of the psychodrama played by several explorers of the Saturnian system.

Readers of fantasy and sf easily imagine parallel universes with "The City of Ice" occurring in one and "The Saturn Game" in another. Anderson excellently presents this kind of scenario in another of his series, where Shakespeare, the great dramatist in some universes, is the Great Historian in the world of A Midsummer Tempest. However, we could, more subtly, read "The City of Ice," if such a story were to be written, simply as what is being imagined by the protagonists of "The Saturn Game" - as a fiction within the fiction.

As it happens, Anderson opted not to write "The City of Ice" as a separate story or even as discrete passages within "The Saturn Game." The psychodrama comes on stage only briefly in dialogue and in italicized passages that are clearly the characters' imaginings. However, these characters encounter alien landscapes that encourage their imaginings. Buried by a landslide on a Iapetean glacier, Scobie imagines that he is in the wreck of the Elf King's Dance Hall which is "...built of mist and starshine..." and "...blocks quarried from the cold side of Ginnungagap..." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 39). That is quite a thought. Meanwhile, Garcilaso, concussed, mumbles that the King has cast his soul into a cold Hell.

Before that, there was a straight description of a scene that could well encourage astronauts to fantasize. They have climbed so high that the curvature of the moon has become evident and the stars now seem to be not above but around them...

Levels Of Pretense

Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game" refers to "The Chaos..." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 26), that earlier, merely Terrestrial, equivalent of the Time of Troubles and the Long Night. Thus, there are three such interregnums in Anderson's History of Technic Civilization.

"To condemn psychodrama, even in its enhanced form, would be to condemn human nature." (p. 24)

A psychodrama is an elaborate enacted fiction. We distinguish three kinds of statements:

true, intended to be believed and to inform;
lies, intended to be believed and to deceive;
fictions, intended to be disbelieved and to entertain.

Children must learn the difference between a lie, which is untrue, and a fiction, which is also untrue. I was concerned when a teacher denounced a comic strip that I read as "Lies!" Lies were bad. He possibly meant that "Luck of the Legion" presented an inaccurate or inauthentic image of the French Foreign Legion.

I wonder whether there is a fourth category of statement:

yarns, intended not really to be believed but to entertain, almost fictions but not quite.

A friend told me a tall tale from his time in India. When I relay such a tale to others, they say things like:

"Art tells a good story!"
"And you believed him!"
"You didn't believe him, did you?"

When I receive such a response, I am annoyed not at Art for deceiving me but at myself for being taken in. Surely I should have realized that this was a joke or entertaining yarn to be taken "with a pinch of salt." He has not deceived me about anything important as if, for example, he lied about having paid a bill. The accomplished yarner might be amused to reflect that naive or trusting friends believe his stories whereas others merely pretend to and others again say, "Come of it!" The naive have enjoyed the story and have not been harmed by it. I have yarned and it has not felt like lying. Do some friends disbelieve but play along with a semi-psychodrama?

Luna And Iapetus

Poul Anderson's explorers of Iapetus see "A darkling plain..." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 8). "...darkling..." is somewhat archaic and definitely Wellsian. it is in The Time Machine (see here), The First Men In The Moon (see here) and even a, to me, previously unknown title (see here).

This invites a comparison. Wells contented himself with a single description of a first visit to another world, the Moon, whereas Poul Anderson was, of course, a space age sf writer for whom visits to other planets had already become routine, at least in imagination:

"Unlike the large Titan- and Saturn-vicinity explorers, landers on the airless moons were simply modified Luna-to-space shuttles, reliable but with limited capabilities." (p. 16)

CS Lewis either said or quoted that only the first visit to a new world is of interest to the reader of imagination, his point being that, when the new world has become familiar and routinized, then it is no longer a new world. True enough, but Anderson also knew that each entire world retains mysteries and unknowns and is seen afresh not only by each new generation but also by anyone who is able to look with new eyes. This earlier post is relevant.

The Mid-21st Century

In about 2055, there is already longevity treatment.

Exploration of the Solar System precedes its industrial development which, in turn, might save Earth. A solar sail takes a colony of a thousand people to Mars orbit where they use the beneficiated minerals of Phobos, send some to Earth and study Mars in auxiliary craft. Other craft sail as far as Jupiter.

The Vladimir is lost en route to Mercury but there is a second attempt and a Britannic-American consortium launches the Chronos on its eight year journey to Saturn. Central Control makes television tapes accessible for only three hours in twenty four because the crew must not become passive. For emergency backup, each has secondary skills maintained by constant training. The crew is a community with families, teachers, entertainers, constables, medical staff, clergy etc. They improve the interior of the vessel and engage in various cultural and social activities. Some stay sane through psychodrama. Hence, the title of the earliest Technic History story, "The Saturn Game."

No one yet knows that, in the League period, Mars will be colonized by extra-solars or that, in the Imperial period, Jupiter will be sold to the Dispersal of Ymir.

Thresholds

"...thresholds exist throughout reality...things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 1.

I am beginning to think that every opening page among Poul Anderson's works contains a significant statement worth quoting like this.

Hegel wrote that quantity affects quality. The trivial example is that the quantitative increase to 100 degrees Centigrade causes a qualitative change in water at sea level from liquid to gas but where are the main thresholds in reality?

A heated inanimate object is hot whereas a sufficiently sensitive organism feels hot;

cerebral processing of sensory inputs qualitatively transforms mere sensations like hotness into the perception that an external object is hot and a source of heat;

increased intellectuality includes the ability to analyze the concept of "heat."

Here are at least three thresholds: analysis of heat is "...altogether different from..." mere perception of heat which is different from the mere sensation of hotness which is different from mere physical heat. Any reductionist philosopher who claims that conscious processes are "nothing but" large numbers of unconscious processes is wrong. There are irreducible qualitative differences. Human beings already stand on the far sides of several thresholds. In Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game," they cross another.