Texts And Contexts II

Poul Anderson's Gunnar Heim stories:

"Marque and Reprisal,"
"Arsenal Port" and
"Admiralty"

- can be read either collected as The Star Fox, in which case they have a sequel, the novel Fire Time, or scattered among NESFA's The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, in which case each story is in a different volume and Fire Time is not mentioned since it is not a short work.

Some fans might even prefer the latter reading experience, unexpectedly re-encountering Gunnar Heim after reading a considerable number of different kinds of works in between. Several other series, e.g.:

Time Patrol;
Wing Alak;
Flying Mountains;
the Rustum History -

- are also to be found in whole or in part among The Collected Short Works... My preference would be for each of the series to be collected as a unit and for any additional Short Works volumes to contain only non-series stories. However, the NESFA collections prompted me to reread, and also to re-post about, what I call the Star...Time series. While hoping for an eventual Complete Works of Poul Anderson, we can meanwhile derive considerable enjoyment from reading the many overlapping volumes that have been published so far.

Solar Flare II

OK. I have answered the questions that I asked in "Solar Flare." I just had to reread carefully. Some readers must be thinking that it is too obvious to be stated.

If the cargo had remained unshielded, then the solar flare would have detonated it, killing the herdship pilot and contaminating near-Earth space. The only solution was to haul the cargo away from near-Earth space, then to jettison the gas into space, and to do all this before the flare arrived - a race against time.

Removing the cargo from near-Earth space prevents contamination of that space. Jettisoning the gas prevents any explosion even further out. Doing all this as quickly as possible minimizes the period during which the pilot is vulnerable to an explosion caused by the flare. Even if a heavily armored man survived the explosion, he would soon be killed by flare radiation.

However, shielding the cargo with the sliced up sail prevents an explosion even after the arrival of the flare. By hauling the cargo away from the Sun until the flare subsides, the pilot saves the isonitrate to be collected by tugs. Future cargos will be shielded to prevent a repeat disaster. This time, only the sail must be sacrificed  - and parts of it might sell as souvenirs! (Anderson's heroes always solve economic as well as technical problems.)

Solar Flare

(See recent posts.)

How To Save Lives, Prevent The Cargo From Exploding And Also Avoid Having To Jettison It In Space

Get crew from several ships to cut the sail into fifteen-yard squares.
Layer the squares within a welded framework to shield the cargo section.
Keep shield, cargo section and hauling herdship facing directly into the blast of the solar flare.
The herdship pilot, loaded with anti-fatigue pills and psychodrugs, must continually counteract gravity which tries to swing the ensemble into orbit.

I have done my best to understand both the danger and the means taken to avert it but still have some questions which arise purely from my lack of scientific and technical knowledge:

we are told that the herdship's own internal shielding "...drank up..." (p. 242) lethal radiation which seems to mean that the herdship crew would have been safe in any case?;

they haul the cargo to where a tug can collect it in the Moon's shadow whereas their previous plan had been to "...valve it out..." (p. 225) at a safe distance from Earth and Moon so why has the use of the improvised sail shield changed this part of the plan?

I am sure that the answers to these questions are obvious to readers with any knowledge of celestial mechanics.

Isonitrate II

I never thought that "isonitrate" would warrant a second post.

An interplanetary industrial process:

scoopships collect substances, including metal atoms, from the Jovian atmosphere;
an orbital station processes these complexes into dangerously explosive isonitrate;
unmanned sailships/sunjammers, moved outward by light pressure or inward by gravity, take months to tack between orbits;
a sail is a metal-coated carbon compound sheet, continually eroded by micrometeorites and eventually replaced;
each sailship also has sensors, automata, signalling equipment and motors that are powered by solar batteries and controlled by a pilot computer;
the motors control rotation and precession of the sail;
one sailship cargo is a ten yard diameter sphere containing cold, liquefied, high pressure, high energy isonitrate, shaded by the sail to prevent boiling;
Earth pays the asterite Beltline Transportation Company well for this cargo, needed to start several chemical syntheses;
Beltline herdships/maintenance ships stay close to the orbits of sail and power craft;
thus, when an isonitrate cargo is endangered by an imminent solar flare, a herdship crew is on hand to detach the sail and other mass, then hook the cargo to their ship and haul it to a safe distance from Earth and Moon before valving it out.

