The Solar System In Context

We are physically involved with the cosmos even while remaining on the Earth's surface. The Solar System rotates around the center of one member of a group of galaxies and Terrestrial life is composed of elements fused inside other stars. Science fiction writers have different ways of communicating our cosmic involvement apart from the obvious concept of interstellar travel:

in Larry Niven's Known Space future history, human beings are mutated Pak breeder colonists of a former Slaver food planet;

in Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, an intelligent gas cloud in radio contact with other such clouds passes through the Solar System whereas, in Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's Fifth Planet, another star with its planetary system passes through;

in Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, human life is transformed when the Solar System passes out of an intelligence-inhibiting radiation zone;

in Anderson's The Byworlder, a space-traveling intelligent being with an entirely different biology and psychology enters the Solar System and establishes communication whereas, in Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, different extrasolar species are allowed to colonize Mars and Jupiter, respectively.

Making the Martians of the Technic History extrasolar colonists rather than natives was a stroke of genius, showing that the author questioned all of his own premises. We can see that Mars is unlikely to bear life, let alone intelligence, yet a lot of sf, including an already written Nicholas van Rijn story, involves our old friends, the Martians. Thus, "Margin of Profit" was incorporated into Anderson's main future history not by editing out the Martians but by revising their history.

The Byworlder: Conclusion

When discussing Poul Anderson's later novel, For Love And Glory, I drew attention here to a literary technique deployed quite often in that work. The concluding sentence or phrase of a chapter would indicate what was going to happen next: things were due to turn bad later etc. These anticipations encourage us to continue reading even though we usually forget them almost immediately.

The technique is used once in The Byworlder (London, 1974):

"...until the hour came when everything was ruined." (p. 162)

We empathize with the characters and vicariously enjoy their breakthrough in communicating with the alien so it is disturbing to be informed that everything is going to be ruined - and it is quite a long time before this happens.

As a result of violence in the spaceship, the Sigman and the Chinaman wind up dead. This leaves the potentially destructive ship under the sole control of a Byworlder, who does not turn it over to any Terrestrial government but instead monopolizes it for peaceful scientific exploration. Thus, a Byworlder saves the world, not from any external threat but only from itself. As I said a few posts ago (here), in a Poul Anderson novel, we can trust individuals, not governments, to make the right decisions. The death of the peaceful, beauty-seeking alien at the hands of an agent of the Chinese government is indeed ruinous but, even despite that, an ultimately satisfactory conclusion is reached.

When the Chinaman refers to the US government as "'...the fascists...'" (p. 180), the Byworlder replies:

"'You're supposed to be a semanticist. How can you think a swear word like 'fascist' means anything, or using it solves anything?'" (p. 181)

He is right. "Fascist" had a precise meaning in its original context but has become a swear word when extracted from that context and used in Chinese government propaganda.

More Evolutionary Differences

In The Byworlder (London, 1974), Poul Anderson imagines an extra-terrestrial that is genuinely alien, both physically and psychologically. The Sigmans:

"...swam in an ocean of sense data and responded to nuances on almost the molecular level." (p. 161)

A single individual Sigman can make a slower than light interstellar journey and spend years exploring the Solar System because its many interacting subpersonalities are never isolated in the midst of the cosmos. Curiosity, which is thought to have called forth intelligence in human beings, is a lesser motivation for Sigmans because their sensory apparatus already makes them fully open to, and intensely aware of, their environment. However, within this wealth of perception, they might have been driven to find, then make, "...harmonious conditions of life." (ibid.) Harmony is an aesthetic value.

Scientific method has two outcomes: knowledge and elegant resolutions of apparent chaos. Human beings and Sigmans value both of these outcomes but human beings emphasize knowledge where Sigmans emphasize elegance, an aesthetic criterion that prevents them from either waging war or polluting their environment, even when scientific discoveries have made possible potentially destructive technology. Anderson did imagine some man-like aliens but this is not one of them. From cells to soul, Sigmans are dissimilar.

This novel, set in the early twenty first century, was originally serialized in 1971, thirty years before 2001. Yvonne asks Skip:

"'Do you remember the turn of the century?'" (p. 165)

Readers can now answer, "Yes!" However, Yvonne goes on to contrast the optimism of the new millennium with the new hope offered by contact with the Sigman:

"'This is the same. Only it's not a youthful illusion now, it's real. It's forever!'" (p. 166)

Grand Tour

In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974), the extra-solar visitor and his three human passengers make an aesthetic (not scientific) Grand Tour of the Solar System. Thus, they experience, first, the alien spaceship which is like:

"...a plant-animal symbiosis, drawing energy from its private thermonuclear sun, nourishment from the gas and stones of space." (pp. 149-150)

The ever-changing interior contains:

rich, strange odours;

complex patterns of resonant, sibilant tones;

 
alternating breezes and calm, dimness and brightness;

rippling, waste-absorbing decks;

 
labyrinthine corridors;

passages expandable as rooms with temporarily grown furniture.

