Leadership

Poul Anderson, For Love And Glory (New York, 2003), Chapter XIV.

Here, we compared Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn and SM Stirling's John Rolfe as different kinds of leaders. Now we find a third example. Lissa Davysdaughter Windholm thinks:

"'I'm only a planetarist. And even that title is a fake. I don't do geology, oceanography, atmospherics, chemistry, biology, ethology, or xenology. I dabble in them all, and then dare call myself a scientist." (p. 85)

So what is her contribution?

"I help get the specialists together, and keep them together, and sometimes keep them alive. That's my work. That justifies me being here..." (ibid.)

It does indeed. So that work must be generally acknowledged and respected? No:

"...though I had to force it every centimeter of the way." (ibid.)

Leadership indeed.

I googled "planetarist" but found a different meaning for it.

New Virginian Catholics

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

"...New Virginia's Catholics included a sprinkling of zealots displeased with the changes in the Church after Vatican II." (p. 430)

That answers one set of questions asked earlier. See here. However, I am not sure why it is mentioned at this point in the text. The reference has been merely to a Franciscan mission and its converts in Antelope Valley (see image).

Theologians might ponder whether the Jesus of one Earth saves souls on another Earth? There must be many Jesuses as well as alternative versions of Christianity or of other religions that have performed the same role on different Earths, like, e.g., an alternative Mithraism that admitted women and historicized the story of Mithras sacrificing the bull. (These changes would make Mithraism more acceptable as a universal religion in the Roman Empire, just as Christianity preserved Jewish monotheism but without the divisive Jewish dietary laws.)

I did not intend to make this post just about alternative religions but have wound up saying slightly more than expected and it has got quite late so let's sign off until maybe some time after a night's sleep. Onward.

Merseians, Draka And Others

I compared SM Stirling's Draka to Poul Anderson's Merseians here. This had implications for Sean M Brooks' article, "Was The Domination Inspired By Merseia?" so Sean added a few new paragraphs. See here.

More generally, colonization and colonialism are issues common not only to Anderson's Terran Empire and Merseian Roidhunate but also to Stirling's:

Angrezi Raj;
Commonwealth of New Virginia;
Domination of the Draka;
"Lords of Creation" Solar System;
Nantucket;
Emberverse.

New Virginians include former white South Africans with racist attitudes comparable to those of the Draka. However, the Commonwealth is preferable to the Domination because it is not a slave state and is developing the North American continent of another Earth.

I have read Conquistador, about New Virginia, only once so might reread it before tackling the seventeen novels of the Nantucket-Emberverse sequence which, I gather, presents two ways of putting its characters into more primitive conditions: Nantucket is transported to the Bronze Age of what must be another timeline and technology stops working in the present. (See also the Changes series.)

I might reread Anderson's For Love And Glory, which I have also read only once. Posts about all the works mentioned here except Nantucket-Emberverse can be found by searching the blog, e.g., Angrezi Raj.

Perspectives

Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us John Carter who was a Captain in the Army of the Confederate States of America, then a chieftain of Thark, a prince of Helium and Warlord of Mars. We are told that there are some malcontents in the empire of Helium but we know little about them, except that such characters are always dishonest and cowardly...

SM Stirling gives us John Rolfe VI, Captain in the US Army and descendant of Confederates. Is Rolfe an all round admirable character like Carter? Stirling gives us different perspectives. Our other hero Tom calls Rolfe ruthless and the sympathetic character, physicist Ralph Barnes, not only refuses to help Rolfe conquer other universes but also calls him a fascist to his face - a misuse of the term "fascist" but it helps to identify Barnes' social milieu. Despite this defiance, Barnes is allowed to flourish in New Virginia although not, of course, to leave it, and even becomes a friend and adviser of Rolfe's rebellious granddaughter.

Stirling shows us social and psychological complexities that were beyond ERB's horizons.

Soap Bubbles II

See Soap Bubbles.

Although I argue that a time traveler who prevents his own birth does not cease to exist, time travelers would nevertheless need to proceed with extreme caution. How can they know which kind of scenario they are in? -

(i) you cannot prevent your birth because your timeline is single and continuous;

(ii) you can prevent your birth because your timeline is single but discontinuous;

(iii) you can prevent your birth because timelines are multiple and divergent.

If a group of people found themselves in what seemed to be their own California long ago and if they wanted to return to their remembered version of the twentieth/twenty first century, then they would have to be very careful not to change the course of events in any way. Rolfe tests whether the Gate has taken him to the past:

"'The first time I came through, I carved numbers on rocks in places I could locate on both sides - boulders, cliff faces - carved them deep enough to last for thousands of years. There's no trace of them back on our side of the Gate, where we know it's 1946. I'm still going to get some astronomers to look at pictures of the night sky - the stars change with time, you know - but I'm pretty certain this is the same time as back in California, the spring of 1946.'" (pp. 26-27)

So he is in the present of an alternative timeline, not in the past of his original timeline although, even here, he was taking a risk. He might have been changing the past/initiating a divergent timeline by carving on those rocks.

Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time are set in scenario (i). His Time Patrol series is ambiguous between (ii) and (iii).

Conquistador, Prologue II

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

After decades of science fiction publishing, past and future exchange places:

Conquistador is copyright 2003;
its Prologue is set in 1946;
Chapter One is set in 2009;
I am reading it in 2015.

When I started to read sf in the 1960's, year dates like 2003 or 2004 could all too readily appear in a text but never in a publishing history! Such years were, and sometimes felt as if they always would be, "the Future." And do not be fooled into thinking that "2009" is in the past. When this novel was published, it was in the near future. Thus, the characters could, for example, refer to a President of the United States who is not the man that we remember as holding office in that year. If the author wants to prevent his text from becoming dated too quickly, then he will avoid any such references so that later readers might not notice that 2009 was then a near future, not a recent past.

The Prologue is headed First Side/New Virginia. We are to learn what "First Side" means. "Virginia" might make some of us think of John Carter. I gather that New Virginia is in Iowa. The viewpoint character, John Rolfe VI, was wounded by a Nambu machine gun and received a Silver Star. His grandfather, John Rolfe III "...lost a leg at Second Manassas, leading a regiment of the Stonewall Brigade..." (p. 2).

John Rolfe VI trained at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and endured Beast Barracks.  He served in Baker Company and used a Garand rifle. As a Democrat, he "...hadn't forgotten whose idea Reconstruction was or who went around waving the Bloody Shirt afterward..." (p.4) He had a "...Tidewater childhood..." (p. 5)

Our Rolfe (VI) finds his equivalent of Alice's rabbit hole or the Narnian wardrobe in his basement when a silver sheet replaces one of the walls. On the other side of the sheet, he sees an unfamiliar landscape which includes:

"A grizzly. Old Eph himself, a big silvertip male..." (p. 7)

Finally, John Rolfe I had waded onto the Virginia shore carrying a rapier. He sounds like an ERBian hero and a worthy ancestor of Johns III and VI.