Some Comparisons

At a Memorial Evening for James Blish, the publisher, Charles Monteith, described Blish's Cities In Flight as "a greater and higher Star Trek." We can make a similar comparison with Poul Anderson's Technic History.

In Star Trek, there are many intelligent species and perhaps two main ones:

Klingons

Vulcans/Romulans

In the Technic History, there are many intelligent species and perhaps four main ones:

Merseians

Ythrians

Wodenites

Cynthians

Wodenites and Cynthians are mainly represented through individuals:

Adzel, then Axor;

Chee Lan - and some others.

But perhaps the closest parallel to Spock is the Chereionite, Aycharaych: pointed ears and a more powerful telepath but on the other side.

Trekkies should read Anderson and Blish.

Some Environmental Details

World Without Stars, VI.

Day is "days" long, therefore the (very dark) night will be equally long so the men work hard to make camp.

Colours are difficult to identify in the dim light.

As usual on terrestroid planets in Poul Anderson's works, there is an equivalent of grass:

"...those tussocky growths which seemed to correspond to grass..." (p. 36)

There are no seasons because there is little axial tilt. Also:

"Photosynthesis under a red dwarf star can't use chlorophyll." (ibid.)

Scientific knowledge is crucial in sf.

Local wild life lacks certain amino acids, vitamins etc but the men eat packaged supplies, then get their food plant working. This is described in detail and we will return to it this evening when I have returned from a day trip to Blackpool. Chapter V has presented a plausible explanation of why the food plant at least had survived the wreck of the ship and its two ferries. Poul Anderson sets his characters up for several years on this planet.

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).

A Clean Sky

When mankind, except for a single aged individual, has evacuated Earth:

"Toward evening, the clouds lifted and the sky showed a clear pale blue - as if it had been washed clean - and the grass and leaves glistened. Kormt came out of the house to watch the sunset. It was a good one, all flame and gold."

-Poul Anderson, "The Chapter Ends" IN Anderson, Star Ship (New York, 1982), pp. 253-281 AT p. 278.

Andersonian pathetic fallacy:

when mankind has gone, the clouds of illusion lift?;

the sky is washed clean - that is explicit;

the renewed Earthly environment glistens appropriately;

the sunset of mankind on Earth but a suitably colourful one.

All the detail that action-oriented sf readers might miss.

Read everything at least twice.

Starward.

Evening On Esperance

The People Of The Wind, III. 

Not for the first time (!), we reread Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind. However, this time, we try to grasp not every rich and colourful detail in Poul Anderson's text but, more specifically, any information to be gleaned about the Ythrian institution of choths and, by extension, the related concepts of Khruath, Wyvan, Oherran and deathpride. 

However, some other details still catch our attention. I want to skip past:

"Ekrem Saracoglu, Imperial governor of Sector Pacis..." (p. 34)

- having found him unpleasant before, although there was some combox disagreement about that, but I cannot ignore a summer evening in an Esperancian garden:

"By then they were strolling in the garden. Rosebushes and cherry trees might almost have been growing on Terra; Esperance was a prize among colony planets. The sun Pax was still above the horizon, now at midsummer, but leveled mellow beams across an old brick wall. The air was warm, blithe with birdsong, sweet with green odors that drifted in from the countryside. A car or two caught the light, high above; but Fleurville was not big enough for its traffic noise to be heard this far from the centrum." (pp. 34-35)

There is much here to divert our attention from current pursuits.

No traffic noise. Perfect. 

Four senses: light; warmth; birdsong; odours. 

We have become accustomed to aircars as part of the scenery in the Technic History. On another humanly colonized planet, Hermes, French doors left open at night allow the Tamarin-Asmundsens to appreciate:

light from two moons;

cool air;

flower odours;

trills of a local bird equivalent;

city sky-glow;

aircars -

"...like many-colored glowflies."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT X, p. 152.

Four senses: light; coolness; odours; trills.

On Terra, in Flandry's time:

"White cloud wandered through blue clarity; aircars sparkled in sunlight. A breeze brought coolness and a muted pulse of machines in the service of man. And here came the souffle."

-Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven IN Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 1-188 AT III, p. 32.

Four senses: light; coolness; muted pulse; taste.

