Going For Infinity: Miscellaneous

Poul Anderson's Going For Infinity (New York, 2002) is a retrospective not only of short stories but also of novels. Three Hearts And Three Lions and A Midsummer Tempest are represented by excerpts and The High Crusade is represented by its sequel, "Quest." We can think other novels that could have been represented by a shorter prequel or sequel. Anderson uses his phrase, "...a wilderness of stars..." (p. 204), once more in his synopsis of The High Crusade.

The Harold Shea stories by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt were Anderson's "...main inspiration..." (p. 238) for Three Hearts... Thus, Pratt joins the list of Anderson's antecedents. Anthony Boucher, Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, asked Anderson to include a parallel universes rationale in Three Hearts... Thus, Boucher joins John W Campbell as an editor influential on Anderson. Thanks to parallel universes, the hero of Three Hearts... crosses over into A Midsummer Tempest and there meets a character from Anderson's two Operation... volumes.

Anderson's multiverse is more compact than Michael Moorcock's sprawling Multiverse which has a Conjunction of the Million Spheres comparable to DC Comics Crisis on Infinite Earths. Moorcock's Multiverse has been graphically adapted. I have discussed how Anderson's works might be adapted for comic strips and screen (also here) but it would have to be done very well or not at all. Anderson himself heard that the film of The High Crusade was "...a piece of botchwork..." (p. 203)

Clifford Simak

Since this blog is about Poul Anderson, I here quote Poul Anderson's opinion about another science fiction writer:

"the late great Clifford D Simak was an inspiration to us all. He still is."
-Poul Anderson, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), p. 81.

I would have been interested to read Anderson's comments on some of Simak's works. I know from private conversation that James Blish did not care for them and that he particularly disliked talking dogs which, as I remember, occurred no less than three times in Simak's sf. Simak must be classified with Ray Bradbury and CS Lewis as not a hard, therefore a "soft," sf writer.

In my teens, I set out to read every word written by certain American sf writers. Simak was on this list. However, I caught up with him, read his then newly published novel, felt that he had become repetitive and self-parodying, and stopped reading although Simak continued to publish a novel a year (or thereabouts).

A lot of what he wrote about time and time travel did not make sense. His Time And Again did present a logically consistent circular causality paradox but I was disappointed when I reread it more recently - too many sf cliches - although one interesting feature was an appearance by Old Cliff himself at the age of ninety.

Anderson, Blish and Simak each wrote a story about exploring the Jovian environment. Anderson's and Simak's characters, though not Blish's, wound up living happily there.

Retrospective

I usually complain about overlap between the contents of collections and have done so on this blog. However, a retrospective volume, like Poul Anderson's Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), with stories, auctorial comments and autobiographical notes spanning a career, makes sense. Anderson even remarks that:

"This book would be incomplete without a van Rijn yarn." (p. 153)

Of course we have already read all the van Rin yarns but we also reread them and might feel like rereading "The Master Key" while looking though ...Infinity.

Earlier in the volume, Anderson wrote:

"'Gypsy' is the earliest that seems worth including here. I could do it better nowadays." (p. 66)

He did rewrite several early stories to good effect but it was neither necessary nor possible to do this with all of them. In any case:

"...this little tale is a landmark for me, my first attempt to celebrate the wonders of our universe." (ibid.)

And that is exactly what this story does. Space travelers who have lost their way and wandered between planetary systems before settling on a terrestroid planet remember the wandering and decide to regain it, thus becoming the first of the Nomads. We read of some of their earlier adventures only as reminiscences:

"We had ridden centauroids who conversed with us as they went to the aerial city of their winged enemies -" (p. 77)

- an appropriate story to include in a retrospective volume.

Plato's Cave

Fifty years of writing by Poul Anderson were celebrated by Going For Infinity, a new collection of stories published during that period with additional autobiographical passages. Fifty years of writing by Isaac Asimov were celebrated by Foundation's Friends (London, 1991), an anthology of new stories inspired by Asimov's works. Thus, all the stories in Going For Infinity and one in Foundation's Friends are by Poul Anderson.

