The Frankenstein Questions

The Frankenstein question has two forms:

Is it right for anyone, God or Man, to create human life?
Will scientists be destroyed by their own creations?

Some religious believers would jointly answer both, i.e., "Creation of life is a divine prerogative. Any scientists who usurp the divine role will rightly be destroyed by their own creation."

In Poul Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire, humanly created artificial intelligences regard the continued existence of free human beings as a threat to their own destiny. In Anderson's Genesis, the existence of humanly created artificial intelligences has eventually caused the extinction of humanity but one AI has usurped the divine/Frankensteinian role of re-creating humanity! Thus, Anderson addresses both forms of the Frankenstein question.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was the first science fiction novel. Anderson was a successor of Shelley not only because he wrote science fiction but also because he updated Frankenstein's questions. Shelley, of course, came long before Anderson's other main predecessors: Wells, Stapledon and Heinlein.

Two Ways

See The Stars Are Also Fire II.

I said here that I remembered only one of the two ways that Poul Anderson's AI might survive the end of the universe. The two ways are presented on p. 546 of The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1994). See also the above link.

Sophotects/AI, reproducing in any matter, not just on planets, spread and communicate between galaxies at sub-light speeds. If there is a heat death of the universe, then they will continue to use energy from disintegrating black holes and particles. If there is a cosmic contraction, then they will experience an infinite number of events and thoughts in the finite time before the singularity. In either case, they will be immortal.

Thus, only the first is a way to survive a heat death but both are ways to survive the end of the universe. "In the end was the Word..." (p. 547) This has to be the ultimate sf speculation.

Raising The Dead

Text on pages 141-145 of Poul Anderson's fantasy novel The Broken Sword (London, 1977) has, very different, features in common both with his fantasy novel A Midsummer Tempest and with his science fiction novel The Stars Are Also Fire.

The feature common to A Midsummer Tempest is that in this passage the dialogue becomes blank verse, although here it is laid out as such, not disguised as prose. Further, this verse is particularly powerful. I found it to be so on a first reading and have confirmed that it is so by rereading. The scene is a difficult, bitter family reunion at a howe or burial mound.

The living characters are:

the hero of the novel, Skafloc;
his mother, Aelfrida;
his sister, Freda (although, until this point in the narrative, Skafloc and Freda have been lovers, not suspecting their close kinship).

The dead characters are:

Skafloc's father, Orm;
his brothers, Ketil and Asmund.

The dialogue, extracted from its prose narrative, can be re-presented as drama. I can convey its poetic power only by quoting it in full.

Skafloc:

Waken, chieftains,
Fallen warriors!
Skafloc calls you,
sings you wakeful.
I conjure you,
come on hell-road.
Rune-bound dead men,
rise and answer!

Grave shall open.
Gang forth, deathlings!
Fallen heroes,
fare to earth now.
Stand forth, bearing
swords all rusty,
broken shields,
and bloody lances.

Orm:

Who dares burst
the mound, and bid me
rise from death
by runes and song-spells?
Flee the dead man's
fury, stranger!
Let the deathling
lie in darkness.

Skafloc:

Terror shall not
turn my purpose.
Runes shall bind you.
Rise and answer!
In your ribs
may rats build nests,
if you keep hold
on what I call for!

Orm:

Deep is dreamless
death-sleep, warlock.
Wakened dead
are wild with anger.
Ghosts will take
a gruesome vengeance
when their bones
are hailed from barrow.

Ketil:

Gladly see we
gold-decked woman.
Sun-bright maiden,
sister, welcome!
Ashy, frozen
are our hollow
breasts with grave-cold.
But you warm us.

Orm to Aelfrida:

Dreamless was not
death, but frightful!
Tears of yours, dear,
tore my heart out.
Vipers dripped
their venom on me
when in death
I heard you weeping.

This I bid
you do, beloved:
live in gladness,
laughing, singing.
Death is then
the dearest slumber,
wrapped in peace,
with roses round me.

