Connections With Fiction

In Is There Life On Other Worlds? (New York, 1963), Poul Anderson discusses an idea for terraforming Venus that was suggested by Carl Sagan and that Anderson himself dramatizes in his sf story, "The Big Rain."

He also points out that probably more than half of the stars are double or triple and that such systems are unlikely either to generate or to retain Earth-like planets. However, they could contain large, superjovian, planets which, in their turn, could have Earth-like moons - such as the colonized moon, Atlantis, in Anderson's Virgin Planet. Atlantis is indeed a terrestroid satellite of a gas giant in a double star system.

"The Big Rain" belongs to the early interplanetary period of Anderson's Psychotechnic History whereas Virgin Planet belongs to the later interstellar period of that same future history. Thus, this series gains immeasurably in scientific plausibility when we realize that these two fictional settings are grounded in serious hypotheses.

I have already argued that the Psychotechnic History, like Robert Heinlein's Future History on which it is modeled, is more substantial than might appear after a cursory reading of individual stories. In his Postscript, "Concerning Stories Never Written," Heinlein discusses not only three unwritten stories but also the first three volumes of his Future History, in the process clarifying the unity and continuity of that History. Anderson does much the same in an Afterword to Virgin Planet, effectively divulging the contents of "unwritten stories" about other regions of Atlantis and periods of its history.

The history of the colonization of Atlantis links the colony back to a previous period when some of the earliest interstellar spaceships were being lost and the story of the discovery of the isolated Atlantean colony refers both to another colonized planet and to an organization that feature elsewhere in the series. On top of all this, we now learn that the fantastic celestial mechanics of the Atlantean sky with the enormous gas giant permanently visible above the colonized hemisphere and with two suns and four other moons moving about is based not only in Anderson's imagination but also in legitimate speculations about diverse planetary systems.

Improvised Technology And Weaponry

In Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (London, 1966), the spaceship that crash landed on Atlantis had earth-moving machinery and construction robots. Thus, the women colonists were able to built a walled city of paved streets and tall, concrete buildings with "Carolinian" domes (p. 135), although the machinery has worn out over the course of three hundred years.

A chemist in the crew constructed a parthenogenesis machine with which the planet has been populated but how long will that machine last? Fortunately, men arrive before it wears out. Anderson refers to "A few thousand women..." in the original crew (ibid.). I thought that the five hundred "families" of identical women meant that the crew had numbered just five hundred?

Lacking steam engine technology, the seafaring women have devised windmills, gears, shafts and propellers that enable their ships to sail into the wind. Lacking firearms and gunpowder ingredients, someone has devised an arbalest with a chamber that automatically feeds six iron-tipped quarrels into the slot while a tightly wound spring recocks the bow several times. "Big wooden flywheels..." work a "Primitive machine gun..." that fires "...a rain of darts..." (p. 137).

Davis Bertram drops his blaster when captured and later sees it used in war by the ruling Atlantean faction. He sets out to recover the gun but not to use it against defenseless women. I would want to retain the gun and to demonstrate its use but not to use it. Its effects, if used indiscriminately, would be like those of a nuclear attack, which I would certainly not launch, regarding it as an act of genocide, not of war.

Atlantean Animals

Only birds are mobile enough to survive and flourish in the Atlantean environment made turbulent by the tidal influences of the giant planet and four other inner moons. Tides are variable but always high, up to seven times Terrestrial.

The inner hemisphere has fish, reptiles and birds but no mammals. The following are all birds except the orcfish and maybe the carnivores.

Orspers: "horse-birds," used for riding, bigger than ostriches, with white, blue-tipped feathers and hawk-like heads;
aquils: swoop down from the rafters for food in the dining hall;
stampers: larger grazing herds, hunted for meat;
jacklins and wolfers: dangerous carnivores;
peepers: small and round with large eyes, parrot-like beaks and a lethal poisonous bite;
"seal-birds" (unknown to Freetooners, first encountered after crossing the Ridge): like large, penguin-feathered seals with dangerous flippers, beaks and jaws, they attack but can be roasted and eaten;
not named in the text: tame birds with colored tails in the garden of Lysum;
corvoids: they moult;
muckbirds: they are not regarded highly;
orcfish: military tunics are made from their scaled hides.

