A Multiversal Wavefront

Poul Anderson refers to Old Wilwidh on Merseia. Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling refer to Old Kzin. We think of Old England. Evocative language. The use of this adjective with a capital initial conveys that its hearers or readers are aware of history, time and change.

One pocket universe comprises the Old Phoenix. Another might be a control room where an observer monitoring screens and instruments detects a multiversal wavefront with details manifesting alternately as Martians, Merseians, Moties, kzinti etc. Multi-dimensional patterns emerge. A Solar Commonwealth morphs into a CoDominium, each succeeded by a different First Empire:

"'Those two worlds - and many more, for all I know - are in some way the same. The same fight was being waged, here the Nazis and there the Middle World, but in both places, Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind at war with man and the works of man. In both worlds it was the time of need for Denmark and France. So Ogier came forth in both of them, as he must.'"
-Poul Anderson, Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977), p. 155.

The observer in my hypothetical control room must dispatch agents to crucial moments where they intervene to prevent inter-cosmic chaos. Although the observer knows of a single timeline protected by a Time Patrol, he oversees multiple timelines.

"'Once the crisis was past in both worlds, the job done...well, equilibrium had been re-established. There was no unbalanced force to send me across space-time. So I stayed.'" (ibid.)

Our history does not record Ogier opposing the Nazis - or the Merseians, kzinti etc - but what might occur without our knowledge?

Religion And Politics In Fiction

A novel can be written by a Catholic or about Catholics or both. In his hard sf, Poul Anderson respects his Catholic characters. In his fantasy novel, Three Hearts And Three Lions, the protagonist converts to Catholicism because of his experiences in another universe.

We could list other Catholics in sf and have already mentioned some. See here and here. However, the greatest possible respect for Catholicism is shown in Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's fantasy novel, Escape From Hell, where Hell is reorganized in accordance with Vatican II! Can you Adam and Eve it? (The entertaining British rhyming slang.) Well, as a matter of fact, no, I do not believe it! But Niven and Pournelle have logic on their side. Dante wrote in accordance with the Catholic beliefs of his period. Therefore, if the beliefs change or develop, then so should the Inferno.

I can usually enjoy fiction despite disagreeing with the author's politics - always in the case of Poul Anderson. There are some sticking points with a few other writers, e.g.:

the later Heinlein lectures and hectors instead of entertaining;

Frederick Forsyth parodies a left wing College lecturer and makes unnecessary auctorial asides, on one occasion implying that, since some atheists are against the Bomb, all theists should be for it;

I have already mentioned a scene that I found problematic in Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history -

Falkenberg orders a massacre.
copied from here.

But these occasions are few and far between.

Cosmic Comparisons

SM Stirling's Conquistador explicitly acknowledges its sources here, including two titles by Poul Anderson. Let us therefore consider the following sequence:

Anderson, Three Hearts And Three Lions
Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest
Stirling, Conquistador

- three novels of cross-time travel.

However, the two Anderson titles are fantasies, involving supernatural beings and magic, whereas Conquistador by contrast is science fiction, assuming only:

an infinite series of parallel universes with identical physical laws;

a technological means of travel between them.

Adrienne Rolfe's experience differs from ours in just one respect: in the existence of the Gate and of what lies beyond it. However, what is beyond the Gate is an Earth where history went differently, not where myths are true. Thus, Three Hearts... and ...Tempest are as fantastic to Adrienne as they are to us.

Her literary predecessors also include the group of extra-temporal exiles in HG Wells' Men Like Gods but these characters are hardly major players in the history of sf. One major predecessor of many science fictional space and time explorers is the original Time Traveler, who could well have encountered a sabre-tooth as the New Virginians do at the end of Conquistador. In the Epilogue to The Time Machine, the outer narrator speculates that the Time Traveler has gone to:

the Stone Age;
the Cretaceous Sea;
the Jurassic Age;
the Triassic Age -

- so we can legitimately imagine him among prehistoric animals even though Wells never wrote a sequel.

