The Horn Of Time The Hunter And Other Matters

It is possible to get completely blown off course when blogging. I have not yet started to read the recently acquired Star Prince Charlie by Poul Anderson because I needed first to finish rereading his The Makeshift Rocket but that has been interrupted by illness, by other reading, by posting on another blog and by the arrival of Anderson's The Horn Of Time, containing six stories of which I had not read two and wanted to reread a third. Meanwhile, Yule, Christmas, New Year and my birthday bear down upon us.

One previously unread story, "The High Ones," addressing major issues and evoking other stories not only by Anderson but even also by Wells, merited considerable discussion.

The story that was to be reread, "The Horn of Time the Hunter," is, like the other works mentioned here, hard sf but one of its several interesting features is psychological, mysterious or even, potentially, fantasy: an unexplained sound like a hunter's horn, heard by only one of the characters, on a briefly visited planet. Was it just the wind? The story was originally entitled "Homo Aquaticus" but that gives away the surprise discovery that the sea-dwelling inhabitants of the visited planet are descended from human colonists. The second title is far superior and extremely evocative.

When the interstellar traders called the Kith were persecuted in the Star Empire, they scattered and fled. One of their ships now returns from a twenty thousand year relativistic round trip towards the galactic center. This ship's crew did not find the Elder Race that they sought and do not yet know whether the Empire, the Kith or even humanity still exist. They find that one human colony has undergone a sea change. One of their number is killed by the aquatics and another hears the horn of time blowing on the wind...

Similar Scenarios

(i) A time traveler visits the far future Earth.
(ii) A space traveler visits an older Earth-like planet.
(iii) A space traveler returns to the far future Earth.

In each of these similar scenarios, a modern or near future viewpoint character can witness the long time decline or devolution of human, or humanoid, beings. In the previous post, I compared Poul Anderson's "The High Ones" (scenario (ii)) with HG Wells' The Time Machine (scenario (i)). "The High Ones" turns out to have been an ironic title.

Anderson's "The Horn of Time the Hunter" (original title, "Homo Aquaticus"), which I am about to reread, is a variation on scenario (iii). Space travelers to the galactic core, returning to Earth in the far future, stop at a humanly colonized planet where human beings have become aquatic and lost their humanity.

Anderson has merpeople in his fantasies. There is, or was, an "aquatic ape" theory according to which early human beings lost their body hair by standing up to their necks in the sea for long periods to evade predators. Imagine if some of them had swum out further, becoming human equivalents of dolphins or even developing gills, real merpeople but sf, not fantasy.

Expeditions And Regimes

Poul Anderson's sf addresses, among many other issues:

(i) political conflicts and future regimes on Earth;
(ii) interstellar exploration and colonization.

Under (i), Anderson shows global power shifting to different parts of the world and twice shows the USSR conquering the US. He links (i) and (ii) by asking:

(iii) What sort of regime would launch an interstellar expedition?
(iv) Might the colonists be political refugees?

"The High Ones," IN Anderson, The Horn Of Time (New York, 1968), perfectly combines (i) and (ii). A World Soviet regime has launched a slower than light spaceship, with suspended animation, to Tau Ceti but, en route, Whites have overthrown the Reds within the ship! Here we encounter an issue familiar from Anderson's Psychotechnic History and Planet Of No Return. Psych-tests were meant to have picked a stable crew so do the tests not work or did someone deliberately sabotage them? The White crew has no intention of returning to Earth except, if they can, as liberators.

What they find in the Tau Cetian system is an ultimate collectivist state where individuals have devolved until they no longer think. Originally intelligent bipeds now have the mentalities of ants, bees or termites. They are on a par with Wells' Morlocks and Eloi or with his Selenites who are biologically adjusted to perform necessary social roles.

Several features of the story are familiar to regular Anderson readers:

we are given the clues - inconsistent behavior by the aliens will be interpreted to mean that they are not intelligent;

there is a moment when our hero realizes the truth - "Holbrook gasped. 'God in heaven!'" (p. 62);

there is a moment when he escapes by grabbing a gun, kicking a guard etc.

Once the truth is realized, it is a very easy matter to evade, immobilize or kill the slow-moving guards, who have not encountered resistance for centuries, and to destroy the computer which is not intelligent but merely applies programs to instruct the population who are helpless without it.

