The Current Agenda

Ketlan has got another old laptop working for me so it seems that we are back in business. It is late so I am not sure how much will be done in what is left of today. I have continued to reread "Iron" by Poul Anderson and will post more about this story, then about Anderson's second and third Man-Kzin Wars stories while rereading them. I might also post a little more on Mars since this topic has recurred recently. I will definitely post about story-telling media and Superman on Comics Appreciation. (Links added later.)

While driving to Ketlan's cottage on the Marsh Estate, Lancaster, to collect the laptop, I found Laburnum Grove (see image) cordoned off by police conducting a murder investigation in one of the houses shown here. I occasionally mention notable events in the City of Lancaster so I thought that this qualified. The tower of the Priory Church, which we have featured before, can be seen in the background behind the tree.

Single Or Multiple Authorship

Poul Anderson's future histories are written entirely by Poul Anderson whereas Star Trek is written by many script writers. These are two ways to generate fiction: basically, quality as against quantity. Anderson's output is enormous for a single author but, of course, he did not confine his attention to just one series and, in any case, could not have matched the sheer volume produced by multiple authorship.

The few Superman stories written by Alan Moore are part of the vast Superman canon but are also part of Moore's complete works and have been collected as such. Needless to say, they are way ahead of most other superhero fiction.

There is an intermediate position. Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history is additionally written or co-written by:

Larry Niven;
SM Stirling;
Jennifer Pournelle;
the contributors to the War World series, including Anderson.

This probably makes for unevenness in the quality of writing. There is unevenness in Anderson's Technic History because it was written over such a long period but multiple authorship almost certainly increases unevenness. However, I have yet to read the War World volumes. SM Stirling managed to pull together a consistently high quality for the Drakas! anthology.

Investigation In Sacramento

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

In medieval society, social rank mattered. In modern society, in theory, every individual is equal before the law. In practice, it is harder for the police to prosecute the rich. (p. 194) Tom and Roy must work in their own time to collect solid evidence against the Rolfes before they even approach their boss - who has already been bought by the Rolfes in any case.

Tom, when captured by the New Virginians, refers to "'...your dimensional portal...'" (p. 222). Adrienne Rolfe corrects him:

"'We usually call it the Gate...'" (ibid.) -

- but Tom had already used the term "'...Gate...'" on p. 197.

Adrienne continues:

"'Think of the other side as bizarro Sunnydale. Or another dimension of time and space.'" (ibid.)

"...bizarro..." is an obscure Superman reference.

Tom and Roy are about to leave their Earth forever.

A Lensman In The Old Phoenix

Here (scroll down) is where I have referred to EE Smith's Lensman series before. Here (see Comments) is where correspondent David Birr says that the:

"...large affable blond man in high boots and gray leather with an iridescent jewel on his wrist..." (Midsummer Tempest, p. 228) -

- must be from the Lensman series. So this is the only appearance of a Lensman in Poul Anderson's works and the Old Phoenix is probably the only appropriate setting. This single part of a sentence is better written than the entire seven-volume Lensman series.

Lensmen:

sound like and resemble superheroes;

are as uni-dimensional as all comic strip characters used to be;

specifically, are quite like the comic book superhero group, the Green Lantern Corps.

With superheroes, I have found that what matters is the script writer, not the character. Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are able to do new things with old characters, even with Superman. Similarly, Poul Anderson would have been able to write a good Lensman novel even if the Lensmens' creator couldn't. I value that man in gray leather with an iridescent jewel on his wrist as Anderson's prose transmuting a cardboard space opera hero into a colorful and interesting character.

Super Powers

SM Stirling, Drakon (New York, 2000).

A Draka and a Samothracian agent fight! These guys are superpowered! The Samothracian's powers, e.g., his relative invulnerability to direct hits by guns, derive entirely from his AI suit but that counts as superpowers in the comics: Iron Man; Green Lantern.

