Mythical Beings

Having catalogued mythical beasts, it makes sense to mention mythical beings. The Unicorn Trade also includes "A Feast For The Gods" by Poul and Karen Anderson and "The Coasts Of Faerie" by Karen Anderson. I think I mentioned the Gods story a while back? In "The Coasts Of Faerie," a young fisher woman sees fairy coasts and a dolphin helps her to reach them while the fisher folk mourn her death.

The Unicorn Trade contains, by either or both Andersons:

poems;
humorous verses;
two sf stories;
fantasies;
a murder story;
a fantasy murder story;
an article;
a humorous "philosophical dialogue";
comments on quotations from some of the astronauts.

This is too much of a mixed bag for me. Some of the items belong in other collections together with works to which they are more closely connected. This volume needs a table of contents and a clear demarcation between the different kinds of works.

Unicorns Etc III

I keep trying to exorcise the unicorns but not succeeding. I forgot to mention that Karen Anderson's sphinxes hunt unicorns. So maybe the unicorns were wiped out by the sphinxes who were wiped out by early men who then displaced the centaurs?

Science fiction writers, including those who also write some fantasy, present alternative answers to shared questions like, in this case: where did the mythical beasts go? One story reminds us of others although, as CS Lewis comments in The Great Divorce, we do not always remember either titles or authors. On this occasion, I remember an author but not the title either of the story or of the collection. In a story by Brian Aldiss, a member of Noah's crew sees a larger Ark with dinosaurs on one deck and mythical beasts on another, then wonders whether the right Ark survived the Flood.

Karen Anderson's "The Piebald Hippogriff" might conceivably find its way into some future "first man on the moon" anthology because it ends as its viewpoint character flies his newly tamed hippogriff towards the moon to homestead there. First man on the moon stories are dated but have their place:

Vernes' characters went round the moon;
Wells' characters went in the moon;
Heinlein wrote a Future History version, a Scribner Juvenile version and a film version of the first trip to the moon;
Lewis' and Blish's successors of Cavor, Weston and Haertel, went to Mars, not to the moon (and Haertel used anti-gravity);
Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters tried for Mars but were sabotaged and crashed on the moon;
a Niven character was on the moon before Armstrong because he traveled to the moon later, then time traveled;
Poul Anderson's Valeria Matuchek was the first human being on the moon in her parallel universe where magic works;
a TV adaptation of The First Men In The Moon showed Armstrong and Aldrin approaching a lifeless moon, then flashed back to Cavor and Bedford - a fixed Cavorite sheet was used to eject the lunar atmosphere into space, thus killing the Selenites.

And that returns us to our starting point: accepting a mythical account, then explaining why the account is no longer applicable.

Where Did The Mythological Creatures Go?

Some works of fantasy are based on the premises that mythological creatures existed, as we can read in Homer etc, but do not exist now, as we can see. So where did they go?

Neil Gaiman presents a brilliant answer about what happened to the Fabulous Age of Baghdad and CS Lewis has a poem about how the unicorn did not make it into the Ark but I am here focusing on three stories by Karen Anderson.

"Landscape With Sphinxes"
After the glaciers melted, sphinx-headed bipeds, which might be game, wandered in...

"Treaty In Tartessos"
Agricultural men were unable to coexist peacefully with centaurs who needed vast, uncultivated areas in which to hunt, so the men let the centaurs migrate to the newly discovered land of Atlantis...

"The Piebald Hippogriff"
The first two stories are sequential: hunting men eliminate sphinxes, then agricultural men displace centaurs. However, the third story locates hippogriffs in an entirely different universe where the world has a fenced off edge, space is blue and a hippogriff can fly to the moon.

Three Novels And Three Short Stories

Three Detective Novels By Poul Anderson
Perish By The Sword
Murder In Black Letter
Murder Bound

Three Short Stories By Poul And Karen Anderson Collected In The Unicorn Trade
"Dead Phone"
"The Kitten"
"Single Jeopardy"

The three novels and the first short story star the San Francisco detective, Trygve Yamamura. The novels hint at supernaturalism whereas the short story ends by affirming it.

