Non-Fiction

It is always a pleasure to read Poul Anderson's non-fiction as well as his fiction. There is more of this than you might think because there are introductions, afterwords and occasional articles in some of the many volumes of fiction and there is also a fascinating article on future histories in a SFWA Bulletin. Having just read the non-fiction Thermonuclear Warfare, I hope soon to receive a copy of Is There Life On Other Worlds?

In non-fiction, the author addresses his readers directly as if in conversation whereas, in a work of fiction, the same auctorial voice is mediated through characters in imaginary scenarios. Thus, in Thermonuclear Warfare, Poul Anderson responds to Soviet aggression whereas, in the Technic History, the Marchwardens of Avalon respond to Terran aggression and, later, Max Abrams and Dominic Flandry respond to Merseian aggression.

In Is There Life On Other Worlds?, I hope to gain some insight into the likelihood or otherwise of Merseians, Ythrians etc. The vast majority of Anderson's aliens are bipedal with arms and a head displaying an immediately recognizable face: two eyes above a mouth maybe with a nose between and ears at the sides. How likely is this? If, as I suspect, Terrestrial animals have arbitrarily inherited these facial features from our earliest marine ancestors, then there is no necessity for them to be endlessly duplicated elsewhere. For example, if Larry Niven's tripedal, two-headed Pierrson's Puppeteers write science fiction, then they probably model all unHearthly intelligences on themselves.

Thermonuclear Warfare And James Blish

I found passages in Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963) that were relevant to four of his fictional works:

Twilight World
"Kings Who Die"
The Psychotechnic History
Planet Of No Return

This passage:

"Many will object that the requirements of an aggressive policy will lead to national regimentation, until we are hardly distinguishable from our opponents." (p. 153)

- is relevant to James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy. In Volume I, set in the early twenty first century, American anti-Communism becomes as repressive as Russian anti-Fascism so that the two systems come to be indistinguishable and are bloodlessly united under a single Premier! - although this Spenglerian Fall of the West is preceded by the escape of a few Westerners from the Solar System in FTL spaceships. Centuries later, the Terrestrial Bureaucratic State falls when anti-gravity is rediscovered and entire cities are able to escape, seeking work among the Colonials.

Thus, this is a future in which thermonuclear war is prevented. The Russians conquer by stealth. Another Blish work, A Case Of Conscience, Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, presents a different outcome of the Cold War. The arms race leads to a Shelter Race until the entire population lives permanently in subterranean cities where there are Corridor Riots. Anderson discusses shelters in Thermonuclear Warfare but does not suggest permanent life underground.

Anderson hoped that the Soviet Union would be defeated by persistent limited wars whereas instead its inefficient command economy was bankrupted by its self-imposed arms race.

"No Peace In Our Time"

Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963), Chapter 9, "No Peace In Our Time," is the core of the book, assessing not the technology but the philosophy of the Cold War. In fact, Anderson uses the term "religion" rather than "philosophy":

"[Communism] is a universalist missionary religion." (p. 104)

He defines "...a religion as an emotionally charged system of beliefs, including the conclusions drawn from the basic premises. We say 'emotionally charged' to distinguish religions from philosophies." (p. 105)

I use the term religion differently but Anderson's usage is clear enough for present purposes. (In fact, he later refers to "...supernatural religion..." as one kind of religion (p. 115).)

It follows from this that the Cold War was not just about politics or economics:

"...what is the conflict all about?

"Americans tend to speak of a clash between 'capitalism' and 'collectivism', as if two economic systems were contending. But this is simply not true..." (p. 102)

Possible Meanings of "Collectivism"
(i) a group of people whose temperament and culture is such that they voluntarily and spontaneously work together towards common aims;
(ii) a group of people who, against their natural inclinations, are forced to work together by an entrenched bureaucracy controlling a powerful state apparatus - thus the idea, not the reality, of a collective.

I think that (i), where it exists, is unobjectionable but that (ii) is clearly what is meant here! Anderson does not deny bureaucratic control in the USSR but points out that:

European Socialists and Social Democrats are anti-Communists;
some mixed-economy countries are on the Western side;
"...socialistic Israel is friendly to us..." (p. 103);
some Arab states are on the Russian side;
many Western businessmen want to do business with the Eastern bloc;
tariffs etc prevent the US from being a free enterprise economy.

Thus, as he rightly argues, "capitalism versus collectivism" is an over-simplification. Nevertheless, I am going to propose a similar formula that does identify the conflict as economic and political and not as "religious." My formula is "market capitalism versus state capitalism."

