Why Empires?

Why are there so many interstellar "Empires" in American sf? Notable examples are the works of Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Frank Herbert, H Beam Piper and Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Although James Blish's Cities In Flight features an interstellar "Hruntan Empire," the main emphasis of this series is on trade by the flying cities.

Empires resonate with much past Terrestrial history. The word "empire" evokes a realm both vast and powerful - although also oppressive and militaristic. It seems both implausible and unimaginative as a future form of social organization.

Poul Anderson wrote well about interstellar empires, then moved on to other kinds of fictional futures. "The Star Plunderer" makes the founding of the Terran Empire by Manuel Argos seem plausible and the Dominic Flandry novels make interstellar Imperial administration seem credible.

Greg Bear wrote:

"...Rome has been much abused. Lay off Rome for a while. And give me no spaceships in feudal settings...unless, of course, you are Poul Anderson, but you are most likely not."
-Greg Bear, "Tomorrow Through The Past" IN SFWA Bulletin, Fall 1979, pp. 38-41 AT pp. 40-41.

I agree that Poul Anderson made even feudalism with spaceships work. I can accept Niven and Pournelle's Empire of Man as part of a literary tradition and as the setting for their First Contact novel but sf must move on, as Anderson did.

The Lost World

What phrase could possibly be more evocative, or potentially nostalgic, than "the lost world"? A whole world lost somehow?

In Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger series, this phrase used as a title denotes a plateau where dinosaurs survive. Of course, surviving dinosaurs are an sf sub-genre:

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Night Shapes by James Blish
Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear
The Sky People by SM Stirling

Poul Anderson does not have surviving dinosaurs but does have time travelers meeting dinosaurs. And another of his time travelers finds an entirely different meaning for the phrase, "the lost world":

"...he was brought in a closed carriage to a palace atop that hill called Montmartre in the lost world..." (The Shield Of Time, p. 291)

Keith Denison, remembering a history and a twentieth century that were almost identical with ours, two World Wars followed by a Cold War etc, finds himself in an almost medieval Paris in 1980, where he is about to be interviewed by "...his Venerability, Albin Archcardinal Fil-Johan, Grand Duke of the Northern Provinces..." (ibid.) Although Denison will pretend to be from Mars, the truth is that he remembers events, and indeed an entire life, that have not happened in Albin's past and that will never happen in his future. Could any entire world possibly be more lost than that?

Marching Through Georgia

This blog is mainly about the works of Poul Anderson but has also covered:

one Anderson-themed anthology;
two novels by Greg Bear;
three alternative histories by SM Stirling.

I have just received Marching Through Georgia (New York, 1991), Volume I of Stirling's Draka alternative history tetralogy, but it will be a while before I post much on this novel because I am still involved in rereading Anderson's Time Patrol series.

As in some of his other works, Stirling ends this book with brief appendices explaining the background of the specific alternative history. To avoid confusion, in these appendices, the author directly addresses the reader, contrasting "...our history..." (p. 372) with the fictional one. Thus the appendices are not written as from within the fictional history although that approach might have generated greater verisimilitude. On the other hand, the appendices could turn out to be narrated by a fictional observer of the Draka timeline who is based in a world more like ours. However, such a revelation would have to be made in a further volume and is not necessary for the plot of this novel.

I hope to get inside the Draka world as I previously got into Stirling's Angrezi Raj, Commonwealth of New Virginia and Lords of Creation Solar System but meanwhile I expect to find more to write about Anderson's Time Patrol.

Greg Bear On Poul Anderson

Greg Bear, "Poul Anderson" IN Rick Katze and Lis Carey, Editors, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume I, Call Me Joe (Framingham MA, 2009), pp. 7-10.

