How Lucas Sells Himself

We first meet:

Lucas, in Poul Anderson's Rogue Sword, at the age of fifteen;

David Falkayn at age seventeen;

James Blish's Jack Loftus at age seventeen;

Dominic Flandry at age nineteen.

(See Falkayn's Age IV and Cadet Loftus and Ensign Flandry.)

However, Lucas seems to be the most talented of these four. He can:

read;
write;
do sums;
speak Greek;
speak "'...more than a smattering of other languages...'" (Rogue Sword, PROLOGUE, p. 20);
sing;
play the whistle;
play the cither;
"'...compose poems in all approved forms...'" (ibid.);
sail;
fight;
spy;
"'...advise on affairs of the heart...'" (ibid.);
learn.

He has learned:

sailing from his fisherman stepfather;
the Greek and Roman alphabets from a great-uncle who was a monk;
the speech of the Cretans and their Venetian overlords in everyday discourse;
arithmetical skills in his master's counting house;
half a dozen languages in polyglot Venice;
martial skills in many fights and in the arbalestiers.

Coming Of Age

See Ensign Flandry And Cadet Loftus.

Coming of age is a major theme in juvenile fiction. I just remembered two passages.

"She enjoyed the rest of the voyage, even after she had identified the change in him, the thing which had gone and would never quite come back. Youth."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Fifteen, p. 152.

"When the long jump from Ss'pode to Malis had begun, Jack had been on the down side of eighteen years old. When the alarm exploded and the Argo came off the Standing Wave, he had turned twenty. But it felt much more like eighty."
-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), Chapter Eight, p. 92.

Both Dominic Flandry and Jack Loftus come off age on long interstellar journeys.

Ensign Flandry is Volume I of the Young Flandry Trilogy, part of the Dominic Flandry series, which is part of the History of Technic Civilization.

Mission To The Heart Stars is Volume II of the Jack Loftus diptych, which is part of the Haertel Scholium.

Addendum: In SM Stirling's Emberverse, pages become squires become knights. Coming of age is formalized.

Cosmic Questions

Reading is unpredictable. Rereading The Star Dwellers was not on my agenda. However, recently (here), we contemplated:

"...the song the worlds sang..." (SM Stirling);

the "Song Of The Earth" (Elliot S! Maggin);

the Great Dance (CS Lewis);

the music of the spheres (I think) (James Blish) -

- and wondered whether Poul Anderson's Aycharaych has a telepathic equivalent of cosmic song, dance or music.

Trying to find the music of the spheres led to rereading The Star Dwellers. Anyone who enjoys Poul Anderson's interstellar sf, e.g., his Dominic Flandry series, should definitely read Blish's equivalent works. Jack Loftus begins as a foreign service cadet and winds up confronting the Hegemony of Malis. Dominic Flandry begins as a Terran Space Navy Ensign and winds up confronting the Roidhunate of Merseia. In both cases, the universe is shown to be full of interesting intelligent life forms and the nature of civilization is discussed. Blish and Anderson show us the cosmos and ask ultimate questions.

Unsanitary Conditions And A Long List

In "A Dusk Of Idols," an Earth ship stops at the planet Chandala where the ruling class uses epidemics to control the population. The ship's surgeon and a passenger who is a famous society doctor discuss the situation on Chandala and I could not help thinking that Dr McCoy, from the Enterprise, would have belonged here but the author, of "A Dusk Of Idols," pointed out that McCoy did not even exist in his creator's mind yet when the story was written.
-copied from here.

I was reminded of this James Blish story when reading SM Stirling's account of the unsanitary conditions in ancient Babylon:

"The street was narrow... An irregular trickle of sewage ran down the middle..." (On The Oceans Of Eternity, pp. 116-117)

Blish imagined a society in which such conditions exist not through ignorance but as a deliberate policy of population control.

We compare Stirling with Poul Anderson because Stirling has perfected alternative histories which were one of Anderson's many sf sub-genres. For comparisons of Blish with Anderson, see:

Flandry And Blish
Two Masters Of All The Genres
Event Police
The Other Blog About A Single SF Writer
Anderson And Blish
Past And Future
Anderson-Blish Interaction
Immortality
Some More Comparisons
Between Galaxies
Comparisons With James Blish
Aliens And Gods II
Why Empires III
Origins Of Science
Everything Is Connected
Boxed Sets
Update
Survival
Two Unaging Men
Connections
Cadet Loftus And Ensign Flandry
Blogs
Recruitment
Connections
The Devil Speaks II
Gods Dead Or Withdrawn?
Galactic SF II
Judgment And Doomsday II
Thermonuclear Warfare And James Blish

- or just search the blog for "James Blish" because this list is becoming too long.

