Any Last Thoughts On Robert Heinlein's THE DOOR INTO SUMMER?

 

Robert Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (London, 1970).

Not really. Not at the moment. Heinlein's causal circles hang together and he makes them work just as Poul Anderson, Audrey Niffenegger and some others do in their time travel novels. Heinlein makes the point that some events that could have happened did not happen:

"...the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded 'not possibles' of the basic circuit design." (p. 188)

If the narrator had read that line of print, then he would have done something that would have prevented its existence but it does exist, therefore he did not do anything that would have prevented its existence.

James Blish thought that all previous circular causality narratives were limited. He proposed at some time to write a finite-spinning-universe-theory-of time-travel novel with its entire plot and characters based on the paradox. That is one of the might-have-beens, like Stieg Larsson's seven further Millennium volumes.

Other Reading II

I am rereading Heinlein's The Door Into Summer for comparison purposes. It is a solid novel about how a talented inventor, Dan Davis, responds to being swindled by his business partner and fiancee. Davis invents neither the suspended animation technique nor the time machine but another sf prop, domestic robots. The two future dates in the novel are 1970 and 2000-'01! Davis' cat plays a big part in the narrative. James and Judy Blish, who had two cats when I visited them, said that Heinlein's account of feline behaviour is all wrong, even canine. That is what my Aesthetics lecturer called an "aesthetic interference condition." Of course, the comparison with Anderson will focus on the time travel and the circular causality paradox when we get to them. In Chapter Four, our villain and villainess argue about which of them had left a door unlocked. Dan Davis, time traveller, had unlocked/will unlock it.

Next Music Festival event: jazz in The Castle Chapel.

Dunne, Rhine And Mitchell

Poul Anderson, "The Long Remembering" IN Anderson, Homeward And Beyond (New York, July 1976), pp. 22-36.

I wanted to comment on Poul Anderson's reference to JW Dunne but find that I have already done so at some length. See here. But there are two other references. The first is to Rhine.

The second, to quote the entire passage, is as follows:

"'I've done nothing more than systematize the work of predecessors, from as long ago as Dunne and Rhine if not further. I owe a tremendous debt to Mitchell and his colleagues; in fact, what I've done amounts largely to fusing their discoveries in noetics with some new concepts of physics and cosmology, and using modern laboratory equipment to check out the hypotheses that followed.'" (p. 25)

I took Mitchell to be a fictional future researcher like the speaker, Rennie, or like James Blish's Adolph Haertel and Thor Wald. However, in his introduction to another story collected later in Homeward And Beyond, Anderson writes:

"When an Edward Mitchell sees fit to found a school of noetics, I pay respectful attention. He's been on the Moon." (p. 166)

See IONS.

While trying to track down the references to Dunne, I have only just now, over breakfast, made this connection between the two references to Mitchell in this Anderson collection.

Joel's Physics And Psychology

 

"Earthman, Beware!"

Joel describes his attempt at interstellar communication:

"'Energy fields vibrating a certain way produce detectable effects in a similar setup well removed from the first... these effects are transmitted with no measurable time lag or diminution with distance.'" (p. 46)

Two Observations

(i) This sounds exactly like James Blish's instantaneous Dirac transmitter.

(ii) When Margaret/Peggy hears Joel's account, she comments:

"'I see. It's a sort of ultrawave.'" (ibid.)

But it sounds like action at a distance and not like a wave. Joel had intially said:

"'...you might call it radiation, though it has no relation to the electromagnetic spectrum.'" (ibid.)

But radiation crosses space - and at finite speed - between two "setups" whereas what Joel describes is an instantaneous remote effect.

When Joel reflects not on physics but on psychology:

"Humans were that way, groping through a darkness of solitude, calling to each other across abysses and never, never understanding." (p. 32)

That is how we appear to someone with his insight and mental abilities but it is also a one-sided account. If solitude and lack of understanding were absolute, then there would be no communication and therefore also no self-consciousness.

What We Read

Second hand bookshops remind us of what we used to read and regard as important. James Bond has endured whereas his TV spin-offs, the Man and Girl from UNCLE have not. In the 1960's, I read sf paperbacks because I had graduated from comic strips to prose fiction about people in spaceships and on other planets with robots and aliens. Nowadays, an sf novel has to contain much more than these sf trappings to hold my attention. As we know, Poul Anderson and James Blish do offer much more than that.

A fictional universe can expand in different directions, incorporating different kinds of fiction, e.g.:

Poul Anderson

James Ching attends school in San Francisco Integrate in the period of the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League.

James Blish

The energy beings called Angels who appear in two juvenile novels also form part of the background of an adult short story with a very different tone and theme.

Ian Fleming

Dexter Smythe committed murder in 1945 and must face the consequences two decades later. It is a minor detail that the man sent from London to interview him is called James Bond - although we also learn an extra biographical detail about Bond.

Dornford Yates

The Berry books are (supposed) humour although Berry Pleydell's cousin, Jonathan Mansel, tracks down criminals in the Chandos books and The Stolen March, belonging to neither series but sharing some characters with them, is a fantasy.

Read them all.

(I bought the book shown today.)

Ancientness, Modernity And Futurity

The phrases, "ancient civilizations" and "modern machines," convey opposite, contradictory, antithetical connotations. (I think.) Yet sf writers imagine ancient civilizations with machines on other planets and in our future. It is to be hoped that such civilizations do and will exist - although, if there had been any in nearby planetary systems, then they should have been detected by now.

In 50,000 AD:

"They went through immense vaulted caverns hewed out of the rock, dank tunnels of silence where their footfalls echoed weirdly and shadows flitted beyond the dull glow of fluorospheres. Now and then they passed a looming monstrous bulk, the corroded hulk of some old machine."

