Large Objects

Regular blog readers know my philosophy. Fully to appreciate Poul Anderson, we compare or contrast him with many diverse authors, including other cosmically-themed hard sf writers. Anderson, Larry Niven and Gregory Benford have all written major sf series and have interacted in different ways. For a comment by Gregory Benford on one of my posts about his Anderson-related short story, see here. For comments on Anderson's contributions to Niven's Man-Kzin Wars subseries, see here.

Benford's and Niven's Bowl Of Heaven (TOR, New York, 2013) is like getting Niven's Ringworld back. I mean an artifact bigger than planets. Ringworld initiated a tetralogy and a co-written trilogy which, like the Man-Kzin Wars, are subseries of Niven's Known Space future history. Bowl... launches a new series. The authors think big and their alien characters build big.

On the title page of Part II, the authors quote Lord Dunsany:

"Man is a small thing, and the night is large and full of wonder." (p. 79)

I think that I can improve that:

"Man is small; night is wide and wondrous."

(Scottish English gives us "Man is wee..." but that sounds twee.)

We can also compare all these series with Star Trek:

"They left a skeleton crew aboard SunSeeker, with [Captain] Redwing plainly sorry that proper ship command protocols demanded that he stay aboard." (p. 81)

Captain Kirk, take note.

Poul Anderson's Legacies

Time Travel
Can anyone top the Time Patrol? Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is at least an excellent circular causality novel.

Cosmic SF
I know that there is much post-Anderson cosmic sf, e.g., by Gregory Benford, but have not really kept up with it.

Alternative Histories
We have seen that SM Stirling has developed this sub-genre further than Anderson.

Future Histories...
...in which extrasolar colonies are isolated for centuries, then reincorporated into an interstellar civilization. We are currently finding that Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history fits well into this sub-sub-genre.

Hard Fantasy?

Past And Future

See here.

I was interested in comparing Poul Anderson's Time Patrol with Robert Heinlein's Temporal Bureau. However, I also mentioned James Blish's fictional organization, the Service, which provides another fascinating contrast with the Time Patrol.

Whereas the Service preserves a utopian future paradoxically by creating that future, the Patrol preserves a necessary past, sometimes by causing that past. It is because of the Patrol that Cyrus the Great survived into adulthood and that the Mongols did not invade North America. Despite its futuristic rationale, the Time Patrol series is entirely about the past whereas:

"One of the many original features of this novel is that it does actually concern the future. Most science fiction, if it is not fantasy, is about an extension of the present which only by agreement do we call the future. It catches our attention because we see in it a mirror of the present day. Blish was after something different. Quincunx is like few other fictions, and does not resemble closely anything else Blish wrote."
-Brian W. Aldiss, "PEEP: An Introduction to The Quincunx Of Time" IN James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), pp. 6-10 AT p. 6.

Whereas twentieth century Patrolmen visit a succession of historical periods, the founders of the Service, who are already in our future, receive increasingly incomprehensible messages from a succession of further futures with different scientific paradigms. One even hears the commander of a world-line cruiser traveling from 8873 to 8704 eleven million light years away in another galaxy.

Some, not all, writers about time travel address temporal paradoxes with appropriate ingenuity, Poul Anderson being at the top of this list. Blish in "Beep"/Quincunx..., like Gregory Benford in Timescape, shows that such paradoxes can be generated merely by transmitting information backwards in time. Characters in these two novels, by Blish and Benford respectively, face this question: we want to know if it is possible to communicate with the past, we intend to transmit a message that might have been received in the past and we have a record of its reception so what will happen if we now do not send the message?

The answer has to be: do not interrupt your own experiment. If you want to know whether it is possible to communicate with the past, then you need to know both that a message has been received and that it has been transmitted. If you do not transmit the message, then the message that was received was not transmitted by you. It originated either in another timeline or in a prevented future. In the latter case, it is what would have been transmitted if its reception had not prevented its transmission. A canny contribution by Benford is that the past is in the sky. A tachyon beam must be aimed at that point in the sky where Earth was when we want the message to be received.