Superman is sf: extraterrestrial. He was so successful and inspired so many imitators that he generated a whole new genre but his roots remain in sf:

mentally powerful defenders of Earth in James Blish's "Citadel of Thought";
Poul Anderson's "Un-Men" and "Sensitive Man";
Larry Niven's Gil the Arm and protectors;
Julian May's Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask;
these characters created by SM Stirling.

The Ultimate Defeat Of Enemies Both Within And Without?

I wrote here that psychological conflicts destroyed the Solar Union and that cosmic complexity destroyed the Stellar Union. However, Poul Anderson's "The Chapter Ends" describes a later era when both of these problems have been solved.

A man can:

will negative feelings out of his trained nervous system;

mentally control the most basic cosmic forces with only a small expenditure of energy by using an artificially mutated section of his brain.

Thus, he can fly not only through the air (see image) but also through interstellar space at trans-light speeds.

Superheroes are a distinct genre, incorporating elements of fantasy, sf and action-adventure. However, they originated as sf: Superman's powers are extraterrestrial, not magical or supernatural, in origin. Over the decades, his powers went up and down the scale:

able to leap tall buildings at a single bound;
able to fly;
able to survive in vacuum and to fly across interstellar distances in seconds.

Script writers sensibly scaled his powers back down again. Thus, John Byrne's Superman could fly to the Moon and back but was not able to remain conscious indefinitely in vacuum. However, Poul Anderson presents future human beings with the power of interstellar flight.

Although "The Chapter Ends" does not seem to fit with the Psychotechnic History in terms of historical details, it nevertheless presents an interesting scenario where the apparently insuperable problems of this future history have eventually been solved.

Superheroes

See here. Poul Anderson did not write superheroes but easily could have done. They exist in prose as well as in comic strips and on screen. The first superhero was an extraterrestrial, therefore an sf character. Pseudo-scientific rationales can be concocted for superpowers. The psychic time travel in Anderson's There Will Be Time is a superpower. His characters, Joel Weatherfield and the Danellians, are super-human beings with sf explanations, extraterrestrial and extra-temporal, respectively.

"Superheroes" as a hybrid genre also presents magical and supernatural explanations for superpowers but Anderson did all that as well. He wrote fantasies featuring Conan, Norse gods and other supernatural beings.

I have said all or most of this before. These current reflections are prompted by concurrently reading David Lagercrant's The Girl In The Spider's Web which ingeniously incorporates Marvel Comics superheroes as fictions within the fiction. Our heroine is not super-powered but has been inspired to develop her human talents to a super-normal level by reading these characters while suffering injustice - a classic superhero "origin story."

Poul Anderson turned his hand to many kinds of work, including original stories about characters created by other authors. Isabel Allende wrote a Zorro novel and I wish that Anderson had written a Superman novel.

Superman In Public Consciousness And Popular Culture

Regular readers might remember that recently I have:

reread Rick Veitch's (sequel to Alan Moore's) Swamp Thing;

been reading for the first time SM Stirling's Conquistador;

been enjoying these texts while also spotting any connections with the works of Poul Anderson.

Our theme for today is references to Superman. In a work of fiction, any reference to Supes implies either that he is a real guy out there somewhere or that the fictional characters share with their readers a popular culture in which this now mythical figure has become a permanent fixture. Veitch gives us the first; the others the second.

Veitch
Swampy goes to Metropolis to kill Lex Luthor who is protected both by his own security system and by Superman. Veitch, like Moore and Gaiman, applies a new insight to an over-familiar character.

Lois Lane: Clark?...Why is it when I'm talking to you, you always seem to be listening to something else?

Lois Lane: There you go again! I start talking and you stare off into space!

Clark Kent: Huh? Oh, uh...Just enjoying the view, Lois. You can see the whole city from up here.

Lois Lane: Yoo hoo! Earth to Clark. Come in, Clark!

-Rick Veitch, Swamp Thing: Infernal Triangles (New York, 2006), pp. 56, 58, 61.

Anderson
See here.

