Idyllic Planets?

Space explorers come to an extrasolar planet that is superficially idyllic but essentially problematic:

Methuselah's Children by Robert Heinlein (Future History);
A Case Of Conscience by James Blish (After Such Knowledge);
"Tiger Ride" by James Blish and Damon Knight;
The Peregrine by Poul Anderson (Psychotechnic History);
The Night Face by Poul Anderson (Technic History);
more than one Star Trek episode.

Obviously, these works differ considerably. Nevertheless, there is a discernible common theme. The two Anderson novels could even be adapted as Star Trek episodes although they would be considerably diminished in the process. As I wrote about the Blish/Knight collaboration (see above): 

Knight writes that the story asks, “What is a man?”  Like Star Trek, though not as tritely, it answers that men need the conflict of unsatisfied desire.

The Gwydiona Experience

"'...it's impossible that you don't feel it! God is here already, everywhere. I can see [Him] shining from you...'"
- Poul Anderson, "The Night Face" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT p. 637.

"God" should mean a supra-rational transcendent experience, not the irrationality of temporary madness, which is what it turns out to mean here. See the previous post about Ken Wilber.

CS Lewis makes the same point as Wilber:

"...a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment, and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as 'So you think you're going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there'll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye'll have a grand time of it!' when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, 'Oh, don't you see, you ass, that there's a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?' That, of course, directed McPhee's fire at him. What emerged was that in Ransom's opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were as he said 'engulfed'. He used the word 'trans-sexual', and began to hunt around for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting 'trans-gastronomic'), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels."
- CS Lewis, Voyage To Venus (London, 1978), pp. 27-28.

Comments on Lewis
(i) I do not see why the Christian Heaven cannot include eating. It is described in the New Testament as a banquet.
(ii) "Trans-sexual" has come to mean something else.
(iii) I do not subscribe to Christian doctrine but Lewis might be describing a possible future development of humanity.

Is the eternal atemporal or trans-temporal and what might that mean? Is the Absolute impersonal or trans-personal and again what might that mean? (I think that the Absolute, that which exists independently of any external relationships, can only be everything, the totality.)

Lewis wrote a work of Christian apologetics called Beyond Personality. If three parallel straight lines symbolize three personal beings, might a triangle symbolize one tri-personal being, the Trinity? (However, I think that the Trinity doctrine arose not because philosophers speculated about trans-personality but because the Fourth Evangelist deified the Son and personified the Spirit while remaining monotheist.)

If the supernatural exists, then by definition it transcends the natural. Secularists deny the supernatural but not, unless they are also reductionists, transcendence, which means going beyond:

consciousness transcends unconsciousness;
human consciousness transcends animal consciousness;
civilization transcends primitive society etc.

As ever, I am grateful to Poul Anderson for implicitly raising such issues in fiction. The third installment of his History of the Technic Civilization is "The Problem of Pain" and the third last is "The Night Face." The former dramatizes a theological problem addressed by CS Lewis and the latter involves the unfortunate identification of "God," the transcendent, with insanity.

The Night Face: Conclusion

(From Monday 5 May until Friday 9 May, I will be on the Isle of Wight, away from a computer.)

In Poul Anderson's The Night Face, we sympathize with Miguel Tolteca, the Nuevamerican mercantile democrat, against Raven, the Lochlanna military aristocrat, but it is Raven that gets it right. Tolteca accuses Raven of not respecting the Gwydiona culture but it is Raven who, by his persistent questioning, solves the mystery of that culture. The bewildered Tolteca gets people killed by trying to reason with (temporary) madmen whereas Raven understands enough to address them with myths, then knows how to fight when this does not work. He does not expect to survive but enables the incompetent Tolteca and the rest of the spaceship crew to escape.

Anderson skillfully makes his readers sympathize with Tolteca, then see that he is wrong.

What the Gwydiona call "God" is not a religious or mystical experience but annual collective insanity. They have learned to protect themselves and each other as far as possible and to channel their homicidal urges through myth, dance, chanting and ritual - although Tolteca's uncomprehending interference upsets the apple cart.

