One Last Dip Into "License" This Evening

"License." 

Labour chief Tom Swanson manages the CIO local, its benefit funds, banks, stores, factories etc. He knows Dulac's chief goon because both of them are prominent Rotarians.

Projects tenements rise on either side of the freeway with not more than three or four to a room, faces at every window and pedestrians like ants below. They are fed and entertained. A protein factory processes algae from Lake Superior. There is crowding everywhere on Earth but also a Peace Authority.

Dulac must have guided missiles in his home defence system because he has filed intent to shoot down any over-flying aircraft that is not police or Peace Authority.

The narrator, Rheinbogen, and his colleague, Nygard, check into a hotel where the bellhop asks if they want girls. "'Later...'" (p. 149) Posing as politicians' union executives, they must maintain their character and therefore add girls to their expense account.

Rheinbogen checks the taps. Water brands are not good since clan feuds wrecked the last great distillery.

The story reads like a very condensed future history background synopsis. I have read it at least once before but have no memory of the details and do not know what is going to happen next.

A Science Of Society: Games Theory

"Inside Straight."

Because the Hermesians, as they are called here, are gamblers and have even based their planetary economy on gambling, they have developed games theory more than anyone else (games theory is one of the inputs to psychotechnics in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History and is applied by a Galactic psychotechnician in "Details.") and, by letting a spy escape with crucial military intelligence, they make the enemy's actions even more predictable. Thus, they win the interstellar war. Is this enough to base a short story on? Well, Anderson did base this story on it and the story has given us three blog posts in addition to several earlier.

The two remaining stories in Seven Conquests are "License" and "Strange Bedfellows." I have no memory of the contents of "License" but am still sitting at home recovering from a cold so maybe "License" is next on the reading list.

"Cold Victory," full of content, generated a dayfull of posts yesterday.

A Life With SF

While at secondary school ("high school") in the 1960's, I:

liked men on horseback but preferred men in spacesuits;

bought sf paperbacks and borrowed hardbacks from a Library;

twice found a hardback sequel to a paperback in a Library;

put several authors, although not yet Poul Anderson, on a "must read" list;

was very impressed by Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky as being set in a completely different kind of environment and did not yet know that it was part of a series;

read Anderson's "The Game of Glory" in the British reprint edition of Venture Science Fiction and did not yet know either that this story was part of a Dominic Flandry series or that that series was part of a future history series;

learned that Merseians had existed in the Polesotechnic League period by reading a reader's letter in an sf mag;

thought of "The Game of Glory" and James Blish's "Beep" as space secret service stories;

learned that the future would be different from the present by reading Guardians Of Time, Twilight World and sf in general;

in particular, knew that Great Powers grow, then decline;

imagined an sf film entitled The Green Fields Of Earth with an appropriate theme song and then saw Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth (that is the order in which this happened in my memory).

The "must read" list was revised later.

Mental Powers

"Earthman, Beware!"

Joel to Peggy:

"'I have some powers over the mind,' he said slowly. 'With your co-operation, I could adjust your feelings about this.'" (p. 48)

She says, "'No -'" (ibid.) but is unable to resist his strong will and telepathic brain. Is he right to do it when she has said no? And, if we were offered it, should we consent to someone else adjusting our feelings? In zazen, we practice "sitting with" whatever thoughts or feelings come up.

Although he adjusts her feelings towards him, he does not erase her memory of his extraterrestrial origin. In fact, she suggests how he might contact his people. However, when the elders of his species arrive, they:

"...make certain changes. Your memory and that of others, your body, the work you are doing and have done -" (p. 60)

He wakes up thinking that he is a Terrestrial human being. But have they also changed his body, changed Peggy's memory, removed all trace of his many inventions and discoveries and erased everyone's memories of them? God-like powers, indeed.

An Acknowledgement And A Contrast

Before we return to our usual topic of Poul Anderson, let me record that I have received an acknowledgement from British author, Alan Moore, although it was not addressed just to me. At the end of three pages of ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

"And thanks to the tiny percentage of you readers who have read to the end of these acknowledgements. To be honest I usually skip them, so your efforts are truly appreciated.