To return to Esperance, planets in the Technic History are made more real partly by being mentioned in more than one context. Nicholas van Rijn had worked on t'Kela with Joyce Davisson from Esperance. Now there is action on the surface of Esperance. It is such a prize colony planet that it reads exactly like Earth. Roses and cherries grow there as if on Terra. But there must be some difference. When Saracoglu plucks and eats a grape:

"The taste held a slight, sweet strangeness; Esperancian soil was not, after all, identical with that of Home." (p. 38)

And the evening proceeds:

"The sun was now gone from sight, shadows welled in the garden, an evening star blossomed." (ibid.)

Again, like Earth.

Sign-Offs

(Back home for an hour between returning from an outing and going out again for the evening.)

When Hloch signs off from the Earth Book, he acknowledges that he and his readers have flown upon only a few of the countless currents that had streamed together at Avalon but nevertheless he thinks that all of them:

"...raise a little higher than erstwhile his knowledge of that race with which ours is to share this world until God the Hunter descends upon both."

Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), p. 390.

Hloch's personal farewell:

"Now The Earth Book of Stormgate is ended. From my tower I see the great white sweep of the snows upon Mount Anrovil. I feel the air blow in and caress my feathers. Yonder sky is calling. I will go.

"Fair winds forever."

-ibid.

These words, completing the first main part of the History of Technic Civilization, are followed either by Ensign Flandry, introducing Dominic Flandry, in the original book publication order or by "The Star Plunderer," about the first Terran Emperor, Manuel Argos, in The Technic Civilization Saga.

Flandry signs off first by saying that we play the game of empire or life without knowing what the score will be and secondly by funding Diana's and Targovi's careers and Axor's research but Axor has the last word in this second main part of the Technic History when he responds:

"'God bless you, whether you like it or not... What you endow goes beyond space and time.'"

-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453 AT p. 453.

And even this is not yet the end of this major future history series.

Gutherius And Nehalennia

"Star of the Sea," III.

When the light fails, the white stag that Gutherius has chased vanishes and:

"Wind piped among the trees." (pp. 625-626)

The following day, as he blunders through a lifeless part of the forest:

"...there was only the wind soughing in the crowns and tearing dead leaves loose." (p. 626)

The following night, during a great storm, trees groan and toss as the wind tears branches loose and hurtles them. 

The old woman who was Nehalennia had predicted woe, then reward.

The following morning, Gutherius' reward begins. The weather is:

"...calm and sunny." (ibid.)

The hound of Nehalennia leads him to a beach where he helps a shipwrecked crew so that later he is rewarded with a fair share of the cargo. Thus, he invests in a ship that trades with Britain:

"Ever did she enjoy fair weather and a following wind..." (p. 628)

Gutherius raises an altar, makes generous offerings and always bows to the evening and morning stars.

We have quoted the closing paragraph before but it bears repetition:

"Hers are the trees, the vine, and the fruits thereof. Hers are the sea and the ships that plow it. Hers are the well-being of mortals and peace among them." (ibid.)

Amen. 

Morning And Evening Star

"Upon her brow shone the morning star."

-"Star of the Sea," I, p. 467.

"Pure as yourself, your evenstar shines above the sunset." (IV, p. 640)

On the first and last pages of this story: two sightings of the planet Venus (as we understand it).

"...her brow..." is the brow of the goddess, Niaerdh.

"...your evenstar..." is the star of:

"Mary, mother of God, mother of sorrows, mother of salvation..." (IV, p. 639)

Poul Anderson has brought us on a long journey through myth, time and history from Germania, 70 AD, to a ship crossing the Atlantic:

"Westward we sail but night overtakes us. Watch over us through the dark and bring us on into day." (p. 640)

One of our earliest childhood memories, passing through the dark and back into day. The story begins with a myth in the morning and ends with a prayer in the evening. And aspects of the goddess have passed into the Mother of God. Our lives are lived when this process is complete.

The (Prevented) Veleda Timeline

"Star of the Sea," 11, A.D. 49.

Is the Veleda timeline entirely prevented? The Tacitus Two text comes from it. 

In the history that is known to us, Burhmund/Civilis made peace with Rome whereas in Veleda's divergent timeline:

Burhmund was crushed;

the prophetess, Veleda, returned to free Germany where her new religion spread;

it grew and developed without competition after her death;

the goddess became the supreme figure, appealing to women who influenced their children;

with the Western Empire collapsed, Christianity did not admit its North European converts to the commerce and culture of civilization;

instead, the Nerthus faith became the core of a Germanic civilization, able, like Zoroastrian Persia, to resist Christianity;

the world was very different by the twentieth century;

"'That's what we're trying to head off,' Everard said harshly." (p. 569)

Only wanting to post once more today, I preferred to return to "Star of the Sea" than to stay with Dinosaur Beach but I will try to get the rest of the latter read and out of the way this evening.