I have learned far more about these processes by summarizing them than by merely reading about them. Readers without a scientific or technical background are at a disadvantage with this kind of hard sf.

Isonitrate

"'Cargo of...I say, this is an odd one. She's carrying eight hundred metric tons of isonitrate from the Sword's Jovian-orbit plant.'" (NESFA Vol 3, p. 224)

I thought that I was going to have to google "isonitrate." However, Golescu asks, "'Isonitrate what?'" (ibid.) and is answered:

"An important industrial chemical,' West explained. 'Alkali complex of 2, 4 benzoisopro -'" (ibid.) -

- at which point Golescu interrupts, saying that he is sorry he asked. I took this to mean that isonitrate was invented for story purposes by Anderson but then googled to make sure and found something that seems to be a different meaning of the word.

At any rate, Anderson's isonitrate will explode if, as expected, the sun flares, so it has to be hauled out of the danger area or should I say volume. The gaseous metallic-complex molecules would cause billions of dollars of economic damage by contaminating orbiting photocells, monitors, spectrometers, weather satellites, manned space stations and cybernets controlling radio relays or Mossbauer clocks. (Someone might have better luck than I did on googling "Mossbauer clock.")

This story is overly technical even for Anderson but, of course, the characters are real people arguing politics and wanting to get back home safe and sound.

"Sunjammer"

Over breakfast, I make a big decision. Should I continue to reread previously read stories in the third NESFA collection of Poul Anderson's short works or instead return, without further delay, to rereading his future history novel, Starfarers?

It is impossible to read or reread anything by Anderson without learning something. In the second paragraph of "Sunjammer" (NESFA Vol 3, pp. 221-243), we read that the Andromeda galaxy is one and a half million light years away. I thought that it was two million. To settle the matter, I check Wiki, which says two and a half million! Lesson learned: we really do only have approximations for cosmic distances.

In the same paragraph, Earth seen from space is described as "...a cabochon of clear and lovely blue..." and Luna as "...a tarnished pearl beyond." (p. 221)

Two thoughts:

beautiful, well-observed descriptions, as in the phrase that generated the title, A Stone In Heaven (see here);
another to me unfamiliar word.

I will reread the rest of "Sunjammer."

"Robin Hood's Barn"

The first story in the Rustum History was not called "Robin Hood's Barn," was it? I will check the next time I am in arm's reach of my copy of Orbit Unlimited. I started to read this story in NESFA Vol 3 and quickly realized what it was. (I have checked. It was called "Robin Hood's Barn" but I do not understand the significance of the title.)

It presents yet another routine use of an air-car, this time by a character whose house is raised above the sea on caissons.

Old Svoboda, a Government Commissioner, goes to a lot of trouble on behalf of his son:

his own reasoning and the books of a theoretician called Anker have convinced Svoboda that there is no hope for a better life on Earth in the foreseeable future;

so he wants to give Svoboda Junior a fresh start in a new world;

but this can happen only if there is a colony on an extrasolar planet;

and the colonists are most likely to succeed if they are able people who have left Earth voluntarily;

but such people will leave only if there is a problem on Earth that they cannot overcome;

so Svoboda Senior covertly hires the actor Laird to play the role of an orator who founds the Constitutionalist movement based on Anker's philosophy;

then he retires Laird with a new identity and a lavish pension;

when Laird is no longer around, having disappeared then drunk himself to death, the possibility that Svoboda has had him assassinated remains open;

Svoboda Junior, who has a rebellious temperament, becomes a Constitutionalist;

Svoboda Senior gets the Government to re-institute free public education and, as part of this, to close the independent Constitutionalist schools;

the Constitutionalists, including Svoboda Junior, can preserve their culture and way of life only by emigrating;

the Government sponsors their expedition because, while they remain on Earth, the many professionals and technical experts who are Constitutionalists threaten strikes, sabotage and insurrection;

these well-off people own property which they cannot take with them and which can therefore be sold to fund their expedition.