"Alan Moore

"Northampton

"January, 2022"

-Alan Moore, Illuminations (London, 2023), p. 456.

Back to "Son of the Sword":

Unusually, Thoas has the same memory twice in the space of a few pages:

"He thought of the timber hall that was his, that his father had built in the wild hills of Cyprus, and of the windy trees and the long slope of mountain down to the sea, salt air and anchored ships and gulls flying overhead." (pp. 116-117)

"Thoas remembered again the great draughty hall on the heights of Cyprus and the far blue sea and sunlight streaming down windy slopes to shatter in a million pieces on its waves." (p. 126)

Deja vu. We're like "Have I already read this?" The Cyprian scene is well worth describing twice in different words.

Each time, the memory has both a context and a corollary. 

First context: Thoas has just reflected that the Egyptian palace is built of mud that could crumble after one or two generations of weather.

First corollary: "Suddenly Egypt was stifling." (p. 117)

Second context: Thoas has just reflected on the strangeness of Egypt, "...riotous with life..." (p. 125) but brooded over by death, and the Nile of laughing lotuses where crocodiles eat murdered corpses.

Second corollary: "Aye, it would be good to come home, if ever they did." (p. 126)

Continuing "Strangers"

See "Starting Strangers."

Something that I did not mention before: there is only one "moon." We are used to more on extra-solar planets!

Something that I have learned by rereading further: the narrator and his species sit on their tails like the same author's Merseians and Mithrans.

I am having a strange experience as a reader. I know that I have previously read every item in Poul Anderson's All One Universe. We are currently rereading the first story in this collection, "Strangers," because, like a couple of others that we have reread recently, it is about human beings colonizing an already inhabited planet. However, I have no memory of the content of the story and might as well be reading it for the first time.

Although the narrator, Ak'hai'i, and his people are physically very unlike human beings, their predicament is all too familiar from other works by Anderson. The climate is changing, populations are on the move and the Wold People are attacked by militarily superior Charioteers with iron weapons.

When Ak'hai'i goes to the Night Folk for help, he describes the individual whom he approaches and we recognize one of us, a human being. And that is as far as I have reread over breakfast this morning.

Today: a talk in Lancaster Museum by a hereditary member of the House of Lords.

This evening: Zen group for me and choir for Sheila.

In the gaps: rereading "Strangers" and Stieg Larsson and reading about the Spanish Civil War.

Some Details In NEW AMERICA

In "Our Many Roads to the Stars," Poul Anderson refers to:

"...voyages to Avalon and Cibola..."

-New America, p. 263.

I have no memory of reading about Cibola before but now can easily google it. The name, "Avalon," is very important in Anderson's Technic History.

In "Home," a brown-furred native Mithran resembles a long-armed, bird-headed kangaroo. Is this an acceptable account of an extraterrestrial? A human being who has grown up on Mithras does not have to think of them like that but that does not change the fact that we do. The name, "Mithras," is very important in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy. (When a planet is named after a god, e.g., Woden, we soon forget the original meaning.)

That interstellar travel might be terminated on the ground that an Earth with an ever-increasing population can no longer afford it makes "Home" sound very like the Rustum stories. These narratives belong together in a themed collection if not also in a linear series.

Current Issues: Time Travel And Jupiter

See Jim Al Khalili on time travel here (I hope).

A very enjoyable afternoon with Andrea overlooking Morecambe Bay, as ever. We watched Jim Al Khalili's very clear discussion of issues around time travel. (For Al Khalili on this blog, see here.) (Scroll down.) There are many parallels between this discussion and Poul Anderson's works. Can causality be circular and/or would a Time Patrol be necessary?

Meanwhile, on another current issue, see also the immediately preceding post, Anglesey And Helmuth. If such posts encourage some blog readers to read or reread the works discussed, then they will have achieved one purpose. I had said that I would concurrently reread four Jupiter narratives and have subsequently read to the half way point of ERB's "Skeleton Men of Jupiter." There were warlike green men and more civilized red men on Mars and there are warlike "skeleton men" and more civilized purple men on Jupiter! 