"...Poul's...full range and brilliance became even more obvious when I read The Broken Sword and Tau Zero back to back." (p. 7)

Heroic fantasy and hard sf. Like reading Tolkien and Stapledon back to back. Brilliant but I would also find it disorienting. When I reread The Broken Sword, I wanted to follow it with Anderson's four other fantasies that form a loose sequence with it:

The Demon Of Scattery;
Mother Of Kings;
War Of The Gods;
Hrolf Kraki's Saga -

- and then I wanted to stay in the past with:

(what I call) the three BC;
Ys;
the Last Viking;
the three novels set in the fourteenth century;
the time travel and other works set in various past periods;
the alternative histories -

- before returning to any of Anderson's technological futures.

Similarly, after rereading Tau Zero, I would want to reread its short prequel, "Pride," before staying with works of hard sf set in other timelines. While immersed in one kind of fictional narrative, I find it hard to jump into a different, almost diametrically opposed, imaginary universe.

"Poul was a modern skald, heir to the traditions of those who entertained weary Vikings centuries past." (p. 8)

Yes, both when he wrote about Vikings and when he wrote about spacemen - whom we learned to call "astronauts."

"This is not to say that Poul's work is not serious, or that it came easily to him..." (ibid.)

Anderson's works address the most serious issues of life, society and the universe. But surely his immense output alone shows that writing came more easily to him than, e.g., to James Blish who did struggle with the text of his historical novel, Doctor Mirabilis, and whose total output is unfortunately much smaller?

Why Do Aliens Enslave Human Beings?

Are human women in any particular danger from alien barbarians? Yes, because the barbarians sell them -

"...at high prices to the human renegades and rebels."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 333.

In fact, they are "...the luxury trade..." (ibid.).

Poul Anderson really was able to rationalize every cliche and absurdity of pulp magazine covers. Apart from women as such, human beings with qualifications like a degree in nuclear engineering are valued by aliens who have acquired space technology and weaponry without understanding them whereas untrained human beings merely do jobs that should be automated and do not last ten years, being easily replaced.

Why do some of us like fiction that combines futuristic technology and extraterrestrial environments with past social relationships like feudalism, imperialism and slavery? Whatever the reason, Poul Anderson knew how to make it work. Slavery appears twice in his History of Technic Civilization. When the Empire has expelled the barbarians, it reintroduces slavery as one part of its penal system.

I value Poul Anderson's works because he excels not only at this kind of space opera but also at serious speculative sf and sometimes even combines them.

"...Rome has been much abused. Lay off Rome for a while. And give me no spaceships in feudal settings...unless, of course, you are Poul Anderson, but you are most likely not."
-Greg Bear, "Tomorrow Through The Past" IN SFWA Bulletin, Fall 1979.

The End Of Eternity, Sort Of

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

Cosmic science fiction addresses ultimate questions, the Stapledonian themes of cosmos and consciousness.

Are the personal issues satisfactorily resolved at the end of Eternity? The Patricia who had left an Earth that, shortly afterwards, had a global nuclear war wanted to find an Earth on which there had been no nuclear war but on which she herself had died in some accident so that she, the Patricia returning from space, could take the place of the Patricia that had died in an accident. Instead, long after Patricia's death, another inter-universal traveler finds an Earth on which there had been no nuclear war but on which Patricia had neither gone into space nor died in an accident. He then merges part of the space-faring Patricia's mentality into the Patricia of that Earth but in such a way that most of the space-traveling Patricia's memories are not retained:

"No Stone in the heavens, she told herself. Whatever that means." (p. 320)

This seems to submerge, rather than to satisfy, the original Patricia? Of course, I would like to know more about the Final Mind and the answer to the last question on p. 322.

I think that it is appropriate to return to Poul Anderson for a while although that will have to wait until I have acquired NESFA Collections Vol 2, not even ordered yet, unless there are meanwhile some further reflections to be made on the Technic History.

