Collections III

Having remarked that Poul Anderson's Conquests (London, 1981) and Seven Conquests (New York, 1984) are one collection with two titles - in fact, they are the UK and US editions -, I now find that I have a copy of each on my shelves so I must have bought them at different times, thinking that they were different books. Anderson's Foreword, explaining this "...one-author one-theme one-genre collection..." about "...human conflict leading to institutionalized violence..." is very good (p. 9 or pp. 1-2). I agree with a lot of it and disagree to the extent that is expectable and necessary in this kind of discussion.

It was appropriate that I commented on "A Bicycle Built For Brew" after discussing The Enemy Stars because Anderson's introduction to the former in Kinship With The Stars (New York, 1991) says that he wrote this light-hearted story after The Enemy Stars, "...a bleak piece of pretty hard science fiction..." and a murder mystery so he "...was in a mood to kick up my heels." (p. 1)

We often commend Anderson's versatility and here it is, in part, displayed.

Again The Enemy Stars

I discussed Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars (London, 1979) (and here) without mentioning its main point. Four men face death and thus also life. Only one survives and he matures. Men of very different backgrounds, characters and worldviews clash but also cooperate. There is heroic self-sacrifice, genuinely heroic: one man dies that others might live; another eats less than his share of the rations and ensures that it will not be known that he has done this - he has gone far beyond wanting praise or adulation.

The setting of their ordeal is truly cosmic, a dead sun far from Earth, possibly even a remnant of the previous cosmic cycle. This emphasises that the main question is the meaning, if any, of the entire universe. At the end, Kipling is quoted and the term "admiralty" is used as it is near the end of The Star Fox.

"'You have told me why men go, and it isn't for nothing. It is because they are men.'" (p. 141)

I suggest that The Enemy Stars is a major Poul Anderson text.

Concluding The Enemy Stars

In Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars (London, 1979):

"...if there was to be enough reaction mass for deceleration and maneuver, the blast must be terminated." (p. 7)

I had though that, just as crews were teleported to and from the interstellar ships, fuel was teleported there also but apparently not.

Maclaren's companion "...was of a carefully selected mutant Burmese strain...flying about the planet without so much as an amazon for chaperone." (p. 9)

So there are mutants and even (unexplained) "amazons." Anderson hints at a lot of social background material that is not elaborated in the novel. The woman's guardian is General Feng and we are told that generals grab the top global title of Protector.

" '...a truly burned out star...Is the universe old enough for any sun to have used up its nuclear and gravitational energy? By the ancestors, it's conceivable this one is left over from some previous cycle of creation!'" (p. 11)

Is that possible? I thought that, between cycles, all matter was reduced to its constituents, then compressed into the next monobloc? That happens in other Anderson works.

" 'The highest interhuman art is to make it possible for others to use their arts.'" (p. 111)

This is also the point of Anderson's The Man Who Counts.

Is it clear at the end of the novel that David's widow and former shipmate are coming together? This is confirmed in the sequel, "The Ways of Love," whose theme is foreshadowed here:

" 'In ten years we may begin to talk to [the aliens].'" (p. 134)

Yet again that futuristic flying vehicle appears:

"Maclaren pointed his aircar earthward." (p. 137)

The Ways Of Love II

"'...I wish you could give me an idea of what the indissoluble unit is among humans.'" (Poul Anderson, Explorations, New York, 1981, p. 139)

A very basic question: in "The Ways of Love," (see here) Terangi Maclaren, survivor of The Enemy Stars, asks it of an Arvelan couple whose biology makes the nuclear family their most fundamental social unit whereas the structure of human families has changed throughout history and is changing now.

But I do not think that there is any answer to Maclaren's question. Human beings are differentiated from all other Terrestrial species by the fact that we change our environment with hands and brain and that we do it together. Thinking about our environment gives us Reason while society gives us Morality. By social morality, I mean not just arbitrary tabus but common interests and mutual obligations which can only exist in a social context.

Cooperative environmental alterations (redecorating, if you like) must be common to all technologically civilized species? But in addition the Arvelans have biological features that oblige them to live and work as indissoluble couples, not as plastic individuals capable of functioning within widely differing social arrangements - that's us.

Anderson's Merseians, Ythrians of the New Faith and Arvelans are all monotheists but how different:

the God steels the Race;
God the Hunter stoops on all;
God is love and love is mostly sex...

A Terrestrial monotheist seeking a basis for interstellar ecumenism would encounter major problems.