Atlanteans have "birdnaps," not catnaps (p. 38).

Anderson tells us in the Author's Note, not in the text, that there are a few primitive mammals, never seen by the colonists, on the outer hemisphere that is permanently turned away from the primary, Minos.

If we cast the net wider to include animals elsewhere in the Minoan system, then the Mars-like moon Theseus has an atmosphere and, according to the novel, "...signs of intelligent life..." (Virgin Planet, New York, 1982, p. 63). Thus, when the Stellar Union integrates Minos, it will have to deal both with the Atlantean colonists who have been isolated for three hundred years and with Thesesian natives.

"This Means War!"

Poul Anderson's fiction often shows both the political causes and the immediate experience of warfare. In his Virgin Planet, women colonists of the planet Atlantis, who have reproduced by parthenogenesis for three hundred years, go to war when one man arrives!

The war happens not only because he is a male human being. He is also in sole control of a spaceship that has obvious military applications. But his maleness is also an issue. The "Doctors", effectively a priesthood, who control the parthenogenesis machine, resist his unwitting challenge to their power. And another group wants to monopolize his reproductive capacity in order to challenge the Doctors.

Thus, the Man must win a war in order first to recover his guarded spaceship and secondly to integrate this lost colony into interstellar civilization. While he watches the conflict:

"Davis felt sick. His whole culture was conditioned against war; it remembered too well how cities had gone up in radioactive smoke and barrenness crept stealthily over green hills." (p. 138)

The very first story in the series shows us the consequences in Europe of World War III.

Anderson shows us not only the political consequences of the man's arrival but also the individual responses of particular women - and, of course, the "Man"'s realization that being the only man on a planet of women is not the experience that he would have expected.

Also worthy of attention are Anderson's detailed imagining not only of the colonized planet but also of its complicated astronomical relationships to other bodies in its planetary system - and finally the fact that this novel fits seamlessly into a series also featuring the Stellar Union Coordination Service, the planet Nerthus and the science of psychotechnics. There are some references to this science in Virgin Planet despite my denial of this in an earlier post.   

Burkeville

Burkeville is an excellent addition to Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet. In the earlier shorter "Virgin Planet", Davis and his companions travel from Freetoon to Lysum. In the expanded version, they make the same journey but visit Burkeville en route. Lysum and Burkeville are offshoots of the same conquered town.

Burkeville is yet another divergence from the Atlantean social norm. Its inhabitants are all Burkes so they have ended casteism and have each developed different skills. Thinking alike, they need no ruler. Their Council, with its Speaker, makes routine decisions but its members are not superior. Their village is on stilts above a lake, approached by a drawbridge.

Burkes are thinkers. Burkevillers, free from other social influences, disparage Atlantean traditions and superstitions but pay lip service when approaching the Doctors for parthenogenesis. Their response to the arrival on Atlantis of a single "Man," or male human being, is unique: kill his companions and monopolize him, thus bearing sons as well as daughters and becoming independent of the Doctors! Davis and his companions fight their way free... This new incident considerably increases the richness of the novel and is another logical implication of its premise.

A Doctor's response, when Davis has disclosed that he is alone and unarmed, is even more drastic: he is a Monster (alien), not a Man, and should be killed! (In other words, a Man will challenge the Doctors' monopoly on reproduction.)

An element of comedy is introduced as Davis is repeatedly interrupted just when getting close to one of the women. A couple of times, he is invited to "fer..." but the invitation is indignantly interrupted by his immediate companions.

Change of subject -

(Something I wrote above inadvertently reminded me of this anti-racist song:

"He who rides with the Klan,
"He's a monster, not a man,
"Because beneath that white disguise,
"I have looked into his eyes.")

The Last Post (This Month)

I expect to be busy today and tomorrow so this will be the last post for October. It is a restful experience to reread Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet immediately after his "Virgin Planet." Both begin with Corporal Maiden Barbara Whitley of Freetoon on orsper(horse-bird)-back and both end with Davis Bertram blushing. The story between is known but Virgin Planet is fifty pages longer so that there are plenty of additional details to appreciate. In fact, there seems to be an entire extra incident in a casteless "Burketown" that I have not reached yet.

