Typing Up Loose Ends

Weoch-Captain and his crew are as good as dead on p. 290 of Larry Niven, Ed., Man-Kzin Wars III. However, Poul Anderson's "Inconstant Star" continues until p. 310 because three loose ends need to be tied up:

(i) future history continuity;
(ii) personal relationships between our hero, his wife and the new female character;
(iii) who was the kzinti's intelligence source on Wunderland?

We will take the first one first.

(i) A prequel must not contradict later continuity. In Niven's Known Space future history, neither the kzinti nor the Earthmen acquired a tnuctipun weapon enabling them to win a decisive victory in the Man-Kzin Wars. Yet representatives of both species have discovered such a weapon in "Inconstant Star." Captain Saxtorph (human) has given Weoch-Captain (kzin) and his crew a lethal dose of radiation so it looks as if Saxtoroh's crew have sole control of the weapon. But they have not. Weoch's last defiant act is to propel the weapon with himself on it into hyperspace. The Rover crew "...saw their prize disappear." (p. 294)

That concluding phrase of Chapter XIX represents a literary tradition that is Wellsian or older. Except when alternative histories are invoked, it is a literary convention that fictional events occurred in the world as it is known to us. Thus, a Tolstoyan character can contemplate assassination of Napoleon but decides against it - and, if he did attempt it, would not succeed. The Cavorite sphere disappears into space and the Selenites kill Cavor before he can transmit the formula back to Earth. The Time Traveler does not return from his second expedition. On a more trivial level, in the 1950's, a weekly comic strip had cavemen discovering that the Moon is made of cheese, pulling it down to Earth and eating it. I said that the following installment must explain why there is a Moon today. Someone said, "Don't be stupid. It's only fiction." But, sure enough, the next installment explained how the Moon had been replaced.

That disappearing tnuctipun weapon follows in the proud footsteps of the disappearing Time Machine and Cavorite sphere.

Space Travel And Time Travel

HG Wells described a single round trip to the Moon in The First Men In The Moon. Robert Heinlein described the financing of the first trip to the Moon in "The Man Who Sold The Moon," then went on to describe regular interplanetary travel in The Green Hills Of Earth.

Wells described a single round trip to the far future in The Time Machine. Poul Anderson described the consequences of the future discovery of time travel in "Time Patrol," then went on to describe regular time travel in the Time Patrol series.

However, regular time travel is considerably more difficult to describe than is regular space travel. There are many space-based series but few time-based series. Substantial though Anderson's Time Patrol series is, it barely scratches the surface of its subject. Time Patrol Specialists spend years or decades in unrecorded periods. Unattached agents travel to whenever they are needed. But what of those later and higher civilizations that send scientists and tourists into the past? We would like to read a series of novels set in such a civilization, when journeys to 1,000,000 BC are as routine as are journeys to Mars for Heinlein's Space Patrol.

The Time Patrol is the police force of several successive time traveling civilizations so there must be stories to be told about those civilizations where, presumably, the Patrol is able to recruit openly instead of approaching prospects discretely and obliquely as it has to do in the earlier periods when the fact of time travel is kept secret.

We could also be told about the interstellar civilization in which the Nine discovered time travel, about the Nine themselves and about the Danellian intervention that prevented the Nine from changing history and established the Patrol. However, this is much more than any one author could have written and I think that experience shows that group approaches to writing sf series do not work well. This would be even more the case with a subject matter that needs to be as finely tuned as time travel, especially in a variable timeline.

Seeing

(Please also check Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments, here.)

"The picture showed a bit of a compartment aboard [a Baburite's] ship...The fittings and furnishings were too alien for her fully to see."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 150.

"He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things until you know roughly what they are. His first impression was of a bright, pale world - a watercolour world out of a child's paint-box; a moment later he recognized the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water, which came nearly to his feet. They were on the shore of a lake or river."
-CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet (London, 1963), p. 46.

- in fact, a Martian "canal."