Stirling
"'Brother, with the amount of money RM and M had to throw around, you could bribe Superman'...'Ten million dollars,' the Man says. 'No, no, I am Superman!' Then it's thirty million. 'No, no, I stand for Truth, Justice and the American Way!' So then it's fifty million, and Superman comes back: 'I'll kill anyone you want!...'"
-SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004), p. 298.

Of course, the real (?) Superman is incorruptible. (In one version, Luthor, formerly the most powerful man in Metropolis, tries but fails to buy Supes as soon as the latter comes on the scene.) But Stirling's character is making a point. Rolfe Mining and Minerals is one of many front organizations for the Commonwealth of New Virginia which has been secretly exploiting another Earth for decades. By any ordinary standards, their funds are unlimited and "Rich enough to bribe even Superman" is a powerful way to say this.

Meteors

(This is another post that begins somewhere else, then returns to Poul Anderson Appreciation.)

Superman began publication as an adult character in 1938 so his spaceship must have come to Earth about 1918, although no one usually associates him with that period. However, in the Smallville TV series, his spaceship arrived in 1989 so why was it not detected as an incoming missile by US radar defense systems? Because this time the small space capsule arrived in a large Kryptonite meteor shower. Did the ship's drive field carry the meteors through hyperspace?

In Poul Anderson's The Star Fox (London, 1968), the space privateers use "...a giant meteorite or small asteroid..." (p. 148) to conceal the descent of a spaceship onto the surface of the planet New Europe. Because of the speed of descent, air impact would destroy the ship:

"Unless she followed exactly behind the meteorite, using its mass for a bumper and heat shield, its flaming tail for a cloak." (p. 149)

Gunnar Heim must steer the ship through its "...narrow slot of partial vacuum..." (ibid), watching the external incandescence and internal instruments, guided by intuition and an unreeling computation of where he out to be at each moment. This sounds like other dangerous space passages in Anderson's works:

Dominic Flandry around a pulsar;
Nicholas van Rijn around an extinct supernova;
the Tau Zero ship around a new monobloc.

Before this, some of Heim's men made an "...epic..." (p. 148) trip around New Europe's moon but it is not stated exactly why. Did they detach the mass that became the meteorite?
(Later: No. The explanation is on pp. 190-191.)

A New Eon IV

Greg Bear, Eon (London, 2002).

The Stone is, possibly, a time machine larger inside than out. That sounds familiar from a BBC science fiction perspective. As Huckleberry Finn might say, I don't take no stock in Doctor Who. However, like Star Trek and Superman, it could be reconceptualized as worthwhile science fiction:

the Time Lords should be our descendants;
Vulcan should be a separated human colony;
for two possible explanations of the Kryptonians, see here.

Greg Bear does some of this kind of work in Eon:

explorers of the Stone find that, whatever the explanation, this mysterious object is a human artifact;
to understand its apparently infinite seventh chamber, they engage a mathematician whose works include Non-gravity Bent Geodesics of n-Spatial Reference Frames: An Approach to Superspace Visualization and Probability Clustering (p. 24).

That sounds as if it just might have something to do with extending a chamber to infinity. Non-gravity bent geodesics and superspace might even explain Superman's flight and other powers. I honestly believe that a reconceptualized Doctor Who would benefit from this kind of treatment but, be that as it may, we can in any case appreciate serious science fiction like this novel by Greg Bear.

Words And Texts

Sometimes one book reminds us of another, then reflection reveals the similarities. When a Superman comic had reminded me of a Robert Heinlein novel, I was surprised to realize the similarities: both works had a lunar setting and both referred to parallel universes.

Poul Anderson's The Night Face made me think of the science fiction-based superhero series, Green Lantern. Both works involve regular faster than light interstellar travel and a mysterious planet, peaceful but with a hidden conflict. This description makes them sound closely parallel, which is entirely misleading. In fact, it was another minor feature of The Night Face that initially evoked Green Lantern.

