Twilight World II

Poul Anderson's Twilight World (London, 1984) (the publication date of this science fiction novel is the title of another) starts with a quotation from Wagner's The Twilight Of The Gods. Its viewpoint character refers to the Ragnarok (p. 8) and to "Der Untergang des Abendlandes..." (p. 6), Oswald Spengler's "Fall of the West."

This recalls James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy which is both Wagnerian and Spenglerian. Blish's Chronology of Cities in Flight even gives a date, albeit agreed and arbitrary, for the Fall of the West: 2100. In that case, an extended Cold War scenario, the West falls to the East because Western, i.e., American, security becomes so increasingly repressive that it is eventually indistinguishable from Russian bureaucracy which therefore simply takes over the running of both systems, banning what had been the crowning Western achievement, space travel.

In Twilight World, the Fall is not bureaucratic resolution of the Cold War but World War III. This leads into a comparison of Anderson's post-apocalyptic scenarios:

The Winter Of The World is post-Ice Age;
Twilight World, Shield and the Maurai History are post-nuclear;
Vault Of The Ages is - I can't remember, but will reread it shortly. 

Twilight World And Maurai

Poul Anderson's Twilight World is two short stories about the restoration of civilization after a nuclear war collected with a newly written longer story about the resumption of space travel, as far as Mars, and a short epilogue set on a colonized Ganymede in the further future.

Anderson's Maurai History is three short stories about the restoration of civilization after a nuclear war followed by one long novel about resumption of space travel as far as the Moon and a shorter novel about time travel to a further future of interstellar travel.

In Twilight World, civilization is restored in the Northern Hemisphere and must incorporate a large mutant population. The Maurai Federation in the Southern Hemisphere is based on new, more organic, applications of science.

In Vault Of The Ages, set long after a nuclear war, scientific knowledge is acquired from a "time vault" whereas, in Shield, also set after a nuclear war, new knowledge is acquired from Martians.

In Twilight World, the remnants of the United States and Canada merge as the North American Union with a Jack and Stripes flag. Hugh Drummond is the viewpoint character of the first story, is mentioned as the first Union President in the second, is the late, great President Drummond with a Martian base named after him in the third and, finally, archaeologists find some of his private correspondence in the fourth. But the main unifying character, active in the second and third stories, is the mental mutant Alaric Wayne who, like James Blish's future genius, Adolph Haertel, designs the spaceship that takes him (and others) to Mars where, like Haertel, they find plants, small animals and oxygen that can be released for use.

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.

Twilight World

My copy of Poul Anderson's Twilight World, published in London in 1984, says that the book was first published in the USA in 1983 and is copyright 1981 by Poul Anderson. However, that must have been a renewal of the copyright and this cannot be a complete publishing history because I am sure that I read (another copy of) this book while I was in my teens at secondary school in the 1960's. In fact, I am surprised that the copy in my possession is not still that earlier copy. I must have parted with it and later replaced it even though I have not subsequently reread the book.

There were at least three standard futuristic scenarios in science fiction:

interplanetary travel;
interstellar travel;
post-nuclear war Earth.

Anderson's Maurai future history and Twilight World are two examples of the third scenario. In fact, the latter is set after a mixture of atomic and bacteriological warfare:

atomic bombs;
radio-active dust bombs;
bacteria bombs;
blight bombs (p. 6).

In the five-part Prologue, the destruction has stopped because it has become impossible to continue it and the world is very slowly starting to recover with a large number of mutants in the population. The viewpoint character, Hugh Drummond, says:

"'...we can't go back to the old ways. We've got to start on a new track - a track of sanity.'" (p. 16)

In the 1960's, I was immature and uninformed enough to think that post-nuclear survival might be a great adventure, in that way similar to the space travel scenarios. It would mean the end of the society upheld by my elders and I did not regard such an ending as a bad thing. Of course, a nuclear winter would also mean the death of every blade of grass on Earth. Although that was not known then, I was certainly very superficial in thinking that there could be anything good in trying to survive after a nuclear exchange.