The first novel features a Metallurgic Laboratories company. "Single Jeopardy," published in Hitchcock's, is a murder story set in San Francisco about the two founders of a Metallurgical Research Laboratory, one of whom shares a surname with a character in the third novel.

"The Kitten," which ends by affirming the supernatural, is set in the fictitious town of Senlac, which also features in Poul Anderson's science fiction novel, There Will Be Time.

Unicorns Etc II

Sphinx = human head + lion's body;
Gryphon = eagle's head & wings + lion's body;
Hippogriff (1) = eagle's head & wings + horse's body;
Centaur = human head, arms & torso + horse's body;
Wyvern = dragon's head + reptilian body;
Hippogriff (2) = winged horse;
Unicorn = horned horse.

Does this make any sense?

Two of the creatures are horses with extra features. The remaining five are composites. Of these, the wyvern has no features in common with any of the others.

The sphinx and the centaur have a human head;
the sphinx and the gryphon have a lion's body;
the hippogriff (1) and the centaur have a horse's body.

I started on this trail because the Andersons' The Unicorn Trade has a winged horse on its cover, because Neil Gaiman's Sandman is guarded by a wyvern, a gryphon and a hippogriff (2) and because Narnians include some of the above. (Also, Alice meets a gryphon.)

The Unicorn Trade cover art is by Tom Kidd while, inside the covers, the title poem and the two short stories called "Landscape With Sphinxes" and "The Piebald Hippogriff" are by Karen Anderson, so the mythological creatures have led us away from the works of Poul Anderson as such although they are sufficiently closely related to warrant some attention here. But maybe that is enough.

Addendum: Further reading discloses that the piebald hippogriff has a feathered head, so is Hippogriff (1), while "Treaty In Tartessos" by Karen Anderson features centaurs. (To continue the comparison with graphic fiction, Lucifer, Mike Carey's sequel to Gaiman's The Sandman, presents a world jointly inhabited by human beings and centaurs.)

Unicorns Etc

The cover of one edition of Poul and Karen Anderson's The Unicorn Trade (see previous post) shows not a horned horse but a small winged horse. CS Lewis' Narnia has unicorns, winged horses, centaurs and other mythological quadrupeds. So how are these quadrupeds related and is a winged horse a "hippogriff"?

According to Wikipedia:

a wyvern has a dragon's head and a reptilian body with two or even no legs (so is not a quadruped);
a gryphon has the head, claws and wings of an eagle but the body, hind legs and tail of a lion;
a hippogriff is like a gryphon but with a horse's instead of a lion's body because it is a cross between a gryphon and a horse.

However, in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Morpheus' Castle is guarded by a wyvern, a gryphon and a hippogriff and the third of these is drawn like a winged horse.

The Unicorn Trade includes a short story by Karen Anderson about sphinxes, that I have not read yet. This is not the first time that I have found an interesting parallel between the works of Anderson and Gaiman, although The Unicorn Trade derives its title from a two page poem by Karen Anderson that opens the book.

Back To Senlac

Rereading Poul Anderson's works and reading some for the first time is an endless voyage of discovery. Many months ago, I posted about his time travel novel, There Will Be Time. One detail that I appreciated in that novel was the hero's birthplace, the carefully realized Midwestern town of Senlac with its river and the nearby Holberg College. In fact, I posted about Senlac specifically.

At present, I am reading, I am fairly sure for the first time, "The Kitten" by Poul and Karen Anderson and blow me down if this short story is not set in Senlac where the viewpoint character's wife commutes forty miles to Holberg College in order to complete her master's degree. I think that the novel also mentions the distance of the College but will check.