We are told that:

"...this central continent was a labyrinth of mountains." (Virgin Planet, London, 1966, p. 60)

- and Anderson adds in the Author's Note that:

"(Later this continent was named Labyrinth.)" (p. 154)

Thus, Anderson had thought out a lot more background material than appears in the stories. Extra installments could have been set on Labyrinth after the long isolated Atlantis had been integrated into the Stellar Union.

Also, Davis is a potential series character who could have been shown exploring other planetary systems. Like Dominic Flandry, he regularly exercises in double gravity not because he likes it - he doesn't - but because a fit body is an asset. However, the two characters are otherwise dissimilar. Davis lives comfortably on inherited money, takes life easy and seeks personal glory whereas Flandry works hard to prolong the life of his threatened civilization.

Davis' Stellar Union is also threatened but, in this case, the causes are not apparent. It is simply that the Coordination Service cannot integrate all the data. According to the Chronology at the end of Starship, "Virgin Planet" is set in 3100 and the Third Dark Ages begin in 3200.

Versions III

See Versions II.

A future history, or any fictitious series, gains substance when it presents a single event from different points of view.

Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet" presents a diary entry by Yamagata Tetsuo, Chief of Coordination Service, Argus 293 Region, Stellamont, Nerthus. There is quite a lot of information to absorb here before comparing this passage with the corresponding one in the expanded version, Virgin Planet.

Stellamont is the single city on Nerthus, a colonized terrestroid planet about a thousand light years from the Solar System in the direction of Argus. This explains why, when the Author's Note to Virgin Planet identifies a star in a Nerthusian constellation, the star is named not just "Delta Capitis Lupi" but, more specifically, "(Ar 293) Delta Capitis Lupi." This means "the fourth brightest star in the Wolf's Head as seen from the base planet (Nerthus) of Argus 293 Region." The same star will have other designations if it is visible from other base planets.

But, to return to the content of Tetsuo's diary entry, the Chief writes notes and makes comments after his interview with Davis Bertram, a stellagraphic survey man. One of the comments is, "So much for Man's Starward Yearning..." (Starship, New York, 1982, p. 89)

Here, the Chief seems to parody the title of Enrico Yamatsu's "...classic history Starward!..." (p. 9)

Virgin Planet presents not Tetsuo's diary entry but a lengthier account of Tetsuo's interview with Davis from Davis' point of view. We even get a third character, the interplanetary freightman, Smith Hilary, who converses separately with both the others. Thus, reading both versions in tandem enriches our perception of the characters and their setting.

Tetsuo, conversing with Smith, confirms what we also glean from The Peregrine, that cities, redundant on Earth, have re-emerged on the frontier. This passage also confirms that men have been in this region of space for about six decades which fits with the Chronology at the end of Starship.

Versions II

See Versions.

Here is a point on which "Virgin Planet" and Virgin Planet agree, differing only on whether to use numerals or words:

"Barbara knew what all the 500 families looked like..." (Starship, New York, 1982, p. 86)

"...she knew what all the five hundred families looked like..." (Virgin Planet, London, 1966, p. 14)

Each "family" comprises a caste of identical twins born by parthenogenesis. Thus, the crew of the colonial spaceship that was displaced and shipwrecked by a trepidation vortex comprised exactly five hundred women. Therefore, I was wrong to suggest a thousand in an earlier post. (However, see here.)

We are told only a few of the surnames, usually with some indication as to their social role: the Udalls are hereditary rulers, the Whitleys hereditary huntresses etc. A Cohen is mentioned without such an indication on p. 91 of Starship but this mention has been deleted from the corresponding passage on p. 24 of Virgin Planet.

A woman is a "Maiden" and a "...novice in the Mysteries..." (Virgin Planet, p. 9) until she has been to the ancestral Ship and returned pregnant but, of course, they are all maidens in the usual sense of the word.

The next post, Versions III, will focus on an interesting difference between the two texts.

Atlantean Astronomy

I missed some salient data about Atlantean astronomy in a recent post. The information is scattered through the text(s). I am finding it informative to reread the novelization, Virgin Planet, immediately after rereading the original, shorter, "Virgin Planet." Information is repeated, amplified or nuanced in the longer version.