The rapid axial spin of Jupiter generates centrifugal force that counteracts its stronger gravity. There is a breathable oxygen atmosphere beneath the poisonous gases in the upper atmosphere which alone are visible to Terrestrial telescopes. The surface is both heated and lit by many volcanoes! ("Gods of all stars!," to quote James Blish's Okies.)

On this blog, we frequently appreciate Poul Anderson's descriptions of weather and scenery. Here is an extract from ERB's Foreword to "Skeleton Men...":

"Occasionally I also have to inject a little weather and scenery in my deathless classics, two further examples of literary racketeering that I especially deplore in the writings of others. Yet there is something to be said in extenuation of weather and scenery, which, together with adjectives, do much to lighten the burdens of authors and run up their word count."

-Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter Of Mars (London, 1968), p. 71.

OK. ERB's tone is frivolous so our response should not be serious. It is interesting that he picked on this one of the many points that we admire in Anderson.

If Venus and Mars had turned out to be as described in SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation Trilogy, then would ERB have become more literarily respectable, as he does in the Trilogy? I doubt it and I question whether this can be a serious suggestion by Stirling?

ERB's politics: there are good rulers and bad rulers and that's it. The bad rulers are arrogant and cruel. Contrast Poul Anderson's sympathetic treatment of some of his characters that he would have disagreed with politically:

a Communist in The Devil's Game and another in Murder Bound;

the dying moments of the leader of the Hermetian revolution in Mirkheim.

In ERB's The Land That Time Forgot, a villainous character says, "I am an IWW. I hate all American's..." (memory)

(The IWW still exists. One of its official showed up to represent some employees in Lancaster!)

We welcome the glimpses of John Carter's and Dejah Thoris's later lives in the later volumes.

I do not think that we have anything further to say about ERB although I will dutifully persevere until the end of "Skeleton Men..."

Down The Stream

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER NINE.

And now for another change of pace. Diana Crowfeather thinks:

"How good it'll be, floatin' quietly down the river with Axor..." (p. 294)

This is almost entirely a personal association but that is part of the experience of reading a rich text. I recently committed to memory one of the best short poems in English:

(Image copied from here.)

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

By Lewis Carroll

A boat beneath a sunny sky,

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —

Lingering in the golden gleam —

Life, what is it but a dream?

-copied from here.

Alice Pleasance Liddell drifts; Diana Crowfeather floats:

"...under skies

"Never seen by waking eyes."

We thank Lewis Carroll and Poul Anderson.

Doyle And Ashbless

See:

Three Other Time Travel Novels 

A Case In Point

Brendan Doyle, time traveller, knows that, on a particular day in 1810, the poet, William Ashbless, arrived in London where he entered the Jamaica Coffee House at 10:30 and then wrote his poem, "The Twelve Hours of the Night," while seated in the coffee house. Wanting to meet and befriend Ashbless, Doyle arrives in the coffee house on time. However, Ashbless does not show up so Doyle writes the poem from memory, then remains in the nineteenth century as Ashbless...

There is more to the story than that but I have summarized the paradox and am now going to bed. Life is busy here: Robin Hood (a version of) this evening; more authentic Vikings tomorrow. It is nearly midnight.

Ecce Romani

Manse Everard of the Time Patrol reflects that the Romans brought not only slave traders, tax farmers and sadistic games but also peace, prosperity, a widened world and afterwards - in the post-Imperial wreckage - books, technologies, faiths, ideas and the memory of lives not devoted to mere survival. (Time Patrol, p. 604)

Reading about the Romans, I am struck by how like and unlike us they were:

civilized, urbane and literate;

participating in complicated political processes, including elections;

owning slaves and disrespecting even freedmen;

very close to physical violence - civil war seems to have been a routine political process!;

worshipping a literal, not a metaphorical, pantheon...

(We appreciate Jupiter in epic poetry but do not expect him to strike us with lightning.)

The Unicorn

Three Hearts And Three Lions.

I am back home from the Gregson. It is getting late. I am not going to research this post, just write from memory. 