Going For Infinity: Miscellaneous

Poul Anderson's Going For Infinity (New York, 2002) is a retrospective not only of short stories but also of novels. Three Hearts And Three Lions and A Midsummer Tempest are represented by excerpts and The High Crusade is represented by its sequel, "Quest." We can think other novels that could have been represented by a shorter prequel or sequel. Anderson uses his phrase, "...a wilderness of stars..." (p. 204), once more in his synopsis of The High Crusade.

The Harold Shea stories by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt were Anderson's "...main inspiration..." (p. 238) for Three Hearts... Thus, Pratt joins the list of Anderson's antecedents. Anthony Boucher, Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, asked Anderson to include a parallel universes rationale in Three Hearts... Thus, Boucher joins John W Campbell as an editor influential on Anderson. Thanks to parallel universes, the hero of Three Hearts... crosses over into A Midsummer Tempest and there meets a character from Anderson's two Operation... volumes.

Anderson's multiverse is more compact than Michael Moorcock's sprawling Multiverse which has a Conjunction of the Million Spheres comparable to DC Comics Crisis on Infinite Earths. Moorcock's Multiverse has been graphically adapted. I have discussed how Anderson's works might be adapted for comic strips and screen (also here) but it would have to be done very well or not at all. Anderson himself heard that the film of The High Crusade was "...a piece of botchwork..." (p. 203)

WWII Fantasy And Completion

On this blog, I have mentioned three British writers of graphic fantasy: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey. A comparable American author is Roy Thomas, whose monthly comic book, The Young All-Stars, combined mythical, literary and historical characters with newly invented superheroes during World War II, each twelve months of publication corresponding to about two months of WWII time.

I mention Thomas for two reasons. First, comparison with Poul Anderson, who also combined fantasy with history while his fantasy novel, Three Hearts And Three Lions, begins with an important incident during World War II.

The second reason is more fanciful and whimsical. I quoted Anderson's character, Aycharaych, calling death a completion. Completeness is a virtue in art. When The Young All-Stars was being published, I was unsure whether to continue collecting it. I was strangely relieved when it was announced that the title would soon be cancelled. This meant that I would shortly have the entire series complete. I may be alone in seeing the parallel - Aycharaych sees death as a completion and I saw the cancellation of an imaginative series as also its completion.

A Multiversal Threat?

Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, four stories unambiguously set neither on our Earth nor on another planet but on another Earth in an alternative timeline, does not mention multiple timelines (I don't think) except in the Introduction written for the collected edition. Three Hearts And Three Lions begins on our Earth, then moves to another. Finally, A Midsummer Tempest provides an inter-universal meeting place for travelers from many timelines. Thus, there is narrative progression.

In that Introduction to Operation Chaos:

"Whatever manifold form it takes, the war of Law and Chaos surely goes on in them all.
"We have learned certain things. We ought to broadcast the lesson and the warning."
-Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (Sutton, Surrey, 1995), p. 2.

Law and Chaos make war in Three Hearts... and in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse. Order and Chaos make war in DC Comics, including Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. So what is the warning? Will Chaos attack all the timelines simultaneously? Will characters from different Anderson works and from other fictional universes have to join forces against a common threat? Well, no. Anderson was an imaginative but also a restrained author who continued to write good novels of different genres set in different periods and universes but who did not follow up on that Introductory warning. Its sense of impending menace contributed to the particular volume but did not need to be taken any further.

Multiverse

Poul Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, is the setting for:

"House Rule"
"Losers' Night"
A Midsummer Tempest, xi THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX.
A Midsummer Tempest, xii LATER.
A MidsummerTempest, Epilogue THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX.

In A Midsummer Tempest, the inn is a meeting place for:

Prince Rupert from the Shakespearean universe of the same novel;

Holger Carlsen from the Carolingian universe of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions;

Valeria Matuchek from the magical universe of Anderson's Operation Chaos and Operation Luna.

In "House Rule," the inn is a meeting place for:

Nicholas van Rijn from the hard sf universe of Anderson's Technic History;
Sancho Panza from Don Quixote;
Erik the Red, possibly from our universe.

