Which Collection Next?

Poul Anderson's "The Voortrekkers" appears in at least two collections, Explorations and All One Universe. The latter is a larger format volume of alternating fiction and non-fiction, short stories but also articles or essays by Anderson.

On this blog, I have referred to two other stories from All One Universe:

the prehistorical story, "The Forest";
a pessimistic future history outline whose title currently eludes me.

I had intended to reread All One Universe after Explorations but my copy of it has at least temporarily gone astray among re-shelved books so, while that is being located, I will reread something else. Bear with me...

Later: My granddaughter is exercising in the book room so I can't get in there. Meanwhile, the gods have heard my prayer. For Love And Glory has arrived so that is what I read next. One of Anderson's many accomplishments was very good contributions to other authors' fictional universes and this novel is based on two of those.

The Voortrekkers

In Poul Anderson's "Epilogue," machines have been naturally selected for consciousness and intelligence whereas, in his "The Voortrekkers" (Explorations, New York, 1981), machines have been programmed with human psychoneural patterns. Thus, "The Voortrekkers" addresses issues that are treated at greater length in Anderson's Genesis and Harvest of Stars Tetralogy.

In "The Voortrekkers," for slower than light extra-solar exploration:

a complex and dynamic human psychoneural pattern is scanned and recorded, then transferred to a photonic-electronic matrix, thus producing a conscious, motivated, self-programming machine, needing no life support, that "'...can be switched off in transit...'" (p. 159);

on arrival in another planetary system, the neural pattern can be transferred to a molecular-organic matrix, thus producing a human being who can explore a planetary surface and test its habitability.

When the original consents to be scanned and recorded and to give cells for chromosome templates, he knows that he will continue to live on Earth or in the Solar System and will eventually die there. It makes no sense for him to wonder whether he will be the one who wakes up in a spaceship entering another planetary system. Yet when the transferred neural pattern becomes conscious, it will think, "I am the one who has woken in the spaceship..."

Is this, rather than human beings traveling faster than light, the real future for interstellar travel?

Explorations

Explorations (New York, 1981) by Poul Anderson is a collection of six stories:

i "The Saturn Game"
ii "The Bitter Bread"
iii "The Ways of Love"
iv "The Voortrekkers"
v "Epilogue"
vi "Starfog"

Maybe "Epilogue" should have been no vi?

Anderson and editor Jim Baen agreed the contents and theme. Anderson's Introduction is a spirited defense of a manned space program:

"A human being is the only computer that continuously reprograms itself, the only sensor system that records data it is not planned to detect, the only thing that gives a damn." (p. 10)

Yes, and therefore a human being is not a computer! Only conscious beings value anything.

The opening and closing stories of this collection are also the opening and closing stories of Anderson's Technic Civilization Future History and therefore have more recently been republished at the beginning of Volume I and the end of Volume VII of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga. "The Ways of Love," about which I posted recently, is the sequel to Anderson's The Enemy Stars and therefore, I think, should be republished as an epilogue to that novel.

"The Voortrekkers" is in Anderson's later collection All One Universe. I am fairly certain that "Epilogue" is in another collection on a shelf upstairs but will confirm this tomorrow rather than at this time of night. So far, mentally eliminating duplicable stories from Anderson collections has had these results -

Alight In The Void: 5-2=3;
Conquests/Seven Conquests: 7-2=5;
Explorations: 6-5=1.

Thus, perhaps one collection of nine stories could be derived from these three? I am left with two stories, (iv) and (v), to reread and one, (ii), to read for the first time.