This ending is brilliant but some readers (at least one) would have liked to read about a genuine mystical experience. In Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall," the people of the planet Lagash all go mad together when the nearby giant stars of an entire cluster appear in their sky once every two thousand years. Could some of them not instead have experienced mystical oneness with the cosmos and emerged saner afterwards?

Words And Texts

Sometimes one book reminds us of another, then reflection reveals the similarities. When a Superman comic had reminded me of a Robert Heinlein novel, I was surprised to realize the similarities: both works had a lunar setting and both referred to parallel universes.

Poul Anderson's The Night Face made me think of the science fiction-based superhero series, Green Lantern. Both works involve regular faster than light interstellar travel and a mysterious planet, peaceful but with a hidden conflict. This description makes them sound closely parallel, which is entirely misleading. In fact, it was another minor feature of The Night Face that initially evoked Green Lantern.

Any word can have a specific denotation, a general connotation and accidental associations. Thus, the phrase, "the Pope":

denotes the present incumbent, Bergoglio;
connotes an entire historical institution in the Catholic Church;
reminds me of my single visit to Rome decades ago.

An author skilfully deploys denotations and connotations but cannot control the accidental associations in his readers' minds. By the same token, a reader must not let his associations get in the way of the author's meaning. That I disliked something in Rome is irrelevant when reading an account of a Pope.

The unusual word "Oa" is the name of the mysterious planet in Green Lantern and is also an interjection used by a character in The Night Face. Associations cannot be more accidental than that.

Clues To The Dark Side

In Poul Anderson's The Night Face, the Gwydiona religion, philosophy or way of life posits that everything, including death, ruin and sorrow, is a facet of the eternal and infinite Oneness. However, Gwydiona arts, literature and daily lives are mostly sunny and cheerful. They are hiding something from themselves.

Although their society is without crime, a house has thick concrete walls, steel-shuttered windows and a wood-faced steel door with a massive, though unused, lock. The construction of houses like fortresses is said to symbolize the strength of the family.

Although it seems that every part of the environment is interpreted symbolically, the baleflower with five-pointed leaves is just a baleflower and it seems better not to ask about it.

Although the Gwydiona are one with nature, their population has moved entirely into the towns. Extra-planetary explorers find an abandoned and ruined village where houses were burned and there are skeletons of people who clearly died violently.Nobody knows why.

What does all this mean? We do not know yet, but Anderson builds a sense of menace in an apparently peaceful civilization.

Gwydiona Symbolism

All ornamentation is symbolic, the opposite of Nuevamerican culture. The fylfot recurring in the design of a bronze chair is the Burning Wheel, the sun, Ynis, and all suns. The Wheel is Time, thermodynamic irreversibility. The interwoven vines in the same design are crisflowers, sacred to the Green Boy Aspect of God because they bloom during the first annual haygathering season. (The Gwydiona year lasts five standard years.) Fyflot and vines together mean Time the Destroyer and Regenerator.

Chair leather from the wild areas belongs to the autumnal Huntress Aspect. Linking the Huntress with the Green Boy recalls the Night Faces and also the Day Faces which are their other side. Because bronze is artificial, it conveys that mankind, by forming the framework, embodies the meaning and structure of the world. Because corroded bronze is green, it also signifies that every structure vanishes but into new life.

A dancer wears a bird costume at the Bird Maiden's time of year. On the Day of the River Child, the Bird Maiden met the child who was lost, carried him home and gave him her crown. This is a seasonal myth for the end of rains and floods, followed by sunlight and blossoms. The complicated tale includes a poem about the episode of the Riddling Tree.

There is a lot more, details impossible to remember on a single reading. Poul Anderson applies knowledge of Terrestrial myths and symbols and also considerable imagination to weave them into new patterns.

New Characters

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization features not one but three major continuing characters and also includes a substantial number of works without any continuing character. (A future history needs a lot of short stories with varied settings to give it body.)