Skafloc to Ketil:

Speak forth, deathling.
Say me whither
Bolverk giant
bides, the swordsmith.
Tell me further,
truly, warrior,
what will make
him hammer for me.

Ketil:

Ill your searching
is, you warlock!
Worst of evil
will it fetch you.
Seek not Bolverk.
Sorrow brings he.
Leave us now,
while life is left you.

North in Jotunheim,
nigh to Utgard,
dwells the giant,
deep in mountain.
Sidhe will give
a ship to find him.
Tell him Loki
talks of sword-play.

Asmund:

Bitter, cruel -
Brother, sister -
fate the Norns
made fall upon you.
Wakened dead men
wish you had not
wrought the spell
that wrings the truth out.

Law of men
is laid on deathlings.
Hard it is
to hold unto it.
But the words
must bitter leave me:
Skafloc, Freda
is your sister.

Welcome, brother,
valiant warrior.
All unwitting
are you, sister.
But your love
has broken kinship.
Farewell, children,
fey and luckless!

Freda must leave Skafloc just as Gratillonius in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King of Ys cannot marry his daughter. The Christian and Mithraic law against incest overrides both elven fecklessness and the heathen gods' decrees.

In The Stars Are Also Fire, Dagny Begnac, a Lunar political leader, allows her personality to be recorded or "downloaded" in an artificial neural network - like becoming a conscious computer. Thus, her leadership outlasts her biological death although she wants the download program to be wiped when her task is completed. Instead, her son merely switched the program off. Many years later, it was reactivated to mental confusion but answered a question and was then granted permanent oblivion: an uncanny technological echo of Skafloc's spell to raise the dead.

Harvest The Fire

Incredibly, Poul Anderson keeps the series going. Despite the cosmic climax of Harvest of Stars and despite the comparable culmination of the succeeding volume, The Stars Are Also Fire, the future history presented in these two long novels provides sufficient background material to generate a narrative framework and what has by now become a familiar setting for two further novels. Of these two additional volumes, the first, Harvest The Fire (New York, 1995), begins:

"Once in his drifting to and fro across Earth, Jesse Nicol found a quivira left over from olden times." (p. 9)

Jesse Nicol is a new character but two features of this opening sentence are familiar: a future Earth on which there is freedom to drift and a virtual reality machine called a "quivira." Nicol generates a virtual interview with Jorge Luis Borges. The cybercosm scans databases "...to synthesize a personality and a setting..." (p. 16) The cybercosm is conscious but it is not made clear whether the simulated Borges has a temporary consciousness of being interviewed by Nicol. Generation of such a temporary consciousness does occur in virtual realities in other Anderson works.

Authentically, the virtual Borges gives Nicol a signed copy of one of his books. Nicol finds this "...heartbreaking.." and afterwards "...glanced down at his hand, as if it held a book." (pp. 29, 30) The cybercosm could have completed the illusion by printing a facsimile book with a forged signature.

Anderson readers are confident that, when this author extends, e.g., the "Harvest Of Stars" sequence or the earlier Technic History, the new work will be a substantial addition to the existing series whereas the appearance of the word Foundation or Dune in a new sf title signifies only the monotony of a recurring decimal.

The Stars Are Also Fire II

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars, the central characters spend a lot of time on the run from agents of an overtly oppressive human tyranny. In the sequel, The Stars Are Also Fire, their successors spend a lot of time on the run from agents of a subtly oppressive transhuman cybercosm exercising the same kind of global control as the positronic Brains at the end of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Despite this conventional thriller fiction, both novels end by anticipating cosmic and even transcosmic apotheoses.

Is the conflict at the end of the second novel credible? Free human beings and downloaded human intelligences will use nanotechnology to fill the stellar universe with organic life that is expected to end when the last star does whereas inorganic intelligence will survive the universe either by utilising the energy of disintegrating black holes and particles or by experiencing an infinitiy of events and thoughts in the finite time before a cosmic singularity.