Alianora rides a unicorn. Holger does not understand her affinity with it. I think that readers are supposed to understand that virgins have an affinity with unicorns?

In Larry Niven's The Flight Of The Horse, a male character describes a female character who has not come on-stage yet as a "frigid bitch." When this young woman does come on-stage, she is a cheerful and sympathetic character - and has an affinity with a unicorn.

When Holger and Morgan le Fay embrace, Alianora approaches on her unicorn which throws her and bolts, never to return! The two women insult each other like fishwives and Holger must choose between them. He does not side with Chaos.

There. That is a short post before returning to late night other reading. There is always something to write about although it is never predictable what it is going to be.

Summer Past; Red And Gold

The Broken Sword.

Two more passages in Chapter XXIV:

"...the memory of Skafloc was becoming a summer that was past, recalled in a new year." (p. 179)

The narrative has combined the passage of the seasons with the feelings of the characters. Now, a past season becomes an analogy for a changed feeling. Both the text and the analogy continue:

"He warmed her heart without searing it, and her longing for him was like a still tarn whereon sun-glints had begun to dance." (ibid.)

A longing that has become still and is like dancing light - has ceased to be a longing.

Over the page:

"There came an evening when they two stood on the shore, the waters murmurous at their feet and the sunset red and gold behind them." (p. 180)

They two are Freda and her new suitor, Audun. He proposes and she accepts. But an elemental, non-human viewpoint would focus on summers and sunsets and not on human relationships!

Going Home

The Fleet Of Stars, 13.

Sometimes it seems more than fortuitous that a particular paragraph falls right at the end of a right-hand page so that it is necessary to turn the page in order to continue reading. Although there is no pause in the text, the reader experiences the very slight pause of a page-turning immediately before a dramatic development in the narrative. Thus, He'o, an intelligent seal, reflecting on humanity and expressing his own experience, tells Fenn and Stellarosa:

"'Yes, you are a peculiar race... I will never fully understand you. Do you understand yourselves?' His whiskers quivered. 'I, though, I am going home to my sea.'" (p. 159)

He'o is going home.

Turning the page, we read:

"Thunder smote. His skull exploded. Blood and brains fountained. The missile whanged off two walls before it dropped." (p. 160)

His last conscious thought before his instantaneous death was of the sea. Some would say that that was the best way to die although I disagree. He'o's best death would have been at the end of a very long old age while experiencing his sea.

Do we imagine that He'o does go home, i.e., that he enters a hereafter corresponding to his memory of the sea? We can imagine this and write fiction about it but consciousness must end when the brain that generates it explodes.

"Together"

Let me discuss something tangential but I will then return us to Poul Anderson's works. All my life, I have heard the Eton Boating Song but had only ever discerned the single word, "together." I hope that the song is audible here. It is mentioned, appropriately, in one of Dornford Yates' books.

What I like and approve of:

the music

togetherness

memory and nostalgia

acknowledgement of the passage of time

What I am not in tune with:

the focusing of all this on an English public school or indeed on any boarding school

Relevance to Anderson: 

continuity

conservatism

Flandry and his fiancee in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows

Memory And Immortality

.

The Fleet Of Stars, 6.

The Prefect of the Synesis denigrates reports of immortality on extra-solar colony planets. He begins by stating that cerebral data-storage capacity is finite, an issue addressed in other Andersonian works. But does a brain retain - or need to retain - every experience?

However, even if retention were infinite, a more fundamental problem would remain. The longer you lived, the less often you would be able to remember any given earlier experience. Thus, how long would you retain any sense of identity or continuity with your younger self? Surely eventually you would effectively become a different person which is what happens naturally in any case when some people die and others are born? Maybe nature has got this issue right in the first place?

In any case, I fully agree with Fenn's response to the Prefect's speech:

"'...I don't think I'd mind a run of several thousand years, myself. And after that - who knows?'" (p. 82)

Exactly. Not caution, courage.

City And Zamok Sabely'

In World Without Stars

City, an artificial satellite of the colonized planet, Landomar, began as a metal shell but, a few centuries later, has acquired:

towers;

parapets;

domes

ports;

a memorial;

docked ships;

swarming boats.