Any word can have a specific denotation, a general connotation and accidental associations. Thus, the phrase, "the Pope":

denotes the present incumbent, Bergoglio;
connotes an entire historical institution in the Catholic Church;
reminds me of my single visit to Rome decades ago.

An author skilfully deploys denotations and connotations but cannot control the accidental associations in his readers' minds. By the same token, a reader must not let his associations get in the way of the author's meaning. That I disliked something in Rome is irrelevant when reading an account of a Pope.

The unusual word "Oa" is the name of the mysterious planet in Green Lantern and is also an interjection used by a character in The Night Face. Associations cannot be more accidental than that.

Modern Myths

Manson Everard, who does detective work in the past, refers to Sherlock Holmes.

Malcolm Lockridge, who has been hired to help recover a treasure, refers to James Bond.

Jack Havig, who has the superpower of time travel, refers to Superman.

I am a fan of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and of Superman in some versions, e.g., when written by Alan Moore or in the Smallville TV series.

Holmes, Bond and Superman are modern myths by which I mean fictional characters who are universally known, even by those who have never read the original texts. Others are:

Dracula
Frankenstein
Alice in Wonderland
Rip van Winkle
Peter Pan
Tarzan
the Batman
the Time Traveler
the Invisible Man
the Man in the Iron Mask
the Three Musketeers
the Count of Monte Cristo
the Wizard of Oz

Usually, it is possible to describe a mythical character's distinguishing feature in a single phrase or sentence. I am sure that it would be possible to generate a list of a hundred, although some would need to be verified by opinion polls.

Anderson's characters are not on the list. Each of us appreciates the modern myths and also many less well known characters.

SF Super Heroes

Science fiction characters include:

scientists;
inventors;
space travelers;
time travelers;
extraterrestrials;
mutants;
telepaths;
immortals;
monsters;
robots;
androids;
AI's;
supermen;
futurians.

One scientist and his monster, Frankenstein and the Monster, initiated the transition from Gothic fiction to science fiction.

One extraterrestrial superman, called Superman, initiated the transition from science fiction to the new composite genre of super heroes, mainly associated with one visual medium, comics, but currently transferring to another, cinema.

Some subsequent sf characters are effectively super heroes although not labelled as such:

the mentalists in James Blish's "Citadel of Thought";
Julian May's Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless;
Larry Niven's Gil "the Arm" Hamilton and the protectors;
Poul Anderson's Un-Men and the Sensitive Man.

Like many of Anderson's characters, the Un-men and the Sensitive Man are potential series characters but their author had other things to write.

Earthman, Beware!

Poul Anderson's "Earthman, Beware!," collected in his Alight In The Void (New York, 1993), is a superman story though not a Superman story. It is not about Kal-El from Krypton but is about a superior humanoid extraterrestrial found in a grain field as a baby and adopted by "...an elderly local couple, childless and kindly." (p. 40)

This story was published in 1951, just twelve years after the first installment of Superman. Did Anderson consciously mimic the origin of Clark Kent or did these circumstances just seem appropriate to him as they had to Jerry Siegel?

Anderson's superman, Joel Weatherfield:

like Kal-El and Jor-El, has a name meaning "God";

at age six, patented, in his foster father's name, farm machinery improvements that enabled his parents to buy any books or equipment that he wanted instead of sending him to school;

soon devised a wig to conceal his permanent baldness;

conceals other bodily differences beneath clothes;

entered Harvard at thirteen;

graduated with every honor at fifteen;

invented the ion-jet space drive, the controlled-disintegration ion process, the cure for the common cold, the crystalline-structure determination of geological age and a robot chef;

won the Nobel prize in physics for his relativistic wave mechanics;

pioneered a new branch of mathematical series theory;

in his youth, wrote brilliantly on archaeology, economics, ecology and semantics;

founded new schools in painting and poetry;

has an immeasurable IQ;

controls an errand-running cat by whistling;

developed an X-ray technique for photographing different layers of tissue just to study himself;