The "Foundation's Friends" that are new contributions to Asimov's future history cover three periods:

US Robots (2 stories);
Elijah Bailey (1);
Empire and Foundations (3).

Anderson's "Plato's Cave" is one of the US Robots items.

In Platonic philosophy, particulars, eg, particular men or round objects, are imperfect copies of a universal Idea, i. e., in these cases, Man and Circularity, just as a shadow is an imperfect copy of a solid object:

"'...we are like prisoners chained in a cave who cannot see the outside, yust the shadows of t'ings that are cast on the wall. From this they must try to guess what the reality is.'" (p. 268)

- explains one of Anderson's characters, Captain Borup, in his Danish accent. Borup says that the metaphorical shadows are unreliable images only because the senses are often wrong, not because the Ideas are, in Plato's view, beyond the sensory realm. But, in any case, Borup cites Plato's cave only to make a comparison with the robotic conundrum encountered by Powell and Donovan.

A robot is bound to obey a human being but can be hoodwinked into thinking that the entity communicating with him by laser beam is just another robot especially if he has been led to suspect that the transmitted image has been tampered with. In this sense, the hoodwinked robot, Jack, is in Plato's cave. Powell and Donovan must appear to be committing pointless suicide only to be stopped by a peremptory order from Borup in order to convince the robot that has been impersonating a man (in order to fool Jack) that Borup at least is probably human and must be obeyed. Anderson gets into the spirit of Asimov's robot puzzle stories.

As often in Anderson's puzzle stories, there is a moment when one of the characters has suddenly realized the answer but does not tell us what it is yet:

"He broke off. Donovan had smacked fist into palm. Powell drew a whistling breath." (p. 272)

- and thereafter the problem is solved.

Winners

The five stories collected in Poul Anderson's Winners (New York, 1981) and the eighteen works collected in his Going For Infinity (New York, 2002) overlap by two items: "The Queen of Air and Darkness" and "Goat Song."

The rationale for Winners is that each of its five stories had won the Hugo award from the annual World Science Fiction Convention (sf fans) - and "Goat Song" had also won the Nebula award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (sf professionals). The rationale for Going For Infinity is that it is a retrospective of fifty years of writing so it is appropriate that it includes two of the award winners.

I am rereading another Winner: "The Longest Voyage." This story opens with a reference to a "...Sky Ship..." (p. 97) We may guess that this will turn out to be a spaceship, although not necessarily. The characters in Anderson's "The Sky People" are not space travelers. Initially, "The Longest Voyage" reads like a parallel world story where magic might work. A sailing ship is circumnavigating a world where all the place names are strange and so-called sea monsters are heard to breach at night. An Elizabethan atmosphere is generated when the captain refers to "'...Her Majesty...'" and "'...her most excellent Company of Merchant Adventurers...'" and says that this voyage is "'...to her glory.'" (p. 100)

Before long, the characters, and thus the reader, learn that Tambur, the large stationary celestial body that became visible when the ship entered the other hemisphere, is a planet of which the sailors' own world is a tidally locked satellite. This is hard sf. There is a legend that mankind was "'...hurled...down onto the earth, at the time of the Fall from Heaven.'" (p. 102)

- so are our protagonists descendants of stranded Earthmen and will the "Sky Ship" reestablish interstellar contact? Only further reading will tell.

Lucifer

In Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" (Going For Infinity, New York, 2002), human beings have named a space-dwelling energy being "Lucifer." The woman who telepathically communicates with Lucifer, thinks:

"They named you better than they knew, Lucifer, she wanted to say, and perhaps she did. They thought it was a joke; they thought by calling you after the devil they could make you safely small like themselves. But Lucifer isn't the devil's real name. It means only Light Bearer. One Latin prayer even addresses Christ as Lucifer." (p. 351)

I did not know about the Latin prayer. When I was Master in Charge of Religious Education at Bentham Grammar School in the single academic year, 1980-81, an English Teacher asked me why the Devil should be called the Light Bringer. I added, "...when he is also called the Prince of Darkness?" A Geography Teacher who was a Bible-reading man was present but did not comment. My only answer at that time was that "Lucifer" was supposed to have been his name before he fell. (I have since come across "Samael" as a pre-Fall name.)