Other guests from our universe or nearer ones include:

the first person narrator of the two short stories;
Leonardo da Vinci;
Albert Einstein;
Heloise and Abelard;
Francois Villon;
Winston Churchill;
an unnamed but identifiable Irish political leader.

Anderson wrote that he hoped to return to the Old Phoenix again...

The inn could have provided a framing sequence for a collection of new stories to display each of the different genres that Anderson wrote. Neil Gaiman used his Inn of the Worlds' End as a Chaucerian venue.

Today, I have read in Latin Caesar's and Tacitus' accounts of the Druids and their resistance to Roman rule.

Multiverse: Hard SF And Fantasy

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

The preceding two posts, about a Three Hearts And Three Lions sequel and an AI/STL story, demonstrate that Multiverse rightly celebrates the yin and yang of Poul Anderson's versatile creative imagination, both his ingenious "hard fantasy" and his speculative hard sf. Tad Williams highlights this literary polarity in the afterword to his "Three Lilies and Three Leopards (And a Participation Ribbon in Science)":

Three Hearts - "...trying to figure out how [a magical world] actually WORKED" (p. 393);

Tau Zero -"...fictional science...as exciting as magic..." (ibid.).

Inspired by Anderson, Williams is a "...'hard fantasy' writer..." who also pursues ideas irrespective of "...genre boundaries." (ibid.) Anderson showed him that "...facts make fantasy more believable..." (ibid.)

Earlier on this blog, I used used the term "hard fantasy" to categorize:

Magic Inc by Robert Heinlein, about magic as technology;

Anderson's Operation... series, developing Heinlein's premise further;

Black Easter/The Day After Judgment by James Blish, about demons but stylistically indistinguishable from hard sf;

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, combining gods and magic with scientifically rationalized time travel.

Harry Turtledove and Tad Williams write Three Hearts... sequels that move in completely different directions. I was unable to cope with the complexities of "Three Lilies..." when reading and blogging late at night. That will have to be another post.

Peter And Poul II

The previous post highlighted some parallels between A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson and The Alchemist's Revenge by Peter Cakebread. Both novels can be characterized by saying that the English Civil War of the seventeenth century is being fought in a version of history where magic works. (Such a historical difference presupposes a corresponding cosmological difference but let's not go that far right now.)

One difference between the novels (so I initially thought) was that A Midsummer Tempest also places more recent technology in the seventeenth century. But so does The Alchemists' Revenge! Reading further, I find that not all of the anachronistic mechanisms are alchemically empowered. Some of them are merely ingenious engineering - although still suspected of Satanic influence, of course.

Each of these novels is one part of a vaster fictional universe but the ways in which this is done could not be more different.

A Midsummer Tempest...
...is set in a universe where all of Shakespeare's plays were literally true. Specifically, it is a sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Further, this Shakespearean universe coexists with the Carolingian universe of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions and with the magical universe of his two Operation... volumes. Prince Rupert meets Holger Danske and Valeria Matuchek in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix.

The Alchemist's Revenge...
...is the "First Book of the Companie of Reluctant Heroes." Further, this series is set in the universe of the Clockwork & Chivalry Role Playing Game (RPG) by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton. Since RPG's are interactive dramas, maybe there is some connection with Old Will after all!

In both cases...
...the fiction must be understood in the context of the history:

"...for all the differences, much remains the same as the real history. Traditional society and values are crumbling; religious and political factions vie for supremacy; kin fight kin, in a bitter struggle for England's future; and ordinary folk struggle to get by, in a world turned upside down...
"...if we were going to do history, even alternate history, we needed to get the history right, before going on to change it."
-Peter Cakebread, The Apprentice's Revenge (Swindon, 2013), pp. 214-215.

Right on.

Beginnings

Poul Anderson's fantasy novel, Three Hearts And Three Lions, was serialised in 1953 but not published as a book until 1961. Thus, Anderson's first fantasy novel in book form was The Broken Sword, published in 1954, the same year as his first science fiction (sf) novel, Brain Wave.