I regard The Night Face/Let The Spacemen Beware as a novel because it is well over 100 pages in length. Set centuries after the lifetime of Dominic Flandry, it necessarily introduces a new cast of characters, who turn out to be specific to just this single work. Since the point of the narrative is to demonstrate how far a small population of extra-solar colonists has diverged from standard humanity, Anderson could simply have described a homogeneous spaceship crew arriving on the planet Gwydion, but he doesn't.

The chief of the expedition is Miguel Tolteca of the Argo Astrophysical Company and the United Republics of Nuevamerica. Fifty years previously, the Republics had won their independence from the aristocratic regime on Lochlann. Raven, a Lochlanna aristocrat, leads the spaceship's military force. There are cultural misunderstandings and conflicts between Tolteca and Raven.

Since both of these men are viewpoint characters in different passages after their arrival on Gwydion, the reader must remain alert. Not only have the Gwydiona diverged from humanity but also we are not being given a single outsider's view of them either.

There are Star Trek episodes with similar themes but The Night Face is a novel. The Gwydiona are not aliens differing from humanity in just one respect but descendants of human beings who, over many generations, have adapted to an alien environment.

"God"

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, "God" is our galaxy seen from a planet of a star in intergalactic space. In Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, Merseians refer to "the God" and Ythrians refer to "God the Hunter" but neither of these phrases is interchangeable with any Abrahamic or Indian use of the word "God."

The human-descended Gwydiona say things like:

"'I understand that God wears a different face in most of the known cosmos.'"
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York,2012), p. 554.

"'...we have lived here a long time. We know the Aspects of God on Gwydion better than you.'" (p. 560)

"'O guest of the house, who may be God, most welcome and beloved, enter.'" (p. 562)

"'...that Aspect of God called the Green Boy...the autumnal Huntress Aspect...the Night Faces...the Day Faces...'" (p. 563)

Gradually we realize that "God" also means an annual collective experience not remembered afterwards... This is mysterious, then shocking when the extra-planetary visitors learn the truth.

Meanwhile, here is a theological conundrum closer to home. In "The Problem of Pain," a Christian character, Peter Berg, says:

"'Way back before space travel, the Church decided Jesus had come only to Earth, to man. If other intelligent races need salvation - and obviously a lot of them do! - God will have made His suitable arrangements for them.'"
- Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 28-29.

But "the Church" can speak with a different voice in different periods. Seven centuries later, a Wodenite has converted to Jerusalem Catholicism and has been ordained in the Galilean Order.

Anarchic State?

"If you had a society with a simple economic structure (automation helped marvelously in that respect, provided that the material desires of the people remained modest) and if you had a homogeneous population of high average intelligence and low average nastiness, well, then perhaps the ideal anarchic state was possible."
-Poul Anderson, "The Night Face" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT p. 560.

Terminological comment: "...anarchic state..." is contradictory and should have read "...anarchic society..."

General comment: I agree and would add that a heterogeneous population of high intelligence could be anarchic, "not ruled."

Heym, a character in Anderson's short story "Genius" (Astounding, 1948) explains how social pressure and mental conditioning usually determine individual behavior. Thus, he argues, a peaceful scientist rarely refuses to engage in war research and:

"'A "born" pacifist, growing up in a warlike culture, will generally accept war as part of the natural order of things.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Genius" IN Anderson, The Complete Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 1, Call Me Joe (Framingham MA, 2009), pp. 196-222 AT p. 218.

Thus also, someone "born nasty" but growing up in an anarchic society should accept cooperation as part of the natural order of things. However, the apparently ideal society in "The Night Face" is on the planet Gwydion where another factor is operating.

The Introductions II

Another engaging feature of Poul Anderson's Introduction to The Night Face is the way he informs the reader of this novel's place in his main future history series. This long, rambling series, originally published in many places, did not have any single title. In these posts, I have referred to it variously as "the Technic Civilization Future History," "the Technic Civilization History," "the Technic History" and "the Technic History series." Baen Books have collected it in seven volumes as The Technic Civilization Saga, although I think that the term "History" is more appropriate. The series has to be differentiated from its author's earliest future history, confusingly called "the Psychotechnic History."