The answer that I realized later was that, in a sense, darkness is the light bringer because light is recognized as such only by contrast with darkness. "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it..."

It is appropriate to compare Poul Anderson with other writers of powerful fantasies. In a work by Alan Moore, male witches conjure the Original Darkness that was before the Creation, believing that it will destroy Heaven, but, when the Hand of the Darkness emerges from Chaos and advances through Hell, fomenting demonic civil war, a Hand of Light descends to clasp it and the Taoist symbol for the interpenetration of opposites appears in the eye of the psychic witness to these supernatural events.

In Neil Gaiman's sequel to Alan Moore's work, Lucifer Morningstar retires as Lord of Hell and, amazingly, Mike Carey, presents a series about his subsequent career. But, returning to writers of prose fantasy and sf, James Blish tells us what Satan does after the death of God. As before, I urge fans of Poul Anderson also to read James Blish.

Beginning To End

Rearranging the contents of Poul Anderson's Going For Infinity (New York, 2002) into chronological order of publication generates this list:

"Gypsy," 1950;
"Sam Hall,"1953;
"The Master Key," 1954;
"Journeys End," 1957;
Three Hearts And Three Lions (extract), 1961;
"Epilogue," 1962;
"The Horn of Time the Hunter," 1963;
"Dead Phone," 1964;
"The Queen of Air and Darkness," 1971;
"Goat Song," 1972;
"The Problem of Pain," 1973;
"Windmill," 1973;
A Midsummer Tempest (extract), 1974;
"The Saturn Game," 1981;
"Quest," 1983;
"Death and the Knight," 1995;
"Kyrie," 1996;
"The Shrine for Lost Children," 1999 -

- and that is fifty years.The acknowledgements list informs us that "The Horn of Time the Hunter" was originally "Homo Aquaticus" and we are grateful for the change.

Some Anderson titles might be confused with each other:

"Quest" and "Terminal Quest" are different kinds of stories;

"Windmill" and "Quixote and the Windmill" are installments of different series.

In 1999, Poul and Karen Anderson attended a meeting in Japan for which they designed an inhabited planet close enough to the Solar System for radio communication. Poul comments that he "...may yet get a novel out of it." (p. 360) Clearly, there was no idea of retiring after half a century of writing.

His story for the fiftieth anniversary issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1999 was "The Shrine for Lost Children," described as a tribute to Japan. (p. 361)

The story's thirteen pages are divided into nine sections each headed by a place name:

KAMAKURA
BERKELEY
KAMAKURA
PHOENIX
KAMAKURA
NORTHFIELD
KAMAKURA
MINNEAPOLIS
KAMAKURA

I found this narrative rather disjointed. The story is fantasy if its protagonist really is internally haunted by her still-born twin sister and psychological fiction if the internal dialogue was caused by the mother's obsessive insistence on naming and continually referring to her lost daughter. In either case, the dead sister is laid to rest when the protagonist makes an offering to "...Jizo, patron of travelers and the savior of children." (p. 372)

And then there is "...Understanding...":

"It was not only Jenny who clung to me. I would not let go. Here I have freed myself from myself." (p. 374)

The last two stories, chronologically speaking, both feature a woman inwardly haunted by her dead in a religious context.

Kyrie

The most interesting feature, to me, of Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" (Going For Infinity, New York, 2002) is the Aurigean, Lucifer, who sounds exactly like the "Angels," one of them also called Lucifer, in James Blish's The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars.

Blish's Angels are described as, or at least compared to, intelligent ball lightning. Anderson suggests that planetary ball lightning might be related to the Aurigeans in the same way that simple organic compounds in a primordial ocean are related to later evolved life. In the gas and energy pervading the multiple star Epsilon Aurigae, magnetohydrodynamics evolved as chemistry did on Earth. Ions, nuclei and force fields formed stable plasma vortices which grew, became complex, metabolized electrons, nucleons and X rays, maintained themselves, reproduced and thought. The description of Lucifer as a multi-colored, twenty-meter-wide, space-faring fireball makes him sound exactly like one of Blish's star-dwelling Angels.