Anderson tried to imagine how people might survive and rebuild but not with any idea that this would be a good process to go through.

The Mississipi And The Midwest

I said that I would reread and post about Twilight World and probably will although I have already published quite a few posts about this volume. See here. I will avoid (too much) repetition.

In the opening paragraph, Hugh Drummond looks down on "...the Mississippi gleaming like a dream sword..." (Prologue, section 1, p. 5). We have just discussed Anderson's The Winter Of The World, where, over ten thousand years hence, the Mississipi has been renamed the Jugular.

Post-nuclear war scenarios and future history series are two very different sf themes although Anderson's Psychotechnic History combines them since its opening installment is set during the beginning of the recovery after World War III and even features a veteran of World War II. In the Prologue of Twilight World, Hugh Drummond surveys the United States after World War III. He sees a pathetic struggle to recover agriculture in the Middle West, thus reminding some of his readers of his Time Patrol character, Manse Everard, who comes from the Midwest.

Each of Anderson's fictional futures is unique, exploring a distinct set of possibilities, but we also recognize some common interests and preoccupations.

Technological Progress

Poul Anderson, The Winter Of The World, III.

Our favorite fat merchant in Arvanneth says:

"'...he got permission to use the telegraph. Marvelous innovation you've got there, sir, marvelous.'" (p. 39)

 - and:

"'...sir, haven't you heard about wireless telegraphy? A recent Killimaraichan invention. We in the Guilds know little more than the fact that it exists.'" (p. 41)

So there has been some very recent technological progress but why were these (re)discoveries not made much earlier? Over ten thousand years are believed to have elapsed since the beginning of the Ice Age.

The Winter Of The World and Twilight World are almost companion volumes about survival during an Ice Age and after a nuclear war, respectively. Unfortunately, Anderson's non-fiction work, Thermonuclear Warfare, refutes Twilight World. See here.

That is all that there is time for this evening. I wanted to post once more about The Winter Of The World before signing off.

Early Stories And Future Histories

Twilight World is a mini-future history. In this post, we compare:

Robert Heinlein's Future History;
Poul Anderson's Twilight World;
Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

Twilight World (1961) incorporates:

"Tomorrow's Children" (1947);
"Chain of Logic." (1947)

The earliest published Psychotechnic History chronology (1955) apparently included "Entity." (1949)

The Future History begins with Heinlein's first published story, "Life-Line," (1939) and also incorporates one other story published in 1939 and six published in 1940.

Thus, to generalize, early stories get into future histories although maybe "Entity" does not really belong? One connection is that a character flies with a gravitic impellor, as in "Teucan." (1954)

"Life-Line," about Pinero who accurately predicts dates of death, does not seem to fit because Pinero is murdered and his apparatus destroyed so how does this story connect with the rest of the Future History? It does because Methuselah's Children discloses that the apparently deathless Lazarus Long had consulted Pinero - who gave him no reading and returned his fee.

Some Short Future Histories

Future histories differ in length. A long future history series is multi-themed, dealing only with whatever happens in the future, whereas a shorter series can have a single theme with a definite conclusion. Although Poul Anderson's Twilight World is not listed as one of his future histories, it is a collected series covering more than one generation and concluding in a further future. Its single theme is that World War III causes so many mutations that some are beneficial and even enable subsequent generations to colonize other planets so that the outer Solar System is inhabited after Earth has become uninhabitable. Without that War, would the race have survived?

James Blish's The Seedling Stars is a single volume in four parts, originally five stories, about the single theme of pantropy, the science of adapting human beings to other planetary environments. It conclusion is that, when Adapted Men have filled the galaxy, Earth has changed so much that it is colonized by Adapted Men.

Twilight World and The Seedling Stars both address changes to the human form and extraterrestrial colonization.

Anderson's Maurai And Kith is a collection of only three Maurai stories and two Kith stories although later a third story was added to the Kith series and a long novel to both series. The theme of the Maurai Federation series is that, after a nuclear war, seafaring people of the Southern Hemisphere become the world power. We get a sense of Poul Anderson exploring every possibility.