In order to make clear to his readers which series he means, Anderson writes that The Night Face:

"...does fit into the same 'future history' as the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire. Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Christopher Holm, Dominic Flandry, and quite a few more characters lived in its past." (Flandry's Legacy, New York, 2012, p. 543)

I agree with Anderson's promotion of Christopher Holm into the ranks of van Rijn etc. It may be thought that, although Holm is in the series, he is not a series character, i. e., he appears in only one work, The People Of The Wind. However, Hloch, the Ythrian editor of The Earth Book Of Stormgate, informs us that Arinnian, whose human name is Christopher Holm, had compiled two of the narratives collected in the Earth Book. Thus, Arinnian features in two volumes of the History where he helps to fill the gap between van Rijn and Falkayn of the League and Flandry of the Empire.

The colonization of Avalon and the establishment of its right to remain in the Domain of Ythri, as against the Terran Empire, is an important part of the story.

The Introductions

In an earlier post, I suggested that, in any uniform edition of Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization History, Introductions by the human author, Poul Anderson, should be preserved but in an Appendix so that they do not interrupt the flow of the narrative which includes Introductions by fictitious characters like Hloch of Stormgate Choth on Avalon and Noah Arkwright.

Having said that, it is good, when reading through Baen Books The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume VII, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), to come across Anderson's Introductions to The Game Of Empire and The Night Face immediately before reading these works.

The Introduction to The Game Of Empire lists the three purposes of the Dominic Flandry series, already quoted here, and also highlights Anderson's textual homage to Kipling. The Introduction to The Night Face informs us that an editor had re-entitled it Let The Spacemen Beware! - just as Anderson's The Man Who Counts had been, equally inappropriately, editorially re-entitled War Of The Wing Men. This Introduction also sets the scene:

"Now the Empire has fallen, the Long Night descended...Like Romano-Britons after the last legion had withdrawn, people out in the former marches of civilization do not even know what is happening at its former heart. They have the physical capability of going there and finding out, but are too busy surviving. They are also, all unawares, generating whole new societies of their own." (pp. 543-544)

This passage has several comforting features:

a social collapse spread across hundreds of light years of interstellar space can be compared to events in Europe, thus on one part of a single planet, in our historical past;

the physical capability of travel has not been lost, just the incentive to use it for the time being;

the passage reminds us of other Anderson works that do feature Romano-Britons and the Fall of the Roman Empire;

new societies are being generated.

Changes In Human Nature

In at least three works, all novels, Poul Anderson envisaged different fundamental changes to human nature. In Brain Wave, everyone becomes significantly more intelligent. Larry Niven's characters to whom this happens think with embarassment:

"I've been stupid." (1)

In Brain Wave, this major change is initially felt only on the intellectual level. Everyone can think more quickly, clearly and efficiently and this can be difficult to adjust to, especially since motivations, beliefs and superstitions are as yet unchanged. Someone now thinks more effectively about how to impose his beliefs on others, for example.

However, a second, more gradual, change is latent. Human history has been a struggle between instinct and intelligence but now intelligence has won so human beings can:

consciously select their desires;
adjust their personalities to intellectually conceived requirements;
end psychosomatic diseases;
control organic illnesses at will;
end pain;
learn enough medicine to make doctors redundant;
extend lifespans;
abolish senility.

In The Night Face, the entire population of a colonised planet is peaceful and harmonious without any governmental or legal coercion but extra-planetary visitors learn that all the colonials become insane for a few days every year, afterwards remembering only that they have had an indescribable experience. During that time, ritual dance and chanting channel otherwise destructive and homicidal energy.

In The Winter Of The World, a new human species has ceased to be herd animals. Each of its members is from birth emotionally self-sufficient, responding to others only as individuals but not regulating behaviour with governments, laws or courts.

It may be more imaginative to conceive of these inner psychological transformations than to anticipate outer technological advances.


(1) Niven, Larry, Protector, London, 1974, p. 213.