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.

Endings

Poul Anderson's "The Chapter Ends" is about endings on several levels:

(i) it is the concluding installment of a future history series;

(ii) in it, the small remaining population of the Sirius Sector, including the Solar System, is evacuated en masse to colony planets closer to the Galactic center -

(iii) - except for one very old man who remains on Earth, but he will survive for at most another two decades;

(iv) the Terrestrial peasants will be assimilated into Galactic Civilization, so that their distinctive way of life will end;

(v) Galactic visitors view the ruins of Sol City, capital of the First Empire, an earlier interstellar civilization that had come to its end fifty thousands years previously.

In a few brief passages, Anderson realizes past Imperial glories, apparent peasant timelessness and individual Galactics' powers. We remember the characters and entire societies of earlier installments that are not referred to here although we can see that their science of psychotechnics has at last been applied to the integration of individuals and of civilization.

We might wonder when and how the Galactic Civilization will end, as we do with the Commonalty in the concluding installment of Anderson's second future history.

Fifty Thousand Years

"'Thousands of years ago, men learned how to control the great basic forces of the cosmos with only a small bit of energy.'"

- Poul Anderson, Starship (New York, 1982), p. 260.

Yet another passage demonstrating that "The Chapter Ends" is set a lot further in the future than is suggested by the Chronology of the Psychotechnic Series (pp. 284-285).

However, a bit further on, there is a passage that tells us something more:

"'The Sirius Sector has been an isolated, primi- ah - quiet region since the First Empire fell, fifty thousand years ago.'" (p. 263)

And how long would the Empire have taken to rise and flourish after the Third Dark Ages which, if I have read the Chronology correctly, ended about 4000 AD?

"The Chapter Ends" summarizes a miniature future history and could stand as a one-off work. However, since only a very small change in the Chronology would eliminate the chronological contradiction between this story and the "earlier" nineteen works of the Psychotechnic History, I am now more inclined to accept Anderson's word that these twenty works form a single series.

It is unbalanced as a future history with just one installment set so long after all the others and with so many intervening events merely referred to but it was Anderson's first attempt at this kind of fiction and I am finding it fascinating to reread and analyze.

Chronological Questions II

There is one easy way to remove the chronological contradiction from Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History. The Chronology dates "The Chapter Ends" to post-4000 and Sandra Miesel's interstitial text agrees with this, dating that story to the early fifth millennium. Just two words, "4000" and "fifth," could be altered without making any change to Anderson's texts and without even making any other change to the Chronology.

By contrast, the text of "The Chapter Ends" is permeated with phrases like:

"...[Terrans] had been static for more thousands of years than anyone knew." Starship (New York, 1982), p. 255.

"...man had changed; over the thousands of years, natural and controlled adaptation had fitted him to the worlds he had colonized..." (p. 258)

However, even if there were no overt contradiction, the story is set so far in the future that it simply has no connection with the histories of the UN, the Solar Union or the Stellar Union. Jorun is a "...psychotechnician..." (p. 256) but, like the hyperdrive, psychotechnics can exist in more than one timeline.

Did Anderson project any stories that would have been set during:

the Third Dark Ages;

the First Empire;

the many sackings of Sol City;

subsequent Empires;

the many millennia of Terran peasantry;

the artificial mutation enabling individual human beings to control cosmic energies and fly between stars;

the alliance of human and other species in "...the great star-clusters of Galactic center" (p. 262);

their friendly negotiations with the gas-giant-dwelling Hulduvians of the Galactic periphery?

That would have been a much longer and more diverse future history.

The Stellar Union Coordination Service correlates information with "integrator" machines (The Peregrine, New York, 1979, p. 30). The psychotechnician Jorun takes his orders from "...the Integrator on Corazuno..." (Starship, p. 256).

So maybe Jorun synthesizes elements derived from the earlier Psychotechnic Institute and Coordination Service? To revive a term that had been applied to the genetic original of the earlier Rostomily Brotherhood Un-men, Jorun is certainly a "superman," nearly a thousand years old and able to fly the thirty thousand light-years from Corazuno to Earth in just ten days, then hang free in space to observe Earth, his ancestral planet although not one atom from it is in his body.

The Mountain

"...it was like trying to knock down a mountain. You beat on its rocky flanks till your hands were bloody, and still the mountain stood there, sunlight on its high snow fields and in the forests that rustled up its slopes, and it did not really notice you. You were a brief, thin buzz between two long nights, but the mountain was forever."
- Poul Anderson, "The Chapter Ends" IN Starship (New York, 1982), pp. 253-281 AT p. 253.

I quote this passage at some length for several reasons.

(i) Anderson incorporates one of his vivid descriptions of natural beauty into an extended metaphor for a civilized man's frustration at trying to persuade a peasant.

(ii) Although the description of a snow-covered, wooded mountain is metaphorical, it simultaneously sets the scene for the depopulated future Earth where the two men are conversing.

(iii) The mountain metaphor incorporates a sonic metaphor for human life, "...a brief, thin buzz..."

(iv) This story describes the end of human occupation of Earth while the phrase, "...long nights...," echoes the concluding period of Anderson's later, longer future history.

(v) Anderson knows that nothing is forever but, at the end of this comparison, he allows himself to write poetically or impressionistically. In human experience, mountains seem to be forever.

Jorun, a Galactic, is trying to persuade Kormt of Huerdar, Gerlaug's son, Speaker for Solis Township, to leave Earth with everyone else. Jorun reflects:

"There was no real talking to these peasants; too many millennia lay between, and you couldn't shout across that gulf." (p. 254)

Millennia? If, as we are asked to accept, "The Chapter Ends" is set in the Psychotechnic History timeline, then Earth was technologically civilized without any peasantry less than one millennium previously. It is a puzzle why this story has been accepted as belonging to this series.