Tomorrow, a new month. We approach the end of the first quarter-century of the Third Millennium. I wish that I could look forward with confidence to a long future ahead.

DINOSAUR BEACH

My copy of Dinosaur Beach arrived today via eBay. I ordered this book because:

it is about time travel (to be compared with Wells and Anderson);

it has an evocative title;

I have known of it as a title for years without having read it;

it might count as an sf "classic."

A Classic is a work that, like The Time Machine, is always in print in multiple editions, that can be picked off the shelf in a large bookshop or, failing that, ordered and whose title is generally recognized even by those who have never read it whereas a "classic" is a work that is remembered by some, regarded as influential, sells well secondhand and is occasionally reissued. 

Beaches have a role in time travel stories:

Wells' Time Traveller encounters giant crabs on a beach in a remote future;

Wells' outer narrator wonders whether the Time Traveller is:

"...wandering...by the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age."

-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), EPILOGUE, p. 101;

significant meetings occur on two beaches in Poul Anderson's "Star of the Sea" and on another at the end of his The Shield Of Time.

The cover illustration shows a man with a gun and a dinosaur as on Anderson's Past Times.

There are six quotations of extravagant praise. On the front cover:

"UNRIVALLED NOT ONLY IN ITS CLASS, BUT IN A CLASS BY ITSELF."

-GORDON R. DICKSON.

One of the four on the back cover:

"Laumer has a gift for time travel. The technology in this novel is fascinating."

-Riverside Quarterly.

We are used to reading rave reviews on book covers and probably disregard them.

So far, I have read only 7 of the 44 short chapters and will persevere to the end. However -

In some sf - or is it mainly in a particular period of sf? - we find that we are reading not just a novel but, more specifically, an action novel in which characters point guns and shoot at each other. This happens in Dinosaur Beach well in advance of any indication that some of the characters are time travellers. (We know that Poul Anderson liked his action scenes but usually these were subordinate to other aspects of a story.)

"...the big board in Ops that showed the minute-by-minute status of the Timesweep effort up and down the ages."

-Keith Laumer, Dinosaur Beach (Baen Books, New York, 1986), 5, p. 31.

Can an effort that is being made up and down the ages have a minute-by-minute status?

"...maybe at this moment a relief team in crisp field-tan was assembling to jump out to the rescue." (6, p. 34)

A relief team at a station in a different time is assembling at this moment?

There is some more complicated text that it would be more difficult to unravel. I do not think that any of that extravagant praise is appropriate.

"...an intriguing introduction for newcomers."

-Monterey Herald.

No. Start with Wells and Anderson.

Addendum, later the same evening: In Dinosaur Beach, I have read to the beginning of Chapter 26 on p. 116. The novel ends with a one-page Chapter 44 on p. 204. I do not want to read any more. The text is uninteresting, unenjoyable and incoherent. Changes that have to be happening in two different temporal dimensions are described as if they can be experienced along a single timeline:

"'...the deterioration began. The chronodegradation...the memory lapses, and the contradictions. We sensed life unravelling around us.'" (25, p. 111)

Having finished John Grisham and wanting to read something enjoyable for the rest of this evening, I will revert to Stieg Larsson. (Grisham introduces a minor character, Zander, clearly based on Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.) Back to Anderson tomorrow.

Well-Being And Peace

"Star of the Sea."

Veleda negotiates peace. That sounds directly relevant to us now but, I think, only superficially. We have the language of peace.

Meditation and sunlight inspire me to think that we can share this Earth and contemplate its beauty, even that that is what we are here to do - except that I do not believe that anyone has put us here for any purpose. The one being has developed in such a way that it has become conscious of itself through us. What happens next is our responsibility, not anyone else's.

We can contemplate natural beauty either directly or through the shared world-views of those who in the past have personified aspects of nature:

"...whenever he saw the evening star or the morning star shine forth, he bowed low, for they too are Nehalennia's.

