One More Detail in "Earthman, Beware!"

I should have remembered this phrase before:

"...the solipsistic loneliness in which humans wandered from their births to the end of their brief meaningless lives."

(Poul Anderson, "Earthman, Beware!" IN Alight In The Void, New York, pp. 29-60 AT p. 56)

This is not Poul Anderson speaking. It is his stranded alien, Joel Weatherfield, momentarily disparaging humanity. In his better moments, Joel does see value, eg, in the life of his human friend, Peggy.

More importantly, we are not "solipsistic" because we genuinely communicate, and would not otherwise become self-conscious. Our lives require no external authority to bestow meaning on them. We value our existence and only conscious beings can value anything.

So our lives are brief - "brief" is a comparative term but, in comparison with many things, yes, they are brief - but they are far from meaningless and this should be affirmed because too casual a use of the term "meaningless" can only demoralize.  

Some Remaining Details In "Earthman, Beware!"

I list details in Poul Anderson's stories, as in the previous post, because the details are ingenious and because I would soon forget them if I did not write them down.

Four concluding comments on "Earthman, Beware!":

(i) One sentence in this story contains a phrase that became important in a later Anderson series:

"The long night wore on."

(Alight In The Void, New York, 1993, p. 45)

(ii) In the first seven pages of the story, Peggy has tracked Joel to his Alaskan cabin. So far, the story could have had a contemporary setting although with the science fictional elements of Joel's partial telepathy and his robot chef invention. Then suddenly, Joel thinks:

"Maybe he should have gone to Mars or some outer-planet satellite." (p. 36)

With this sentence, we are wrenched into a futuristic scenario where interplanetary travel is routine. We are used to such scenarios in science fiction but are usually given notice of them earlier in a story. Two pages further on, we are informed that Joel invented the ion-jet space drive so it seems that he is responsible for interplanetary travel.

(iii) A single word can trigger an entirely accidental association in one reader's mind. Joel's human foster parents were called not Kent but Weatherfield. I live on Blades St in the city of Lancaster in the county of Lancashire. Since December 1960, a British TV series has shown the denizens of Coronation Street in the fictitious town of Weatherfield, Lancashire. (Apparently, Weatherfield is a hour by motorway from Lancaster. If only I knew which direction to drive in...) So maybe the foster parents' ancestors came from the North West of England...

(iv) When, in the very last sentence:

"Dr Joel Weatherfield, eminent young physicist, rose cheerfully and began making ready to go home." (p. 60)

- he has been made to forget his personal cosmic connection. We are Joel. We are all connected to the cosmos and are usually unaware of it.

Ultrawaves And Telepathy

In Poul Anderson's "Earthman, Beware!" (IN Anderson, Alight In The Void, New York, 1993, pp. 29-60):

neuronic activity generates short-range brain pulses that are measurable by encephalographs but not directly related to telepathy;
telepathy, part of the ultrawave spectrum, crosses space without time lag;
spatio-temporal geometry generates gravity from matter and ultrawaves from vibrating energy;
however, an ultrawave is generated only when there is both a transmitter and a receiver;
an ultrawave's frequency is that of its generating fields but infinite velocity would generate an infinite wavelength so the wavelength should be conceived in terms of tensors;
ultra-energies are omnipresent in the cosmic structure;
the telepathy center of a super-human brain can impose vibrations on it;
other centers control ultra-energy to create, destroy or move matter, cross space, scan the past or scan future possibilities;
when the stranded alien, Joel, telepathically contacts his people, several of them immediately come physically to Earth across what might be millions of light years, from another galaxy.

When discussing Anderson's Brain Wave in an earlier post, I commented that sf can show our place in the galaxy without necessarily having human beings travel physically into the galaxy. Here is another example of that.

Maybe the ultra-energy is what the Black Nebulans and the Chereionites access in Anderson's Technic Civilization History.

The Ultrawave Series

If a series is more than one work, thus at least two works, then maybe I have found an "ultrawave series" by Poul Anderson. "Earthmen, Beware!" and "The Star Beast" depend on different applications, mental and technological, of an "ultrawave," which is very similarly described in both stories although I have found one difference:

"'The important thing is that these effects are transmitted with no measurable time lag...'"

("Earthman, Beware!" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void, 1993, pp. 29-60, AT p. 46)

"The transmitter field was generated. At the speed of light, Harol flashed around the world..."

("The Star Beast" IN Alight In The Void, pp. 61-102, AT p. 66)

However, maybe the superhuman Joel Weatherfield detected a deeper level of the ultrawave? According to his account, which mostly matches "The Star Beast":

ultrawave radiation is unrelated to electromagnetism;

vibrating energy fields produce detectable effects without time lag in similar apparatuses elsewhere (this sounds like James Blish's instantaneous Dirac transmitter);

in order to attract his people to Earth, the stranded alien Joel broadcasts pulses representing stars, with intensity standing for absolute brightness and time separation standing for distance;

however, receiving no reply, he realizes that he must instead use his telepathy which turns out to be another part of the ultrawave spectrum.

There is more but it is proving difficult to unravel at nearly midnight so further discussion of the ultrawave will have to be postponed till a later post.