HG Wells imagined a further strange sensory experience in space. Bedford, returning to Earth in the Cavorite sphere, is enclosed in a uniform unchanging environment with no alteration of day and night. Further, he is weightless and alone. Becoming psychologically detached from his physical body and former identity, he conceives himself as an eternal consciousness peering into space-time through the aperture of Bedford.

We might in space experience what some have recounted on Earth.

Anderson And Wellsianity

Associative processes are spiral, not linear. Setting out to reread The War Of Two Worlds by Poul Anderson, I instead began to read for the first time Threshold Of Eternity by John Brunner, published in the same Ace Double volume. Noticing, so to say, the obvious "Wellsianity" of both novels, I then reflected more generally on Wells and his successors.

Thus, this post belongs more appropriately on the Science Fiction blog and will be copied there. However, most page viewers visit Poul Anderson Appreciation. Further, Wells and other sf writers are discussed here not in their own right but to compare them with Anderson.

CS Lewis referred to:

"...what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook, the picture of Mr. Wells and the rest." ("Is Theology Poetry?" IN Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast and Other Pieces (London, 1965), pp. 41-58 AT pp. 45-46)

Lewis acknowledges that practising scientists as a whole do not accept this "Scientific Outlook" and concedes that "...the delightful name 'Wellsianity'...," (p. 46) suggested by another member of the Socratic Club, would have been more appropriate.

Wells' works, both fiction and non-fiction, express Wellsianity as Lewis' express Christianity. Wells' science fiction pioneers four themes:

space travel;
time travel;
interplanetary invasion;
future history.

Wells has many successors, including Anderson and Brunner, and one main opponent. I have argued on the Science Fiction blog that Lewis' Ransom novels are a systematic reply to the four Wellsian themes.

Wells is content to describe:

a single journey to the Moon in the Cavorite sphere, which is lost at the end of the novel;

a single journey to the future on the Time Machine, which is lost at the end of the novel;

a single attack by Martians, who are killed by Terrestrial microbes;

a single historical turning point in the next two hundred years - although, as against this, the Time Traveller's journey to the further future shows him the devolution of mankind and the end of life on Earth.

Wells' successors describe regular space travel, time travel and alien contact and write longer future histories. Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds, like Wells' The War Of The Worlds, describes a war between Earth and Mars and Anderson went on to write many other accounts of interplanetary conflicts. Brunner's Threshold Of Eternity, like Wells' The Time Machine, describes time travel but, in this case, such travel has become routine and indeed a means of conflict.

I have argued previously that Olaf Stapledon and Poul Anderson are major successors of Wells.

Time Travel And Space Travel

HG Wells wrote definitive works on time travel, The Time Machine, and on space travel, The First Men In The Moon. Can these ideas be combined? Time dilation (see Tau Zero by Poul Anderson) comes close but is not time travel because it is only futureward.

It occurred to me years ago that time travelers could travel within a slower than light interstellar spaceship, even a Heinleinian "generation ship" with many generations born and dying in flight. A time traveler whose existence was unknown to the crew but who appeared briefly now and then might be regarded as a ghost, hence a possible title: The Haunted Spaceship.

Another implication of this notion is that a time traveler entering the ship on Earth, traveling forward along the ship's world line to emerge at its destination, then returning along the ship's world line back to Earth would be able to report on the outcome of the mission before its departure.

Poul Anderson seems to have hit on the same idea in the concluding chapter of There Will Be Time (New York, 1973) but develops it slightly differently. He imagines not a generation ship crew with invisible time travelers moving among them but simply a ship crewed by time travelers for whom the journey will take only hours or minutes even if the ship itself takes centuries to cross an interstellar distance and he does not mention the obvious implication that the crew would be able to report back to Earth before their departure - although perhaps they would prefer to preserve the freedom of not knowing, a point which is mentioned in the novel.

Finally, a point that I could not have thought of, "...a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light..." means that the fact of time travel might enable physicists to develop an FTL drive. (p. 174)