The Angels communicate with each other instantaneously across interstellar and intergalactic distances. Anderson's Lucifer communicates instantaneously, and telepathically, with a human telepath across an interstellar distance. In itself, Anderson's use of the word "telepathy" could be merely a terminological difference. The Angels' means of instantaneous communication is internal to each of them so maybe it also could be called "telepathy." But the difference is that Lucifer communicates not only with his own kind but also with a human telepath.

The main difference between Lucifer and the Angels is in their origin. The oldest Angels, the First Born, date from the first twenty minutes of the universe and may have participated in the First Cause. Younger Angels were born in the processes that generate stars. Barring unlikely accidents, Angels will survive until the end of the universe. Meanwhile, they have been allied with ten different galactic confederations of planet dwellers and must now choose between Malans and Terrestrials in the Milky Way. They operate on a vaster scale than the Aurigeans who originated in a single stellar system and cooperate with humanity.

"Kyrie" presupposes Aurigeans, human telepaths, faster than light interstellar travel and instantaneous telepathy merely so that it can combine these ideas with one consequence of time dilation. Lucifer died falling into a supernova remnant but the nun who had been telepathically linked to him still hears him...

I am not sure that this conclusion warrants the presuppositions that were necessary to make it possible.

Retrospective

Poul Anderson's editor, Robert Gleason, had three ideas for the volume that became Going For Infinity (New York, 2002):

(i) stories selected from half a century of writing;
(ii) information about their origins, backgrounds and contexts;
(iii) a historical overview of fantasy and sf for that period.

(i) requires "representative" rather than "best of...," although I think, nevertheless, that each writing phase, career stage, publishing outlet, genre, series, decade etc should be represented by whichever short story or novel is the author's best work within that particular sub-category. I suspect that "Death and the Knight" represents the Time Patrol because it is short. I would have picked "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

(ii) the book is rich in.

(iii) Anderson's Introduction states that he presents just one reader/writer/participant's experience - but that is more than enough.

I do not agree with all the inclusions. But I think that a comprehensive best of/representative collection would have to be multi-volume. But then again, that could now be published on a kindle so that mere physical size is no longer an issue. On that basis, I would want to include, at least, in their entirety:

the Time Patrol;
the Technic History;
the King of Ys;
the two intergalactic novels, World Without Stars and Tau Zero;
After Doomsday (I think of this and the intergalactic novels as a triad (not trilogy) of "complete" hard sf novels);
A Midsummer Tempest and the other works linked to it by the Old Phoenix;
There Will Be Time.

Epilogue

(Thirty posts in three and a half days. I meant to slow down and will have to, soon.)

Three points about Poul Anderson's introduction to his short story, "Epilogue," in his capstone collection, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002) -

(i) Anderson informs us that the self-maintaining, self-replicating sea rafts in this story were based on a suggestion, in Scientific American, by John von Neumann, which may in turn have been the first appearance of the von Neumann machine idea, later applied by its conceptualizer to the notion of interstellar probes, as discussed in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years and, I think also, Starfarers. This is one of the many cases where a little background information enhances appreciation of a story.

(ii) John Campbell accepted the story despite arguing at length "...that things couldn't work out that way." (p. 254) I would like to read Campbell's letter. I also thought that, although self-replicating machines, left to themselves and with their programs "mutated" by radiation, would evolve, they would not exactly parallel biological evolution even down to males impregnating females and the latter giving birth. They already have a much simpler, more straightforward, mechanism for self-replication.

(iii) Anderson rightly points out that, when the story was written, "girl" was an acceptable term for "young woman." Linguistic usages change in our lifetimes. I have noticed the term "Negro" when reading a few Anderson stories recently.

(Words change and new coinages are included in every new edition of any comprehensive dictionary. I was amused this week by news coverage of a new coinage: "selfie.")

Series Not Included

Which of Poul Anderson's series are not represented in his Going For Infinity (New York, 2002)?

Wing Alar
the Flying Mountains
the Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy
the Old Phoenix (should have been in there?)
"Pride"/Tau Zero
The Enemy Stars/"The Ways of Love"
Genesis (could count as a series, with chapters set in successive future periods?)