Outside the ship, the travellers see:

the "...hundred different umbers and rust-reds..." of Mars (p. 151);
"Jupiter, imperial world...," described in a poetic paragraph (p. 156);
the "...gigantic rainbows..." of Saturn's rings seen from below (p. 163);
Mercury, "...crags and craters under a black sky...pools of molten metal..." (p. 172);
"Sunward of Mercury...an unutterable white splendour..." (p. 174);
"(...[the Sigman] found Venus as unattractive at close quarters as men did.)" (p. 166)

The Sigmans have neither waged wars nor polluted their environment. The visiting Sigman seems to assume that humanity is as innocent as the few other races with atomic power that it has encountered. Has it found only innocent races because others have destroyed themselves? How will Sigman technology affect human society? I have yet to reread to the end of the novel...

Five Sisters

(This is the 100th post for September. The theory is that I now take a break or draft some notes to be posted early in October. However, practice can diverge from theory.)

Page 143 of Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974) has an intriguing misprint:

"...they were coming to know one who fared between the stairs."

Obviously, the alien fares between the stars. However, this is a fortuitous error. I am sure that either Neil Gaiman, author of Neverwhere, featuring London Below, or China Mieville, author of Un Lon Don, would be able to write a juvenile fantasy about "One Who Fared Between The Stairs." That phrase should be able to inspire a novel - how many worlds might be concealed between the stairs from the front hall to the first landing? - although I am not able to write it.

Recently, as I mentioned at the time, we visited York and I meditated in the Minster. I noted references to York in Poul Anderson's novels. Here is another such reference. In The Byworlder, the alien "Sigman" has come to the Solar System in search of artistic inspiration. Terrestrials mistakenly tried to communicate with words instead of with shared art. Having realized their error, they now show him a large and varied selection of works of art, including the Five Sisters windows in York Minster. See attached image.

Sharing beauty from different periods and cultures kind of puts the political rivalries between the US and China into a different perspective. Hopefully, the novel approaches a happy resolution although, at least in his short stories, Anderson sometimes gave us anything but a happy ending.

The Underworld

In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974), early twenty first century society has divided into Orthos, Byworlders and Underworlders. To us, "organized crime" means illegal activities like protection and prostitution run by large criminal organizations sometimes, especially in the Italian tradition, controlled by powerful families. Anderson's "Underworld" seems to take organized crime to a new level, an entire social subculture, although we are not told many of the details.

When the heroine of the novel is professionally kidnapped by a man with faked Secret Service ID, the hero, putting his personal knowledge of the local Underworld to good use, tortures a knowledgeable consultant clairvoyant, thus learning some addresses to which he directs the FBI, who indeed then rescue the kidnap victim from an address on the list. Too easy? Implausible?

This part of the novel contains little science fiction except that:

the success of the hero's ploy seems to depend on a greater degree of "Underworld" cohesion than existed in the period when the novel was written;

a technological innovation enables him to smuggle a weapon into the clairvoyant's presence despite being searched by a bodyguard.

The kidnapping, and before that a murder attempt, make sense, in terms of the plot of the novel, because the heroine has made a breakthrough in communicating with the orbiting alien whose technology had better not be acquired by any one Terrestrial nation. The Chinese are clearly bad news although the heroine's opposite number among their scientists is a good guy. The Americans are also trying to get a monopoly on alien knowledge so is their government acting for the best?

In a Poul Anderson novel, we can depend on individuals to make the right decisions.

Maury Station

In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974), Maury Station, staffed by respectable, conventional scientists, must be Ortho, not Byworld? Pages 100-104 present some minimal information about the Station. Still rereading the novel with 80 pages left, I cannot remember whether there is more about sea life later.

The purpose of summarizing interesting details from Anderson's novels is to convey an appreciation of the imaginative depth and wealth crowded into each work.

Fifty kilometers from the Oregon coast, platforms with projecting piers support buildings, machinery and a shaft with an elevator descending fifty fathoms to the central undersea dome which is surrounded by a ring of other domes kept at ambient pressure and connected by tunnels. Laboratory experiments include producing alcohol from plankton. When the Viking fleet delivers a cargo of refined metals, its flag ship, too large to dock, anchors at a safe distance while the concentrator ship lays alongside a pier.

