Poul Anderson Interview On Youtube

I have been trying to post a link to a Poul Anderson interview on Youtube but either can't do it or don't know how to. The reference is:

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v
=qsstCR44lbo

When I click on this link on an email, where I received it, I get straight to the video whereas, when I go to the link online, I get "Video unavailable." However, searching for:

"Poul Anderson SF writer interview/advice on writing"

- gets me straight to the video.

After all these years of writing about Poul Anderson, this is the first time that I have heard him speak - apart from overhearing a conversation at a Con party.

Summary From Notes Taken While Watching The Video

Anything said about plot in sf applies equally to all fiction. Sf is a set of narrative techniques. Plot, character, background and ideas are not separate. A plot is a scheme of events in a story.

Achilles' character drives the plot of the Iliad because it determines when he stops, then resumes, fighting. The plot would have been different with Odysseus as hero. Hamlet's character drives the plot of Hamlet because it prevents him from killing Claudius earlier. The plot of the Iliad is external whereas Finnegans Wake is internal.

The three plots according to Heinlein are:

Boy meets Girl;
The Little Tailor;
The Man Who Learns Better.

(Anderson takes the Little Tailor to be "The Man Who Solves A Problem" whereas I took Heinlein to mean "The Man Who Beats City Hall.")

The Heinleinian plots can be reversed or combined. In sf, problems are solved by the hero's ingenuity. (Many examples in Anderson.) A man who fails to learn is tragic or farcical. The wrong lesson learned is ironic. In Anderson's World Without Stars, the narrator "learns better" that the girl of "Boy Meets Girl" is long dead. (The characters also solve the problem of how to escape from their "World Without Stars.")

There are other ideas of how many plots there are but Anderson is one of those who think that plots cannot be classified although Heinlein's list might be helpful.

Anything can suggest a story if you have that frame of mind. The experience of bureaucratism while traveling around Europe followed by the experience of McCarthyism after returning to the US generated "Sam Hall." McCarthyism was not as frightful as it has become in legend and it was possible to mock it with impunity even at the time.

A plot should combine logic or rightness with surprise or newness. The surprise should nevertheless be a logical outcome of the premise. (I noticed this with Brob.) Coincidence in plots is acceptable to readers only if it is disadvantageous to the hero.

That is not all but all that I wrote. Link here.

Adzel II

Adzel rents a shack in the San Jose district of San Francisco although I cannot find that district on a googled map.

Jim and Adzel met on a course in micrometrics.

Adzel dials for pipa music.

Humor: Adzel is surprised to be told that he is living in a crime area and comments that he has never been molested. (He is something like a dinosaur.)

Two points of comparison between Adzel and Poul Anderson's and Gordon R. Dickson's character, "Brob":

both can be peaceable because they are physically powerful (see here);
both have adopted the Japanese tea ceremony (see here).

And, of course, Brob's home planet is another Mirkheim.

Starting To Consider The Hoka Series As A Whole

I have finished reading the second collection of stories in Poul Anderson's and Gordon R Dickson's Hoka series and can now start to reflect on the series as a whole - although I have yet to read the novel, which should be in the post.

When reading the first collection, Earthman's Burden (New York, 1979), I forgot to remind readers that the song "Sam Hall," of which a few lines are sung on p. 137, provided the name for a revolutionary alias in a Poul Anderson short story and that revolutionaries collectively called the Sam Halls were referred to in his novel, Three Worlds To Conquer.

One Hoka story ended with "THE WORDS": "Elementary, my dear Watson!" (p. 121) and the second collection ends with another famous quotation: "Publish and be damned!" (Hoka, New York, 1985, p. 240). The story states, and google confirms, that the Duke of Wellington commendably gave this advice to a would-be blackmailer. As with the pirates' names in the first volume, we learn a little history by reading the series, although a lot more from Anderson's historical and time travel fiction. I am sure that there is a reference to Colonel Blimp in Hoka although I cannot find it on re-scanning the text. Since Anderson also references Blimp in "Delenda Est" (Time Patrol), this time I googled and learned the history of this cartoon character, including the meaning of his surname.