A Soviet loyalist says of the aliens:

"'Their reasoning processes must be fundamentally akin to ours, simply because the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe.'" (p. 49)

That does not follow. Yes, logic and maths should be a basis for communication but only a meta-basic basis. Thought processes can differ considerably even between human cultures. And, of course, his very next sentence is absurd:

"'Including those laws of behavior first seen by Karl Marx.'" (ibid.)

If Marx were there, he would say, "I do not know about these aliens. We have to find out." And he would be intelligent enough to make Holbrook's discovery. There is a parallel situation in Isaac Asimov's future history. The laws of psychohistory describe human society. The Laws of Robotics are not merely about robots because they control robotic behavior towards human beings. Thus, both sets of laws refer to humanity. Therefore, both are irrelevant when considering extra-Galactic intelligences. Hari Seldon, Susan Calvin and Karl Marx would say, "We might find some parallels between human and alien societies but we will have to look and see."

Holbrook replies, "'Pseudo-laws for a pseudo-religion!'" (ibid.)

I do not agree that Marxism is a pseudo-religion but that "Soviet" dogmatic formulation of it certainly is. The Soviet loyalist, holding a gun on his human companions, says, to the approaching alien guards, "'I have them, comrades!'" (p. 65) - and is blown to pieces because, as Holbrook had realized, the aliens are incapable of making any fine distinctions; they simply obey orders to guard or to attack etc. Theirs is a degenerate civilization comparable to what Wells imagined in The Time Machine.

If a Stalinist regime conquered an entire planet and thus ceased to have any external competitor, then it would cease to have any competitive dynamic and would indeed become a horrific, deadening despotism that might eventually wind up as Anderson describes here.

Whites And Reds

Poul Anderson's "The High Ones" IN Anderson, The Horn Of Time (New York, 1968) is an excellent short story that will require more than one post for adequate discussion.

The human characters in the story are either "Whites" or "Reds." These terms are neither racial nor chess-related but political. In this context, "White" means "libertarian" and "Red" means "pro-Soviet." However, both "White" and "Soviet" have changed their meanings, historically.

"White" originally meant "Tsarist." If the White general, Kornilov, had succeeded in his attempted military coup in 1917, then he would not have liberalized Russia.

"Soviet" means "council." The Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917 were elected from mass meetings in large factories whose work forces were resisting Tsarism. Thus, these councils democratically represented a socially progressive class, industrial workers with modern ideas, but not the Russian population which was overwhelmingly peasant. Against both workers and peasants were Tsarist aristocrats and a small, weak bourgeoisie dependent on foreign capital and afraid to press for parliamentary reforms in case these incited more radical demands from below.

Bypassing ineffective bourgeois leadership, the soviets overthrew first the Tsar, then the duma (parliament). Some workers' leaders wanted to democratize, modernize and emancipate Russia with material support from similar workers' organizations elsewhere in Europe but, instead, several years of isolation, blockades, military interventions and civil wars physically destroyed industry and either killed workers or drew them into the growing, besieged bureaucracy.

What began as a workers' democracy became, first, an unwilling dictatorship industrializing in order to restore workers' democracy, then a willing dictatorship industrializing in order to increase exploitation for the purpose of military competition, therefore needing to crush any workers' resistance despite still calling itself "Soviet"...

Thus, it is a coherent (minority) position to say: "I would have supported workers' councils in 1917 but would have regarded them as defeated, strangled, crushed, transformed into their opposite, by about 1927."

I think it is necessary to discuss how terms have changed their meanings because the changes are historically significant. "Social democracy" changed from "revolutionary socialism" to "parliamentary socialism" and "communism" changed from "common ownership" to "bureaucratic dictatorship." The next post or two will have more to do with the content of the story!

A Man To My Wounding

I definitely have not read Poul Anderson's short story, "A Man To My Wounding," before despite having it in a collection. It begins with a quotation:

"I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt." - Genesis, iv, 23.
- quoted in Poul Anderson, The Horn Of Time (New York, 1968), p. 27.

I thought that this meant that the speaker had wounded and hurt himself by killing a young man. However, the Revised Standard Version gives:

"I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me." Gen. 4. 23.

 - the exact opposite meaning.

The story shows legalized drug use and legal assassinations. One contributor to the SFWA Bulletin advised fellow writers:

think of something that is shocking to us;
then imagine that it has become the social norm;
then deduce its logical implications.