Still reading the story, I am not sure whether it is going to fit into the category of mystery fiction or of fantasy. There is an early cryptic reference to "...the other place..." that will have to be elucidated (The Unicorn Trade, New York, 1964, p. 122).

Since There Will Be Time is set in the timeline of Anderson's Maurai future history, the Senlac setting suggests a slight extension of this series, which can be collected in three volumes:

Vol I, the three Maurai stories;
Vol II, Orion Shall Rise;
Vol III, There Will Be Time and "The Kitten."

This sequence starts in a post-nuclear future and ends in a quiet Midwestern town in the present.

The Incorporated State And The United Protectorates

"The Innocent Arrival" (1958) by Poul and Karen Anderson established a version of a future Earth which Poul Anderson reproduced in the sequel, "The Moonrakers." (1966)

"'...you won't find find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamster Hour on Mars...'"
- Poul and Karen Anderson, The Unicorn Trade, New York, 1984, p. 59.

"'...the Incorporated State has naturally produced a, uh, gullible type of citizen. His life's so thoroughly regulated that his main freedom lies in fantasies, which the sensies and the advertisers are quick to supply. Maybe for the average Earthling, those hackneyed old show motifs are more real and meaningful than his own life.'"
- Poul Anderson, Beyond The Beyond, London, 1973, p. 149.

Fantasies realer than life? Once, when I was waiting in a hospital, two porters walked past. One showed his colleague a tabloid newspaper headline. The colleague smiled in appreciation of the story, whatever it was (we call news reports "stories"), then asked this crucial question, "Wha'? In real life or in t'soap?" So - first he appreciated the story, then he checked which of the two parallel narratives it belonged to, "real life" or fiction.

On the other hand, social conventions like money, laws, rights, obligations, contracts and personal and family names are creations of human minds; they do not exist in the physical reality shared with other species and with inanimate objects. Thus, human beings are protoplasm with a creative imagination? However, everything outside ourselves is not fiction. We encounter both external reality, in the universe studied by science, and internal reality, when we understand the workings of our own and others' minds.

The Innocent Arrival And The Moonrakers

Poul Anderson's "The Moonrakers" (Beyond The Beyond, London, 1973) was unsatisfactory, at least to me, the first time I read it because it referred to events that had occurred between our pre-space travel present and the story's interplanetary future but did not tell the reader where he could read about those intermediate events or even confirm that they had been recounted in any published text. However, see the comments to the previous post.

James Church in "The Moonrakers" says, "Matheny was a great-uncle of mine..." (p. 150). That completely opaque statement makes sense when we discover that Peter Matheny, together with discussion of the financial poverty of a Martian colony, features in "The Innocent Arrival" by Poul and Karen Anderson, which is included in their collection, The Unicorn Trade (New York, 1984). This collection is a mixed bag, to say the least, but its main emphasis is on fantasy, as its cover demonstrates, so it is the last place where I would have searched for a prequel to the hard sf short story, "The Moonrakers."

I will shortly read "The Innocent Arrival," I think for the first time, before returning to "The Moonrakers," which is now making a lot more future historical sense. Some initial comments on "The Moonrakers": it is solid Andersonian economics, politics and sociology in a hard sf setting. As usual, Anderson applies his knowledge of history to a speculative future. Having just read about the Nomads in his Psychotechnic History, we now read Church's comparison of the asterites, asteroid colonists (Larry Niven says "Belters"), with ancient nomads. The latter were not progenitors but offshoots of civilization - survivors and warriors.

An enthroned asterite Chief of the Keep is described as a throwback to earlier times on Earth although his opulent cave is like a forerunner of the exotic lairs of Anderson's much later Selenarchs.

The Unicorn Trade

The Unicorn Trade by Poul and Karen Anderson (New York, 1984) has two pages of acknowledgments but no contents page. Since the contents are of different types (prose and verse; fiction and non-fiction), lengths (some of the verses are haikus) and authorships (Poul, Karen or Poul & Karen), it is necessary to leaf through the book to find out exactly what is in it. I have ascertained that there are eight pieces of prose fiction either written or co-written by Poul.