Beyond Death

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

I am extremely skeptical of any claim that each of us consciously and indefinitely continues to exist after physical death. Surely the overwhelming evidence is that mental states depend on brain states? - although any contrary evidence must be investigated. Some analytic philosophers argue that "survival" is logically impossible but I think that that goes too far. Of course, we can define death as the end of life, in which case "life after death" is a contradiction, but matters of fact are not settled by defining words.

Could the memories and sense of identity that are transmitted from each momentary cerebral state to the next later be transmitted from the last cerebral state into some other medium or even continue without embodiment? I do not believe in disembodied consciousness - indeed, how could it be detected? - but I do not see that it is logically impossible either. Accounts of "out of the body" experiences may be disbelieved or explained as vivid imagination but they are not dismissed as verbal contradictions, like "square circle." A philosopher may continue to argue that the "survivor" is not identical with the original but concepts change as experiences change. In Buddhist teaching, the apparent self is like a candle flame, burning different wax from moment to moment, then either extinguished or passed on to another candle.

I see no impossibility in the speculation that future technology might record and preserve individual consciousness. Greg Bear gives us some feel for what this might be like. Two characters meet in a technological hereafter:

"'I'm not in the right place,' she said.
"'None of us is, mistress,' the Kelt said. 'Remember. I am trying to be strong, to remember, but it is difficult. Remember!'" (p. 279)

And another two:

"What are we - spirit, energy?
"We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which particles of matter and energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they are..." (p. 258)

And again:

"They sped along the conduits reserved for the subtle messages of subatomic particles, space-time's hidden circuitry." (p. 288)

These survivors of death have become like elemental beings, merging themselves with nature. But can the minute forces linking subatomic particles carry enough information for this purpose?

The Further Future

A good sequel should tell us that there was a lot that we did not know while we were reading the prequel. In Greg Bear's Eon, the Jarts seemed to be conquering aliens, conventional sf villains. We learn about them in Eternity. It is always possible that two groups that are fighting now will be united in the future so what happens if contact with that future is established now?

I enjoy the immediacy of posting about a novel while still reading it. This allows a focusing on details that might otherwise be forgotten but it also means that I might make a provisional comment that has to be revised or amended later - but that is an acceptable risk and a learning process.

The Way, an artificial hypercosmic corridor, endures and extends from our near future to the end of this universe. Some people have traveled the entire length of the corridor right to the far end and one has returned, a very changed man if still a man. He bears a message from the Final Mind: the Way is (somehow) an obstruction to our plans; please destroy it from your end. But how can this be done? Could we send a message to the ancient Egyptians: we don't like your pyramids so, having constructed them, please destroy them?

This is a question, not a rhetorical question. I do not understand the physics of superspace.

Saving The Past

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

Imagine, in the future:

unlimited energy and resources available for pure research - an entire high energy civilization devoted to this single purpose;
the technological ability to record and preserve, thus to "save," every experience and memory of every past organism.

Is this even theoretically possible? Do events and experiences leave a permanent echo that could be detected by sufficiently finely tuned instruments? One theory of ghostly apparitions, like a nun seen walking through a wall at the site of a former convent, is that they are naturally occurring, psychically activated visual recordings of past events. But such a process seems unlikely to operate universally and permanently. Entropy reduces order to chaos and information to noise.

If past events are not detectable in the present, would it be necessary to travel into the past to record them and is pastward time travel even theoretically possible?

Eternity Continued

The clavicle, the device used to find and enter universes, is not only a cosmos locator but also a telepathic Artificial Intelligence. This explains its mental attunement to its user and its focus on the kind of universe that she wants to find.

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization:

"'You, personally, down underneath everything, do you not feel death is just a little bit vulgar, not quite a gentleman?'
"'Maybe. What would you call it?'
"'A completion.'"
-Poul Anderson, Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra, Ed. Hank Davis (New York, 2012), p. 164.

And in Eternity:

"'Death is failure,' Ram Kikura said, her tone angry.
"'Death is completion,' Lanier said.
"'Death is a waste and a loss.'"
-Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010), p. 205.

