Poul Anderson's Martians: Owlies, Hordes And Conquerors

Searching the blog for physical descriptions of Poul Anderson's Martians, I found this post that compares two of Anderson's Martian races. I remarked somewhere that, like ERB's green Martians, the Martians of the Technic History have social units called "hordes." However, I cannot find that post now so let me merely repeat the remark here.

That leaves only the Martians of The War Of Two Worlds, the most humanoid of Anderson's Martian races. Again, I am sure that I would have listed their physical characteristics in an earlier post but cannot easily find it so:

long straight legs;
lean waist and arms;
very broad chest and shoulders;
hairless brown skin;
high cheekbones;
domed forehead;
narrow chin;
long pointed ears;
small flat nose;
mobile, human-like mouth;
large slanted golden eyes;
small antennae.

An sf cliche? Sounding more like a man adapted to Mars than an independently evolved organism? Nevertheless, these particular Martians serve their purpose in this early novel.

Manipulation Of History

I asked here: in which three stories by Poul Anderson do aliens among us manipulate Terrestrial history for good or ill? The stories that I had in mind were:

"No Truce With Kings"
"Details"
"Interloper"

Sean M Brooks suggested:

The War Of Two Worlds
"No Truce With Kings"
The Avatar
"Peek! I See You!"

I agree with the inclusion of The War Of Two Worlds.

However:

in The Avatar, do the aliens merely observe?;

 

 in "Peek! I See You!," do the aliens merely trade with one isolated community without intervening elsewhere?

Footnotes

If Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, is Western sf a series of footnotes to Wells? - in which case, Mary Shelley is the equivalent of Thales, the beginning.

Post-Wells works on time travel, in particular Poul Anderson's six volumes, are like a very long series of footnotes to the phrase "...curious possibilities of anachronism and utter confusion..." in The Time Machine. The War Of The Worlds is the grandfather of all alien invasion stories. In popular sf, the Daleks (evolved beings in protective machines) play the roles of Morlocks (persecuting the blond, fair-skinned Thals) and Martians (invading Earth).

When discussing Greg Bear's Eon, I twice explicitly referred to Wells and could have drawn at least three other parallels:

alternative histories on parallel Earths (Men Like Gods; A Modern Utopia);
future technological warfare (The War In The Air etc);
in particular, nuclear warfare (The World Set Free).

These are significant issues, not Buck Rogers stuff. However, Wells did not address artificial intelligence or immortality.

The War Of Two Worlds: Concluding Remarks

Poul Anderson's The War of Two Worlds (New York, 1959) describes a war that is of two worlds, Earth and Mars, but with three sides, Earthmen, Martians and extra-Solars. Thus, the title informs us that the book has a similar theme to one by Wells but also misleads us as to its contents and the existence of the third side is revealed gradually.

The Martian, Regelin dzu Coruthan, reflecting that victory over Earth has cost his people a quarter of their small population and impoverished the rest, remarks, "Oh, a cold victory!" (p. 31) The phrase "Cold Victory," applied in a different context, is the title of a pivotal story in Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

Even in the midst of Anderson's action-adventure fiction, we enjoy his descriptions of natural scenes:

"Sunrise came in a shout of light. The long grass outside was one glitter from dew, and the lake rippled and flashed beyond a screen of spruce and beech and sumac. It smelled of growth here, green leaves, needles and forest mould, water and sunlight." (p. 90)

- a full circle from "Sunrise" to "sunlight."

"It is late as I write these final lines. Outside, there is the cool northern night, and the shimmer on the lake and the whisper of trees." (p. 103)

We have been led to believe that the narrator, Arnfeld, and his Martian ally, Regelin, die shortly after Arnfeld completes his manuscript but there is a clever surprise ending. The leader of the metamorphs thought that they were dead because he saw the bodies of two of his own people who had been tricked into masquerading as Arnfeld and Regelin and had then been killed!

At the end, Intelligence Prime "...pleaded for the life of his people." (p. 108) They should be spared and have much to teach but should have come in peace in the first place.

Disintegrators

Another common sf prop is a disintegrating gun. Again, Poul Anderson, in The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959), makes this cliche real by going into detail: a dense force-field, generated and projected in a tight beam without noise or recoil, then encountering matter, reacts with intermolecular forces and yields its energy to the molecules, forcing them to fly apart, reducing the object not to single particles, because the molecular bonds are too strong, but certainly into separate chunks.

The gun, charged by an alloy in a metastable energy state, can be adjusted so that a wide beam kills a man "...noiselessly by disrupting cell nuclei..." (p. 93) whereas a narrow beam blows a thin segment to atoms at greater range. And the principle has many peaceful applications although weapons were invented first.