Thus, here are three beginnings:

Brain Wave was not only his first sf novel but also the first in which he speculated about interstellar travel;

Three Hearts... is the first of several fantasy novels that are set in alternative timelines but whose characters can meet in an inter-cosmic inn;

The Broken Sword (London, 1977) is the earliest of his fantasy novels to be set in our timeline - although it is not the first in chronological order of fictitious events because it refers to the sunken city of Ys which exists and is sunk in a tetralogy by Poul and Karen Anderson.

That The Broken Sword is set in our timeline is shown by the concluding words of the later written Foreword:

"As for what became of those who were still alive at the end of the book, and the sword, and Faerie itself - which obviously no longer exists on Earth - that is another tale, which may someday be told." (p. 12)

That tale was not told but the Foreword clearly places this version of "Faerie" in our past.

Chapter I of The Broken Sword is historical fiction. A Jutlander settles in England and marries a Christian but continues to offer to Thor, Frey, Odin and Aegir despite conflict on this issue with his Christian priest. So far, supernatural beings, including "...the White Christ..." are objects of belief and worship but not yet active subjects in their own right (p. 17). That is soon changed by the opening sentence of Chapter II:

"Imric the elf-earl rode out by night..." (p. 18)

So what might have remained historical fiction has become historical fantasy. But Anderson's Foreword suggested that the earlier, unrevised text had belonged to a different genre. It had contained "...rationalization..." with "...the dwellers in Faerie...technologically advanced beyond their human contemporaries..." and with their "...alien metabolism..." vulnerable to actinic light and to electrochemical reactions with iron (p. 11). That would have made this an sf novel.

The first volume of Tolkien's better known fantasy trilogy was also published in 1954. Thus, Anderson and Tolkien were approximately simultaneous in their adaptations of North European mythology into modern fantasy. However, it was Tolkien's success that made heroic fantasy respectable and thus enabled Anderson's novel to be republished later in revised form.

Tolkien ennobled the elves whereas Anderson kept them immoral, as in the Eddas and sagas. In that sense, his novel is more authentic.

Between Worlds

When a character moves between worlds, how does the author describe the transition? Sometimes, the character imagines another world, then enters it - and later wonders whether it was real - but usually the other world is unequivocally real. I will mention only a few examples from the works of three fantasy writers, CS Lewis, Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman.

Lewis' most famous entrance to another world is a wardrobe but there is a better example in a later book. The characters look at a painting of the ship the Dawn Treader until it seems that the waves are moving, then they fall into the sea and are rescued by the ship's crew. Lewis never explains how a painting of a contemporary Narnian ship came to hang in an English house.

The hero of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, fighting Nazis on a Danish beach, finds himself in the Carolingian mythological universe. Later, mission accomplished in that universe, he returns to the Danish beach with no loss of time, like a returned ruler of Narnia.

In Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Puck tells Prince Rupert of the Rhine's companion, Will Fairweather:

"'...to speak of inns and such - My friend, if sorely pressed for shelter, think of this. There is a tavern known as the old Phoenix, which none may see nor enter who're not touched by magic in some way. It flits about, but maybe you can use his ring to find it, or even draw a door towards yourselves...'" (pp. 55-56) (Oberon and Titania have given Rupert a magic ring.)

Sure enough, the ring lights the way to the inn which appears before Rupert and Will although it remains invisible to their Puritan pursuers. A regular of the Old Phoenix tells us:

"Look for it anywhere, anytime, by day, by dusk, by night, up an ancient alley or in a forest where hunters whose eyes no spoor can escape nonetheless pass it by unseeing...you must be alert for its fleeting presence..." (Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, 1981), p. 9).

