Inter-Species Communication II

See Inter-Species Communication.

Poul Anderson
The relevant quotes are:

"The nonhuman remains nonhuman. He can only show us those facets of himself which we can understand. Thus he often seems to be a two-dimensional, even comic personality. But remember, we have the corresponding effect on him."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), pp. 264-265.

"'[Nonhumans] are too unlike us. You probably know better than I how vastly their psychologies, instincts, drives, capabilities differ from ours, and from each other's...I think we interact with them, and they with us, only on a rather superficial level. Partnership is possible between human and alien, yes. Sometimes even what the human feels as friendship. But how does the alien feel it? That may be ultimately unknowable, on either side.'"
-Poul Anderson, For Love And Glory (New York, 2003), Chapter IX, p. 53.

Bob Shaw
Bob told me that he never had conversations between human beings and aliens but there was some conversation with hyper-dimensional beings in the Orbitsville Trilogy and maybe between souls of different species in the scientifically rationalized hereafter of The Palace Of Eternity? In old age, we try to remember works read literally decades ago.

Carl Sagan
Sagan suggests a means of communication. See here.

Niven and Pournelle
When, in Anderson's A Circus Of Hells, an alien on her own planet shakes her head in disbelief, we ask, "Would she do this?" whereas, when one of Niven's and Pournelle's Moties nods her head, we soon realize that this is because she is trying to converse with human beings and is learning fast.

I am definitely signing off till next month. Excelsior.

Why?

As Bob Shaw observed in a Serious Scientific Talk at a Science Fiction Convention, most people think that, if they are struck by lightning, it will kill them but science fiction readers know that a much more likely outcome is that they will be flung into the past.

Which period of the past they will be flung into is a product of three factors:

the voltage of electricity in the lightning;
their body weight, measured in pounds;
which period the author has been mugging up on.

Lightning was the mechanism for time travel in L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and in Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early," which is a direct comment on the de Camp novel. The Anderson story remarks that lightning-induced time travel happens very rarely - so rarely that it has happened in only one other work of fiction so far?

A similarly humorous explanation may be appropriate for the conundrum presented in Anderson's "Delenda Est":

"'...the Patrol and the Danellians are wiped out. (Don't ask me why they weren't "always" wiped out; why this is the first time we came back from the far past to find a changed future. I don't understand the mutable-time paradoxes. We just did, that's all.)'"
- Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 187.

I suggested two answers to this not-to-be-asked question in a recent post but the real answer, of course, is that the author has started to write a series about an organization whose job is to prevent time travelers from changing the past so now he is writing a story in which some time travelers have changed the past. (Similarly, Asimov started a series in which Seldon's psychohistorical predictions guided the Foundation, then wrote a story in which the Mule overturned those predictions - but, as I always say, Anderson's historical fiction is far better and moreover is about real history.)

When the Patrol plans its counter-intervention in the pivotal battle, Everard says:

"'...I don't think we can get away with more than two agents actually on the scene. The baddies are going to be alert, you know, looking for counterinterference.'" (p. 222)

This tells us that the action will continue to focus on Everard and his companion for this story, Van Sarawak. Indeed, Everard continues:

"'The Alexandria office can supply Van and me with costumes.'" (ibid.)

Something else that we might notice here is that, as science fiction readers, we are on familiar territory. We already know that, if we intervene in a battle in order to change the course of history, then we need to be alert for any other time travelers trying either to preserve the established course of history or to undo our changes!

The tradition of time travelers possibly observing and interacting with historical battles goes back to a conversation between the Time Traveler's dinner guests.

The Quiet Earth

This occasional sf idea has a modicum of plausibility: FTL will move human activity out of the Solar System so Earth will become a quiet place. Obviously, an entire planetary population would not emigrate immediately, even if given unlimited living space to colonize, contra Bob Shaw in Orbitsville. However, the home population might indeed decline over time.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight future history, antigravity-powered cities leave Earth for economic reasons:

"Earth itself became a garden planet, bearing only one city worth noticing, the sleepy capitol of a galaxy. Pittsburgh valley bloomed, and rich honeymooners went there to frolic.
"Old bureaucrats went to Earth die.
"Nobody else went there at all."
- James Blish, Earthman, Come Home (London, 1963), p. 13.

These reflections are occasioned by the fact that essentially the same future Earth exists both in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic future history and in his stand alone novel, World Without Stars.

"Earth is a quiet world."  - World Without Stars (New York, 1966), p. 120.

The following passage describes:

great forests;
low population;
starport towns;
educational centers for galactic youth;
flourishing art;
living science and scholarship;
but no new buildings;
preservation of the old;
immortal space travelers' property unchanged after centuries of robotic supervision.

In "The Pirate," A Psychotechnic History story, Earth is commended for "...its quiet, its intellectuality..."
- Starship (New York, 1982), p. 212.

In The Peregrine, a Psychotechnic History novel, Earth is green with forests through which "...isolated houses and small village groupings..." are scattered.
- The Peregrine (New York, 1978), p. 24.

The following passage describes a planet with:

a small, mostly creative, population;
scientific research;
education;
arts -

- so it definitely reads like World Without Stars revisited.

STL Or FTL?

Poul Anderson made a point of imagining different means of faster than light interstellar travel (FTL) and this blog has recently mentioned three of them. However, with his characteristic comprehensiveness, Anderson also based an entire novel, Tau Zero, around the idea of slower than light (STL) Bussard ramjets.

In Larry Niven's Leshy Circuit stories, Bussard ramjets, flown at relativistic speeds, are used for trade between Earth and a few extrasolar colonies. In Niven's Known Space future history, Pak protectors use ramjets. Mutated Pak breeders, i.e., human beings, travel in suspended animation in slow ships and send equipment in Bussard ramjets which, at this early stage of Terrestrial technology, would destroy any organisms that they carried. Later ramjet models are safe but then extrasolar colonists buy the hyperdrive from a space-dwelling alien race.

In one (or two?) of his novels, Bob Shaw ingeniously synthesized the idea of ramjets with the idea of FTL. When ramjets pass a certain high percentage of light speed, they pass from the realm of FTL-prohibiting Einsteinian physics into the realm of FTL-allowing Arthurian physics. The curiously named Arthur Arthur formulates a theory that supersedes yet incorporates relativistic physics just as relativity had superseded yet incorporated Newtonian physics. Thus, Arthur is Shaw's equivalent of Blish's Haertel or Anderson's Mach.

However, the term "Arthurian" suggests that we are reading a fantasy, thus could be an auctorial comment as when Blish named one of his FTL drives the "Imaginary Drive."