Not Read Yet

Regarding Poul Anderson titles not yet read by me, Murder In Black Letter remains available but too expensive for my budget.

Since the SM Stirling novel to which I referred here was In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings, I searched the blog to see what, if anything, I had already posted about this novel. See here. There is an explicit reference to Poul Anderson but the viewpoint character of this passage is Frederik Pohl.

The fictional Pohl reflects that sf settings will have to go extrasolar as meanwhile Louis L'Amour and James Michener will fictionalize the exploits of planetary explorers, just as Kit Carson was fictionalized in his own lifetime. Carson even read dime novels about himself while he still really was fighting Indians in the Rockies. That is an interesting relationship when it occurs - between the real man and his fictional counterpart. If someone writes a novel in which Kit Carson reads a "Kit Carson" dime novel, then a fictional Carson reads about a fictional Carson or, to be more precise, a realistically fictional Carson reads about a fancifully fictional Carson.

Somewhere in Stirling's first "Lords of Creation" novel, The Sky People, an explorer on Venus reflects that people on Earth enjoy fictional accounts of the exploits of named planetary explorers. (Correction, 4 June 2015: not named. See here.) And this happens in a work of fiction that is written to celebrate earlier works of fiction written at a time when Mars and Venus really might have turned out to be inhabitable. Pretty smart stuff.

Murder And Psychodynamics

The latest news from here is that Poul Anderson's Murder In Black Letter is available from Amazon for £144.00 - more than I am willing to spend on a single book. I need someone to give me a grant to research Poul Anderson! (But I am not asking readers of this blog to contribute!)

Meanwhile, however, Anderson's Psychotechnic Future History remains eminently worthy of discussion. Baen Books left a big hole in the History when they did not include "The Snows of Ganymede" in their 1980's uniform edition of the series. In "Snows," Planetary Engineers travel to the outer Solar System to study the feasibility of terraforming Ganymede and Callisto. In "Brake," set fifty years later, an Engineer travels to the outer System with machines to terraform Europa.

These two stories could be collected as a single volume to be called The Order Of Planetary Engineers. References in "Brake" to the Engineers' castle on the rim of Archimedes Crater and to the curiously named University of X on Ganymede make some sense after reading "Snows."

In "Brake," Anderson, wanting to inform his readers that Terrestrial society is rapidly descending towards the Second Dark Ages, makes Captain Banning refer, first, to the conflict between Oriental Kali worshipers and Occidental protechnological Puritans and, secondly, to three complicating factors:

Kali worshipers are only one branch of the Ramakrishian Eclectics;
many Asians support Technic civilization just as some Americans worship Kali;
there are also Husseinite Moslems and a New Christendom.

This all sounds a bit ad hoc and in fact there are no stories set on Earth in this period so we do not see the Kalists, Technics etc in conflict. They are referred to only here. But the point is made that Earth is in very bad shape.

Before the two Planetary Engineers stories, "Holmgang," "Cold Victory" and "What Shall It Profit?" could be collected as The Humanist Revolution: before and after. That would leave six other pre-FTL stories as maybe something like After World War III?