This regular finds it many times, once unbelievably on ship at sea, another time more reasonably on a country road after dark where he knows that:

"The inn might waver from sight at any instant." (Anderson, "Losers' Night" IN All One Universe (New York, 1996), p. 107)

It sounds like Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End:

"Up the lane aways is the Inn. You just have to be SURE it's there, though. If you AREN'T sure, then fizzlywinks, it's only goin to be fireflies and treeses" (Gaiman, Neil, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 22.

One Worlds' End guest enters it in stages. Brant Tucker is driving to Chicago at night on the interstate. So far then he is travelling though not as yet between worlds. (However, his Earth is that of the DC Universe where anything not only can happen but routinely does happen.) Then:

he was very tired, so did he dream everything that followed?;
he didn't think it was weird when it started to snow in June;
a large, strange animal ran in front of the car (we see this since we are reading graphic fiction);
the car went off the road, across a field, down a hill and into an oak tree;
Brant, carrying his unconscious co-driver, Charlene Mooney, could not find the road;
he was directed to the Inn by an apparently disembodied voice (see above - the reader realises that the speaker is a hedgehog; regular readers recognise the speaking hedgehog from Gaiman's The Books of Magic);
Brant finds a country road;
at the end of the road, is a light;
first it is fireflies in a hedge, then it is the Inn.

I think that the transition between realities began with the apparent snow storm which, we learn, was a reality storm, stranding travellers from many realms in the Inn. A sailor's account is different:

"Y'see, there was a storm, come up out of nowhere at midnight - - we were swept onto the rocks where there shouldn't've been rocks neither, nohow." (p. 67)

Brant and the sailor then disagree about whether the date is June, 1993, or September, 1914.

And a Necropolitan says:

" 'A dark thunderstorm arose suddenly, and the brougham in which my companions and I were travelling was washed into a river.' " (p. 42)

Making an ordinary journey seems to be the beginning of the process.

The landlady explains:

"This place is the Inn at the end of all worlds. None of you were BROUGHT here. Each of you was travelling, and was caught in an unseasonable storm of some kind. You made your way here by luck, and took refuge and advantage of the hospitality offered. And you WILL leave here, when the storm is over." (p. 139)

However, Charlene is allowed to stay to work in the Inn and we see her there in a later series, The Furies by Mike Carey. The characters offer different theories about what causes a reality storm. A common feature of the Old Phoenix and the Worlds' End is the telling of stories and some of these stories offer other routes between worlds:

"...the silver road...glittered and glimmered away beyond a street market." (Gaiman, p. 29)

The man who sees the silver road works in an office in a modern city where gravestones can have "...letters from forgotten alphabets..." (p. 28). That odd touch, if taken literally, means that the modern city is certainly not on any Earth like ours. The narrator of this story asks:

"Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?" (p. 28)

And that is where the other worlds are.

The Valeria Matuchek Trilogy

It is almost a trilogy.

Volume I
In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, Valeria's parents meet and marry. Valeria is born and grows to the age of three. A demon kidnaps her but her parents rescue her from Hell.

Volume II
In Anderson's Operation Luna, Valeria turns fifteen and is the first human being on the Moon in her timeline.

Volume III
In his A Midsummer Tempest, Valeria, now a graduate student travelling between timelines, advises other travellers, including Holger Danske from Three Hearts And Three Lions, whom she meets in the inter-cosmic inn.

Epilogues
In "House Rule," we meet a regular of the inter-cosmic inn.
In "Losers' Night," the regular lists spectacular women including Moll Flanders, Sojourner Truth and Valeria Matuchek.

The writing order of the Volumes was I, III, II so Anderson filled in an account of Valeria's teenage years after he had included the adult Valeria as a supporting character in A Midsummer Tempest.

Maybe her flight to the Moon qualified her as a spectacular woman or perhaps there was more later? We would like to know the rest of her career but, as far as it goes, this trilogy, or tetralogy if we include Three Hearts And Three Lions, and its Epilogues is already a comprehensive, and not merely linear, narrative sequence.