Felipe Argens' portwife lives in high-weight, overlooking space.

In The Fleet Of Stars

Zamok Sabely', a space habitat orbiting sixty degrees behind the planet Demeter in the system of Alpha Centauri A, began as a stone maneuvered into position and converted into structures which, over the centuries, have come to include:

a faceted hub;

hundred-kilometer spokes;

intricate cables and passages;

a flashing rim;

solar collectors;

spire-like anti-meteor guns;

guardian robotic vessels.

Balanced, harmonious, beautiful and jewel-like, this orbiting city, depot, market, commercial and cultural centre, aerie and castle reminds Guthrie of medieval cathedrals.

Download Guthrie is a consciousness whose memory includes all that.

Quantum Consciousness

The Fleet Of Stars, 2.

Computers and robots behave like people but only because they carry out algorithms. Conscious, creative minds could not be created:

"'...till the quantum nature of consciousness was understood.'" (p. 21)

Then researchers, applying their knowledge of atoms and quanta:

scanned a nervous system molecule by molecule;

recorded the patterns corresponding to memory and personality;

mapped these patterns into a neural net that was an analogue of a brain;

thus created a download that was a copy of a mind;

gave the download sensors, a speaker and a machine body although not yet a newly grown organic body;

thus learned how to make electrophotonic hardware and software that was self-conscious without having been copied from an organic brain.

These "sophotects," linked with all computers, robots and each other, became self-programming and self-evolving. There is a single pyramidal cybercosm with everyday appliances at the base and the unimaginable Teramind at the peak and there is a similar mind at the galactic level in Poul Anderson's later Genesis which is the peak of future histories.

Clearly, a neural net is an artificial brain, not a computer.

Sequels By Stapledon And Anderson

Any futuristic sf novel creates a unique future environment that becomes a possible basis for one or more sequels. Thus, in Olaf Stapledon's second Last Men novel, the Sun has been enlarged, Mercury, Venus and Earth have been destroyed and the Eighteenth Human Species inhabits Neptune. Because the Solar System had been transformed in precisely these ways in the first novel, that transformed system necessarily provided the background setting for the framing sequence of the second novel which is mainly about the Last Men's exploration of the past.

Similarly, Poul Anderson's first three Harvest of Stars novels had established major civilizational changes within the Solar System and also some extra-solar colonization. On this basis then, the fourth novel, The Fleet Of Stars, opens on Amaterasu, the colonized fourth planet of Beta Hydri. Beginning to reread this novel without having first reread any of its three predecessors, I rely both on my memory of earlier readings and on Anderson's text to make for comprehensible reading. 

Both Last Men In London and The Fleet Of Stars begin with a man and a woman seeking solitude on a beach but these accounts are in no way parallel or comparable. Stapledon's imagined future is dated in ways that Anderson's is not, yet.

Immortal Employees

World Without Stars.

"Immortal" spacemen live for centuries or even millennia and spend all that time in paid employment in the same kind of work. Can't they save, invest and retire either to leisure activities or to retraining for other kinds of work? It seems an odd kind of existence. Even odder, they preserve their sanity by periodically editing their memories so that they only ever consciously remember a much shorter period, maybe only a few decades, like the equivalent of what used to be a normal working life. Their previous lives and work are recorded somewhere but not in their own conscious memories. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, recalls his youth, his most recent few years of work and only a few other selected details. He speaks of revisiting old places and visiting new places but even most of the old places will be experienced anew. And, in any case, there is an infinity of new places because the space jump gives access to every galaxy. This has to be the strangest fictional future ever.

In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the small group of mutant immortals have had to solve the memory accumulation problem for themselves and are able to traverse interstellar space at only sub-light speeds so their situation is very different. They propose to part and to reconvene in another million years which I should think is impossible. Will Hugh Valland survive for a million years? Statistically unlikely. But we would have liked to have read some sequels.

In James Blish's Okie cities, unaging policemen, and men in other professions, simply stay in those roles for centuries.