Results:

Government gets rid of Constitutionalists without having to imprison or massacre them;
Constitutionalists build the society that they want;
Svoboda Junior makes a fresh start in a new world.

But could any one person plausibly contrive all that?

"Eve Times Four" II

Poul Anderson's "Eve Times Four" in NESFA Vol 3:

is yet another Holmesian story ("Time Patrol" and "The Martian Crown Jewels" are in NESFA Vol 1 and "The Queen of Air and Darkness" is the title story of NESFA Vol 2);

makes the interesting point that, on a planet with longer days and nights, organisms active at night and those active by day will be more specialized and differentiated;

presents clues that we, or at least I, did not recognize as such (e.g., why is planetary rotation so slow when there is no large satellite to retard it?);

presents an odd mixture of castaways - one young man, three young women, one older woman, two extraterrestrial quadrupeds of different species - but then explains the oddity;

nevertheless, remains an example of a kind of rather flippant humor that does not appeal to me.

NESFA Vol 1 contains the three Wing Alak stories.

NESFA Vols 1-3 contain the first three Time Patrol stories although these are collected in Time Patrol.

NESFA Vols 2-3 contain the first two of the three Gunnar Heim stories although these are collected with the third in The Star Fox.

 

NESFA Vol 2 contains two Flying Mountains stories and Vol 3 has another two although these are all collected in Tales of the Flying Mountains.

The second Rustum story is in NESFA Vol 2 and the first is in NESFA Vol 3 although these are collected in Orbit Unlimited.

Awesomeness

I have scrolled back down this blog. The content is awesome. I am not congratulating myself. The contents of these posts are entirely down to Poul Anderson and to comparable writers like SM Stirling. I could not have written any of these works but can read, reread and recommend. Plot summaries and commentaries illustrated with book covers or with other appropriate images should provide good introductions or reminders for other readers.

I turned to rereading one chapter of Anderson's Starfarers while awaiting the third volume of his collected short works which was to arrive by post. Now I will read one more new (to me) story in this volume and then maybe reread one or two of the already familiar works before returning to an in-depth rereading of Starfarers although I had posted about this novel, I thought comprehensively, before. Word by word rereading and posting is incomparably more rewarding than reading a book from cover to cover then going on to something else. Anderson's apparently endless detail work in thinking through the backgrounds and rationales of his plots can easily be missed by readers carried forward by the momentum of an exciting action-adventure narrative, although such works can also serve as entertaining diversions for anyone who does not want to delve any deeper into their texts.

Each work has at least two levels and usually a lot more.

"Mustn't Touch"

Poul Anderson, "Mustn't Touch" IN NESFA Vol 3 (see previous post).

Interesting Points

(i) "...spaceman's bombillas of tea..." (p. 410)

(ii) "'I say nothing against the Australian Authority - war had to be eliminated somehow...'" (p. 413)

Anderson acknowledges that other nations might wield world power in future, especially in the wake of a nuclear war. In other works, the Maurai and the Swedes.

(iii) Computers have been replaced by "...creatively synthesizing robot brains..." (p. 408), which are "...rational, conscious beings." (p. 410) One character remarks:

" ...we've talked for a long time now about making contact with alien races. But I wonder if we'll ever find any as alien as this one we've built ourselves.'" (p. 413)

Dr Richard Slaughter speculated that, if artificial intelligence is ever created, then it will be the real alien intelligence. He mentioned this idea to Isaac Asimov who replied, "Yes, I might get a story out of that."