Metamorphs

Metamorphs, or shape-changers, are a familiar sf concept. Poul Anderson, as always, does not merely accept the idea but reasons about it logically. In his The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959), no such beings have evolved naturally but one Sirian race, having mastered biology, uses manipulation of individual genes and forced growth to develop artificial mutations as metamorphic spies and infiltrators with:

pigmentation cells;
flexible tissue;
a calcium system able to grow bones and teeth in seconds probably around a cartilaginous base;
a nervous system able to control these many intricate details;
an equilibrium that can be upset only be electric shocks because nerve currents are electrical.

Thus, Anderson not only rationalizes protean powers but also extrapolates a logical weakness for such organisms. And he addresses not only their biology but also their sociology. Having helped their creators to conquer the Sirian system, they are feared, ostracized and forbidden to breed so they steal a spaceship and set out to colonize the Solar System, replacing high officials of Earth and Mars and their families, then engineering a war that weakens both planets.

As with Frankenstein, we are shown a monster, then made to feel sorry for it.

Probabilitas?

(We are near the end of November and this is the ninetieth post of the month so it might be the last till December. We have another day long trip from Lancaster to York, for a Winter Fair, scheduled for tomorrow.)

I remember from school that one standard of Classical drama was probabilitas, meaning, in this context, "plausibility" or "credibility" rather than "probability." So how plausible is Poul Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959)?

The introductory passage makes two significant statements about the "...lord of the Solar System..." (p. 5):

he thinks that Earth is "[a] lovely world...a broad fair planet...one to fight for, to seize and hold like a beloved mate..." (ibid.), whereas the Martians, suffering in thick atmosphere and high gravity, occupy Earth only as a military necessity;

he has a "...great crested head..." (p. 6) whereas the Martians each have only two small antennae (p. 23).

These are early clues that the real controllers of the Solar System are not the natives of Mars and conquerors of Earth. But this is where the plausibility questions begin. A massive, outrageous deception is being perpetrated on an interplanetary scale yet is quite casually penetrated. Then the handful of characters who have learned the truth survive indefinitely as hunted fugitives. Like all good Andersonian heroes, they are able to knock aside the gun of a state trooper and make their escape.

Still, it is always good to see former enemies, in this case Earthmen and Martians, united against a common enemy. Solarians, unite.

Martians

How many fictional races of Martians are there? I have lost count of Poul Anderson's although he surely has over half a dozen. One of his sets of "Martians" comprises extra-Solar colonists although they share certain physical characteristics with an indigenous Martian race in another story.

The "Marshies" of his The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959) sound like cartoon Martians:

seven feet tall;
long straight legs;
lean waist and arms;
large chest and shoulders;
hairless brown skin;
high cheekbones;
domed forehead;
narrow chin;
long pointed ears;
small flat nose;
mobile mouth;
large slanted golden eyes, protected by additional transparent eyelids from Terrestrial sunlight;
small antennae;
black uniforms;
able to live, uncomfortably, in Terrestrial atmosphere and gravity, unlike men on Mars;
huge spongy lungs drawing oxygen from food as well as from air by "...symbiosis with anaerobic bacteria." (p. 26)

This description has three features:

some logical extrapolations about what bipedal life should look like on Mars;
a few cartoonish elements;
recognizably characteristic Andersonian speculation about alternative life forms.

The Martian conquerors are polite like the Chinese. Thus, life on occupied Earth is not very different from being ruled by human beings of a different nationality. There is nothing really alien or unEarthly, as there was under Wells' very different Martians.

The War Of Two Worlds II

Rereading Poul Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959) is slowed by other activities. For example, we have just watched a BBC program about the life of CS Lewis. However, it is alright for rereading to be slowed. There is no hurry to find out how the story ends and there is time to appreciate descriptive passages. Chapter I begins:

"Sundown was brief, night came swiftly out of the Atlantic and flowed across the world. A few lamps blinked on in the city, but most of it lay in darkness; there was more light overhead, as the stars came out." (p. 5)

I have realized only now that I should have asked: why is the city dark? This is explained later.

Many works of fiction describe Terrestrial sunsets but science fiction also describes scenes elsewhere in the Solar System:

"The asteroid spun swiftly through a great cold dark, between a million frosty stars and the glittering belt of the Milky Way. The sun was remote, a tiny heartless disc whose light was pale on the cruel jagged rocks." (p. 10)

Two very different views of the Sun.

A third quotation indirectly links the first two as a spaceman returned from the asteroid looks across a city:

"They'd told me New York had had it bad, but I never realized it would be like this.

"The haughty skyline of Manhattan was a jumble of steel skeletons, stripped, snapped off, and stark against the sky." (p. 15)

(Some of the buildings had also melted.) Quoting this single sentence, I have just noticed its alliteration: sky, steel, skeletons, stripped, snapped, stark, sky - and listing the "s" words highlights the sky "sandwich."