Capitalism involves competitive production of wealth but markets are not the only form of competition. In Russia, the bureaucracy accumulated collective wealth in order to compete militarily against the Western powers. Stalin and others rose through the bureaucracy during civil war after a revolution. Their siege mentality made them crush opposition and increase production not for social aims but for military competition and they used Marxist language to justify this, thus generating the sickeningly bland propaganda that Anderson quotes:

"The social sciences must continue to struggle with determination against bourgeois ideology, against right Socialist theory and practice and against revisionism and dogmatism. They must uphold the purity of the principles of Marxism-Leninism." (pp. 109-110)

Orwell parodied this well! Meanwhile, social scientists must try to understand society, testing received ideas and developing new ones. I know some contemporary British Marxists who analyze the economy and society intelligently but their link back to Marx is through Trotsky, not through Stalin, and on some issues they disagree with Trotsky.

Meanwhile, back to Anderson's "religious" Communists. They existed and he tells us how he met some of them. At the top of the Russian Communist Party were cynical wielders of power whereas European Communist Parties had many devoted members including heroic fighters against Naziism. I honestly do not know where, within the Party hierarchies, devotion ended and cynicism began or how so many well-intentioned people were able to stay in those Parties for so long. But it was a day for rejoicing when the Soviet Union, bankrupted by its pointless military competition, finally collapsed in 1989.

Fiction And Non-Fiction

I have found two germs of Poul Anderson's fiction in his non-fiction work, Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963).

First, the suggestion that nuclear powers might avoid damage to their homelands by waging nuclear war on neutral ground or in outer space:

"Limited thermonuclear contests for limited objectives might be fought in the Sahara Desert or beyond the moon." (p. 76)

This is the short story, "Kings Who Die."

Secondly, Anderson notes that governments and corporations  increasingly use systems analysis, games theory and operations research to plan "...five to ten years ahead." (p. 85)

He adds that:

"New [intellectual tools] may be added in future." (ibid.)

This is the science of man as developed in the Psychotechnic History and Planet Of No Return.

I am only about half way through the book so will look out for more fiction-nonfiction parallels.

A Moral Question

I am reading Chapter 6, "Concerning Total War," in Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963). This chapter is dense with data about acceptable and unacceptable levels of radiation on which I am unable to comment.

However, I have reached this passage which does raise one question of policy:

"As long as our whole population is highly vulnerable to attack - or to the by-products of a purely military attack - we have no choice except to threaten retaliation on the enemy's own people." (p. 75)

Well, we always do have a choice. If personally attacked, I could choose Ghandian non-violence - although I wouldn't. But, in the situation that Anderson describes, I would not threaten retaliation on the enemy's own people. I am not able to say what would happen in practice, of course, but any country whose policies I was able to influence (which in practice means none!) would develop every possible defensive measure (e.g., land mines and anti-tank guns against tanks, not tanks against tanks) but meanwhile would pledge not to attack and would call on the populations of other countries to pressurize their governments not to attack either.

To attack a population with nuclear weapons would, to my mind, be unacceptable. Therefore, to threaten to do so would also be unacceptable. Meanwhile, it would be an urgent priority to reduce our own population's vulnerability, of course.

Military Intelligence

Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963) impresses me with the fact that anyone thinking strategically about warfare needs to assess a lot of information of different kinds, not only military but also technological, political, economic and psychological.

On that last point, Hitler was "...nihilistic..." whereas Stalin was "...coldly calculating..." (p. 55), so it would be criminally negligent to say just that they were both dictators. Because so much information, or "military intelligence," is necessary, appalling mistakes have been made:

"...it is impossible to forgive the stupidity of leaders like Haig, Joffre, and Hindenburg." (p. 26)

Military intelligence is as necessary to those who want to prevent war as to those who want to wage it. An anti-war campaign needs, apart from slogans and speakers, advice from military historians and former combatants - but anti-, like pro-, war campaigners do include the informed as well as the un-.

My Italian Fascist friend has a detailed knowledge of three major conflicts, the Napoleonic War and World Wars I and II, including their hardware. I cannot share his enthusiasm for all these details but this is one reason why we value conversations with friends and books like this one by Anderson.

Anderson obviously had a lot of background knowledge when he wrote, e. g., The People Of The Wind, in which leaders on the colonized planet Avalon calculate and plan what risks they might take when resisting annexation by the Terran Empire.

