Three Novels And Three Short Stories

Three Detective Novels By Poul Anderson
Perish By The Sword
Murder In Black Letter
Murder Bound

Three Short Stories By Poul And Karen Anderson Collected In The Unicorn Trade
"Dead Phone"
"The Kitten"
"Single Jeopardy"

The three novels and the first short story star the San Francisco detective, Trygve Yamamura. The novels hint at supernaturalism whereas the short story ends by affirming it.

The first novel features a Metallurgic Laboratories company. "Single Jeopardy," published in Hitchcock's, is a murder story set in San Francisco about the two founders of a Metallurgical Research Laboratory, one of whom shares a surname with a character in the third novel.

"The Kitten," which ends by affirming the supernatural, is set in the fictitious town of Senlac, which also features in Poul Anderson's science fiction novel, There Will Be Time.

Jovian Society

In Poul Anderson's The Snows Of Ganymede (New York, 1958), the colonists on Ganymede are called Jovians, not Ganymedeans. After over a century of isolation, they speak a dialect variant of archaic English with "y'all" as the second person plural pronoun.

This reminded me of a point that I forgot to make when discussing Perish By The Sword. In that novel, a character who has been faking an accent is advised, first, that "you-all" is a plural and, secondly, that it is usually pronounced more like "y'all." "You-all" is indeed a plural but, in terms of usage, I think that I have heard it used to address a single person and with the first syllable fully pronounced!

Jovian society has four classes:

Cincs are the rulers - Cincs of first and second grade are ex officio Archangels;

Angels are priests, artists, engineers, poets, scientists and philosophers;

Hounds are tall, genetically identical security men;

Sergeants are commoners, "...part of the machinery..." (p. 35), capable only of unskilled manual labor, for which they are cheaper than automation or robotics, with no individuality, conditioned and continually propagandized - Porters are silent and have four arms;

children, taken early from creches, are psych-tested and, if picked for Angel or Cinc, "...never told who their parents were" (ibid.);

each Cinc above novice level maintains as many guards as he can support to protect him not from the easily controlled Sergeants but from other Cincs because:

"'God gives victory to the righteous, but we men can't know who that is. Many're called but few're chosen.'" (p. 36)

Well, that is one way to find out which ones God favors!

The novel gives a practical example of psychotechnic manipulation. When the White American opponents of the American government began to fund the colony on Ganymede, the government surreptitiously subsidized the colony because:

"'The Psychotechs foresaw that the attempt would exhaust and break up the organization on Earth.'" (p. 16)

Thus, the science of social prediction was used not necessarily for the common good but for sectional interests. Consequently, the Psychotechnicians were later overthrown by the Humanists.

Contemporary Cosmic Context

Although we differentiate contemporary fiction about personal and social relationships from science fiction about the impact of future technology, alien contact, interplanetary spaces, other planets etc, these fictions are set in one universe and a single word in a contemporary novel can remind us of that wider context.

For instance, in Poul Anderson's detective novel, Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959), as Michael Stefanik walks through a cold wind:

"A glance overhead, between flapping leaves, showed him a few stars. They were dim, unbelievably remote, and flickered as if some gale through their own spaces were about to blow them out and lay darkness upon their planets." (p. 145)

Stars seen in the night sky are a permanent feature of humanity's perennial environment so it does not feel like any sort of intrusion when a character in a novel looks up at them. Quite the contrary. However, a reference to their "planets" goes beyond what can be seen with the naked eye and reminds us of modern scientific knowledge with its future implications of maybe traveling to some of those planets.

But Anderson does more here. The projection of Earthly weather into space, the idea of a wind blowing out the stars as if they were candles and darkening their planets, suggests a story set in an alternative, magical universe. In fact, the novel seems to become fantasy when Stefanik hears what he thinks is a whispering ghost or headless body wielding what, according to the legend, is a murderous sword. But then when Stefanik is alone in hearing this and when, further, the police apprehend him with the sword, a wounded companion and no one else present, then we start to think that we have after all been reading about his states of mind. And finally the detective explains the mystery and solves the crime.

Thus, Anderson has taken us through a mundane windy night, the stellar universe, a fantastic realm, a possible ghost story and a possible psychological story to the resolution of a detective story and, at five minutes past midnight, I am once again ready to turn in.

