Galactic Civilizations And Global Conflicts

No posts today until now because we (editorially speaking) have been with Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. 

 Andrea usually says something blog-relevant. He knows of an sf TV series with the premise that there is about one technological civilization in every twenty or so galaxies but some of them have FTL (faster-than-light space travel). 

Observations:

the FTL must be very F if there is regular intergalactic travel;

are they taking any steps to populate the galaxies?;

Poul Anderson would be able to take that premise and write prose fiction set in that universe;

I am inclined to accept the scarcity of technological civilizations but not FTL.

Andrea's other contribution today: although nothing much is changing internationally right now, we are heading for a major conflict and indeed are already in the first stage of World War III although it is not yet recognized as such - it took a while for 1939-'45 to become a global conflict.

Are we the only intelligences in a vast volume of space and also about to destroy ourselves? 

Poul Anderson wrote a few short dystopias.

Marcus Aurelius

To Turn The Tide.

Temporal displacement involves place name change. "Vienna, Austria" had been and becomes again "Provincia Pannonia Superior, Imperium Romanum."

Artorius' first meeting with Emperor Marcus Aurelius gets a massive buildup. In CHAPTER FIFTEEN, Marcus Aurelius discusses Artorius while still in Rome. In CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, Marcus Aurelius discusses Artorius after he has travelled to Vindobona in the Province of Pannona Superior. In CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, Artorius reflects that he is about to meet someone whose life and death he has studied and whose books he has read, then does meet him. The Emperor closely resembles his own face on coins and statues. Artorius quotes a book that Marcus Aurelius has not written yet and presumably will not write, or not in the same way, in this new timeline. 

This has to be a classic of time travel fiction.

(It was fortunate not only that the merchant Josephus who found the newly arrived and defenceless time travellers did not kill and rob them but instead helped them and treated them with respect but even that they had arrived near a road where they could be and were discovered immediately. However, my friend Andrea informs me that it is inappropriate either to entreat or to thank Fortuna.)

Conscious Simulations

 

Andrea usually says something relevant. 

In Poul Anderson's Genesis, a far future post-organic intelligence creates simulated environments with conscious inhabitants who think that they really are living in ancient Greece, in nineteenth century England or in an alternative history etc. Andrea summarizes current arguments to the conclusion that we are now living in such a simulation.

(i) If there is one material environment containing many simulated environments, including simulations within simulations, then it is statistically more probable that we are living in one of the simulations than in the original material environment.

(ii) Apparently, sub-atomic particles are observed to exhibit properties that would conform to the simulation theory but I have lost track of the argument. 

See:

Simulation hypothesis

It gets complicated - and it is getting late here. But Anderson's sf is still at the forefront of speculation.

This Sunday

Today, my wife and daughter have embarked on a day-long coach trip to Holy Island. Having meditated, breakfasted and blogged, I will walk by Lancaster Canal to a Hospice cafe for lunch and will then return home, again to meditate, read, blog and eat. Tomorrow evening, Zen group. Tuesday, the monthly visit to (male) Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

Reading involves noticing the multiple parallels between Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman. In Three Hearts And Three Lions, Alianora somewhere refers to Queen Mab who appears as a character in both authors' works.

OK. It is time for me to move.

Laterz.

Multiverses

See Anderson And Andrea. 

In addition to discussing the state of this world, Andrea and I also watch superhero TV series that involve inter-universal crossovers within a fictional multiverse.

Worthwhile prose sf that I have read about multiverses includes:

Conquistador by SM Stirling;

Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest in which -

the Prince Rupert of the Rhine from the Shakespearean universe of this novel (A Midsummer Tempest),

Holger Danske from Carolingian myth and from Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions,

and Valeria Matuchek from the magical universe of Anderson's Operation Otherworld -

- meet each other in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, from Anderson's "House Rule" and "Losers' Night," the first cameoing Nicholas van Rijn from Anderson's Technic History and the latter featuring among others Winston Churchill.

We can't get enough of it. (But fortunately Anderson gives us quite a lot.)

Addendum, 29 April: Life has gotten busy here. (I use an Americanism out of respect for Poul Anderson.) So far this year, we have had 440 posts in 4 months so maybe that is enough until some time early next month? On Saturday, there will be a May Day March and Rally in Lancaster and, on Sunday, I might get a lift to a Wesak (The Buddha's Birthday) Festival in Northumberland. Did both last year. (Maybe not many people celebrate both.) Anderson-wise, we are still rereading Harvest The Fire. After that, who knows? Onward through the multiverse.