Some characters refuse an indefinitely extended lifespan when it is offered to them. I disagree with their reasons. My discussion of this question is here.

Superhumanity

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

Novels are (usually) about humanity but some of these guys aren't human. Olmy:

uploads the recoded mentality of a captured hostile alien, called a "Jart," into one of his own memory implants;

sends a "partial," i.e., an incomplete recording of his own personality, in there to investigate the alien and report back to him;

has algorithms to interpret alien sensory experience, e.g., Jarts combine sight and sound into a single sensation;

has internal defenses to prevent contamination, sabotage etc by the Jart;

is interrupted in this process by an "assigned ghost," i.e., a projected partial of a colleague who wants to speak to him;

has, with his wife, reproduced by constructing an artificial personality that exists in a virtual reality and has to pass an exam to be incarnated;

should survive death because an almost indestructible implant will be extracted from his dead body, enabling his personality to be preserved and reincarnated although not necessarily in a humanoid body.

Despite all these differences from humanity as we know it, Greg Bear conveys to his readers something of the motivations and inner experiences of a character like Olmy.

Psychological SF

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

In Eternity, advanced mental technology enables memories to be implanted and personalities to be merged. Thus, this novel can be categorized either as psychological speculative fiction or as science fiction in which the "science" is psychology.

The character called "Olmy" "...detested deep intimacy...he did not want to know himself completely, or to have anyone else know him. He did not relish the thought of exploring his own mentality, as others did." (p. 99)

I share Olmy's detestation for being fully known by anyone else. In fact, Poul Anderson has a short story in which telepaths soon become disgusted with one another. However, what is wrong with Olmy knowing himself? A friend at University thought that those who want to find or know themselves make the questionable assumption that the self is something important. Well, maybe it is? But, if it isn't, then all the more reason to know what it is in order not to entertain any illusions about it. In Buddhist teaching, there is no permanent, enduring entity answering to the term "self" but there are causally related mental processes and states and it makes sense to understand them just as it makes sense to understand mechanics if you drive a car.

Preferring not to know yourself completely means preferring not to understand or control what you do or why you do it. I think that this is willful and culpable ignorance. It was encountering this psychological sf in the first novel, Eon, that got me into rereading Poul Anderson's Brain Wave in which intelligence overcomes instinct.

Stapledonian SF

Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 2010).

The intelligences who travel to the end of the Way enter a cosmegg, or potential universe, and, having unsuccessfully tried to shape this new cosmos from within, are about to be engulfed and destroyed by chaos when however they are rescued by the Final Mind of the universe that they have left: Stapledonian indeed. We are told this story only in summary because its details would transcend our understanding but hopefully its consequences will include important events for the comprehensible human characters of the novel.

Although we cannot understand all the details, we are told that a united, immaterial intellect and will operated below the level of light and energy. Thus, intelligence was a process not only within highly evolved, energy-using organisms but also below the most basic level of energy. Is this possible, if not in a naturally occurring universe, then at least in a secondary, artificial one?

"It is far more difficult to be a god than we could possibly have imagined." (p. 78)

I already know this! - because I have just reread Mike Carey's Lucifer. Yahweh's granddaughter, Elaine Belloc, practicing in her own newly created universe, finds it hard to manage even a single planetary ecology. She learns that sometimes the best but also the hardest thing to do is nothing. I have learned that this is true in human affairs. I know that Christian theology includes the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent Providence that need not intervene because its creation is like a well-plotted novel in which the characters act according to their natures but the author controls the resolution. I take issue with this concept on another blog and I also know that Christian theology includes other views of creation. See the novels of Susan Howatch.

Having read about a would be "god," we turn the page and are back on Gaia, the Earth dominated by the Greek culture that gave us the Classical gods.