Jargonese

An English Teacher that I used to work with and still meet gets mad at modern English like "out-source" and "invite" (used as a noun). Poul Anderson's Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959) conveys the amusement that can be generated by new linguistic usages and people's reactions to them:

"'Did you want to see Mr Deacon?...'He's in conference, engineerwise, but I can intercom him.'
"'Never mind.' Even then, Stefanik reflected that modern business English was enough to drive a man to socialism." (p. 19)

(The guy I know laughed uproariously the first time I pulled "(insert noun)-wise" on him.)

Later, the same secretary says:

"'...he messaged me over the intercom. He said to call a New York supplier we deal with and ask them to urgentize a shipment we have on tap.' Yamamura was so nauseated that he barely heard the rest..." (p. 93)

Nowadays, we "private message (pm)" each other on facebook. I would say "prioritize," not "urgentize," but I remember when my father had not heard "prioritize."

Meanwhile, of course, Anderson writes excellent descriptive English. I have commented on his descriptions of the seasons in historical fiction but this perception is also present in his contemporary fiction:

"Nob Hill was more than a good address; it was seeing the great two-footed stride of the Bay Bridge, or the lovely curve men had thrown across the Golden Gate, or ships standing in past blue islands, whenever you wished." (p. 1)

"Saturday morning was blue again, with small white clouds and sunlight spilling across the hills. But a wind came streaking from the Bay and the ocean beyond." (p. 113)

Different Reading Experiences

Part of the experience of reading a book is where and when we first read it, which is different for each of us. I started to read Poul Anderson's Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959) in the cafe of the Tate Gallery at Albert Dock, Liverpool, formerly a dock, now a memorabilia, museum and tourist area, on 30 September, 2013. Two members of my family attended the Chagall Exhibition but I preferred to drink coffee and read Anderson.

Later, I sat on a bench overlooking the Dock beside the Maritime Museum. Liverpool has history and I have history

with Liverpool. The teenage girl who served us in a confectionery shop spoke in a singsong Liverpudlian accent which brought back the ten years when I worked in Merseyside. On this occasion, I did not have time to meditate in the Anglican Cathedral, eat in an upstairs vegetarian restaurant or visit either of the sf and comics shops, Worlds Apart or Forbidden Planet.

I started to read this novel for the first time in the future, forty four years after its publication. Our twenty first century has cyberspace but not yet hyperspace and Global Warming instead of Cold War. Our future, forty four years hence, in 2057, remains as unknown to us as our 2013 was to Anderson and his fellow sf writers. Moreover, I would be 108 then but nevertheless hope to live long enough to see most of what transpires between now and then.

The Gospel According To...

In Poul Anderson's Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959), Michael Stefanik, translating a Russian text, thinks:

"...better include a critical note, warning the reader to allow for Marxism. Soviet work nowadays seemed less influenced by dogma than formerly, but Stefanik remembered that the gospel according to Karl postulated agriculture had evolved from nomadism (the reverse is actually the case) and this might well bias even a scientific report." (pp. 12-13)

In reality, of course, there is no "...gospel according to Karl..." If Marx thought that agriculture had evolved from nomadism but the reverse is the case, then Marxists have to accept this like everyone else. The Omniscience and Infallibility of the Founder is a religious, not a political, doctrine. However, Stefanik refers not to a group of thinkers and enquirers applying and developing Marxist theory and analysis, for whom "dogma" would be anathema, but to a group of bureaucrats misruling a country, using Marxist ideas, instead of the older Orthodox beliefs, as their ideology and indeed as a "dogma." These are as far apart as a theological conference or a Bible study group is from an Archbishop blessing Imperial troops!

It is fortunate that scientists were able to communicate even across the Iron Curtain, thirty years before the collapse of the Bureaucratic State. Science is universal. When, with a group of other Careers Advisers, I visited UMIST, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, the Admissions Tutor told us that he needed to know of any course applicant, "Does he speak the language we speak? That is the language of mathematics. And does he obey the laws we obey? Those are the laws of physics." A school leaver usually showed this by achieving high grades in public exams in the relevant subjects. A third exam pass with high grades was also needed but could be in any subject: History, Literature etc. (Cultured scientists are a greater social asset than uncultured ones.)