Previously, I asked rhetorically why I was unable to deduce in advance what further use the authors would make of their superjovian-dwelling character, Brob. Sure enough, Brob makes himself helpful one more time in a way that follows logically from what we have already been told about his personality but that I was completely unable to anticipate.

Brob On Toka

Here is another logical yet significant deduction about the inhabitants of the superjovian planet called Brobdingnag by human beings. It is OK for one of their number, called "Brob" because no human being can pronounce his real name, to spend weeks at sea with the British fleet on Toka because:

"Brob had eaten before they left Mixamaxu, and one of his nuclear meals kept him fueled for weeks."
-Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson, Hoka (New York, 1985), p. 200.

Consuming isotopes, he does not need to eat two or three times a day.

Needless to say, Brob's role in the story is more than just either light relief or a means of quick transportation for Alex Jones from Earth to Toka. Like a superhero, Brob is powerful enough to defeat an enemy without either suffering or inflicting any physical injury. As he swims towards the French fleet, their cannonballs bounce off him. Catching a mast with a hooked chain, he dives and swims until he has overturned the ship enough to soak its gunpowder. When he has done this twice, the remaining ship flees. Thus, a battle has been prevented with no harm either to the enemy or to their single adversary, just as Superman would have done it.

My only question here are:

Surely Brob should be so heavy that he sinks like a stone instead of being able to swim?

Why can I not logically deduce in advance whatever is the next contribution that the authors will have this character make to the plot?

Brobdingnagian Culture And Technology

In Poul Anderson's and Gordon R Dickson's Hoka (New York, 1985), the Brobdingnagians, large nuclear-powered inhabitants of a supernova-blasted superjovian planet, are strong enough to pull apart with their bare hands even "...the collapsed metal armor of a warcraft, rather like a man ripping a newsfax in half." (p. 184) "...collapsed metal..." sounds as if it means that the particles are pressed together, thus that the material is artificially super-dense?

It follows first that they have no natural enemies, not even on Brobdingnag, and secondly that they "...have no reason not to be full of love for all life forms..." (ibid.) and, of course, they tend to assume the same attitude in others. Although the space-traveling Brob knows from experience that this is not the case, he retains an unAndersonian inclination, for example, to give the benefit of the doubt to aggressors since they are probably only misguided...

In conversation with Brob, Alex must practice patience but he has learned how to do this by dealing with the Hokas. Here, several species interact.

Two comments on the super-strong bur peaceable Brobdingnagians:

(i) they would make excellent Marvel Comics superheroes;
(ii) might they be unFallen?

I no longer subscribe to the belief that humanity was created in, and has fallen from, a Paradisal state. On the contrary, I now think that we have risen through natural selection followed by manual and mental labor. However, the question of whether some rational species are "unFallen" arises at least twice in sf:

CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy;
Poul Anderson's character, Fr Axor, in the Technic Civilization History.

Alex needs to return to Toka quickly and Brob's battered, corroded trading ship takes him there quickly. Brob's power-plant matches that of a dreadnaught and his drive is as finely tuned as a courier's because the Brobdingnagians "...could work on a nuclear reactor as casually as a human could tinker with an aircar engine..." (p. 183) 

The authors are thorough in deducing every implication of their premises.

Brobdingangian Biology And Sociology

In Poul Anderson's and Gordon R Dickson's Hoka (New York, 1985), having described the bizarre Brodingnagian biology, based not on oxidized organics but on fissioned nuclei, the authors deduce some sociological implications.

Although not dangerous, traveling Brobingnagians are often feared and avoided:

"Having delivered a cargo to Earth, Brob found himself unable to get another..." (p. 174)

Seeking company, he frequents a pub and is "...pathetically grateful..." (ibid.) when Alex Jones not only talks to him but stays in touch afterwards. On Earth long enough to study Terrestrial culture, Brob likes Japan and adapts the tea ceremony. Since tea sipped by a Brobdingnagian becomes steam:

"...he contemplated the white clouds swirling out of his mouth..." (p. 175)

I suppose he would. More may happen later but, so far, Brob's only role in the narrative is to provide Alex with much-needed discreet transportation back to Toka. Thus, conscientious sf writers, in this case Anderson and Dickson, work extremely hard on all the background details like the natures of alien races that add interest and substance to this kind of imaginative fiction.