The Ways Of Love

If I buy an anthology because it contains a story by James Blish or Poul Anderson, I do not read the entire anthology but, if I buy an Anderson collection, I expect to read any stories in it that I have not already read elsewhere.

Despite this, Explorations (New York, 1981) has been on my shelf for years yet I have no memory of ever reading "The Ways Of Love" and either had not known or had completely forgotten that this story is a sequel to Anderson's The Enemy Stars.

A logical sequel: the novel climaxes with First Contact so how was that contact perceived by the other side? And what happened next?

"Sometimes a vessel in transit gets used as a relay station by a couple or a party bound for too distant a world to make it in a single jump. Then they stop for a short visit. This would happen in Fleetwing, she being on our uttermost frontier and bound onward into strangeness." (p. 118)

Meaning and context make it clear that the word "not" should be inserted between "...would..." and "...happen..."

In the novel, human matter transmission is by instantaneous gravitational propagation whereas, in the short story, the Arvelans use a "...modulated tachyonic beam..." (p. 118). Tachyons, although not instantaneous, are faster than light with no upward speed limit so they would clearly be able to serve the same purpose.

The Arvelan process of child-nurturing fully involves both parents, ensuring that:

they are naturally monogamous;
their basic social unit is the nuclear family;
remarriage would mean becoming a different person;
they become killing machines if their partners are threatened (Terrestrial kidnappers do not know what has hit them);
they have never had nation-states! (This is a revolutionary idea - make love, not war - that the Terrestrial Protectorate all too understandably wants to suppress.)

It is good to see what had happened to two human characters after the events of the novel. The sole survivor of a space expedition married his shipmate's widow although this shocks their Arvelan friends.

Protectorate Society

In Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars (London, 1979):

quantum theory is three centuries old, space travel two;
the Interhuman language is spoken;
Earth, ruled by a Protector, exploits its extra-solar colonies;
there is a secret revolutionary Fellowship of Independence on Krasna in the Tau Ceti system;
Krasnans are swamp-ranchers, fishers, miners, loggers or trappers;
there are also colonies on Sarai in the Capellan system and on Rama, the third planet of Washington 5584;
new colonies are quarantined for thirty years;
the title of Protector has been seized by successive generals;
Terrestrial society is divided into technics and commons;
technics are of different ranks;
the highest ranking technics do no productive work;
one technic family, the Maclarens, draws its income from kelp beds;
the highest commons are heavily taxed;
the lower commons barely survive;
in theory, the technics serve but do not pay;
the Astronautical Guild assigns a technic, a commoner, a Sarain Buddhist and a Krasnan revolutionary to the Southern Cross.

Thus, a rich social background for a hard sf novel.

Matter Transmission

In Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars (London, 1979):

a human body contains about 100,000,000,000,000 cells, each with millions of molecules;
each molecule is scanned and structurally identified, its momentary energy level and spatiotemporal relationship to every other molecule noted;
the scanning beam touches every atom, is modified by the contact and sends the modification to the transmitter matrix;
the contacts reduce the scanned body to gas which is "...sucked into the destructor chamber and atomically condensed in the matter bank..." (p. 38);
as yet, the signal entering the transmitter matrix is too complex to be recorded and transmission must be simultaneous with scanning;
transmission is not by beam or wave but by instantaneous gravitational propagation; 
the receiver matrix, an interstellar distance away, combines gasses to form elements, molecules and cells according to the signal.

The instantaneity sounds like Dirac transmissions in James Blish's works.

The characters are transmitted to a spaceship approaching a black dwarf where, unexpectedly, the rapidly rotating dwarf's strong magnetic field damages the ship, destroying its matter transceiver. References to the Blackett effect and to germanium strengthen the resemblance to Blish.

The Enemy Stars

The Enemy Stars is a one-off novel by Poul Anderson with a unique background. Usually in science fiction, interstellar travel is either slower or faster than light, STL or FTL, but Anderson was able to imagine intermediate scenarios. He combines STL with time travel in There Will Be Time and with teleporation/matter transmission in The Enemy Stars.

In the latter, an interstellar spaceship flies between stars STL. However, fuel is teleported to it and crews teleport back and forth. When a ship passes through a planetary system, it leaves matter transmitters there. Thus, the system can be colonised and cargo transmitted back to Earth. An interstellar ship lasts for centuries and is used by later Terrestrial civilizations.

We expect from Anderson both an informed scientific rationalization of the teleportation and complicated Terrestrial and colonial societies and we find all these plot elements in this single short novel, which I am still rereading. There is a "Protectorate" but, of course, it is different from the one in Shield.

I expect to post a few more times about various aspects of The Enemy Stars.