That third quotation answers the question raised by the first. Cities are dark because Earth has been hit hard in a space war. The first time reader reads on to find out what happens next...

A straightforward pulp sf plot but with well-observed details elevating Anderson's writing above the pulp level.

Loyalty

In Poul Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959), after twenty years of war, Mars has captured Luna and defeated Earth. Under the terms of the armistice, the Earth space service must yield Pallas Base in good condition to the Marshies. The executive officer on Pallas, David Arnfeld, intends to obey that order and therefore must carpet an engineer who sets out to wreck safety controls so that the main power pile will blow up some time.

The engineer's loyalty is to his race. Arnfeld's is to the Earth HQ that issues his orders. Arnfeld can also point out first that the Terrestrial population will suffer if the armistice is broken - here, loyalty to family is invoked - and secondly that:

"Maybe we can get our revenge later, but that won't be for a long time yet." (p. 10)

So, fellow Terrestrials, which of them is right: Arnfeld or the engineer?

The War Of Two Worlds

The text of Poul Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds (New York, 1959) comprises:

an introductory passage without a heading;
Chapters I-XI;
an Epilogue.

In the unentitled introductory passage, "...Intelligence Prime, lord of the Solar System..." (p. 5), described as possessing  a "...great crested head..." (p. 6), starts to read a text hand-written by a now dead Earthman called David Arnfeld.

It is a safe bet that Chapters I-XI are narrated by Arnfeld and that the Epilogue returns to Intelligence Prime's pov.

Prime's people have conquered Earth and Mars. He refers to "...the Exodus..." (p. 6) and aspires to "...know peace under friendly stars..." (p. 5) so the conquerors seem to have crossed an interstellar distance. Although he is "lord," he operates in secret:

"It was not risky for him to appear at the window. His secret office was so high above darkened Sao Paulo..." (p. 5)

Contradiction?

Arnfeld's text, dated 2043, gives his birth year as 2017, just four years from now and five years before the start of a war. He entered Lunar Academy at the age of twelve and was exec of Pallas Base at twenty five so his twenty first century has more interplanetary capacity than ours has had so far.

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.

Another Ace Double

I have in my possession an Ace Double book published in New York in 1959. On one side is The War Of Two Worlds by Poul Anderson, described on the cover as a "Complete Novel." Additional cover blurb declares, "Earth Must Choose - The Martians Or The Monsters!" The cover illustration shows four streamlined air- or spacecraft, two flying past, one being shot down by an Earthman with a futuristic hand weapon, the fourth already crashed on the rocky terrain.

Inside the cover:

p. 1 summarizes the plot and advises "Turn this book over for second complete novel";
p. 2 is a "CAST OF CHARACTERS";
p. 3 is the title page for The War Of Two Worlds;
p. 4 is the publishing details;
pp. 5-108 are the text of novel.

Thus, this novel fills 104 pages. A novel is a long prose fiction. My rule of thumb for a novel is 100+ pages so this work qualifies. I read it once on purchase years ago and will reread it to blog.

On the other side is Threshold Of Eternity by John Brunner, "Complete & Unabridged." Cover blurb informs us that "All Time And Space Was Their Battlefield." The cover shows a giant in a gas mask tearing through a wall, knocking over machines and threatening four space-suited men, two of them armed.

p. 1 summarizes the plot and advises "Turn this book over for second complete novel";
p. 2 presents information about the author;
p. 3 is the title page;
p. 4 is the publishing details;
pp. 5-148 are the text.

I have not read Threshold Of Eternity but will because:

I have not read much Brunner but know that he could write well;

I am particularly interested in time travel although I found Brunner's Times Without Number disappointingly incoherent (about a time travel organization but in no way comparable to Anderson's Time Patrol series);

I will compare Threshold Of Eternity with Anderson's works about conflicts through time and comment either here or on the Logic of Time Travel blog.

Yet More On Mars

See here.

At least four works by Poul Anderson -

The War Of Two Worlds,
Shield,
"Duel On Syrtis,"
"The Martian Crown Jewels" -

each present a different version of indigenous Martians.

I have yet to read "The Martian Crown Jewels," which I understand is a Sherlock Holmes tribute, and would be grateful if someone could point me towards a collection or anthology containing this story.

Anderson's Holmes tributes are various:

Holmes and Watson appear in "Time Patrol," the first Time Patrol story, and Holmes is mentioned again as "Altamont" later in the series;
a descendant of Holmes features in "The Queen Of Air And Darkness," the last Rustum History story;
a criminal character called Moriarty appears in There Will Be Time, the last work in the Maurai sequence;
better than this, a lineal descendant of Moriarty is the viewpoint character of "The Word From Space," a non-series short story.

From Mars to Holmes covers just two of Anderson's numerous interests.