The scientific background of Perish By The Sword is more detailed than in some hard sf novels:

"The time isn't too far distant when you'll specify the properties you want in a metal and some engineer will design an alloy for you. Right now, of course, there's still a lot that isn't known, a great deal which has to be worked out by empirical methods. That's what D & C does. Partly it solves problems handed it by other outfits which don't have facilities for such specialized research. Partly it carries out independent investigation, with an eye to discovering something patentable and profitable." (p. 43)

So this detective novel is like a prequel to any number of "the day after tomorrow" sf novels.

Perish By The Sword

(Will be away 4-14 Oct.)

I do not make this stuff up. Poul Anderson books really are this interesting to read and discuss.

A novel about contemporary scientists and their current work is fiction about science but is not "science fiction" so what is it? (Someone once told me that she was not a "girl friend" but a "girl who is a friend.") Poul Anderson's Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959) is a detective novel about science with the information about Japanese swords adding almost a historical fiction element and even a fantasy element if we heed the legends about the swords. The Norse sword, Tyrfing, which features in Anderson's historical fantasy, is mentioned for comparison.

The detective is Trygve Yamamura but a surprising number of chapters are narrated from the point of view of his friend, Michael Stefanik. Stefanik is attacked with a stolen sword and I wondered if one chapter was going to end with his death. But things get more complicated.

Maybe an established science fiction writer should avoid references to sf when writing in another genre? For instance:

"(Part of Yamamura wondered why a terminated human being always appeared so much more dead than an animal, and thought that perhaps it was because man had no fur to cover his poor waxen skin, and speculated that a race of furry intelligent beings might be less afraid of their dead than man is.)" (p. 78)

That is just the sort of speculative detail that Anderson does include in his hard sf but does it fit here?

When confirming an alibi, one character says:

"'I wish I were enough of a scientist to invent a time machine and be in two places at once, but I'm afraid such talents as I have are more for business.'" (p. 89)

Exactly. This book is about business, not time travel! Readers unfamiliar with sf might ask, "How could a time machine let him be in two places at once?" If he travels back twenty four hours, then he necessarily coexists with his younger self of one day ago. I know from experience that some people would not understand this or would say that it was impossible or might even argue that his younger self was there yesterday but now his older self is so his younger self can't be as well. Or something.

It is good that different works interconnect and cross-refer even across genres but maybe, when immersed in a mystery novel, we are better off not being too directly reminded of issues in sf?

Two Contemporay Novels

Poul Anderson's first contemporary mystery novel, Perish By The Sword, has just (26 Sept) arrived by post but meanwhile I had started to reread his contemporary fantasy novel, or contemporary novel with a fantasy element, The Devil's Game (New York, 1980).

In ...Game, an old, rich guy, Sunderland Haverner, has had a life long deal either with a literal demon or with a demon-like being that goes by the name of Samael. (In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Lucifer's name before he fell.)

Haverner, inspired by his demon, induces seven disparate characters, all badly needing money, to play Follow the Leader, the winner or winners to receive one million dollars, tax free thanks to an ingenious legal loophole. The reader has to keep track of eight major human characters plus the supporting cast of Haverner's servants.

As far as I remember, from having read the novel only once when bought, the seven interact without any demonic influence so that the central narrative is not fantasy. Perhaps the Haverner-Samael dialogues are the framing device? The game is designed to draw out the worst from its contestants so that some unpleasant passages are to be expected. The chapters are unnumbered but not innominate:

SAMAEL
THE ISLAND
INTRODUCTIONS
INTERVAL ONE
SUNDERLAND HAVERNER
INTERVAL TWO
LARRY RANCE
INTERVAL THREE
GAYLE THAYER
INTERVAL FOUR
BYRON SHADDOCK
INTERVAL FIVE
ORESTES CRUZ
INTERVAL SIX PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
ELLIS NORDBERG
INTERVAL SEVEN PART ONE
MATTHEW FLAGLER
INTERVAL SEVEN PART TWO
JULIA PETRIE
FAREWELLS
SUNDERLAND HAVERNER

This structure is unusually elaborate, with a three-part Interval Six and the two parts of Interval Seven separated by the sixth of the seven contestants. As expected, Samael and Haverner bracket the contestants.