It has been argued that it makes more sense to kill not soldiers or civilians but leaders. One man who wrote a book called Killing No Murder, when interviewed on British television, was asked, "Is there any politician who you think should be assassinated?" and replied, "I cannot answer that question because I have been warned that I could then be charged with incitement to murder."

Anderson imagines declared states of war replaced by declared states of assassination. The Bureau of National Protection (in Britain at present, an unfortunate set of initials) must protect politicians whom it thinks that the declared enemy will try to assassinate.

However, states of assassination escalate. The Chinese try to kill not the present American leaders, who are too well guarded, but potential leaders, like leading members of a party that has just lost an election but might win the next one. This could escalate further to include important leaders in other fields: scientists; writers; even gifted children; also bystanders too close to the targets. All such potential victims in every country must be protected indefinitely so that states of assassination, far from limiting the killing, become as horrific as states of war.

Thus, the story ends:

"'Where is it going to end?'" (p. 43)

The Horn Of Time

Poul Anderson's The Horn Of Time (New York, 1968) (see image) has arrived by post. It is a collection of six separate stories, three of them fitting into different series written by Anderson. The blurb wrongly implies that this volume is a novel or collected series with a single theme.

The front cover states:

"They were savage primitives of a strange future - a harrowing chronicle of the millennium after the end of the world!"

The back cover states:

"THE 20TH CENTURY PLAYED A GAME OF NUCLEAR RUSSIAN ROULETTE. AND LOST. Man must escape his own dead world, raid hostile planets, subdue his human nature to survive in a strange cosmos.
"Science-fiction master Poul Anderson explores the future in a bloodchilling narrative that spins from Earth to distant galaxies as he foretells the ultimate destiny of mankind in THE HORN OF TIME."

The book is six narratives, not one. There is no escape from a dead Earth and there are no distant galaxies. One story is about time travel from the twentieth century to the Viking period. The title story, "The Horn of Time the Hunter," features a spaceship returning from a relativistic journey to the galactic center and "The High Ones," which I have yet to read, also features interstellar travel but everything else is set on Earth. At least three of the stories do refer back to a nuclear war but with different outcomes.

The title, "A Man To My Wounding," looked familiar and the story is in fact in the collection Conflicts but I do not seem to have read it. Like "License" in Conquests, it features legalized assassination. Keeping track of collections and of short stories with related themes gets complicated.

I will post about "A Man To My Wounding" and "The High Ones" and might revisit the haunting "The Horn of Time the Hunter." Then, back to The Makeshift Rocket and Star Prince Charlie.

The Horn Of Time

Google informs me that The Horn Of Time is a Poul Anderson collection of:

"The Horn Of Time The Hunter" (Kith future history);
"A Man To My Wounding";
"The High Ones";
"The Man Who Came Early" (time travel);
"Marius" (Psychotechnic future history);
"Progress" (Maurai future history).

The future history stories should be, and have been, collected in their respective series. The time travel story should be included in a revised edition of the time travel collection, Past Times.

That leaves two stories. "A Man To My Wounding" sounds familiar although I can't place it. Regular correspondent Sean recommends "The High Ones" which sounds unfamiliar to me so I will order a copy of The Horn Of Time.

"Time" is always an evocative word in a fiction title. In sf and in Poul Anderson, it can mean time travel although not here.

Tracking down second hand copies of all Anderson collections is one way to acquire some previously unread stories but what we really need is a multi-volume Complete Short Stories.

The Horn Of Time The Hunter

Moving on within Poul Anderson's Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), we come to "The Horn of Time the Hunter," an evocative title. The word "time" is always good, even when not involving time travel.

So far, four series have been represented:

the Technic Civilization History;
the Psychotechnic History;
the Time Patrol;
the Kith -

- although the first two were not acknowledged. Anderson's comments merely focused on the individual stories.

Regarding the Kith, in "The Horn of Time...," Anderson explains his thinking: time dilated space travelers would develop their own culture and might sometimes be ostracized on Earth? Good thinking, Anderson.

I have said that this story should be published as an appendix to Starfarers, which does incorporate the two other Kith stories. Anderson explains:

"I was going to incorporate "The Horn of Time the Hunter" as well, but Karen convinced me that it was too dark." (p. 137)

I respectfully disagree.