American Fiction

Still no Call Me Joe from Amazon. Meanwhile, I am rereading The King Of Torts by John Grisham. When I started to read Poul Anderson's science fiction as a secondary school pupil in the 1960's, I would have regarded an American legal thriller as mundane by comparison. Now, of course, I know better.

Grisham's DC street lawyers and tort billionaires, like Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn and expeditions to unusual planetary systems, are literary expressions of the dynamic society inhabited by Grisham and Anderson alike. Rich lawyer's private jets flying from Washington to New York in forty minutes are exact equivalents of van Rijn's hyperdrive ships flying between planetary systems faster than light.

Grisham, like Anderson, describes spectacular wealth but values basic humanity. Anderson additionally values knowledge of the universe, with serious scientific speculation about stellar and planetary evolution. We need fiction about contemporary society and also about our place in the cosmos.

Franchise Universes

Call Me Joe and Man-Kzin Wars IX are traveling at sub-light speed from Amazon. Meanwhile, let us consider whether it would be a good idea if Poul Anderson's estate and publishers were to franchise sections of some of his many series, e.g., the Time Of Troubles or the Long Night in the History of Technic Civilization.

Such continuations by other authors would have to be done very well or not at all. There are many unanswered questions in the Technic History - but there are so many that it would never be possible to answer them all.

There are several potential sub-series:

the trader team after Coya had joined it;
the team that Chee Lan joined after Falkayn's team was disbanded;
what van Rijn did later;
the continuing adventures of Diana Crowfeather and her companions;
more about Roan Tom and about the Commonalty Rangers -

- but even this is in no way a complete list.

Continuations of the Time Patrol series would present special problems, to be addressed later. (Right now, my son-in-law is coming out of hospital today so there is some family activity here.)

The NESFA Collections

To the best of my knowledge:

the New England Science Fiction Association Press has published six collections of short works by Poul Anderson;

there will be more volumes from NESFA;

Volume 1, Call Me Joe, contains forty six items of which I have read perhaps fifteen;

consequently, this and subsequent volumes present much to me as yet unread material;

the items in Call Me Joe include an article on "Heinlein's Stories."

Call Me Joe should be in the post and, when I have read that, I will have to track down Volumes 2-6. I regard Robert Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's Psychotechnic and Technic Histories as a triad among future histories so it will be of particular interest to read Anderson's views on Heinlein's stories.

While awaiting the arrival of Call Me Joe and of Man-Kzin Wars IX, I have read as far as p. 154 of John Grisham's 447-page Sycamore Row.

Cover Illustrations

This time, let's just appreciate some good cover illustrations.

I can't fit them all into a single post but I recommend everyone to google the NESFA Press The Collected Short Stories of Poul Anderson volumes - and, of course, to buy the books.

Poul Anderson's Fictions

(I want to end July with 89 posts in order to form a round number with June, which accidentally ended with 101 instead of 100, because I find round numbers easier to deal with. (Addendum, 30 Nov 2015: Later, two posts were moved from 2013 to 2014. One of these posts must have been from June 2013 because that month now has 100 posts.) This might mean a few posts drafted tomorrow and Wednesday but not posted till Thursday. Meanwhile, I hope that there are enough here for anyone who is interested!)

It really is extraordinary how one reader's attention can move around between Poul Anderson's multifarious works of fiction. When I was posting about Anderson's diverse works set in the past, I did not want to return to his futuristic sf.

More recently, for over two months, I focused entirely on a single futuristic series, the Technic Civilization History, because I thought, and still think, that this series warrants that much attention and more. However, I began to wonder how long I would be able to sustain a commentary on one series - it can always be returned to later. Meanwhile, I remembered that there was one historical fiction short story that I had not yet read and had intended to return to.

Identifying this story as "Son of the Sword," in the collection Alight In The Void, I read and posted not only about it but also about the remaining four stories in this collection. Although I prefer novels to short stories and trilogies, tetralogies or series to single novels, I currently feel that the future of Poul Anderson Appreciation blogging lies in the short stories so I will be reading or rereading some other collections that have gathered on a bookshelf upstairs.

Earlier, a particular theme took me entirely outside the Anderson canon. Anderson's several works set on Jupiter include "Call Me Joe" which has strong parallels to James Blish's "Bridge." Rereading the Anderson story led to rereading the Blish story which led to rereading and blogging about several other Blish works, on James Blish Appreciation. However, Anderson's output is much bigger than Blish's so that, after about a month, I was back with Anderson. It is unpredictable where this process will lead to next.