"McPherson 'gills'..." (p. 103) extract oxygen for the artificially generated merfolk who are evolving dialects appropriate to the high-pitched speech caused by the helium content of the air in the decompression chambers joining the tunnels to the main dome. In the water, a man directs an orca. I think that there were earlier references to cetacean speech although I cannot find them looking back. There are transparent submarines. Soon, there will be a new undersea civilization. The oceans cover what, two thirds of the Earth's surface?

That is it. In mid-paragraph, the viewpoint characters who have visited the Station are back with the Viking fleet. I am sure that Anderson would have worked out a lot more detail for Maury Station and there might be more of it later in the book.

Terrestrial And Sigman Metazoans

Stages of Terrestrial Evolution
protozoa, some swimming with cilia;

a clump of aggregated cells;

a hollow sphere;

two concentric spheres;

spheres with specialized inner and outer walls and an opening at either end for intake and excretion;

colonies like sponges and corals;

cells joined end to end as segmented worms;

complex organisms retaining bilateral symmetry and an oral-digestive-anal tract;

branched-off organs like heart and lungs adopting the canal principle.

Stages of Sigman Evolution
spheroidal, not flat, protozoans with universally spaced cilia for swimming and whipping food towards the animalcule which is permeable, without orifices;

cells joined by linking cilia which became tubes for support and fluid conveyance;

complex organisms comprising spheroids connected by rods with axial or radial, not bilateral, symmetry and permeable skin;

possibly sensing and thinking with the whole body, not needing a brain, thinking more slowly but also more deeply.

Conclusion
Human beings have a lot to learn from the disgusting looking alien.

Mural

I have been reading Poul Anderson since the 1960's. In those days, I also read American comic books. I got back into comics twenty years later. Usually, the only graphic element in a novel or short story collection is the cover illustration -  although some hard back editions do not have one. Novels republished several times over the decades can have a few different covers whereas later novels, even when reprinted, tend to stay with a single cover.

In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974), the character Skip takes two pages to describe a mural of the Revelation of St John the Divine that he himself had painted on the walls and floor of a Bible-belt diner during a week when it was closed. Any screen adaptation of the novel would have to show this mural even though it is described only in a flash-back. The graphic content is vivid and cannot be reproduced here except by quoting the entire passage which I am not about to do.

However, the main highlights are:

the Father's face "'...was half human, half lion'" (p. 87) (this connects with CS Lewis and Hinduism);
"'...his long white hair and beard tossed in the storm of destruction...'" (ibid.);
Gabriel was a jazz trumpeter;
the floor underfoot was Earth with tombstones falling and graves opening everywhere since, by the time of Judgment Day, bodies have been buried everywhere;
different stages of the reconstitution of resurrecting bodies;
"'...a distant view of burning cities, floods, earthquakes...a lightning bolt...'" (p. 88);
the saved "'...whirling upward like dry leaves in a cyclonic wind...,'" all naked (ibid.);
the damned falling and starting to burn;
Satan making a defiant, offensive hand gesture towards God;
"'...the number of the beast in binary'" (p. 89) (?);
the Great Whore of Babylon glad-eyeing the Antichrist...'" (ibid.)

Skip, not a believer, had enjoyed literally interpreting Revelation and had been so engrossed in creativity that it had not occurred to him that the locals would not appreciate it. But they need to ask themselves whether this is what they believe.

A comic script writer would verbally instruct his penciller, inker, colorist and letterer whereas Anderson, a prose novelist, verbally addresses his readers. I am sadly lacking in visual imagination but I expect that most readers can visualize Skip's apocalyptic mural to some extent.

Orthians

In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974), "Byworlders" live alternatives life styles to that of "Orthodox" society but what is the latter like?

Orthos are called "georges," staid taxpayer types (p. 10). Skip, a sigaroon, contrasts the Viking sea gypsies with Orthos:

"The average upper-class Orthian was doubtless more hard-driving, well informed, thoroughly trained, including in the new mental disciplines which could evoke effective genius from ordinary cerebral endowment; but he was also anomic, chronically anxious, inwardly alone: a sane and realistic logician, emotionally crazy as a hoot owl.
"The oldest Viking kept youthful spirits." (p. 80)

It sounds as if these two cultures need to be synthesized: the Ortho new mental disciplines with the Viking youthful spirits. The idea of genius-evoking disciplines is relevant to Anderson's The Long Way Home in which apologists for the computer-run Technate society dismiss their Commoners as having hopelessly low IQ's, even though the Technate meanwhile uses genetic engineering to ensure a high average IQ among its Ministerial class.