I have already discussed "A Feast for the Gods" by Poul and Karen as what I call "gods fiction." (Ghost stories treat ghosts as real; gods stories treat gods as real.) The Anderson's King of Ys Tetralogy is historical fiction with elements of fantasy, including some gods fiction: the Olympians and the Three of Ys withdraw before the new God that is to be in the Age of the Fish. Later, in Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children, Christian exorcism expels the last merfolk from Europe in the fourteenth century. In these cases, however, the gods, while influencing human affairs, remain off-stage so that these novels are not in your face gods fiction.

"Fairy Gold" by Poul Anderson was first published in The Unicorn Trade. Like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, this story ends when morning sunlight transforms fairy gold into dry leaves.

In a single night, when each of the human characters has a different reason for haste:

for killing a troll, Arvel Tarabine receives a large coin of fairy gold from the elf Irrendal who advises him to spend it that very night;

Zulio Pandric the banker, who recognizes fairy gold and knows its properties, gives Arvel not the 400 aureats that the coin is worth but 350 which is enough for what Arvel wants, to buy his passage on an expedition to the New Lands;

Natan Sandana the jeweler gives Zulio 400 aureats' worth of gems for the coin;

Natan buys pearls from a Norrener merchant with the coin;

the merchant gives the coin to a courtesan in return for her services in future;

the courtesan buys a large house from a scholar;

the scholar, who wants to marry, buys Lona Grancy's pottery business and cottage;

Lona had broken off her engagement to Arvel because of his unrealistic attitude but now takes the coin to him to buy their passage on the, previously unrealistic, expedition;

Arvel already has enough for their passage which is fortunate because the sun rises on the coin...

The story is set in an unspecified other world or realm with unfamiliar place names and temples instead of churches so I think that it counts as a parallel universe narrative. I also think that it connects with some other Poul Anderson short stories but I will confirm or disconfirm this by rereading further.

Natan reads the verses of Cappen Varra and a story, classed as "A-Historical," in another Anderson collection is called "The Valor of Cappen Varra" so there is a trail to follow here.

(In The Sandman, the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream is to Auberon's court. Asked for payment, Auberon replies, "You ask Auberon of the fay for gold? Very well, you shall have your gold." Despite what happens to the coins next morning, Shakespeare thinks that his company has been well paid by playing to such an audience.)

Dead Phone

"Dead Phone" by Poul and Karen Anderson (IN Poul and Karen Anderson, The Unicorn Trade, New York, 1984, pp. 91-119) turns out to be not only a detective story but also a ghost story. In this, it must surely differ from the three novels featuring the same private detective, Trygve Yamamura? - although I have yet to read those.

An incoherent phone call from a client wakes Yamamura from a troubled dream during a bad storm. He goes to the client's house where he finds the client dead. It looks like suicide but Yamamura deduces that it is disguised murder. Then it turns out that, at the time of the call, the client's phone was dead because of the storm...

So a dead man used a dead phone. Yamamura cannot remember what the caller said and now thinks that he dreamed the call which felt so real that he half woke and lifted the bedside phone to his ear.

The reader is in the privileged position of knowing exactly what the caller said. He asks Yamamura to come, says that it is very dark, that he had thought that afterward he would know everything or nothing but that instead he doesn't understand and is lonely. There is more, even eerier, that I will leave for others to remember, read or reread! No wonder Yamamura did not (want to?) remember.

He also completely forgets, and we might also unless we reread, what he felt while holding the receiver even before the caller spoke: whirl, seethe, click, "...a whistle that went on forever, and he had a moment to think that the noise was not like any in this world, it was as if he had a fever or as if nothing was at the other end of the line except the huntsman wind." (p. 93)

- so it is clear enough that the line was dead and that the call was not from this world. The story fits in a collection with the fantasy title, The Unicorn Trade.