Important: See next post.

NESFA Vol 3

Rick Katze, Editor, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 3, The Saturn Game (Framingham, MA, 2010).

The Table of Contents lists 30 items. However, these include two Introductions and one Acknowledgments. Therefore, 27 works by Anderson. Of these, 9 are short verses. Therefore, 18 works of prose fiction by Anderson. (No non-fiction articles in this Volume.)

The 18 works comprise:

5 in the Technic History;
2 in the Flying Mountains future history;
1 in the Rustum future history;
1 in the Time Patrol series;
1 in the Gunnar Heim series;
1 in the Operation... series;
7 non-series stories.

Important Addendum: see here.

We have already read the 11 series stories and 5 of the 7 non-series stories.

When I listed "Series With Only Two Installments" (see here), I made at least one omission. "Sam Hall," counted here as one of the 7 non-series stories, describes the Sam Hall revolution which is referred back to in Three Worlds To Conquer. Thus, this short story and this novel can count as another short series.

Greg Bear On Poul Anderson

Greg Bear, "Poul Anderson" IN Rick Katze and Lis Carey, Editors, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume I, Call Me Joe (Framingham MA, 2009), pp. 7-10.

"...Poul's...full range and brilliance became even more obvious when I read The Broken Sword and Tau Zero back to back." (p. 7)

Heroic fantasy and hard sf. Like reading Tolkien and Stapledon back to back. Brilliant but I would also find it disorienting. When I reread The Broken Sword, I wanted to follow it with Anderson's four other fantasies that form a loose sequence with it:

The Demon Of Scattery;
Mother Of Kings;
War Of The Gods;
Hrolf Kraki's Saga -

- and then I wanted to stay in the past with:

(what I call) the three BC;
Ys;
the Last Viking;
the three novels set in the fourteenth century;
the time travel and other works set in various past periods;
the alternative histories -

- before returning to any of Anderson's technological futures.

Similarly, after rereading Tau Zero, I would want to reread its short prequel, "Pride," before staying with works of hard sf set in other timelines. While immersed in one kind of fictional narrative, I find it hard to jump into a different, almost diametrically opposed, imaginary universe.

"Poul was a modern skald, heir to the traditions of those who entertained weary Vikings centuries past." (p. 8)

Yes, both when he wrote about Vikings and when he wrote about spacemen - whom we learned to call "astronauts."

"This is not to say that Poul's work is not serious, or that it came easily to him..." (ibid.)

Anderson's works address the most serious issues of life, society and the universe. But surely his immense output alone shows that writing came more easily to him than, e.g., to James Blish who did struggle with the text of his historical novel, Doctor Mirabilis, and whose total output is unfortunately much smaller?

Imaginary Science? II

"Clement himself often allows faster-than-light travel, mainly because he needs it to get his characters to his alien worlds in reasonable time but partly, he has admitted, because of a feeling that it may be possible in spite of what most physicists say."
-Poul Anderson, NESFA vol 2, p. 107.

To me, that first reason is no longer acceptable. If an sf writer wants to transport characters from Earth to another planetary system, then he can:

accept the limits of slower than light travel;

locate the other system fairly close to the Solar System, focus his narrative on events in the other system and fudge the issue of STL v. FTL;

do something original with FTL as Anderson tried to do each time he resorted to it;

find a way within current relativity theory to allow for FTL as Carl Sagan did in Contact;

do something that I haven't thought of (I am the fan, not the writer);

but please do not just invoke an unexplained sf cliche called "hyperspace."

This blog has discussed Anderson and other writers connected to Anderson and is now discussing Anderson on other writers. Onward.

Imaginary Science?

Reading Poul Anderson's articles on "imaginary science" and on hard sf, I realize that I have been making a more simplistic distinction between hard sf, epitomized by, e.g., Blish, Anderson and Niven, and another, unnamed, kind of sf, epitomized by Bradbury and Lewis - although I can only think of those two authors to go into that second category. (Addendum, 29 October, 2017: Also, Clifford Simak.)