We have now proceeded from Anderson to Heinlein to Blish to Benford. I have no control over the direction of this blog.

Galactic SF

Some recent posts catalogued science fictional treatments of the Solar System. Everyone knows the names of the planets outward from the Sun. Space travel can be interplanetary or interstellar although, since the latter can mean just a slow boat to Proxima Centauri, I suggest a third category, "galactic," taking in the Milky Way as a whole.

When sf writers venture beyond the Solar System, they often describe:

the interior of a spaceship en route across an interstellar distance;

the surface of an extrasolar planet.

However, there is so much more than that out there. Poul Anderson does in fact do more. First, he characteristically describes a star and its planetary system before focusing on a particular planet. Secondly, he imagines many dramatic stellar events generating extreme alien environments. See here.

I think that a reader of galactic sf should be given some sense of the size and shape of the galaxy, the arms, the center, the halo and any other features. I am less familiar with more recent sf. Gregory Benford has a Galactic Center Saga. Some passages in works by Anderson or by James Blish impart relevant information and may be discussed later.

Signing off for what may be a busy weekend.

The Sea Of Space

Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999).

"Her gaze went back to the blackness; stars and nebulae and cold galactic river." (p. 176)

Poul Anderson regularly describes stars seen from space and I usually skip past such passages but now realize that I could instead compile a long comparative list of these descriptions by Anderson and other sf writers.

How often is the universe compared to water? Nearly every title on Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series makes this comparison:

In The Ocean Of Night
Across The Sea Of Suns
Great Sky River
Tides Of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity

James Blish wrote evocatively:

"It was the empty ocean of space that washes between galaxies."
-Earthman, Come Home (London, 1963), p. 56.

"...the Rift turned and eventually faded out into a rill of emptiness, soaking into the sands of the stars." (p. 59)

And, in Anderson:

"...Rax...had drifted about until it stranded at last on this tolerant shore." -Young Flandry (New York, 2010), p. 214.

"...a brawling, polyglot, multiracial population, much of it transient, drifting in and out on the tides of space." -Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 195.

Space has no tides but we get the idea.

Science Fiction And History III

Gregory Benford, quoted by Poul Anderson, deplored some unexamined assumptions in futuristic sf stories, that future societies will be:

liberal capitalist;
state socialist;
high-tech but semi-feudal;
or imperialist.

(We all know that interstellar empires are unlikely and that Poul Anderson wrote them well.)

"State socialist" could mean:

(i) like Russia during the Cold War, dictatorial, exploiting industrial workers in order to stockpile instruments of genocide for military competition against the other Great Power;

(ii) such a system conquering the planet, or the known universe, and therefore ceasing to have a competitor.

I call (i) "state capitalist" because of its exploitation and competition and (ii) a return to ancient despotism because of its lack of a competitor. (ii) would indeed be horrific (1984) but hopefully is unlikely and, if it did occur, would soon stagnate, then collapse under its own weight.

Multiverse: AI And STL

David, Brin, "Latecomers" IN Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014), pp. 249-274.

Like Gregory Benford and the later Poul Anderson, David Brin addresses the issues of Artificial Intelligence and slower than light interstellar travel. AI is ideal for STL because how can organisms survive interstellar journeys? But then:

"Instead of just exploring and making further self-copies, the 'mother probe' had a mission to recreate her makers here in a faraway solar system. To nurture and prepare them for a new planetary home. A solution to the problem of interstellar colonization by organic beings." (p. 272)

Apart from thus synthesizing AI with STL, Brin also addresses the more basic question of the fundamental relationship between organic and artificial intelligences. In the opening dialogue of the story, a cyborg and her AI partner quickly dismiss Asimovian Robotics. AI's are not programmed with Laws but brought up as children by human beings and given time to learn. (Susan Calvin did do this in one story.) One giant artificial brain admires and respects human beings because they created AI's despite their often-expressed Frankenstein complex.