Atlantis is an Earth-like moon of the gas giant, Minos, which is permanently visible above the colonized hemisphere of Atlantis. When full, Minos is fourteen times the size of Luna as seen from Earth! Also, four other inner Minoan moons may be visible. On one occasion:

"...overhead...were two crescents, dim by daylight: one almost twice the apparent size of Luna seen from Earth, the other half again as big."
(Starship, New York, 1982, p. 97)

I wondered, "Half again as big as Luna or half again as big as the moon that is twice as big as Luna?"

The novel elaborates:

"Overhead...were two crescent moons, dim by daylight, one almost twice the apparent size of Earth's, the other half again as big as Luna seen from home..." (Virgin Planet, London, 1966, p. 31)

The Author's Note to the novel elaborates further:

in full phase, Minos is as bright as twelve hundred full moons on Earth;

the moons Ariadne and Theseus are each several times brighter than Luna;

Aegeus and Ariadne never set but instead move rapidly across Minos from west to east, then behind Minos from east to west;

Aegeus crosses the sky in 3.1 hours and completes its phases in about 30 hours;

occasionally, the full Ariadne changes color as it transits the full Minos at midnight.

What a sky! What might native Atlanteans have made of it? But there are no natives, only colonists. The colony is three hundred years old so its inhabitants are thoroughly familiar with their complicated celestial mechanics - and when a survey man arrives, he knows what to expect.

More could have been done with these ideas. The Author's Note includes information that did not make it into the texts, e. g.:

there are a few primitive mammals on the outer hemisphere but the colonists never see them;

the mountainous main content, on the inner hemisphere, was later named Labyrinth.

After the events of "Virgin Planet," men would arrive, bringing technology. Thus, the colonists would stop reproducing by parthenogenesis, society would modernize and many sequels could have been written about this one planet.

Atlantean Genotypes

Nicholsons, unintelligent menial workers.
Whitleys, hereditary huntresses, military, higher caste.
Dyckmans, "sloppy," scant mother instinct, good flatterers.
Latvalas, slim, blond, good with javelins,usually hereditary bodyguards.
Udalls, hereditary rulers.
Macklins, husky, military.
Cohens.
Burkes, counselors, thinkers, soldiers, artists, artisans;
Lundgards, military.
Damons, military.
Hausers, military.
Craigs, poets and weavers.
Holloways, Salmons, O'Briens, artists, artisans, entertainers.
Trevors, a higher caste.
Tottinos.

This cannot be a full list of Atlantean castes and I may have missed some surnames in the text but will continue to check.

Religion, Astronomy And Society

You might expect a women only society to have a Goddess religion but the inhabitants of Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet," conscious of their three hundred year separation from the by now mythical "Men," invoke "Father," not "Mother."

Their Earth-sized colony planet, Atlantis, is a moon of the massive gas giant planet, Minos. Thus, the Atlantean sky contains:

two suns, one merely the brightest star although visible by day;

Minos, permanently above the inhabited hemisphere, several times larger than the Moon as seen from Earth, with visible storms, daily eclipsing the nearer sun;

four other Minoan moons, two visibly moving.

Although without a moon of their own, Atlanteans see seven heavenly bodies apart from the fixed stars. This complicated celestial activity has planetary consequences. High, shifting tides make alternating salt marshes or lakes, to which local life has adapted, of the coastlines.

About a thousand women reproducing parthogenetically have generated a caste system based on the psychophysical aptitudes of the different genotypes. However, other social arrangements have also developed:

the veiled Doctors controlling the parthenogenesis machine in the ancestral Ship have become a neutral but powerful priesthood;

refugees colonizing a fertile, easily defended river island became anarchic and unwarlike;

salt marsh dwellers have degenerated to neolithic nakedness;

the freer, more mobile sea people have a democratic republic.

As ever, Anderson considers sociology as well as planetology.

A Public Performance?

In Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet," the all female colony on Atlantis has been reproducing by parthogenesis for three hundred years. This has more consequences than just a single sex society. It also means that there is a limited number of genetic templates so that society becomes caste-ridden as types with different aptitudes adopt specific roles. They expect "the Men" to arrive but have mythical ideas about what this will be like.