Anderson And Andrea

 

(That is a neat post title, literally meaning "Son of Andrew and Andrew.")

Regular readers remember that Andrea is a male friend of Italian descent who lives above his brother's Old Pier Bookshop (see the attached image) where I visit him once a month.

The word from Andrea this month:

The world is in a bad state and getting worse. I think that each of us can fill in some of the details.

Reality reflected in Poul Anderson's works:

Time Patrol

"It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.

"Here also it was fall, the kind of crisp and brilliant day New York often enjoyed until it became uninhabitable..." (my emphasis)

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 342.

"[Manse Everard] didn't like dirt, disorder, and danger any better than I did. However, he felt he needed a pied-a-terre in the twentieth century, and had grown used to these lodgings before decay had advanced overly far." (my emphasis)

-"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" AT 1980, p. 352.

The Technic History

"The Technic Civilization series...begins in the twenty-first century, with recovery from a violent period of global unrest known as the Chaos."

-Sandra Miesel, CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION IN Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December2009), pp. 611-619 AT p. 611.

We are in the twenty-first century and entering the Chaos. Anderson's fantastic fiction resonates now.

Verbals And Visuals

We read descriptions of Valles Marineris in Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, would see the Valles in a film adaptation of The Fleet Of Stars and do see it in Alan Moore's Watchmen.

This post revisits the three story-telling media. A story can be narrated, enacted or depicted. We still value narrative, whether heard or read, although it is the one of these three media that is not visual. Of course, most writers and readers have some visual imagination which I lack, being auditory digital, according to a Neuro-Linguistic Programming trainer. (You get that kind of input if you work in certain kinds of jobs.)

It is getting to that time of the evening when I turn from blogging to "other reading," in this case from Anderson's Harvest The Fire to Moore's Watchmen. And tomorrow will be a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop which means that I will be very well informed about the state of the world although not posting about it until later in the day.

Past And Future Histories

Reading past history increases my appreciation of future histories. Geography precedes history. An historian informs us that Russia is a gigantic, austere plain open to eastern winds and Asian migrations, then introduces populations, peasantries, nobilities, cities and so on. We know that we can read about all of these features elsewhere. A future historian introduces planetography and planetary populations and persuades us that we would be able to read about them elsewhere. Readers with amateur writing abilities can fill in some details with fanfic. (I can write but not fiction.)

Emil Dalmady comes from the colonized planet, Altai. Later, Dominic Flandry visits that planet. We accept what we are told about its history just as we accept a past historian's account of Russia. The background details do not really exist but Poul Anderson is able to write as if they did.

(Here at Blog Central, we have been busy preparing for four house guests for five nights arriving tomorrow. When they leave, I will visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. So posts might remain sparse. The spirit is willing but not always the social conditions!)

Carl Donnan

After Doomsday, 3.

Donnan:

ranch kid;

tramp;

merchant seaman;

engineering degree;

jobs around Earth;

a few investments;

friendship with a Senator;

assignment to the first American interstellar spaceship;

studying extra-solar mechanical techniques;

visits to twelve planets in four civilization-clusters;

beginning of a sketch of the galaxy;

takes over the Franklin when its crew goes to pieces...

That is the end of Chapter 3 and a good place to stop for the night. Chapter 4 introduces the all-women European ship, the Europa.

Other reading:

finished Maugham's Avenden;

starting the tenth Inspector Morse novel.

As my friend, Andrea, said, I want to be around to see what happens next.

World Wars

In my teens in the 1960's, futuristic sf was mostly about either spaceships or post-nuclear-war survival although, of course, the sky was the limit and other familiar themes included natural catastrophes, alien invasions, time travel, telepathy etc.

Several works by Poul Anderson, including two of his future history series, begin in the aftermath of a nuclear war. I used to think that nuclear war and World War III were synonymous and that MAD prevented the latter.  However, here is a suggestion from Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop today. Are we already in World War III? World War II took a couple of years to grow from local and regional wars into a world war. Are we at that stage with WWIII?

Here is another Andrean thought, this time drawing on history. The Hundred Years War was the real World War I, the Napoleonic Wars were the real WWII and subsequent global conflicts should be renumbered accordingly. Now that such conflicts are numbered, they need not be periodically renamed.