Thermonuclear Warfare, not Twilight World

In Poul Anderson's Twilight World, a nuclear war causes so many human mutations that the government is able to gather a community of individuals whose mutations are beneficial, enhanced abilities rather than deformities. Eventually, the whole human race inherits such abilities.

Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963) argues that such an outcome is impossible:

"Some romancers have suggested that increased irradiation of man will simply increase the rate of evolution and so create a race of supermen. But this, again, is nonsense...

"Mutation, a strictly random process, nearly always does the wrong thing. A few babies born with superior intelligence, eyesight, or whatever [as in Twilight World] would be of no use to a human race most of whose children were being born defective. And even these few accidental superiorities would often be nullified by deleterious genes in the same individual.

"For practical purposes, then, we can say that all mutations are bad..." (p. 39)

I began reading Thermonuclear Warfare in the hope that it would not only inform us the readers about its subject (which it does) but also provide background information for his Psychotechnic History. Instead, it refutes his Twilight World future history! But this is what happens in speculative fiction. Some speculations pan out; others don't.

Science And Philosophy

(Please bear with me. All this is relevant.)

In the Greek/European/Western tradition, Thales was the first philosopher and Plato was the first written philosopher but Socrates played a major intermediate role. First, he was Plato's mentor. Secondly, it was he that differentiated what we call "philosophy" from what we call "science."

Science used to be called "natural philosophy." That description exactly fits Thales and the other pre-Socratics. They observed and reasoned but were not able to practice scientific method because that was not due to be invented until a long time later by, according to James Blish, Roger Bacon. The pre-Socratics wanted to know which was the most basic natural element. Thales thought that it was water and he was not far wrong. Water is two thirds hydrogen and:

"The simplest atom is that of hydrogen."
- Poul Anderson, Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963), p. 12.

(Thales was also an early entrepreneur but that is another story.)

Socrates explicitly stated that he was simply not interested in unimportant details like how many material substances there were. Instead, he wanted to analyze important concepts like Justice and Goodness. Hence, Plato's belief in the primacy and reality of "Ideas." Socratic philosophy has to be called "conceptual" or "analytic" to differentiate it from pre-, and indeed also post-, Socratic natural philosophy.

I am a Socratic philosopher because I prefer conceptual analysis to empirical science and cannot easily follow Poul Anderson's summary of nuclear physics. But events have shown that Socrates was wrong to think that such details were unimportant.

Thermonuclear Warfare: Introduction

So far, I have read only the Introduction to Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963), in which Anderson writes:

"The survival of this nation, of liberty, and quite possibly of what we know as civilization, depends on an enlightened public opinion." (p. 8)

We can now add "...also, the survival of humanity and of every blade of grass."

Do I want my nation to survive? Not as at presently constituted. As a matter of fact, Scotland is about to vote on independence from the UK but that would be a fairly minor alteration. Our history includes the inception of a United Kingdom under James VI of Scotland/I of England.

What I do hope is that people will be able to continue to live happily in the British Isles or rather that many people will be able to start to live happily in the British Isles - currently, there is growing poverty, job insecurity and divisive xenophobia. The current division of the world into armed nation states looks like being part of the problem rather than the solution. However, it has strong roots in history, is preferable to previous arrangements and is not about to be ended quickly.

Nationalistic thinking makes us deplore the explosion of a bomb in one of our own cities more than the bombing of a city elsewhere. After a terrorist attack, someone said, "This must never happen again in our country!" I agree that, "This must never happen again!"

Thermonuclear Warfare

How many of Poul Anderson's futuristic sf works are post-nuclear?

Twilight World
Shield
The Psychotechnic future history
The Maurai future history
Vault Of The Ages
Planet Of No Return

I have found so much depth and wealth in the Psychotechnic History that I am reluctant to stop blogging about it but I may have wrung the series dry for the time being. However, that future history begins in the immediate aftermath of World War III, in the 1960's, with partisans still fighting in Europe, including one who had been involved in World War II.

Therefore, to read a non-fiction work, Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963), is not to leave this subject but rather to delve more deeply into the author's background thinking. Since 1963, the Cold War has ended and the Nuclear Winter has been conceptualized. On the other hand, instruments of genocide continue to be stockpiled  even though there is an urgent need for technology instead to be directed towards addressing immediate needs and problems.

I will read Thermonuclear Warfare for what it discloses both about our world and about the parallel universe of the Psychotechnic Institute.