Fortuitously, local animal species do not include mammals, in which sexual differences are easily discerned. Finally, the women do know about what they call "Monsters," non-human intelligent species that might also arrive in spacecraft. Therefore, when one man does arrive alone, he must prove that he is not a Monster.

He is put naked in a cage with a Maiden, a women who has not yet been fertilized, in front of a crowd and told to fertilize her. She gives him her permission so this would have been consensual sex with an adult!

Individuals and mores differ. Like many of us, he is unable to function in these circumstances. (In "Rammer" by Larry Niven, an inability to have sex in front of witnesses was interpreted as evidence that the viewpoint character would be able to handle the isolation and celibacy of a long solo interstellar journey at relativistic speeds.) My only comment here is that, although our hero's predicament is understandable and expectable, it is not inevitable. I  have known men who would willingly and gladly prove themselves in these circumstances... But then Anderson's story would have been over very quickly, as Hamlet would end quickly if its hero could just do what he thinks he ought to do in the first place!

(Arnold Shwarzenegger's Hamlet rewrite: "You killed my father, Claudius! Big mistake!" Gun fire. Curtain.)

Versions

"The Old Udall leaned back and let her chamber-maid comb the stiff gray hair. Elinor Dyckman had gotten that job; an Udall usually took a Dyckman for a lover."

- Poul Anderson, "Virgin Planet" IN Anderson, Starship (New York, 1982), pp. 83-181 AT p. 93.

"The Old Udall...leaned back and let her chambermaid comb the stiff gray hair.
"Elinor Dyckman had gotten that job. The Dyckmans were good at flattery."

- Poul Anderson, Virgin Planet (London, 1966), p. 26.

This passage has been changed in two ways for the novelization.

(i) The sentence from "The Old..." to "...gray hair" has been lengthened. The additional material is:

"...finished a bone and snapped her fingers. While an adolescent Craig ran up with a wooden plate of choice pieces, she leaned back and..." (ibid.)

(ii) All reference to sexual relationships between the women in this all female colony have been removed. Presumably this decision, taken either by the author or by the publisher, reflected expectations about the market for the book version which was first published in the US in 1959?

The Astronomy Of Virgin Planet

The astronomy of Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet" is confusing so it is helpful to consult the Author's Note in the longer version, Virgin Planet.

Caput Lupi, the Wolf's Head, is a constellation visible from Nerthus, a colonized terrestroid planet of Carsten's Star, which is about a thousand light years from Sol towards Argus. The four brightest stars in Caput Lupi are Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta Capitis Lupi, respectively.

Delta is a double star:

hot blue A, called Daedalus, has three uninhabitable planets;

Sol-like B, called Icarus, has two planets, including the eighteen-mooned gas giant, Minos.

The third Minoan moon, Atlantis, Earth-sized and colonized, is the "Virgin Planet." Thus, the story is set on one of the eighteen moons of one of the two planets of one of the two companions in the fourth brightest star of a constellation visible a thousand light years from the Solar System.

The (inhabited) "inner hemisphere" of Atlantis is the side permanently facing Minos. Anderson presents tables for the equatorial diameters, orbital radii and periods, angular diameter from Atlantis and times between oppositions to Atlantis for the five inner moons. All of this information cannot be incorporated into the text of the novel but it nevertheless determines the Atlantean environment in ways that affect the story.

As Brian Aldiss remarked once, a hard sf writer works harder than a mainstream novelist.

See also Atlantean Astronomy.

Orspers

Although I have started to reread the original shorter version of Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet," it is helpful also to refer to the Author's Note at the end of the novel. It may be necessary to reread both versions in their entirety.

The women only colonists of another planet have domesticated large flightless birds, "orspers," to ride on. Such steeds are more imaginative and exotic than extraterrestrial equivalents of horses. Regular Anderson readers will remember his novel, The Day Of Their Return, in which colonists of the planet Aeneas have imported both horses and green, six-legged stathas as draught animals and the planet is also visited by the Chereionite Aycharaych whose species may be descended from large flightless birds. But that is on another planet in another history.

Although the orspers are an exotic touch, birds remain a Terrestrial kind of organism and we even have some that are large and flightless. However, the Author's Note convincingly accounts for the existence of such similar organisms on another planet and also demonstrates the amount of background thinking hidden behind any well conceived work of hard sf:

first, terrestroid biochemistry is to be expected on such an Earth-like planet;

secondly, currently life is flourishing in a mild interglacial climate;

thirdly, only birds are equipped to escape from the sudden, major environmental changes that are caused by this planet's irregular weather and turbulent geology.