"Hers are the trees, the vine, and the fruits thereof. Hers are the sea and the ships that plow it. Hers are the well-being of mortals and peace among them." (III, p. 628)

We imagine Nehalennia and it is we that are responsible for well-being and peace.

Tacitus One And Two

"Star of the Sea," 2.

By "Tacitus One," Everard and Floris mean the restored version of Tacitus' Histories that recounts history as we know it. By "Tacitus Two," they mean a different version that has been found by time travelling sociologists in the early second century and that recounts a very different outcome of the Northern revolt. The problem as I see it is: how can a Tacitus Two manuscript exist in the Tacitus One timeline? My suggested solution is that the sociologists were in the second century at a time when both Tacitus One and Tacitus Two were possible. When they wanted to borrow a contemporary copy of the Histories from a private library, they had to travel a short distance into the future in order to enter the library surreptitiously and this short journey took them into the then possible Tacitus Two timeline but then they returned pastward and forward again into the Tacitus One timeline. As far as I can remember, Poul Anderson indicated in private correspondence that he would accept this explanation. However, the problem that I still have with it is that I cannot fit it into any other theoretical framework to explain events as recounted in the Time Patrol series. But then I do not think that anything else fits either. 

Although:

"The Patrol speech had a grammar capable of handling chronokinesis, variable time, and the associated paradoxes..." (2, p. 482)

- Everard and Floris several times postpone speaking Temporal and prefer to stay with English because they do not want to go too deeply into the problem at their first meeting. We understand their English but not what they are trying to say with it.

I think that that is enough time travel for this evening, don't you?

The Story So Far

There Will Be Time.

Havig was not able to evade the Eyrie indefinitely but Leonce rescued him.

Wallis did not learn the secret of the thirty-first-century post-Maurai civilization but Havig and Leonce did because they were able to learn the Ingliss-Maurai-Spanyol hybrid language and to travel through the strangely pastoral yet high-tech global society.

Now only twenty-eight pages and three chapters of the novel remain. In that span, Havig must found a rival time travel group, defeat the Eyrie, usurp its role, bring about the Star Masters civilization and embark on an interstellar journey with Leonce, leaving Robert Anderson to wonder about the future and the past and later to bequeath his notebooks to Poul Anderson.

Regular blog readers probably know what I am going to say next: "Not at this time of night!" Tomorrow should be gym in the morning and Zen in the evening with some time for blogging between. Will we finish There Will Be Time? What will we reread next? Something else about time travel?

Remembering THE AVATAR

This is one of my very quick late evening posts before doing some other reading (Stieg Larsson) and turning in.

How much do we remember about Poul Anderson's The Avatar? 

It has an Andersonian hero whose name I forget.

It has Andersonian villains: politicians who try to halt interstellar travel or delay it indefinitely because its consequences will be disruptive! (In other words, it will challenge their social control.)

Interstellar travel and exploration are in STL ships but by rotating around Tipler machines. (Is this FTL or not?)

The T-machines have been constructed and deployed by one intelligent species but are used by others.

There really is an Elder Race which the human explorers meet near the monobloc at the start of another universe. 

There are interesting space-time jumps to places and times limited only by the author's imagination.

There is intelligence on a neutron star.

This is a single long stand-alone novel, another part of Anderson's imagiverse. 

Descriptive Passages In "The Chapter Ends" II

"The Chapter Ends."

Jorun and Zarek fly above ocean-like plains of wind-rippled grass darkened by herds of wild cattle with thunderous hoofbeats. (I am summarizing but Poul Anderson's description is better.) There are large old forests, gleaming rivers, fish leaping in lakes, radiant sunshine and swiftly moving cloud shadows. 

When Jorun lands on a beach, white dunes run from salted grass to roaring, tumbling surf. Sunset is golden, wind is wet and a conch is intricately architectured. Jorun is unsure whether the evening star is Venus or Mercury.

In a house of Solis Township, a single long room with a low door and smoke around its rafters is kitchen, dining room and parlour with doors to bedrooms. There are:

skin rugs

oak wainscoting

carved pillars

glowing hammered copper ornaments

an ancient radium clock on a stone mantel above a fire

a hanging gun

a wooden table

Evening meal, all produced locally:

meat

vegetables

bread

beer

milk

ice cream

coffee

We appreciate all these details.

Later

Robert Heinlein soon found that everything that he wrote did not fit into a single Future History nor did it need to. However, since one of the features that we appreciate in any future history series is consistent internal cross referencing, it is necessary to be clear about whether any particular story belongs to such a series.