I think that we can agree that our Italian Fascist (former or otherwise) friend above his brother's Old Pier Bookshop has not let us down and I don't feel like exercising any more grey cells for the rest of this evening. Van Rijn can come in and sound off if he likes.

The Future

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."

-Whitehead, quoted at the beginning of After Doomsday, 2.

"'Give you military your heads, and you'd build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future.'

"'We are always being invaded by the future...'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 437-662 AT V, p. 490.

"'I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow.'"

-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 4, p. 24.

We quote the Time Traveller entering "tomorrow," the terrain of sf, because Wells preceded so many of us into that dangerous and invasive future.

Breakfast post before bus to Morecambe Bay to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. I will probably return this evening with something to relate.

Where To Next?

Blog-wise, we have passed from Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History to other future histories to what I call "future historical writing" and this has brought us back to Anderson's After Doomsday which will be our next blog rereading title although, here at Blog Central, other activities intervene such as gym this afternoon, Zen this evening and the monthly visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for a long afternoon tomorrow.

Also, in other reading, Somerset Maugham's World War I secret agent, Avenden, has just been sent to:

"X...the capital of an important belligerent state; but a state divided against itself; there was a large party antagonistic to the war and revolution was possible if not imminent. Ashenden was instructed to see what under the circumstances could be done..."

-Ashenden, 11, p. 214.

Appreciating the distance afforded by fiction, we pretend not to know exactly where X might be.

The problems of Avenden and of X are nothing compared to those of the returned spaceship crew at the beginning of After Doomsday. Sf writers know where we all have been - of course - and take us further.

"(New centuries scream in birth)"

-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (New York, 1962), 13, p. 104.

Adversity and resistance.

Twentieth Century Space Travel

Andrea thinks that NASA could have paid for itself by selling and profiting from its discoveries and technological off-shoots, also that Projection Orion would have been able to send a large craft to Alpha Centauri in 99 years. Maybe sf ideas of the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century could have come about after all?

Back home from Andrea's place overlooking Morecambe Bay, I need to clear my head from a bus journey (no longer driving a car), meditate and read or blog or maybe just read. 

Back here later today or tomoz, maybe.

Loa And Other Planets

Loa is the name of a moon of the planet Nyanza in Poul Anderson's Technic History and the name of a planet in his "The Chapter Ends." See blog search result for Loa. (Scroll down.) The planet Loa is "...jeweled with islands..." (p. 256) These posts also mention other planets. 

In "The Chapter Ends," the Galactics evacuate Terrans to an unnamed planet which is:

"'...the most Earthlike world we could find that wasn't already inhabited.'" (p. 261)

However, its trees, grasses, soil, fruits, animals, birds, fish and every sensation are subtly different because no two planetary evolutions can be identical.

Here, we are:

writing this post over breakfast;

about to drink a second coffee after beans on toast;

reading Colin Dexter's fourth Inspector Morse novel;

preparing to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for most of the afternoon;

appreciating existence.

Onward and upward.

Comparing Universes

Of course we might have concluded Intergalactic Travel by comparing Poul Anderson's Tau Zero and The Avatar with James Blish's The Triumph Of Time whose immortal characters use their antigravity drive to fly to the Metagalactic Centre where, after the cosmic collision, their bodies become new monoblocs. Blish, like Anderson, followed Heinlein and wrote cosmological sf and a future history series as well as fantasy and historical fiction. Anderson contributed to several other authors' series whereas Blish contributed to one other, Star Trek - as also did post-Heinleinian future historian Larry Niven. We are talking about a pool of authors and subject matters here.

I was a Blish fan long before I became an Anderson fan and my James Blish Appreciation blog would have been longer if Blish's output had been bigger. Having said that, there are depths in Blish's works that we have not penetrated on either blog.

See:

David Ketterer, Imprisoned In A Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish (The Kent State University Press, Ohio, 1987).

The next three days in Lancaster (for some of us) -

Sunday: Chinese New Year street procession and event;

Monday evening: Zen group or choir;

Tuesday: visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop (we hope).

Sequels And Prequels II

Captain Dominic Flandry fights Merseians who employ the Chereionite telepath, Aycharaych. The conflict between Flandry and Aycharaych climaxes in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

Prequels:

a Christian from Aeneas (see below) is among the human beings employed by Ythrians during the exploration of the planet Avalon;

Nicholas van Rijn's trader team led by David Falkayn spearheads the Polesotechnic League mission to save Merseia from the effects of supernova radiation;

aristocratic Merseians disaffected from Technic civilization join the Baburite space navy which occupies both the supermetals-rich planet Mirkheim discovered by Falkayn and Falkayn's home planet, Hermes;

the Merseian Roidhunate is a growing threat during the period of the early Terran Empire;

the Young Flandry Trilogy recounts Flandry's early career, including his defeat of the McCormac Rebellion centred on the planet Aeneas;

Aycharaych foments potential jihad on Aeneas between the defeat of the Rebellion and the Chereionite's first encounter with Flandry. 