The Wealth Of Anderson's Works

The more we reread of Poul Anderson's texts, the more there is to be found in them. So far, these posts about the "Old Phoenix Sequence" have covered:

the nature of Hell in Operation Chaos;

clever implications of fantasy premises in Operation Chaos;

scientific rationales for fantasy ideas in Three Hearts And Three Lions;

the use of language and Shakespearean allusions in A Midsummer Tempest;

an ingenious sequel to The Tempest;

the physical environment of the Old Phoenix;

contrasts between the Time Patrol series and the Old Phoenix;

Valeria Matuchek's life and career;

Nicholas van Rijn's antics in the old Phoenix;

the basic conflicts underlying Three Hearts And Three Lions and A Midsummer Tempest;

the issue of religious intolerance as shown in A Midsummer Tempest;

the political demands of the Johannines;

connections with Robert Heinlein, James Blish and Neil Gaiman;

the plausibility or otherwise of different imagined alternative histories;

clever uses of real history as shown by the inclusion of d'Artagnan;

literary references to Oscar Wilde and The Wind In The Willows.

"Operation Salamander"

Is the magic getting a bit implausible by the time we have read as far as Chapter IX of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995)? University Physical Sciences are housed in a "...grimy little..." building and nuclear physics is to be valued only because, e.g., it makes alchemy practical by preventing the unintended production of radioactive isotopes (pp.55-56).

In "...the goetic age...," a football match is a contest not of physical prowess but of the "...essentially intellectual..." Art (p. 58). Footballers levitate, change form - one even into a greased pig -, cast spells and counterspells, wear Tarnkappes and toss thunderbolts. One accidentally steps on a blown scorecard, piercing several of his opponents' names.

Clearly, this is not a football match. Fantasy and sf fans praise what we see as clever and logical implications deduced by the author from his initial premise. A guy I knew would have dismissed many of these implications as "tricks." Obviously, the fantasy of Operation Chaos is very different from that of the same author's Three Hearts And Three Lions or his A Midsummer Tempest. Three premises:

the Carolingian myths were true;
Shakespeare's plays were true;
magic works.

The first involves a very basic conflict between orderly civilization and a primordial destructiveness.
The second involves the modern conflict between immemorial forests and industrial factories.
The third involves "tricks"?

In fact, something else is going on beneath the surface of Operation Chaos but it is very abstract. In the untitled opening passage, Steve Matuchek refers to the trans-cosmic war between Law and Chaos, which we recognize from the Carolingian universe of Three Hearts And Three Lions. This is a "...strife...older than creation..." (p. 3)

Also, in Chapter IV, which was maybe added to the book version, Steve, rendered unconscious to the outside world, enters a void where he overhears a malevolent message or monologue. In Chapter XI, again rendered unconscious, he does not overhear but is addressed by "...absolute hate..." (p. 76). So there is an ultimate opponent of some sort but this is all very vague as yet.   

A Midsummer (Night's Dream And The) Tempest

After rereading Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, the logical next step is to reread his A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975). Both are alternative history fantasies and the hero of the former cameos in the latter.

Chapter i of A Midsummer Tempest reads like historical fiction because it describes a battle in the English Civil War. Chapter ii reads like science fiction (sf) because it presents anachronistic technological advances, a railway and semaphores near industrialised Leeds and Bradford, in the seventeenth century. Chapter vi reveals that we are reading a fantasy because Oberon calls forth the Faerie folk and they refer to both Titania and Puck.

  Chapter xii reveals the basis of the fantasy, or are we back to sf? This seventeenth century occurs on a parallel Earth, an idea that can be rationalised scientifically. What differentiates this parallel is that Shakespeare was a historian, not a playwright. Thus, Faeries exist and there were clocks in Caesar's time and cannon in Hamlet's. Therefore, their world was technologically ahead of ours from an early date so that their Industrial Revolution was able to start in the seventeenth century. That single premise explains all the discrepancies. There are either infinite or factorial N universes but, in this and the related volumes, we learn of six:

the Shakespearean history;

the Carolingian romantic history where Holger Danske originated;

our history where Holger, in a different identity, saved Niels Bohr from the Nazis;

an Aztec pantheon history from which Holger barely escapes while trying to return from our world to his Carolingian history;

a history in which the effects of cold iron were degaussed about 1900, thus magical/"paraphysical" forces were technologised, World War II was against the Saracen Caliphate and inter-cosmic travel has begun;

the pocket universe or interuniversal nexus containing the Old Phoenix where Shakespeareans, a Carolingian and a "paraphysicist" meet.