"Star Ship" could fit into Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History in the same period as The Peregrine which is a few centuries later than "Gypsy." Then the Galactic Coordinators become the Coordination Service and the Galactic civilization becomes the Stellar Union.

And that is all for now because I am about to go out for the rest of the evening. Keep rereading Poul Anderson.

Late Evening Coincidence

OK. I am reading "Fantasy in the Age of Science...," in which Poul Anderson devotes a paragraph to the uniqueness of Lord Dunsany and also rereading Mike Carey's Lucifer: The Divine Comedy (New York, 2003) in which two fallen cherubim approaching a massive house in a supernatural realm remark that it:

"...looks kind of faux Victorian...like something out of Lord Dunsany." (p. 169)

Coincidence.

Also, I found a cover image for Time And The Gods by Dunsany and have thought that Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and "Star of the Sea" could appropriately be collected under a new title as The Gods Of Time.

And now I propose to return to mere reading for what is left of this evening.

Technological Progress In Future Histories

The future begins tomorrow so it matters when sf is written. HG Wells' Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that he has travelled through "tomorrow" (the following day), then further into "futurity." But he said that in the late nineteenth century, when the only manned flight was with balloons, so his "tomorrow" is now one with Lewis Carroll's "...sunny sky...In an evening of July -" Wellsian anticipations become our nostalgia. 

There is no spaceflight in Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come although the film, Things Of Come, ends with a space launch. In Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men, later human races eventually traverse the Solar System, colonizing Venus, then Neptune, but go no further although there is slower than light interstellar travel in Stapledon's cosmic history, Star Maker. 

In Robert Heinlein's Future History, which begins in 1951, the first Moon landing does not happen until the fourth instalment and interstellar travel is by generation ships although a mathematical genius on the second extra-solar expedition invents a faster than light drive but this exists only in Volume IV.

Wells, Stapledon and Heinlein have taken time to get off the ground. After that, American future histories usually start with space travel. Larry Niven's Known Space future history series begins with interplanetary exploration. Poul Anderson's Technic History began with interstellar exploration until "The Saturn Game," about interplanetary exploration, was retconned. Blog readers know of other examples.

Regarding Anderson's Technic History and Genesis as culminations, I will end there, although never forgetting the Time Traveller.

Chill In The Spirit

Fire Time, FOREWORD.

The two opening paragraphs are an extended pathetic fallacy. The first three sentences describe the impact of a man:

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a wholly just man.

"His image had been chilling enough in court. Now we were summoned to himself." (p. 1)

The three remaining sentences follow this chilling man with appropriate natural phenomena -

First:

"Dusk took us as we stepped from the flyer..." (ibid.)

The flyer is a futuristic prop but also appropriate in this case because Fire Time follows The Star Fox in which Gunnar Heim had travelled in a flyer.

Secondly, a satellite passing out of sight:

"...vanished as if the thin cold wind that whittered about us had blown it out." (ibid.)

Of course the wind is cold when visiting a chilling man! (And the wind is everywhere in Poul Anderson's works.)

Thirdly:

"There streamed a smell of glaciers and distances." (ibid.)

Glaciers underline all the chill and cold. I have asked before when analysing an Anderson text: what do distances smell like? (See here.) In this case, the "glaciers and distances" suggest that this fearfully just man is both chilling and remote.

Lastly, for now, we notice that all the chill, cold and glaciers contrast with the title, Fire Time. We remember the beginning of another Anderson novel:

"Every planet in the story is cold - except Terra, though Flandry came home on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit."

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT I, p. 342.

More chilliness.

Gravanol And Sisyphus On Staurn

The Star Fox, Part Two, V.

On the high gravity planet, Staurn, the drugs in human medikits include gravanol and kinesthan. I cannot find kinesthan anywhere else but gravanol now exists in several fictional universes.

 Walking in Staurnian gravity is a "..Sisyphus task..." (p. 108)

Parliamentarism is perhaps another Sisyphus task. Great Britain will have a General Election on the Fourth of July! This blog will NOT present regular election updates. Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition and probable next Prime Minister, once defended my late son-in-law, Ketlan, in court and that is all that this blog will say about any of the candidates. We trust that our trans-Atlantic cousins will have a good Presidential election later this year. Next time here I will return to The Star Fox but I am out at a meeting this evening.