Thus, I have been classifying faster than light travel, time travel and parallel universes as hard sf although they are consequences of imaginary science, not of known science. However, I cannot feel this as a real distinction. I think that Anderson wrote "hard," scientifically and technologically based, sf just as much when he explained that hyperspace was a series of quantum jumps as when he delineated the environment of the planet Starkad.

The real distinction is between authors who know and care about science and those who do not. In one story, Bradbury accounted for the faster than light velocity of a group of interstellar explorers merely by stating that their speed was the speed of a god, thus evoking not quantum mechanics but a fantasy concept.

Lewis grudgingly acknowledged that the sciences were good in themselves - damning with faint praise - but concentrated his fire on their capacity to be perverted for diabolical ends without displaying any knowledge of scientific principles. To Lewis' character, Ransom, scientific knowledge of the universe is:

"'...the enemy's talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe with no centre at all, but millions of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds for ever, and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness."
-CS Lewis, Voyage To Venus (London, 1978), pp. 197-198.

Not bow down! But bigness can at least be acknowledged. Why are infinite worlds worse? The enemy referred to is literally the Devil. It is Lewis' anti-science that contrasts so sharply with the pro-science fiction of the hard sf writers.

Science Fiction And History II

"Nor is it necessarily simpleminded to anticipate no new ordering of society, different in kind from any that have gone before. Though often proclaimed, this advent hasn't happened yet, in thousands of years."
-Poul Anderson, NESFA vol 2, p. 229.

A new order does not happen every time it is proclaimed! However, I suggest that:

hunter-gatherers;
slaves;
serfs;
wage-workers -

- have had qualitatively different experiences of life. We live in a world that has been changed by the scientific and Industrial revolutions. Of course, society can regress, as Anderson also points out, but I argue that nevertheless we have undergone several social transformations. Another is the rule of law. If a member of my family is murdered, then I am not obliged to exact revenge or to negotiate wergild. Instead, an entire apparatus of laws, courts, police and prisons deals with what originally had to be a private responsibility.

So I think that we are the fortunate heirs of several revolutions and new orders.

Science Fiction And History

In "Science Fiction and History," Poul Anderson writes:

"...private organizations exist on sufferance of the state, and the real dictator is always the man who controls the armed forces and the police. At most, large corporations may be junior partners of government - very junior and this is possible in just a few countries. Other outfits, such as unions, could as well fill the role, and churches have sometimes been coequal or senior."
-NESFA vol 2, p. 229.

But where did the state come from? Corporations control an economy that is able and willing to support armed forces and the police. The Church was integrated with the medieval feudal state when it controlled wealth in the form of land.

I suggest that the state, which has grown from a body of temple guards to an elaborate bureaucracy, exists to maintain the economy, which in turn has grown from priestly control of granaries to competitive accumulation of profit. The rich control the state either directly or by funding political parties. The state protects not only human life (when not destroying it in wars) but also wealth and property, thus the economy. Historically, could it have been otherwise?

I think that technology and education will enable human beings to live, work and create wealth without state supervision. However, vested interests and the dead weight of tradition prevent us from jumping immediately to that happy outcome!

Moments Of Realization

Exhaustive though this blog may be, it falls well short of an Encyclopedia. Every time I find a "moment of realization" in an Anderson story or novel, I draw attention to it but there is no way that I am going to catalogue them all.

"The Dutch...fought themselves free of Spain and free of the ocean itself; when the French or Germans came, they made the enemy sea their ally -
"The bottle fell from his grasp."
-NESFA Vol 2, pp. 71-72.

In other words, this asterite, not at sea but in space, has just realized how he can fight the North Americans - but we will find out what he is going to do when we see him doing it. And I do not remember although I have read the story at least twice.