The conclusion concerns organic beings alone. Enclosed in an asteroidal habitat but knowing that they cannot indefinitely survive a war of machines raging throughout the Solar System, intelligent organic beings find the only possible way to leave a comprehensible record of their history. Using the primitive information technology of hammers and chisels, they carve in the surrounding rock a massive comic strip: extensive, intricate pictures arranged in neat rows and columns separated by narrow lines of text depict suns, planets, machines, beams, missiles, claws, attackers and defenders.

Like Benford's Furians, these beings find a way to transmit information to any future space-traveling species.

Multiverse: A Linguistic Detail

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse:Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

This is a minor detail but English becomes:

Anglish in Gregory Benford's "Bloodpride" (p. 331);

Anglic in Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization;

Angelic in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's post-CoDominium Empire of Man.

Unless my memory is playing tricks in that third case? If not, then the addition of that single letter "e" is brilliant because "Angelic" links both to Anderson's "Anglic" and to the fact that the Empire of Man is officially Christian.

These word roots have been linked before. When one of the two St Augustines saw slaves being unloaded from a boat and inquired as to their identity, he was told, "Angli," and responded, "Non Angli sed angeli" (not Angles but angels). (See here.) Augustine traveled to England (=Angle-land), converted its south-east corner to Christianity and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury or Primate of England.

(On reflection, I prefer Anderson's terms "Ythrians" and "Deathpride" to Benford's "Ythris" and "bloodpride.")

Multiverse: Bloodpride II

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

Surprise. Gregory Benford's Ythris, in "Bloodpride," want to destroy the Ark hidden in the asteroid belt of the Solar System. They have made it a bloodpride matter to destroy all Arks because, when one such had entered their planetary system, they allowed organisms from it onto their planetary surface where the invasive life nearly destroyed their biosphere.

From this event, the Ythris concluded that the Arks had been sent as weapons. They had no understanding that they themselves were at fault for admitting invasive life without studying it first. In the Solar System, the Ark will be allowed to initiate an alien ecology inside a large, specially dug, rock chamber on the Moon. Thus, there will be no danger but much new knowledge which was the intention of the Arks' senders.

"Bloodpride" refers to "...Galactic Complex. That host of innumerable societies had largely, flourished long before humanity was born on the dusty plains of Africa." (p. 327)

I do not know whether this reference places "Bloodpride" in or out of Benford's Galactic Center future history.

Multiverse: Bloodpride

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

On closer investigation, this anthology includes two, not three, Technic History stories. In "Bloodpride," Gregory Benford accurately describes Poul Anderson's Ythrians, here called simply "Ythri," but changes their history and places them in a different fictitious future. Instead of hyperspace-traveling Terrans exploring extrasolar planets, including Ythri, Ythris in plasma drive spacecraft, seeking a Furian artifact, enter the Solar System through an Oort Cloud wormhole used by extrasolar races but concealed from humanity.

When the Furians' sun became a red giant, that now extinct race launched information-carrying solar sail Arks towards planets with detectable biospheres but as yet no evidence of intelligence. An Ark would use the light of a red giant to decelerate, then proceed towards a nearby dwarf star with a targeted planet. Four million years ago, a red giant passed close to Sol so Earth was targeted and the Ark should now be in the Solar System awaiting discovery by a space-traveling race. The Furians informed other races, including the Ythris, of their Arks by microwave.

SETI librarians, custodians of recorded transmissions from many extrasolar civilizations, might be able to help the Ythri to find the Ark in exchange for the coordinates of the wormhole. As a first step, one librarian gains the Ythri's respect by flying with them in Lunar gravity, as Lunar colonists and tourists do in Robert Heinlein's Future History.

This is a Gregory Benford interstellar future incorporating one race of Anderson aliens.