Time travel but more than time travel is involved so I am not sure whether my analyses of the logic of time travel are applicable. The Final Mind sends a constituent member of the would be god back to the twenty first century to request that the Way be re-opened but then destroyed from this end. But how can it be destroyed? They have already traveled/will travel along it.

Influences And Parallels

I am enjoying Eternity by Greg Bear in its own right. Right now, how did that former Russian soldier get back to Earth having, in Eon, embarked on a one-way many-times-faster-than-light journey between universes? And what is the important message that he bears?

On a Poul Anderson Appreciation blog, Andersonian influences and parallels are never far away. Karen Anderson helped with how language might have been if history had been different. Thus, we get Alexandros, Rhoma and Karkhedon instead of Alexander, Rome and Carthage etc. And there are parallels with Poul Anderson's fiction. There is a timeline in which Rome did not destroy Carthage and in which Alexander did return from Babylon. (These are two separate stories among Anderson's works.)

Eternity (London, 1989) refers to "...the little-known Ioudaian Messiah Jeshua, or Jesus." (p. 50) If the Classical tradition had needed a sacrificial victim figure, then it already had two candidates, Socrates executed and Caesar assassinated. (Dante puts Brutus and Cassius with Judas as traitors in the Inferno.) However, the Roman Empire went for the Jewish option I think because the Hebrew prophets had forged an uncompromising monotheism that was more appropriate for a universal state than were the speculative monotheisms that were meanwhile being postulated by pagan priests and prophets. Thus, in our history, an executed Messianic claimant became the perfect victim.

If instead Mithras had become the world historical pivotal figure, then his story would have had to have been historicized - although maybe this could have been done by identifying a historical figure with Mithras?

Gaia

Chapter 3 of Eternity by Greg Bear is set on Gaia, the alternative Earth that Patricia/Patrikia had accessed near the end of Eon. I feel that, at this point, the hard sf of Eon became fantasy. The element that I find fantastic is not the existence of alternative Earths but the means of finding and entering them.

While inside the infinite artificial corridor called "the Way," which  physically is out there somewhere in interstellar space, projected from one end of a spacecraft, Patricia was one of a number of people who had a knack like water-dousing. Each of them wielded a device that enabled them to locate a particular point on the inner surface of the Way, namely a point at which it would then be possible, using the same device, to open an entryway to a particular alternative Earth at a particular moment of its history.

Patricia sought a history in which there had not been a recent nuclear war, therefore in which her parents and fiancee had not died in such a war, but in which she herself had nevertheless died in some accident so that the Patricia arriving from the Way would be able to replace the Patricia who had died in the accident. She walks around inside the Way holding the device called the "clavicle," somehow sensing the presence of alternative Earths, receiving an impression of their contents, even information about them, and homing in on the one that she wants. It seems that she does not read the data on dials or a screen on the clavicle but rather inwardly senses them with the help of the clavicle?

So an analogy might be an astronomer seeking stars with habitable planets who points a telescope at the sky, moves it around and is guided by the telescope to focus on a particular part of the sky and eventually on a single star? This does not sound like a scientific process. In fact, to complete the analogy, he would be able to specify and locate a planet not merely habitable but Earth-like in every detail although uninhabited?

When she begins "...the gate dilation," the clavicle whistles painfully, she sees "...a circle of whirling possibilities at her feet..." (Eon, London, 2002, p. 470) and the circle becomes a gateway to a point on the Earth's surface, although she gets the wrong Earth. But I find it difficult to accept that she can get to any Earth by such a means.

A View From Space

"President Kies Farren Siliom stood on a broad transparent platform, the wide orb of the Earth coming into view beneath him as Axis Euclid rotated. Five hundred square meters of stressed and ion-anchored glass and two layers of traction field lay between the president's conference chamber and empty space; he seemed to stand on a stretch of open nothingness."
-Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 1989), p. 9.

This passage is a visual description. We think that it should be drawn or filmed. But we also appreciate prose, especially since it tells us what a picture cannot, i.e., the real nature of that "...open nothingness."