A surprise ending is a moment of realization for the reader. This story, "Industrial Revolution," begins with a reminiscent dialogue involving a "Missy Blades." (p. 48) The body of the story is an extended flashback during which Mike Blades interacts with two women, his secretary and an enemy North American. So which of them will become his wife and widow? Only the surprise ending will tell us.

"Cold Victory" in the Psychotechnic History begins with a dialogue, then presents an extended flashback featuring two brothers on opposite sides in a civil war, then ends by showing us that we had been misled as to which of the brothers was involved in the opening dialogue. Thus, another moment of realization for us.

"That Flowing Spaceman's Pace..."

Robert Heinlein's Future History was rightly said to have given the future a daily life. Heinlein concentrated on lunar colonization. Poul Anderson and Larry Niven followed this with asteroidal colonization.

"He...stepped off toward the nearest entry lock with that flowing spaceman's pace which always keeps one foot on the ground. Even so, he didn't unshackle his inward-reeling lifeline till he was inside the chamber."
-Anderson, NESFA Vol 2, p. 51.

On an asteroid whose rotation counteracts its minimal gravity, Mike Blades wears grip-soled boots, keeps one foot on the ground and uses a life-line. Anderson writes as though he and his readers were familiar with that flowing spaceman's pace.

I distinguished between social and political stories when discussing Anderson's Psychotechnic History. Mike Blades' story in the Flying Mountains future history contains both of these elements, details of daily life in an asteroid but also political tension after a change of government back on Earth. I know from experience that members of armed services avoid political argument with civilians. They are probably warned against this. Yet a visiting Navy man blurts out that Belt companies are:

"...only using natural resources that rightly belong to the people, and the accumulated skills and wealth of an entire society." (p. 58)

This insensitivity plus intelligence-gathering questions from other Naval personnel indicate that trouble is brewing.

"Cold And Vacuum And Raw Rock..."

Michael Blades, hanging upside down from the wide end of a truncated pyramidal asteroid, seeing pitted rock, jutting crags, black shadows, glaring lamps, a cliff-like horizon mere kilometers away and crowding stars, thinks:

"You couldn't escape from people on Earth. Cold and vacuum and raw rock and everything, the Belt was better."

-Poul Anderson, "The Industrial Revolution" IN Anderson, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 2: The Queen Of Air And Darkness (Framingham, MA, 2009), pp. 48-80 AT p. 51.

Well, I prefer people! However, if enough people think like Mike, then the human race will colonize the Solar System. Poul Anderson and Larry Niven have shown that mining the Asteroid Belt will be profitable even if making it comfortable to live there will take a lot more work.

Prophecy

"Prophecy" by Poul Anderson was published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1949 - when I was four months old. I cannot find the Astounding cover for that month but here is the cover of the issue that contained the same author's "The Helping Hand" (May 1950).

Both stories:

are republished in The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson (Framingham MA, 2009);

ask whether a more advanced civilization can meaningfully help a less advanced one;

answer "no" - although in different ways.

One answer is to show help given with disastrous results. The other is to show help refused because the more advanced civilization is wise enough to know the consequences.

I found "Prophecy" uncharacteristically disappointing. In this story, there is no imaginative speculation about extra-solar life forms. Human forms are assumed just to serve the single point of the story. (We are in Jonathan Swift territory: Gulliver encounters Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Laputans etc so that Swift can satirize humanity.) "Prophecy" comprises a single conversation summarizing the recognizable Andersonian theme of historical cycles but ending with the bald statement that the alien psychotechnicians cannot help and must leave humanity to learn the hard way even though that way includes atomic wars: too much discussion and too little dramatization of the issues.

"Genius," nicely contrasted with "Backwardness" in the same collection, includes even more socio-historical exposition by its protagonists but incorporates this material more effectively into the narrative which in this case gives us some impression of what a more intelligent civilization might conceivably look like.