Anderson-Blish Interaction

For a Poul Anderson fan who is also a James Blish fan, rereading Anderson's "Call Me Joe," set on Jupiter and Jupiter V, automatically led to rereading the "Jupiter V" chapters of Blish's They Shall Have Stars for comparison. This in turn led to rereading the "New York" chapters and "Washington" sections of They Shall Have Stars and the opening chapters of The Triumph Of Time so I am publishing some posts on the James Blish Appreciation blog.

The two novels mentioned are the opening and closing volumes of Blish's main future history which, considerably shorter than Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, is complete, with a beginning, a middle and an end, in just four volumes.

I recently posted remarks about Anderson's two intergalactic novels, Tau Zero and World Without Stars. Blish's equivalent, The Triumph Of Time, is set entirely outside the home galaxy. The flying city of New York has colonized the planet of New Earth in the Greater Magellanic Cloud and, from there, the New Earthmen, as they have become, have colonized other planets in the Cloud.

The moving planet of He leaves the Milky Way, crosses intergalactic space, passes through the Andromeda galaxy, then sets out to return to the Milky Way, passing through M-33 and both Magellanic Clouds en route. Meeting the New Earthmen, who advise them to avoid the home galaxy, now ruled by a new non-human empire, they propose to seek elsewhere for a solution to the problem that they had discovered in intergalactic space, " 'Nothing less...than the imminent coming to an end of time itself.' " (Blish, Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 505)

Mayor John Amalfi suggests making the million light year journey to NGC 6822 but a Hevian replies that:

" '...our ultimate destination must be the center of the metagalaxy, the hub of all the galaxies of space-time.'" (p. 508)

Only there can they hope to " '...escape or to modify the end...' " (p. 508)

Like World Without Stars, The Triumph Of Time postulates a faster than light means of intergalactic travel. Like Tau Zero, it presents human beings who survive until, then decide how to respond to, the end of the universe.

Joe On Jupiter And Others Elsewhere

If a neural pattern were to be duplicated in another brain, whether organic or artificial, then consciousness, memory and sense of identity would also be duplicated so that the copy would, at least initially, think that s/he was the original. In Poul Anderson's works, this happens in "Call Me Joe," the Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis.

An Earthman remotely controls every waking moment of the central nervous system of the artificially grown Jovian organism, Joe, so that, when the Earthman dies and Joe wakes, the man's memories have been transferred to Joe's brain. Other Earthmen, near death, might regard transfer of their memories into a Jovian organism as an extension of life.

James Blish's "Bridge" parallels "Call Me Joe" in terms of subject matter: an Earthman on Jupiter V remotely perceives the Jovian environment. "Bridge" also parallels Anderson's "The Saturn Game" in that both describe interplanetary exploration preceding interstellar travel in a future history series.

Of the authors compared in an earlier post, Burroughs presents the bizarrest version of Jupiter whereas Blish's version is the most scientifically accurate. Blish seems to go along with the idea that Jupiter, like smaller planets, has a uniform solid surface that can be clearly distinguished from its gaseous atmosphere. After all, what else is the Bridge (one of the classic settings for an sf story) standing on? However, Blish goes on to reveal that anyone descending through the Jovian atmosphere would encounter only increasing density with denser material from further down sometimes forced upwards to form merely temporary continents on one of which the Bridge is built.

Three On Jupiter

I refer to three fictitious accounts of the exploration of Jupiter:

James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981);
Clifford Simak, City (London, 1965);
Poul Anderson, "Call Me Joe," IN The Dark Between The Stars (New York, 1981).

In Blish, Robert Helmuth on Jupiter V dons a helmet and perceives the Jovian environment through instruments on a car that moves along the Bridge being built on the Jovian surface;

In Anderson, Edward Anglesey on Jupiter V dons a helmet and perceives the Jovian environment through the central nervous system of an artificially grown quadrupedal organism that has been sent to the Jovian surface;

In Simak, Kent Fowler in a dome on Jupiter is transformed into a quadrupedal organism and sent out onto the Jovian surface.

Thus, Anderson's account is intermediate between Blish's and Simak's. Anglesey and Fowler wind up happy in their Jovian bodies whereas Helmuth hates that environment and wants to get away from it. Blish told me that he could not have described Jupiter as a comfortable place. His "Bridge" came from an experience under a New York bridge that shook as a train passed overhead.