A Midsummer Tempest is to be recommended both for creative imagination and for literary style, with verse and poetry disguised as prose:

" 'Mesim 'twar wise we haul our skins from heare,' panted the dragoon, 'while still they may hold wine.'
" 'And while I yet may hope to bring together men enough that they can cover their retreat...and mine,' Rupert said." (p. 6)

Rearranged as dramatic verse, that becomes:

Dragoon: Mesim 'twar wise we haul our skins from heare
While still they may hold wine.
Rupert: And while I yet may hope to bring together men
Enough that they can cover their retreat...and mine.    

Holger Danske And Unwritten Sequels

Holger Carlsen, the hero of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977), turns out to be Holger Danske whose legendary status we nowadays can easily confirm by googling.

The full list of threats faced by Holger is:

a suit of armor;
Elf Hill;
a dragon;
a giant;
a werewolf;
a nixie;
a troll;
the Hell Horse;
the Wild Hunt.

Is the end rather abrupt? Having retrieved his sword Cortana and regained his memory:

"He rode out on the wold, and it was as if dawn rode with him." (p. 154)

But then we are back with the "outer narrator" visited by Holger who tells him:

"I rode out and scattered the hosts of Chaos, driving them before me." (p. 155)

That is all. Then Holger was back on this Earth in the Danish resistance helping Niels Bohr to escape from the Nazis, thus waging essentially the same fight in two worlds.

Despite Anderson's prolific output, there are sequels that were never written. Holger disappears again from this world but we do not see him return to the Carolingian world of his origin. We do see him lost between worlds later but not in a direct sequel to Three Hearts...

The Foreword to Anderson's The Broken Sword (London, 1977) ends:

"As for what became of those who were still alive at the end of the book, and the sword, and Faerie itself - which obviously no longer exists on Earth - that is another tale, which may someday be told." (p. 12)

But it wasn't.

Episodic Adventures

In the "American Gothic" story line of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing (1985-'86), the title character plant elemental successively encounters several major horror fiction themes:

vampires;
a werewolf;
zombies;
a serial killer, "the bogeyman";
ghosts.

So far, unoriginal but there is a double point to this sequence:

first, the author creatively re-imagines each of these familiar ideas;

secondly, they build up to a horror beyond them all, in this case the conjuring of the Original Darkness that was before the Creation.

Poul Anderson had used the same technique thirty two years earlier in Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977; first published, 1953). The hero of this novel successively fights:

an animated suit of armour;
a dragon;
a giant;
a werewolf;
what else? (I am still rereading.)

And these episodic battles build up to a major attack by Chaos on the Law of which our hero is the Defender.

(In Swamp Thing, the Darkness rises out of the Chaos beyond Hell and advances against the Light, even fomenting civil war between demons preferring the Devil they know and those welcoming ultimate darkness.)

I mentioned the dragon and the giant in the previous post. Anderson continues his scientific approach with the werewolf:

"...lycanthropy was probably inherited as a set of recessive genes." (p. 83)

Someone with a full set of genes will be killed as a wolf in the cradle.

"With an incomplete inheritance, the tendency to change was weaker." (p. 84)

A woods dwarf can follow the scent of a werebeast in its animal form:

"Holger wondered if glandular secretions were responsible." (pp. 86-87)

And, when the suspects have been reduced to four, Holger applies detective techniques to identify the shape-changer.

(By contrast, Alan Moore uses his werewolf story to raise some feminist issues.)