That is a lot of prequels.

Addendum on the Bookshop and Holmes: While I was with Andrea, Sheila texted that she was downstairs in the Bookshop and had found a Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Hudson book so Andrea went down to invite her up and we bought the book.

Interplanetary Exploration

Is Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game" an accurate extrapolation of interplanetary exploration? Not a repeat of Apollo with a few astronauts walking on a planetary surface for a short while before returning to Earth but self-sustaining light sail colony ships with crews of hundreds remaining in orbit while sending fleets of auxiliary craft down to the surface of Mars, Iapetus etc:

J. Peter Vajk to Mars;

Vladimir to Mercury;

Zeus to Jupiter;

Chronos to Saturn.

Will this happen in this century? Can Earth get out of its current Chaos? I don't know. I am going out to a meeting shortly and visiting Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop tomorrow. However, let us reflect on this opening instalment of Anderson's Technic History.

Coffee In Gaian And In Lancaster

"Lodestar."

Nicholas van Rijn offers his granddaughter, Coya Conyon, an impressive range of drinks, which we have already listed no less than three times, but she makes the same choice as I would have done, coffee. Tea is not mentioned.

I never tire of reading about the generational clash between van Rijn and Coya but we have probably said as much about that here as we can. I was on a different wavelength from my parents but not from my daughter.

I am drinking coffee at home and will have to dash through rain to get a bus to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop in Morecambe because I stopped driving a car a while back but we have free pensioners' bus passes.

Van Rijn tells Coya that maybe Falkayn has:

"'...got somewhere a daughter old as you.'" (p. 345)

Recently I campaigned alongside a woman who, I realized, was five years younger than my granddaughter. Fiction and life run in parallel.

Captain Hirharouk, leaving van Rijn's cabin, signs off with:

"'Freelady Conyon, hail and fare you well.'" (ibid.)

In Gaiian

"Lodestar."

Coya Conyon:

"...found she could control her thoughts, somewhat, but not the tingle through her blood." (p. 342)

Can she control her thoughts? In zazen, we practice awareness, not control, but that is one vast topic.

Scottish ancestry has gone to Hermes, African to Nyanza, and both have returned to Earth in Malcolm Conyon, father of Coya. We are already doing this, as far as we can, on Earth. Andrea, whose parents came from Italy to Morecambe (instead of New York) via Glasgow knows about Italian Scots.

"Sprawled in a lounger, [van Rijn] waved a two-liter tankard of beer he clutched in his hairy left paw." (ibid.)

See "More Beer!"

Have we begun a new thread about references to beer or should we just take it as read that van Rijn does drink a lot of beer?

I will shortly resort not to a temple of Bacchus but to the historic Lancaster Quaker Meeting House where our meditation group hires an upstairs room. Tomorrow: Andrea has told us that he will cook a curry and maybe bake a cake. Life continues to be good for some Earthlings some of the time. 

Continuing Characters And Series III

We have demonstrated that Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is vast and spacious enough to comprise a comprehensive synthesis of several character-based series with a single future history series. The Technic Civilization Series, Volume IV, Young Flandry, collects three entire novels covering just the opening phase of Dominic Flandry's career. That would have been impossible on the scale of Robert Heinlein's Future History which is only five volumes in total, really just four and a half. At this Technic History mid-point - Young Flandry - we have come a long way from the opening installment and still have a long way to go to the concluding installment. There are major historical turning points in the lifetimes of Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn on the one hand and of Dominic Flandry on the other hand. The van Rijn-Falkayn period turning point is the cartelization of the Polesotechnic League whereas the Flandry period turning point is the loss of legitimacy of the Terran Empire. We need no longer differentiate between a series about individual characters and one that is about successive historical periods. Poul Anderson has combined them.

When appreciating the Technic History, we can either analyze a single phrase in a single short story like "Esau" or contemplate several millennia of future history.

Sheila has taken a bus to a Christmas Fair in a nearby village. I will walk to the gym and hope to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop this week.