James Blish's Okie series was complete as four stories in one volume. However, Blish added a prequel, a juvenile novel and a sequel. Okie culture ends in Volume III and the universe ends in Volume IV.

Larry Niven's Known Space is a long future history series with a definite ending. Because human beings are artificially selected for the inheritable psychic power of luck, Known Space and the Thousand Worlds become utopian societies of lucky people about whom Niven becomes unable to write any more stories! As Fran Cobden remarked, "...an amazing idea!"

Other short future histories:

The Moon Maid by ERB (a sequel to John Carter);

City by Clifford Simak;

Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand by Brian Aldiss.

Past Futures

See Ancient Futures.

Futuristic sf becomes alternative history sf either when the present catches up with it or when its scientific premises are disproved. In the case of Poul Anderson's Twilight World, World War III did not happen on schedule and Anderson himself has refuted the idea that any mutations caused by radiation could turn out to be beneficial. See here. Thus, in "past futures" sf, we read not what the future might be like but what it was once thought that it might be like. We go backwards, then forwards again but in a different direction.

If HG Wells had written about interstellar space travel, then his scientific premises would probably have included the proposition that our galaxy is the entire universe (see Significant Dates) although, following Kant, he might have speculated about other "island universes." See here.

I will reread Twilight World as a "past future" but first I must finish rereading The Winter Of The World.

Flying The Hump In World War II

Colonel Hugh Drummond, who has the same name as Bulldog Drummond, has just flown around the world for two years in an atomic-powered stratojet which he lands on the street of the US capital, Taylor, Oregon, where he is received by the de facto President, General Robinson, who says:

"'Gambai.
"Drummond thought Robinson must have flown the Hump in World War Two to learn that toast. That would have been long ago, when he was young and it was still possible to win a war."
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), Prologue, I, p. 9.

Observations
I had to google the Hump.
World War II was "long ago" but still recent enough for a man who had served in it to serve also in World War III. That is no longer the case, if we are going to have a World War III: another example of a future becoming a past.

That is all for today, folks. I will be busy tomorrow but might manage to publish some posts.

Twilight World: Epilogue

Poul Anderson, Twilight World, Epilogue, pp. 175-180. (Only four pages of text.)

"Orna of Nildo was a courteous host who wished his guest to see all the sights." (p. 177)

The narrative has moved so far into the future that the forms of names have changed.

"Ganymede didn't have many, but the midnight sky was worth a good deal else." (ibid.)

In the previous chapter, spaceships from Earth had only just arrived on Mars.

"He helped Danivar into flexarmor; he himself needed only put on a coat and facial mask." (ibid.)

So Orna is more adapted to the Ganymedean environment?

They float up a gravity shaft. That technology had not existed before although Alaric Wayne might have invented it.

They see Jupiter at full phase, crags, scarps, a frozen lake and a few stars. Underground fusion plants have warmed Ganymede up to a hundred below and will have made it comfortable in maybe another century. Orna will be quite old before the task is completed. When he was a boy, there was neither hydrosphere nor air.

Collie, on the first Martian expedition, had thought that one day Mars would be green. (17, p. 166) Now, Danivar is from the richest Solar planet, the green Mars, and calls himself a Martian. (p. 178) (In The Winter Of The World, Mars is blue although astrologers say that it used to be red.) Ganymede is the frontier.

Like Isaac Asimov's Second Foundationers, Orna and Danivar converse in gestures and single syllables. Danivar had visited Earth "'...as esthetician of an archaeological party.'" (ibid.) Martians have dug on Earth for millennia. The Terrestrial biosphere collapsed at the time of the emigration to Mars. Danivar acknowledges that Alaric Wayne had established "'...a self-sufficient terrestroid ecology on Mars...'" (p.179) just in time. There is now an ecological restoration program on Earth.

Danivar found a box containing objects including a post card to Hugh Drummond. Having spent a few hours learning ancient languages, he was able to read it. He thinks that, in another hundred generations, when the sense of perception is fully developed, it might be possible to detect lingering auras.