Magic And Science

A good fantasy author writes logically and plausibly about a familiar idea. For example, if giants existed, what would they be like? In Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977):

"...we of the Great Folk sit in our halls throughout the endless winter night of our homeland year after year, century after century, and pass the time with contest of skill. Above all are we fond of riddles. It were worth my while to let you pass, could you give me three new ones of which I cannot answer two, that I may use them in turn." (p. 75)

- which explains why a giant at a bridge asks a traveller three riddles.

Of course, Anderson applies scientific principles. A fire breathing dragon retreats when a gallon of water is thrown into his mouth, generating steam in his hot interior. A giant is squat and short-legged in proportion to height because he needs enough cross section to bear his weight. Gold stolen from a sun-striken giant is cursed because, when carbon becomes silicon, there are radioactive isotopes. Maybe it is the actintic radiation in sunlight that adversely affects Middle Worlders?

Since I am still rereading Three Hearts..., I will look out for any further scientific rationalisations.

Conflicts

Poul Anderson's fantasy novel Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977) has a unique flavour that I missed on first reading. It is more than a string of well-presented cliches. Things and signs are not what they seem. In particular, Faerie is not neutral.

In childhood, I was pleased to read the theory that fairies had been angels who remained neutral during the War in Heaven. That seemed to explain their status as a third class of supernatural being inhabiting neither Heaven nor Hell but Nature. It was always satisfying when one mythology explained another. A second example is the Greek mythological explanation of pharaonic zoomorphism: attacked on Olympus, the gods fled and hid in Egypt, disguised as animals.

In Three Hearts And Three Lions, in the parallel world to which Holger Carlsen has been transported, Faerie supports Chaos against Law. For this reason, Holger as guest in the castle of Duke Alfric, lord of Faerie, recalls (to me) not other visits to Faerie, as in "The Land of Summer's Twilight" in Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic, but the hospitality received by the damned soul Christopher Rudd in the castle of a Lord of Hell in Mike Carey's Lucifer, a sequel to Gaiman's The Sandman.

There seem to be four realms: Heaven, Earth, Hell and the Middle World, the last comprising Faerie, Trollheim, Giants etc. (Why "Middle"? In some reckonings, Earth, Midgard, is in the middle.) A woods dwarf tells Holger that the Faerie folk:

"...live in wilderness, which is why they be o' the dark Chaos side in the war." (p. 27)

Alianora adds that they:

"...canna endure broad daylight, so 'tis forever twilit in their realm." (p. 37)

This sounds like Gaiman's "Summer's Twilight."

Alianora speculates:

"If Chaos wins, mayhap yon dusk will be laid on the whole world, and no more o' bricht sunshine and green leaves and blossoms...And yet does Faerie have an eldritch beauty..." (p. 37)

Is this getting a little confused? I do not expect the Fair Folk to oppose sunshine and blossoms. And a victory for Chaos and/or Hell surely mean universal darkness, not the eldritch beauty of Faerie twilight?

Contrasts

I have gone directly from rereading Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars (1997) to rereading his Three Hearts And Three Lions (1953). The contrast could not be more complete: forty four years back through Anderson's career from late science fiction (sf) to early fantasy. Between the early fifties and the late nineties, there was an earlier period of very different sf.

The Fleet Of Stars is Volume IV of a hard sf tetralogy of imaginative speculation about the future of society, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel and the cosmos. Three Hearts And Three Lions is the first of four more loosely connected fantasy novels about parallel universes where history was different and magic works.

The Harvest Of Stars tetralogy, culminating in The Fleet Of Stars, uses the terms "chaos" and "chaotic" in their modern scientific senses whereas Three Hearts... presents a supernatural/magical cosmic conflict between Law and Chaos that is also to be found in Michael Moorcock's fantasies and, under the names of "Order" and "Chaos," in DC Comics including Neil Gaiman's The Sandman which I have previously compared to Anderson's works. (I have just found a character's name common to Three Hearts... and The Sandman: Alianora.)

Despite all the differences, the reader remains conscious of being in just another part of Anderson's  imagination. We need not worry that, if we enjoy one of the genres in which he works, we will dislike others simply because they are different.