Thus, although a few primitive mammals do survive on another part of the planet with stabler weather, it is the birds that have multiplied, and sometimes increased in size, whenever conditions have again become favorable. Land species are usually wiped out before they can become well-established.

Parallel evolution, of course, occurs on Earth. Fish and swimming birds and mammals are similarly streamlined. Sight and flight have such high survival value that both have evolved several times. We can expect flyers, if not birds, on other planets. The future history that contains Aeneas and Chereion also contains Ythri whose dominant species, although not birds, are winged and feathered and remain hunting carnivores even after they have become intelligent.

Pagination

My old, second hand, paperback copy of Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (London, 1966) (see image) has, inside its covers:

a title page;
a publication history;
a dedication;
a blank page;
the text of the novel on pp. 9-149;
an Author's Note on pp. 150-156;
four pages advertising other books.

Since there are only four pages before the text, why does the text begin on p. 9 instead of on p. 5? I think that one page has been removed before the title page and can see that another has definitely been removed before the text. Here, "one page" means two numbered pages, thus pp. 1-2 and 7-8.

I guess that:

p. 1 was extracts from the text;
p. 2 was other Anderson titles;
p. 7 was the table of contents;
p. 8 was blank.

I suggest that a text should always begin on p. 1 and that the preceding pages should be numbered from p. i. In order to know how many pages are occupied by this novel, it is not sufficient to look at the last numbered page. Instead, we must subtract 8 from 149, then confirm that there are no blank pages between chapters. There are not. This practice started later.

We usually attend only to the content of a novel but it is interesting occasionally to reflect on its physical format, especially since publishing conventions have changed slightly over the decades.

Virgin Planet

"Virgin Planet" by Poul Anderson was:

published in Venture Science Fiction, 1957;
novelized in 1959;
republished in the Anderson collection, Starship (New York, 1982), pp. 83-181.

In my copy of Virgin Planet (London, 1966), the text of the novel is on pp. 9-149. Thus, 41 more pages, with smaller, closer print, than the shorter version in Venture and Starship. Pp. 150-156 are an Author's Note, explaining the premises of the novel:

the light speed limit applies to "...the group velocity of a particle-wave train..." but not to phase velocity so "...a device for handling discontinuous psi functions..." (p. 150) allows a faster than light pseudo-velocity "...limited only by the frequency of the engine's oscillators" (ibid.) and also gravity control;

a spatial condition called a trepidation vortex, as explained in the novel, can occur;

"...a nearly perfect dielectric..." (p. 151) makes small, manageable blaster guns feasible (an earlier story in this, Psychotechnic, future history mentioned "dielectrics" as making destructive weapons feasible for smaller groups and I commented that this idea should reappear as part of the background of later installments);

electronic readjustment of emotional patterns;
robots;
interstellar emigration for psychological, not economic, reasons;
the Stellar Union and its Coordination Service;
a Basic language and a Cosmic religion;
the galaxy mapped with reference to constellations as seen from base planets like Nerthus.

This background information might be more interesting than the story although I will shortly reread the latter, at least in the shorter version. One difference that I remember between the two versions is that one of them shows Lesbianism within the women only colony whereas the other does not.

Details

In a future history, no detail is unimportant. A major event in one story can provide a background detail for another story that might be set centuries later with no character continuity or plot linearity. Thus, a network of cross-references between otherwise independent stories binds together the future history.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History:

I have yet to read "The Green Thumb" but an internet book review reveals that it is about human beings who colonize a planet, then suspect that one of its species is intelligent;

"Virgin Planet" reveals that the Stellar Union Coordination Service has a base on the planet Nerthus and that Carsten was a planetary explorer or discoverer;

The Peregrine reveals that Nerthus is Carsten's Star III;

"The Pirate" reveals that Nerthus was humanly colonized before it was realized that it already had intelligent life.

These clues generate a high probability that "The Green Thumb" is about Carsten on Nerthus. I still know nothing about the other uncollected story, "The Acolytes."