They call themselves Homo Superior by contrast with the Old Humans. The cold gets to Danivar and he wants "'...to go back inside...'" (p. 180)

A comparable concluding story is James Blish's "Watershed."

Jeering Wind And The Weight Of Centuries

Poul Anderson, Twilight World, Prologue, 3.

Isolated farmers have deformed mutated children and argue about whether the world is ending, Biblically speaking. When the boss man accuses a woman of having killed a child:

"The woman shrank back, her lips tight. The room filled with a crackling silence through which Drummond could hear the jeering of the wind." (p. 24)

Yet again, the wind as Greek chorus.

The passage continues:

"One of the babies began to cry. It had two heads." (ibid.)

Before that, Anderson had told us only that about a quarter of the children "...were visibly monstrous." (p. 23)

Sometimes horror fiction works by letting the reader's imagination work. (Twilight World is not horror but, like any sf, can draw on that tradition.)

"Drummond rose. He felt a weight as of centuries on his shoulders..." (p. 25)

Earlier, he had thought of himself as "Heir of the ages..." (Prologue, 1, p. 5)

Time has weight, at least metaphorically. See here. A James Blish character has a similar experience:

"Weinbaum stared straight ahead. Suddenly, everyone and everything in the room was strange to him. He felt as though he had been enclosed in a glacier for 25,000 years."
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), p. 104.

Different fictional futures but comparable experiences.

Worlds

That is one Wow! cover.

First, see Ad Astra. Notice that Robert Heinlein wrote a juvenile novel called Time For The Stars whereas a Poul Anderson collection is called Time And Stars!

Another word quite frequently used in sf titles is "World."

Poul Anderson:

Twilight World 
Satan's World
The Rebel Worlds
The Winter Of The World
World Without Stars
The Byworlder
A World Named Cleopatra
The War Of Two Worlds
Three Worlds To Conquer
Is There Life On Other Worlds? (non-fiction)

And that is all unless, of course, you know better.

Twilight World As Future History?

I am beginning to suspect that Poul Anderson's Twilight World (London, 1984) is not only a series packaged as a novel but also potentially a short future history:

Prologue, 1-5 (30 pages);
"Chain of Logic," 1-5 (30 pages);
"The Children of Fortune," 1-18 (101 pages);
Epilogue (4 pages).

In the Prologue, Hugh Drummond, having just completed an exploratory flight around the world after it was devastated by the nuclear and bacteriological Final War, conducts a census of what is left of the United States, highlighting that mutants are now a permanent part of the population and will become the majority.

"Chain of Logic" 1, narrated from the viewpoint of Roderick Wayne in the small town of Southvale, reveals that, nine years earlier, the US and Canada were united and Drummond was elected President.

"Chain of Logic" 2 shows Richard Hammer leading his gang towards Southvale, intending to capture the town, hijack a plane, fly to the capitol and destroy it with one of its own stockpiled atomic bombs, thus destroying the government which otherwise would put an end to his rule in Southvale.

"Chain of Logic" 3, which is as far as I have reread, begins when Wayne's mutant son, Alaric, is woken by his equally mutant dog trying to warn him about a threat from the south - Hammer's gang.

"The Children of Fortune," set later, covers the resumption of interplanetary travel, as far as Mars, but it features Alaric Wayne, not a later generation, which is why I describe the series as only potentially a future history. However, the Epilogue is set millennia later when Homo Superior with telepathic communication and individual lifespans of centuries inhabits the rich green planet Mars and is terraforming Ganymede so the future historical perspective is definitely present.

