Continuing Conquests

Continuing to reread Poul Anderson's Conquests/Seven Conquests, I have completed three of the seven stories. What did I forget to say about the second story, "Wildcat"?

First, it has a good fight scene between men with guns in jeeps and a tyrannosaur. Secondly, I have formed the habit of noting words in Anderson's extensive vocabulary that I am unfamiliar with. When the viewpoint character relieves a guard, the latter hands over his rifle and adds, "'And here's the glim...'" (Seven Conquests, New York, 1984, p. 75). From the context, I infer that he means his flashlight. Of course, in a visual medium, we would see what he was handing over.

The doctor says of a patient, "'He can do light work with that Stader on his arm.'" (p. 61) Stader?

And why does the chaplain call the oil rig men "'...wildcatters...,'" the phrase that becomes the title of the story? (p. 63)

Back to the third story, "Cold Victory." The Captain demonstrates that the anti-Humanist counterrevolution succeeded because of chance events, accidents, but the academic insists that Humanism is a historical movement that will not be deflected so easily so their philosophical disagreement remains unresolved.

"Cold Victory" addresses the harrowing issue of brothers on opposite sides in a civil war. In this case, the one who wins dies. The story also cameos a character whose condition is addressed in another installment of the Psychotechnic future history, a tramp who draws his citizen's allowance and preserves old stories: one of the millions permanently unemployed because of advanced technology.

Although this tramp is not embittered, the condition of millions like him is a cause of the war:

"'Psychotechnic government had failed to solve the problems of Earth's adjustment to living on a high technological level. Conditions worsened until all too many people were ready to try desperation measures. The Humanist revolution was the desperation measure that succeeded in being tried.'" (p. 87)

As often, I could quote more but must close the quotation marks somewhere. This is an early work by Anderson and here he is using a character, the Martian academic, to summarize an entire period of this future history.

When, Where And Why?

In Poul Anderson's "Wildcat," the opening paragraph has three sentences:

in the first, it rains in a swamp;
in the second, the viewpoint character sees a derrick and a floodlight;
in the third, he hears a brontosaur.

So where is he? In the past, in the Lost World or on another planet?

The second paragraph establishes only that he is on a dock and that it is still raining. In the third and fourth paragraphs, he evades, and shoots at, an attacking plesiosaur. Half way down the second page, Herries' altercation with the guards, who should have been more vigilant, establishes that he and they are a hundred million years in the past.

So why is this story in Conquests, a collection on the theme of human warfare? All will be revealed but that may be the limit of my blogging for today!

(Meanwhile, still among Wellsian themes, we have moved from space travel to time travel.)

Two Collections

Poul Anderson wrote many short stories. Many of them have been collected. As its American title suggests, Seven Conquests (New York, 1984)/Conquests (London, 1981) collects seven short stories. Alight In The Void (New York, 1993) contains six works but the sixth is a poem. Thus, these two volumes contain twelve stories.

Four of them need not be in these volumes:

"Wildcat" in Conquests and "Flight to Forever" in Alight In The Void are time travel stories and as such are included in Past Times, a (mainly) time travel collection;

"Cold Victory" in Conquests is an installment of Anderson's first future history series and as such is collected in, indeed is the title story of, one volume of that history;

"Son of the Sword" in Alight In The Void is historical fiction, therefore, I argue, should be included with at least four other stories set in diverse past periods in a relevant collection that could be called Many Times.

Conquests is a collection on the theme of war. Thus, since, e.g., "Wildcat" is about both war and time travel, there is some rationale for its appearing in two differently themed collections. However, what is needed now is a complete multi-volume collection, without duplication, of all of Poul Anderson's short stories. Seven Conquests/Conquests can either lose the Seven from its title or, probably, gain two relevant stories from among those that are still uncollected.

I have recently discussed the five stories in Alight In The Void. "Wildcat" is discussed briefly under "Limits on Time Travel" in the earlier post, "Time Travel And Poul Anderson," dated Tuesday, 24 April, 2012 (see here), but will warrant further discussion later (indeed has already been discussed (see here and here) because the order of these posts has been shuffled between drafting and publishing).

War, Wells And Anderson

Everyone knows that sf writers follow in the footsteps of HG Wells but it is not always obvious how. Wells predicted not only spacecraft but also aircraft - that nineteenth century nation states armed with twentieth century weapons would wage World Wars. Soldiers on battlefields would be replaced by aviators bombing major cities. Not only armies but also populations would suffer and die in large numbers.

Wells wrote The War In The Air in 1907. He added a Preface in 1921 and another in 1941. The latter ended, "I told you so. You damned  fools." (Wells, The War In The Air, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973, p. 8)

Poul Anderson's collection, Conquests (London, 1981), addresses exactly the same theme as Wells' novel, The War In The Air: future technological warfare. The first story, "Kings Who Die," adds the more familiar Wellsian theme of space travel. In fact, the exportation of institutionalized violence into space is effectively offered as a partial solution to the problem propounded in The War In The Air, and experienced in World War II. The United States and United Asia have learned better than to bombard each others' cities or even each others' Lunar bases. Only soldiers die and only in space.

But why can this endless, carefully controlled slaughter not be ended to make way for peaceful coexistence on Earth and in space? The Unasian General Rostock practices brain-computer symbiosis like a character in Anderson's later novel, The Avatar. From all the data available to him, Rostock deduces that the sacrificial deaths of the revered soldiers is "'...an outlet for the destructive emotions generated in the mass of the people by the type of life they lead. A type of life for which evolution never designed them.'" (p. 35)

Rostock wants the American prisoner Diaz to join with him in devising a solution but first Diaz must help Rostock's fleet against the Americans! Is Rostock's claim to want peace merely a ruse to get Diaz's help in the war? I would be with Rostock in wanting to end war but a credible first step is not to enlist a prisoner's help in waging the war. Diaz agrees, a strange thing for an Anderson hero to do, but it turns out that he is acting under a posthypnotic command that he had agreed to but, of course, willingly forgotten. Appearing even to himself to cooperate, he gets close enough to Rostock to sabotage the latter's computer with an oscillator hidden in his body.

So, by the end of the story, the highest loyalty open to Diaz is to his country, not the more general loyalty to humanity apparently offered by Rostock. I have to agree in disagreeing with Rostock's means, if not his end. (Similarly, Aycharaych asked Flandry to help him preserve Chereion but that would have required Flandry to betray his allies, including his murdered fiancee's family. Good end, bad means.)

How plausible is Rostock's theory that the war is a revival of human sacrifice? This, if true, would be horrific and governments would have to agree to stop the slaughter, then find some other way to address their disagreements. But I think that they should do this anyway.

Collections III

Having remarked that Poul Anderson's Conquests (London, 1981) and Seven Conquests (New York, 1984) are one collection with two titles - in fact, they are the UK and US editions -, I now find that I have a copy of each on my shelves so I must have bought them at different times, thinking that they were different books. Anderson's Foreword, explaining this "...one-author one-theme one-genre collection..." about "...human conflict leading to institutionalized violence..." is very good (p. 9 or pp. 1-2). I agree with a lot of it and disagree to the extent that is expectable and necessary in this kind of discussion.

It was appropriate that I commented on "A Bicycle Built For Brew" after discussing The Enemy Stars because Anderson's introduction to the former in Kinship With The Stars (New York, 1991) says that he wrote this light-hearted story after The Enemy Stars, "...a bleak piece of pretty hard science fiction..." and a murder mystery so he "...was in a mood to kick up my heels." (p. 1)

We often commend Anderson's versatility and here it is, in part, displayed.