Why should both not happen? The cybercosm judges that a cosmos full of organic life will be unpredictable and thus might jeopardise intelligence's chance to survive so that the two destinies are incompatible. Are they? Can't inorganic intelligence cooperate with and take its chances with organic life? Can it not accept uncertainty while striving towards its goal? Should it not see the suppression of scientific data as an unacceptable means to an end just as it no longer uses physical coercion? This issue is the ultimate expression in Anderson's works of the basic conflict that he sees between freedom and control but I wonder if it is rather contrived in this case?

Dives

How many "low dives" do fictitious characters frequent? Quite a lot. Remember the bar scene in Star Wars and Larry Niven's Draco Tavern. I have already celebrated the "Pey d'Or" meeting place in Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise. One of Anderson's time traveling characters recruits a traveling companion in a stereotypical underworld haunt in "Flight To Forever" and, in three other Anderson works, there is a (more respectable) inn between the worlds, the Old Phoenix.

The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1994) introduces a "Downright medieval" dive, the Asilo, a bistro with a surrealistically dancing lightsign above the door (p. 169). Blue-hazed air reeks of tobacco, marijuana, opium and sniph. The Asilo is "...a hangout for metamorphs...," Titans, Tinies, Drylanders, Chemos, Aquatics, Chimpos, bulge-headed Intellects and Exotics - "...genomes modified for purposes of science, industry, war, pleasure...," continuing to procreate (pp. 170, 171).

Titans were gene-bred for strength and endurance as infantry. Chemos are hardy against radiation and pollution. Drylanders' bodies store water so that they can survive in deserts. Having projected a cosmos in which human beings do not meet any aliens, Anderson then imagined altered, and alienated, forms of humanity.

The Stars Are Also Fire

Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars promises a stellar future for organic life and a post-Solar future for inorganic intelligence. What could follow that? Well, the second volume in the series, The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1994), after an unnumbered opening chapter set on the colony planet Demeter, presents two alternating narratives:

"The Mother of the Moon," a series of extended flashbacks presented in even numbered Chapters 2-40, is a prequel to Harvest Of Stars;

the remainder of The Stars Are Also Fire, starting with Chapter 1 and ending with Chapter 46, is a sequel to Harvest Of Stars Chapters 1-47 that stays within the Solar System whereas Harvest Of Stars Chapters 48-63 are set in the system of Alpha Centauri.

Thus, the author constructs a future history though not on the original Heinleinian model of several independently published short stories and novels. Several chapters of Harvest Of Stars, differentiated by the recurring title "Database," are extended flashbacks, some to Anson Guthrie's life time. The chronological order of fictitious events is:

(i) Harvest Of Stars, "Database";
(ii) "The Mother of the Moon";
(iii) Harvest Of Stars Chapters 1-47 minus "Database";
(iv) The Stars Are Also Fire minus "The Mother of the Moon";
(v) Harvest Of Stars Chapters 48-63;
(vi) Harvest Of Stars, "Epilogue" (though placed at the beginning);
(vii) the third volume, Harvest The Fire;
(viii) the fourth volume, The Fleet of Stars.

Should the entire series be read in this order? In any series, and particularly in a future history, reading order can part company from publication order. On the other hand, some prequels are designed to be read later. For example, Lunarians are human beings adapted to live and breed in lunar gravity. Having met them in Harvest Of Stars, it makes sense then to read their origin story in "The Mother of the Moon." Incredibly, Guthrie's granddaughter, Dagny Beynac, is the mother of the first Lunarians. We see this new human species grow up, invent its own language ("ARVEN ARDEA NIO LULLUI PEYAR" (p. 132)), construct its stronghold Zamok Vysoki, explore the outer Solar System and rebel against Earth. (Incidentally, in the midst of plausible Earth-Moon politics, Dagny solves a neat murder mystery.)

The part of The Stars Are Also Fire that is not prequel but sequel is set after the Lyudov Rebellion which (we remember) was mentioned in Harvest Of Stars. Again, this is part of how to write a future history. Different works within the history can be linked by common references to a fictitious event whether or not that event gets to be described in any of the works.