Twilight World And Nuclear Winter

Science Fiction

The first published suggestion that a cooling of climate could be an effect of a nuclear war, appears to have been originally put forth by Poul Anderson and F.N. Waldrop in their post-war story "Tomorrow's Children", in the March 1947 issue of the Astounding Science Fiction magazine. The story, primarily about a team of scientists hunting down mutants,^[91] warns of a "Fimbulwinter" caused by dust that blocked sunlight after a recent nuclear war and speculated that it may even trigger a new Ice Age.^[92][93] Anderson went on to publish a novel based partly on this story in 1961 titling it Twilight World.^[94] Similarly in 1985 it was noted by T. G. Parsons that the story Torch by C. Anvil, which also appeared in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, but in the April 1957 edition, contains the essence of the "Twilight at Noon"/"nuclear winter" hypothesis. In the story a nuclear warhead ignites an oil field, and the soot produced "screens out part of the sun's radiation", resulting in Arctic temperatures for much of the population of North America and the Soviet Union.^{[95]
-copied from here.}

A Better Future

Poul Anderson, Twilight World, Prologue, 4.

In Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, the future becomes better because everyone's intelligence increases. In Anderson's Twilight World, the future might become better because some influential people have learned from historical mistakes:

"'...remember what we said once, about leaving the old savage way of settling things, that never brings a settlement at all? We'd throw away a lesson our noses were rubbed in not three years ago.'" (p. 28)

"'...the only way to sanity - to survival - is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We're all - well, Earthlings - and subclassification is deadly. we all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it.' Drummond smiled with little mirth. 'End of sermon.'
"'Yeah...yeah, I guess you're right, at that.'" (pp. 29-30)

For me, the only discordant note here was "...as individuals." That can mean "everyone for himself." But the passage as a whole means that we should cooperate as informed individuals. Subjects of a totalitarian state who work together only because they are told to work together cannot meet the challenge of the future.

A Maurai Superhero

Orion Shall Rise, CHAPTER TEN, 3.

 Wairoa Haakonu, artificially conceived and a social misfit, looks odd but has hyper-acute senses, is able to hear subvocalizations and can also speed-read while deducing more by logic and intuition. Thus, like the mutants in Poul Anderson's Twilight World, he is a superhero, although not referred to as such. See Comics And Science Fiction. Superheroes grew from prose sf but became a different genre in a different medium, sequential art, and have now moved big time to another medium, cinema.

Because superheroes originated in sf, they can still be found there as in the cases of Wairoa Haakonu, the Twilight World mutants, Jack Havig and Joel Weatherfield.

Nuclear Winter

See:

Twilight World And Nuclear Winter

There Will Be Time III

"Winter lay heavily on the north, a huge gray sky seeming frozen solid over the rolling white plains. The last three winters had come early and stayed long. Colloidal dust of the bombs, suspended in the atmosphere and cutting down the solar constant by a deadly percent or two."
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World, Prologue, 3, p. 19.

In some projections, a cloud of radioactive dust would surround the Earth, completing blocking the sun and killing every blade of grass.

I would like to post once more this morning but other duties call.

A Peaceful Scene

"The car emerged from the woods onto the shore of a small lake. It was a peaceful scene, the quiet waters like molten gold in the slanting sunlight, trees ringing them and the mountains all around. Under one huge pine stood a cottage and a woman on the the porch."
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), Prologue, 1, p. 14.

I quote this passage to demonstrate that Anderson was able to write descriptive passages like that as early as Twilight World and also that it was not yet a multi-sensory description.

several factors counteract the peacefulness of the scene:

soldiers guard the cottage from marauders;
a daisy is huge, red and irregularly shaped;
a squirrel has noticeably altered facial features.

One hopeful factor is that the woman is pregnant.

The Children Of Fortune

Poul Anderson, "The Children of Fortune" IN Anderson, Twilight World (London, 1984), pp. 69-173:

p. 69 is an internal title page;
p. 70 is blank;
pp. 71-72 are a quotation from The Song of Grotte which could have fitted onto a single page;
pp. 73-173 are the text, divided into 18 chapters.

On pp. 73-74, the viewpoint character, Collie, kills two assailants, one of them an Indian too old to be a mutant, the other a teenage mutie. From the fact that Collie leaps to a branch twenty feet above, we infer that he also is a mutie.

We have encountered different characters in the Prologue, in "Chain of Logic" and now in "The Children of Fortune" and are still within a generation of the War. Twilight World will transport us into a remote future in its short Epilogue, a slow-paced future history.