Nicholas van Rijn, Rupert of the Rhine and Holger Danske all visit the Old Phoenix, the inn between the universes, at various times.

Anderson explains that Tau Zero does not lend itself very well to excerpting and also that:

"...the evidence has become strong that our universe is flat, not closed as was commonly thought in those days." (p. 355)

Cosmological theories have changed that much within one lifetime. But I do not think that Anderson's second point matters from the point of view of fiction. Tau Zero is classic hard sf and myth. The existence of a prequel even bestows the status of a series: the two works read together present an immensely long cosmic history. So I would like to see the Tau Zero passage describing cosmic death and rebirth included in a representative collection of Anderson's works.

Quest

In the introduction to "Quest" in Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), Poul Anderson uses the phrase "...a wilderness of stars" (p. 204) for a fourth time. In the story itself, there is a variation: "...a wilderness of uncharted suns." (p. 205) These are powerful phrases so I intend no adverse criticism when I draw attention to their repeated use.

Anderson draws a solid picture of a Grand Council including many nonhuman great folk on Planet Winchester. Some nonhumans have risen high in the English Empire by accepting the True Faith, indeed Archbishop William himself is a Wersgor, but, of the former space captain Insalith, we are told that:

"He was an obstinate pagan who attributed all events to the operations of quantum mechanics." (p. 207)

Here we see our own world view observed completely from the outside.

Having read this story twice before, I remember an intriguing Grail Quest that is somehow disappointed although I do not remember precisely how.

Before the English invaded the Wersgor empire, Insalith saw:

a planet unoccupied except by what could have been a Christian monastery;
a monster or dragon that gave him and his companions no trouble as they approached;
a few beings that might have been human;
through an open door, what might have been a silver chalice on an altar -

- "...and heard ineffably sweet music." (p. 208)

This is intriguing enough. I cannot remember whether Insalith was lying for some reason or, if not, what other explanation was given as to why the Real Grail was not to be found when the planet was revisited but I will shortly find out.

I have thought that an sf novel might be written along these lines. A spaceship from Earth with a small crew reaches an inhabited extra-solar planet and establishes communication. At an early stage, an inhabitant mentions that someone else came from Earth a long time ago and is living in seclusion on the other side of the planet. Dismissing this as a mistake or misunderstanding, the Earth crew continues its dialogue with the natives and its exploration of their environment but, before they return to Earth, one of them flies around the planet to investigate this claim since it has been made again. He reports back by radio in hysterics and seems to be repeatedly swearing. When two of his colleagues have flown to the rescue, he insists that the previous visitor from Earth was Jesus Christ who had come to this planet after the Ascension. Since human exploration has now reached this far, he has departed, going straight up under his own power, saying, "I go to continue my Father's work at the end of the galaxy..."

- or something as elusive and allusive as the concluding passages of the Gospels.

Sam Hall II

We are not finished discussing Poul Anderson's short story, "Sam Hall" (Going For Infinity, New York, 2002). No way.

In this story, Anderson accurately portrays how three different groups of people respond when living under a dictatorship to which there is armed resistance.

(i) "...he laid no blame. The tragedy of civil war was that it turned brother against brother. Millions of decent people were with the government because they had pledged themselves to be, or simply because they didn't believe in the alternative." (p. 107)

(ii) "Most citizens were passive. They always are. Probably no more than one-fourth of the population was ever in earshot of an engagement. ...provisional councils...rarely met cheers and flowers. Nobody knew how the war would end... As nearly as possible, the average American continued his average life." (p. 103) But, in this case, the rebels, unlike the government, avoid total war. They do not slaughter the population that they are trying to free.

(iii) How can undergrounders inside the state apparatus contact or communicate with each other? Thornberg, chief of the Technical Division, Central Records, acts alone when he fakes the records of Sam Hall who is, according to the (faked) records, guilty of murdering policemen. Thus, when the police hunt for Sam Hall, they do not find anyone, although rebels start using the name. Eventually, Major Sorensen of Security Investigation tells Thornberg, "'Sam Hall is a shadow...We have not been able to find a single individual who remembers him...No undergrounder or foreign operative we've caught had any knowledge of him, which defies probability. The whole business seems impossible.'" (p. 97) You might expect Sorensen then to ask, "Might someone on your staff have faked the records of Sam Hall?"