Under Recovery legislation, mental therapies have been applied on Earth. Belligerents have been pacified and:

"Mental illness and and dysfunction were virtually eradicated." (ibid.)

Meanwhile, I have received a vision of the future from an unexpected quarter. Waiting for a funeral service to begin, I read the introduction to the Anglican hymn book, revised in 2000. Whereas the original version had been used throughout the British Empire, the editors recognized, first, that life had changed and that many issues had become less certain in the twentieth century and, secondly, that this most recently revised edition is to be used in a new century of probably unimaginable social changes - in other words, a science fictional century.

Eternity II

I collected my copy of Greg Bear's Eternity, a direct sequel to his Eon. I said earlier that an internet review of Eternity did not make it sound like a sequel. That is because it was a review of Bear's City At The End Of Time! But these titles can be samey, especially to someone who hasn't read the books yet. In fact, I have just seen an artistically beautiful graphic adaptation of Harlan Ellison's Star Trek episode, The City On The Edge Of Forever, another resonant - and similar - title.

In Eternity, set four decades later, I will be interested to see whether the proposal to "purge" the minds of Earth-dwellers has been carried out. That would alter the characters' motivations and thus make this a novel not of humanity but of changed humanity. Karen Anderson is again credited for linguistic and historical advice so the Anderson connection continues.

Since I am about to attend a funeral and will be otherwise engaged for part of this evening, there will be a short intermission until normal service is resumed.

Eternity

Tomorrow, I must collect Eternity by Greg Bear from Waterstones Bookshop, Lancaster, and attend a funeral at St John the Baptist Church in the village of Low Bentham (see attached image). Thus, Eternity and eternity.

How many sf books have "Eternity" in their titles?

Eternity by Greg Bear;
Sailing Bright Eternity by Gregory Benford;
Threshold Of Eternity by John Brunner;
Assignment In Eternity by Robert Heinlein;
The Palace Of Eternity by Bob Shaw;
Highway Of Eternity by Clifford Simak;
Empress Of Eternity by L.E. Modesitt Jr;
One Against Eternity by A.E. Van Vogt;
The Siege Of Eternity by Frederick Pohl;
On The Oceans Of Eternity by S.M. Stirling;
The Eternity Stone by Aden Foster Romine and Mary Cox Romine;
"The Eternity Engine" by Jack Williamson;
The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov;
no doubt others.

Asimov gives us dire time travel logic. Brunner gives us fairly incomprehensible time travel. Some titles I have found by googling. I will be interested to learn how Bear's Eternity follows from his Eon.

The End Of August

I have exhausted what I can post about Brain Wave, Greg Bear's Eternity has not yet arrived at Waterstones Bookshop, I am lying in bed with a cold and I want to finish August with 150 posts so this looks like it.

It is rewarding to compare Anderson's fictions with other imaginative works - his Time Patrol series with the Doctor Who TV series and his prose fantasies with the graphic fantasies of The Sandman and Lucifer. We appreciate Anderson's works more and also appreciate similar or parallel fictional series.

My correspondent Sean recommends SM Stirling as another sf author to read after Anderson.

The Range Of The Blog

I decision-made as to whether to discuss another author, Greg Bear, on Poul Anderson Appreciation. This was a good move because:

Bear's Eon was definitely worth reading;

there was additionally (secondary point) plenty of scope for comparisons with Anderson and Wells;

the common theme of changing human nature unexpectedly led to a serious rereading of Anderson's Brain Wave.

Human beings change their environments. Science fiction writers speculate about how they might do this in future by:

remaking the Earth;
terraforming other planets;
building space habitats;
creating universes;
etc.

But what could be more important than changing ourselves? Anderson imagines a spontaneous increase in intelligence but then demonstrates that people would need to learn how to use that gift intelligently. Bear asks the moral question whether people should be changed for their good even without their consent. Excellent question...