used a variation of his crystalline-structure method to determine that his deceased mother was at least five hundred years old;

has a heart with more functions than its human counterpart;

has a better organized brain, preventing insanity;

has, in the brain,  a "telepathy center," sensitive to neural currents in other organisms;

has developed limited telepathy by comparing human reactions and words with detected emanations;

can also emit emanations although no human being can detect them;

quickly predicts any acquaintance's reactions and verbal responses;

knows their feelings better than they do;

has a cerebral center for voluntary control of pain, endocrine regulation etc, but has not learned to use it effectively;

has not learned what some other centers are for;

became a multimillionaire in five years;

discovered a radiation unrelated to electromagnetism that will be the subject of a further post;

thus, is homo superior in many ways that were beyond the imagination of Jerry Siegel - Superman's models were the Biblical and Classical strong men, Samson and Hercules.

A Diversion

For months, I have been reading, mainly rereading, Poul Anderson's novels and posting about them while reading them. This means that I read the books more slowly than usual but also that I get more out of them. It also means that I read less other stuff. However, I must occasionally read something else.

Having received the Smallville TV series First Season DVD's as a present, I have been watching the early episodes and have also started to reread a Smallville novel, Dragon by Alan Grant.

Grant's description of a small spacecraft surrounded by a meteor swarm entering the Solar System and falling towards Earth while the Luthors and Kents go about their business in Smallville, Kansas, is worthy of Anderson. Many different authors have written Superman. Isobel Allende wrote a Zorro novel - called Zorro. Poul Anderson contributed to many other authors' sf series. (In fact, "Anderson in Asimov's, Niven's and others' universes" could be a topic in itself.)

What if Anderson had written a Superman novel, scientifically rationalising all the absurdities of a humanoid alien with impossible powers and presenting the character as interacting not with even greater absurdities but with the real world of economic crisis, climate change and US military interventions - Clark Kent reporting from Iraq and investigating Lexcorp? The twentieth century myth of Superman deserves such treatment in the three related media of prose fiction, graphic fiction and film. Graphic story-telling is intermediate between prose and film. Each of the three can do what the others can't. Poul Anderson would have been able to write a memorable novel.

Poul Anderson On Comics

Poul Anderson wrote many works of fiction in prose but not in the visual media of cinema or comic books. I have found three references to comics in his novels.

(i) In There Will Be Time, time traveller Jack Havig comments that, despite Superman's telephone kiosk, the most convenient place in a modern city for a time traveller to disappear is a public toilet cubicle.

Greek dramatists sometimes commented on and corrected errors or implausibilities in the works of their predecessors. In this vein, in the first Superman film, Clark Kent, responding to an emergency, approaches a public telephone that is not even enclosed in a kiosk, realises that it would afford him no privacy for a costume change and instead uses a revolving door at super speed.

Thus, the film, like Anderson, comments on a familiar scene from earlier Superman comics.

(ii) In Operation Luna (New York, 2000), Steve Matuchek remarks:

"It's only comic-book heroes and their ilk who bounce directly from one brush with death to the next, wisecracking along the way. Real humans react to such things." (pp. 158-159)

Yes, real humans in real life and in realistically written novels or comics. There is nothing in the latter medium that obliges that it be written unrealistically.

(iii) Matuchek also speaks against vigilantism even if conducted in "...comic book costumes" (p. 140). Right. Again, comics comment on earlier comics. Frank Miller's Batman is a vigilante wanted for assault, breaking and entering, child endangerment and, when the Joker's dead body has been found, murder. In Alan Moore's Watchmen, the public demonstrates and the police strike ("Badges, not Masks") until anonymous vigilantism is banned. In Garth Ennis' The Boys, superheroes are untrained and get a lot of people killed on 9/11. So the critique of comic book implausibilities is conducted in comics.

I would like to see high quality film and graphic adaptations of Anderson's works.

Later: For a fourth reference to comics, see here.