Instead, claiming to follow the Holmesian principle that, when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, he asks all his psychologists and also Thornberg of Central Records to research whether the underground could have found a way to erase memories and fool personality testers! Thornberg finds that such an invention is not currently possible but takes his time to submit a long report saying that it just might be possible...

Before leaving after their first meeting, Sorensen presented a very succinct summary of rebel propaganda, then commented:

"'Devilishly clever propaganda, Major Thornberg. Watch out for it.'" (p. 99)

Thornberg found that odd, as well he might. It turns out, of course, that Sorensen, an undergrounder, having suspected that Thornberg had created Sam Hall, devised the psychological research as a blind and then becomes sure of Thornberg's position when the latter submits his nonsensical report.

Let us be thankful that we do not live in a society where we have to communicate with each other like that all the time.

The Horn Of Time The Hunter

Moving on within Poul Anderson's Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), we come to "The Horn of Time the Hunter," an evocative title. The word "time" is always good, even when not involving time travel.

So far, four series have been represented:

the Technic Civilization History;
the Psychotechnic History;
the Time Patrol;
the Kith -

- although the first two were not acknowledged. Anderson's comments merely focused on the individual stories.

Regarding the Kith, in "The Horn of Time...," Anderson explains his thinking: time dilated space travelers would develop their own culture and might sometimes be ostracized on Earth? Good thinking, Anderson.

I have said that this story should be published as an appendix to Starfarers, which does incorporate the two other Kith stories. Anderson explains:

"I was going to incorporate "The Horn of Time the Hunter" as well, but Karen convinced me that it was too dark." (p. 137)

I respectfully disagree.

Sam Hall

(Folks, the attached pictures came up as "images" for Sam Hall so please don't blame me for this.)

In Poul Anderson's capstone volume, Going For Infinity, I have reread "Gypsy" and read, for the first time ever, "Sam Hall." Every single story by Anderson raises different questions or initiates lines of inquiry in different directions. Where to start with "Sam Hall"?

Anderson bases his fiction-within-the-fiction, the faked ID of "Sam Hall," on a song that he and his friends used to sing. I have heard and prefer the earlier version of the song in which "Jack Hall" is a chimney sweep and burglar, not a murderer:

"My name it is Jack Hall,
"Chimney sweep, chimney sweep,
"My name it is Jack Hall,
"Chimney sweep.
"And I have robbed them all,
"Great and small, great and small,
"And I have robbed them all,
"Great and small.
"And my neck will pay for all,
"When I die, when I die,
"And my neck will pay for all,
"When I die."

Google discloses that the historical Jack Hall was indeed a chimney sweep turned burglar and highwayman, hanged for a burglary.

Without checking the text, I am reasonably certain that the successful revolutionaries on Earth in Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer are called "Sam Halls" so can we (please!) call the story "Sam Hall" a prequel to that novel? Because of those "Sam Halls," I had thought that the name of Sam Hall was somehow associated with the American Revolution and had not connected it with "Jack Hall" - and I had heard the latter in a solo performance by a blind man in an Irish band so I had not realized that Jack Hall was English - but it is good when things come together.

After the successful revolution, when it is known that there had been no Sam Hall but that different revolutionaries had used this name, someone would then be able to celebrate the revolution by writing a biographical novel, a work of fiction, with Sam as viewpoint character, although he should not be the narrator. The novel should read like a historical reconstruction, leaving it open where Jack is now... He could be off Earth, since the story presupposes interplanetary travel.

I have experienced a "Sam Hall" scenario closer to home. Our National Comics Writer, the uncrowned King of Northampton, Alan Moore, created the British character, John Constantine, who was Americanized in the film Constantine, which I haven't seen. I know someone who registered for the vote as John Constantine and I posted Alan a photocopy of the voting card. Some British Anarchists, when stopped by police, have given the name "John Constantine" and one of them said, "I don't know where it comes from. It's just a name we use."

