Fictional Games

Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game" focuses on a role-playing game. Anderson mentions chess twice, in "The White King's War," incorporated into A Circus Of Hells, and in "The Immortal Game," although only the latter describes the moves of a game.

(Addendum: Of course, Anderson "mentions" chess more than just twice. See comments.)

Science fiction provides opportunities for imagining new games or variations of games in the future or on other planets, although Anderson did not do this. We would expect the Merseians to play a combat-based board game. However, the winged Ythrians would not think in two dimensions.

Reading on, I have learned that SM Stirling's Martian board game, atanj, the Game of Life, can be played by up to eight and that its board is octagonal with sixty two squares on a side. These and other differences remove it far from any real comparison with chess. Another difference is that the Martians play it virtually all the time, hardly the case with chess. These Martians are unempathetic characters and I much prefer Stirling's Venus.

Iain M. Banks Culture novel, The Player Of Games, centers on extremely elaborate board games but we are not told any of their rules which I think we should be.

Time Patrol, Multiverse And AI

I have finished rereading Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series and, for the time being, am reluctant to descend from this high point back down to rounding up a few remaining non-series short stories. After Anderson's long, substantial, historical time travel series, anything else seems like an anti-climax - especially mere one-off short stories, even when written by Anderson himself.

I expect this blog, now nearly two years old, to gain new life with the publication (this year?) of Multiverse. When that happens, I will welcome views other than my own - but that is always the case.

Meanwhile, there is never a shortage of material to post about, even if not on this blog. Yesterday and today, I have added to both "Science Fiction" and "Comics Appreciation." The Time Patrol had interrupted my reading of Iain M Bank's third Culture novel, Use Of Weapons. Having returned to that novel, I found in it a dialogue between an artificial intelligence (AI) and a human being about AI so I have posted about that.

Once, on this blog, I listed Anderson's various approaches to AI. Notably:

in the Harvest of Stars Tetralogy, AI begins to make human beings redundant within the Solar System although humanity flourishes elsewhere;
in Genesis, mankind is extinct but Solar AI re-creates it.

Banks' "Culture" is an interstellar civilization fully integrating both humanity and AI.

New Comparisons

Happy New Year, Poul Anderson fans. Thank you for continued page views during a period of blog quiescence. I have continued to post about Neil Gaiman's The Sandman on Comics Appreciation and have found three more Anderson-Gaiman parallels:

fairy gold;
Faerie withdrawal with the rise of science;
dialogue written in blank verse.

(I have just remembered one other: quotations from poems by James Elroy Flecker.)

Meanwhile, my daughter has given me the first three volumes of Iain M. Banks' Culture sf series. Previously on this blog, I have discussed:

HG Wells;
Olaf Stapledon;
CS Lewis;
Robert Heinlein;
Isaac Asimov;
James Blish;
Larry Niven

- in order to compare them with Anderson. I am less familiar with more recent sf but Banks might now join the list of comparisons.

Banks wrote contemporary novels as Iain Banks, then started his long sf series as Iain M Banks. The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, like James Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy, derives its title from a short phrase in TS Eliot's The Waste Land. Banks' interstellar society is in some ways similar to the one presented in Douglas Adams' A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

When Wells wrote his "fantastic and imaginative romances," many by now familiar ideas were still new:

heavier than air flight;
tanks;
heat rays;
poison gas;
world wars;
interplanetary projectiles;
antigravity;
time travel.

Since then, many later ideas have become all too familiar background material in much sf:

hyperdrives - that cannot be activated too deep in a gravity well;
artificial gravity;
interstellar civilizations - waging wars;
humanoid beings on many extrasolar planets;
telepathy;
artificial intelligence.

Banks had clearly mastered all these later ideas before starting to write Consider Phlebas. He adds the questionable idea of "human" species on many planets, apparently resulting from parallel evolution.

Anderson deploys the second list of concepts brilliantly in his History of Technic Civilization, where the quality of his writing overcomes conceptual cliches. I am currently assessing Banks by the same criteria.