In view of changes made so far, I think that no part of the human condition should be regarded as unchangeable. Better diet, medicine, educational input and, if they are to be found, "...new mental disciplines...," like the training received by Anderson's Time Patrolmen, can draw out and enhance existing intellectual, practical or creative abilities that were previously left undeveloped in those who were thought not to need them.

Byworlders

In the early twenty first century -

Byworlders:
leave "Ortho" society not to join the organized crime of the Underworld but to found diverse sub-cultures like -

Theontologists:
an eclectic religious community.

Sigaroons:
drifters, migratory workers;
do odd jobs and provide personal services or entertainment;
ostracize any of their number who beg, bully or steal;
can exercise a right to a public works billet, doing, e. g., clean-up work.

Skip, a sigaroon (interior decorator, carpenter, mechanic, repairman, singer and story-teller) spends time with Theontologists and sea gypsies.

Sea Gypsies:
sail international waters indefinitely in nuclear-powered ships;
re-use equipment developed for the Moon and Mars;
fish;
harvest plankton;
process water for minerals;
process sea weed for food and fabrics;
prospect for ore or oil;
carry cargo;
employ land-based brokers.

The Viking fleet preserves Northern virtues.
The fleet flag ship carries four thousand people with command posts, offices, electronic communications, schools, hospital, culture, recreation and private enterprises.
The other ships include a service vessel with machine shops, a mineral-extractor craft, a trawler, a submarine and a factory ship processing harvested kelp.

I expect to learn about several more Byworlder cultures while rereading Poul Anderson's The Byworlder. So far, by page 79, of 190, we have met these three groups.

The Sigman

OK. That last post quoted an example of characteristically flamboyant Andersonian characterization from The Long Way Home. Now let's get down with summarizing the description of the physically nauseating alien "Sigman" in Andersion's The Byworlder (London, 1974):

a 3 meter long, 130 centimeter wide, spongy black, flexible ellipsoid, covered by three layers of golden-brown plates independently mounted on muscular stalks, permanently glistening with moisture and excreted slime, occasionally revealing the black inner sponginess when the Sigman stretches;

four legs near the middle, two arms at each end, four claws each surrounded by six tentacle fingers, several tendrils with sensors including four eyes;

no front or back;

claws macerate food, then hold it against the spongy surface of the sheathed arms where digestive juices break it down until it is absorbed up the arms;

a booming voice from vibrating tympani;

many human observers are physically sickened.

Like Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers, a laudable attempt to envisage a non-human alien, although not one that we would like to meet. I have yet to reread far enough to learn anything about Sigman psychology.

Knowledge Of Knowledge Of

"Science" means (Latin) knowledge.
"Theology" means (Greek) knowledge of (Greek) God.
"Scientology" means (Latin) knowledge of (Greek) knowledge!
"Theontology," coined by Poul Anderson in The Byworlder (London, 1974, p. 5), would mean what? (Greek) knowledge of (Latin) knowledge of (Greek) God?

Theontologists seek the divine through diverse sub-cults of Spirits, Jesus, Brahma, Amida Butsu, Snake or Oracle. If I were being brought up in a Theontologist community, then I would want to practice in a Zen cult but otherwise let's just stick with Zen as taught by a Buddhist lineage.

The Byworlder introduces a genuinely non-humanoid extra-solar alien, the Sigman (plural: Sigmans), who has entered Earth orbit after approaching the Solar System in a Bussard ramjet from the direction of Sigma Draconis. An entire page is necessary to describe this creature. The way he moves is fairly sickening and that comes through in the description. The problem of devising a mutually comprehensible pidgin language is also recounted in the necessary detail.

The Chinese rulers who have to cooperate with the Americans and others in communicating with the Sigman are absurdly sure, first, that they represent "the people" and, secondly, that, if they get the chance to tell the alien the facts about American imperialism, then he will support the cause of the people. (Hopefully, he will indeed support the people, not their rulers.)

Terrestrial society has divided into sub-cultures. Our first viewpoint character belongs to a sub-culture that does not settle down and live in a house with a steady job but travels around, for example, by staying as a guest of Theontologists. However, far from being parasitical, he is a migrant worker with an amazing range of practical skills to offer. There is a, to Anderson readers, now familiar moment when, speculating about the Sigman's motives, he realizes something, breaks off with open mouth and yells but does not immediately divulge what he has realized. We have to read on.