Moving on, the next stories in Going For Infinity are "Death and the Knight" and "Journeys End" which, like Finnegans Wake, is above apostrophes. (It seems that "Journeys..." is plural and "...End" is a verb, whereas Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End has an apostrophe but in an unexpected place.)

For me, "Journeys End" is yet another difficult story. I read it before, found it emotionally unpleasant and do not want to reread it - but that is Poul Anderson's diversity for you.

(I should add that Alan Moore has seen John Constantine twice, once during a ritual when John told Alan about magic, and once in a London cafe when John nodded knowingly at him. The look on Alan's face is reproduced in Swamp Thing.
(Alan has referred to a house where apparitions of a man with a wide-brimmed hat and a cloak have been seen. Research revealed that the house had been occupied by the creator of The Shadow. So do reality and fiction overlap, as in the Old Phoenix?)

Farms, Planets, Iapetus And Harbor

Before reading the Introduction to Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), I had not known that a period of Poul Anderson's childhood was spent working on a family farm. That gives him something in common with my hero, Clark Kent.

After the general Introduction to the book, comes the shorter introduction to the first short story, "The Saturn Game." This is, of course, the first story in Anderson's Technic Civilization History and also in his non-series collection, Explorations. Nevertheless, I am beginning to understand why stories are collected as they are. Here, there is no mention either of the Technic History or of the earlier Psychotechnic History to which the second story in Going For Infinity, "Gypsy," belongs.

Instead, the introduction, in this volume, to "The Saturn Game" explains Anderson's early and lifelong interest in the planets, starting with Mars but going on to Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and even the Saturnian moon, Iapetus, on which "The Saturn Game" is set. So the introduction begins with the young Poul looking at Mars and ends with Poul and Karen in 1980 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Voyager One flyby of Saturn, one question being whether the probe would transmit any data to contradict the story, which at that time had been written but not yet published.

Having reread "The Saturn Game" quite recently for this blog, I will not reread it again now but I ought to read through "Gypsy." I remember this as a satisfying story in which interstellar travelers who cannot find their way back to Earth have become comfortable as farmers on their colony planet of Harbor but prefer to return to the wandering life in their star ship, the Traveler, which thus becomes the first Nomad ship although that term is not used in this story. "Gypsy" is potentially the start of a series within the series.

The story opens with its first person narrator returning to Harbor from a journey within the planetary system, seeing the empty Traveler in orbit, then failing to find it again "...in that thronging wilderness of stars." (p. 67)

So here is a question for Anderson fans: in which two novels does he also use the phrase "...wilderness of stars"?

Going For Infinity

I have yet to read "Dialogue" and "The Communicators," the concluding two stories in Poul Anderson's collection, Dialogue With Darkness, but meanwhile I have started to read that capstone volume, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002). Poul Anderson died in 2001. I wrote then, "Our thoughts accompany Poul on the Wild Hunt," so I hope it is appropriate to repeat those words here.

In his Introduction to Going For Infinity, Poul Anderson summarizes his antecedents and early life, thus showing several major influences:

the sea;
Scandinavian history and culture;
"a solid and  loving home life" (p. 13);
Danish-English bilingualism;
from boyhood experience on a farm, "such themes...as countryside, cold, storm, animals, and men and women who make their livings by their hands" (p. 14);
science fiction magazines featuring "...the creations of Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and the other gods" (ibid.);
a degree in physics, mathematics and chemistry;
the Minneapolis Fantasy Society.

Anderson went straight from University to a long career as a full time writer. How many of his books feature the sea? (I will not write another of my long lists.) From Scandinavia, we get his Viking novels and Hrolf Kraki's Saga. The "themes" listed on p. 14 appear in many works, including the King of Ys Tetralogy, co-written by Karen Anderson. The influence of Robert Heinlein's Future History gives us Anderson's major and minor future histories. The influence of de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall is seen in the Time Patrol, which also gives us "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth." From Anderson's scientific knowledge and training come all the background details of many fictitious planets and other celestial bodies.

Joining the Minneapolis Fantasy Society must have seemed like coming home.