Two Novels

See Cadet Loftus And Ensign Flandry, Between Galaxies and Distance And Giganticism.

When one work reminds us of another, it is worthwhile to identify the similarities or resemblances, which can be surprising.

Mission To The Heart Stars is the second of two Jack Loftus novels by James Blish and the Angels and Heart Stars of the Loftus novels are referenced in one further short story. Ensign Flandry is the first of seven Dominic Flandry volumes by Poul Anderson and Flandry cameos in a further novel about his daughter.

Similarities
(i) Hyperdrive and Haertel overdrive.

(ii) A mentor, Dr Langer, and two teenage cadets.
A mentor, Max Abrams, and the teenage Flandry.

(iii) Malans and Merseians.

(iv) In fact, the Hegemony of Malis and the Roidhunate of Merseia.

(v) Langer and the cadets visit Malis and meet the Hegemon whereas Abrams and Flandry visit Merseia and meet the Protector of the Roidhun's Grand Council.

(vi) In both cases, there is a quick exit from the alien planet and recourse to the FTL drive dangerously deep in a gravity well.

(vii) In both cases, the fleeing ship is able to evade capture by faster pursuers.

(viii) Cadet Loftus turns twenty en route to Malis. Flandry loses his youth on the long flight from Merseia.

Dissimilarities
(i) Langer and his cadets are the sole representatives of the UN to visit Malis whereas Abrams and Flandry go as members of a diplomatic mission to a planet that already has a Terran Embassy.

(ii) The Terran Empire and the Merseian Roidhunate are out at the end of one spiral arm whereas the Hegemony of Malis occupies the galactic center and the UN is allied with immortal energy beings that have known civilizations in ten other galaxies.

Connections

The previous post, "Cadet Loftus And Ensign Flandry," (here) connects with "Parallel Blogs" on the James Blish Appreciation blog. I mention this because there are still consistently more page views here than there. I am currently considering Anderson and Blish in parallel. Both successors of Robert Heinlein, they nevertheless have more in common with each other than with their distinguished predecessor.

For many posts, I was content to remain with Anderson's pasts: his historical novels, historical fantasies and retellings of myths and legends. Having reread this entire long series as I think of it, although really it is several different works, I returned to his futuristic hard sf, finding there a close parallel with Blish. Consequently, I started to reread the latter, then to post more frequently on the appropriate blog. This will continue for a while.

I hope that blog viewers who want to read about Anderson will continue to find previous posts here of interest and will also check out James Blish Appreciation.

Cadet Loftus And Ensign Flandry

James Blish said that he wrote The Star Dwellers (London, 1979) as a reply to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The titles imply an antithesis at least in emphasis. Troopers kill whereas dwellers live.

Blish's juvenile hero, the seventeen year old Jack Loftus, senior foreign service cadet in the department of the Secretary for Space, also contrasts with Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry of Terrestrial Imperial Space Intelligence, especially since we first meet the latter as a nineteen year old Ensign.

Jack has read magazine fiction in which:

a terrestrial representative fights alien hordes with a hand gun;
space fleets fight between stars;
abduction, assassination and incitement to insurrect are regular tactics.

In other words, he seems to have read the Flandry series! In fact, it is possible that thirty seven years hence, Jack, due to be born in 2033, will read magazines of classic sf reprinting Poul Anderson.

Jack's temporary mentor, Dr Langer, comments, " 'Utter nonsense...' " (p. 49) and explains that:

space fleets would be unable to intercept each other or to fight if they met by chance but would each destroy the enemy's home planet, solving nothing;
" 'The essence of interstellar diplomacy is to make friends, not enemies.' " (p. 50)

This is indeed a direct reply to Heinlein but is also relevant to Flandry, though not, of course, to the entire range of Anderson's works.

Regular blog viewers might have noticed that I am trying simultaneously both to express my appreciation of James Blish's works and to hold the attention of those who prefer to read about Anderson! To me, it makes sense to read them together. Their main, though not their only, similarity is the precise combination of scientific information, extrapolation and speculation in their hard sf.

Also in their hard sf, each notably goes intergalactic for two volumes - Anderson, World Without Stars and Tau Zero; Blish, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph Of Time.