-"Flight to Forever," p. 209. 

And see also Something Basic on the James Blish Appreciation blog.

Inside Quotation Marks

"In any case - if you traveled long enough, through space or time, you got back to your starting point."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, November 1984), pp. 207-288 AT p. 287.

This confirms something that was almost 100% obvious, that "space of time..." (my emphasis) was incorrect in Alight In The Void. See the previous post. We always have to check to be 100% sure what an author had intended. It might just possibly have been something unusual and not obvious. In any case, I would have been wrong to correct of to or when quoting the story as presented in Alight In The Void. Words between quotation marks have to be quoted as given. Apparently, when James Joyce dictated Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett, the latter was careful to write exactly what Joyce said because he, Beckett, did not understand any of it. Checking through what Beckett had written, Joyce found that the words, "come in," had been inserted because he, Joyce, had called, "Come in," in response to a knock on the door while he was dictating. Beckett thought that, since "come in" was an error, it should be removed but Joyce replied along the lines of: "This is a book about the cosmos. If the cosmos is going to take a hand in writing it, all the better. Leave it in." Reportedly, Beckett was disgusted.

Willis McNelly confirmed the truth of this story in conversation in a Dublin pub. James Blish was also a Joyce scholar. See his A Case Of Conscience and Spock Must Die!

This story of quotation marks has taken us away from Poul Anderson but not from fantastic or cosmic fiction.

All The Gods

"Flight to Forever."

The alien general, Hunda:

"'By the gods, if we had decent weapons!'" (p. 217)

Saunders:

"...thought how beautiful [Taury] was - by all the gods, how beautiful!" (p. 218)

Does a new polytheism seem appropriate for a multi-species, interstellar civilization? It does to me but, in any case, we have already addressed this question in more detail than I would have felt able to do at present. See here.

James Blish's phrase, "gods of all stars," common to his Okie and pantropy series, seems especially pertinent.

See also The National Anthem.

More Ultrawave

The ultrawave is also mentioned in "Flight to Forever" (p. 216)

Although James Blish's fictional futures feature an ultrawave/ultraphone, this is clearly different from the one in the Andersonian futures.

Sf jargon like "hyperdrive," "warp drive," "Terra," "Terran" etc can generate a spurious sense of continuity between diverse narratives. My father, having heard "warp drive" mentioned in Star Trek, remarked to me that it was also referenced in Lost In Space whereas to me, of course, this was just familiar sf terminology. We need sf that breaks out of genre cliches. The future will be different from anything that has been imagined so let's imagine something that has not yet been imagined. I started this post just with the word, "ultrawave," and did not know where I was going with it. Now I must watch some TV news and get back to rereading Stieg Larsson.

We have not yet exhausted the temporal epic, "Flight to Forever."

Prefigurement

"Flight to Forever."

Sometimes an early passage in a fictional narrative prefigures later developments although a first-time reader cannot be aware of this, e.g.:

"At that rate, they had enough energy to travel to the end of the world.

"Eve, Eve, I'll come back. I'll come back if I have to go ahead to Judgment Day...." (p. 172)

In fact, Saunders will return to Eve by travelling through "Judgment Day" and beyond.

Similarly:

"'Marlowe to the contrary, misery does not love company.'

"Baring his teeth, Baines said, 'We'll see about that.'"

-James Blish, Black Easter IN Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), pp. 319-425 AT p. 336.

The first speaker is the black magician, Theron Ware. Later, Baines will commission Ware to release a host of major demons from Hell for an entire night, thus unleashing nothing less than Judgement Day. (The sequel is entitled The Day After Judgement...)

But only on rereading do we appreciate the significance of Saunders' and Baines' remarks.

Death And Tau Ceti

In the recent post on Death, we should have added that, in Plato's Phaedo, Socrates says that dreamless sleep is the greatest happiness (?) and that, if there is no hereafter, then eternity is a single night (Yes!).

Not to be confused: Tau Zero is a novel by Poul Anderson whereas Tau Ceti is a star.

Tau Ceti on:

Wikipedia

Poul Anderson Appreciation

James Blish Appreciation

- and in Anderson's "Terminal Quest," it took human beings forty years to travel to Tau Ceti which is twelve light-years away so this story is set in an Andersonian STL (slower than light) future like at least three others that we have discussed recently.

(Lessons in Lancaster history continue: there was a controversial murder trial in the family of a local Councillor just over a hundred years ago.)

The Future

"If, somehow, a writer knew the future, s/he could not write a story set in it. There would be too much strangeness, too much explaining to do. (Think of yourself going back just a hundred years in time and trying to tell people what it was like up ahead.)"

-Poul Anderson, All One Universe (New York, May 1997), p. 250.

I have imagined a novel written and set in 3000 AD, temporally transported to 2000 AD, translated and published without explanation. It would refer to then recent events without explaining them just as we can refer, e.g, to World War II, or just "the War," without having to explain that. Such a novel would be incomprehensible, disregarded and long forgotten by 3000 AD.

Sf can be not only set in our future but also show characters dealing with their futures, eg, HG Wells' Time Traveller and Anderson's Martin Saunders in "Flight to Forever." One of Anderson's Time Patrolmen reflects:

"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.

While reading headlines in 1955, he would know something of our situation in 2026.

Characters in James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time receive increasingly incomprehensible messages from successive periods of their future.

Fictional series can hint at future events long before divulging them. Near the beginning of The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, a fictional introduction refers to a recent (to the author) "Terran War" which does not occur until the end of Volume III. 

Through seven volumes, Julian May refers to a Metapsychic Rebellion which finally occurs in a concluding volume.

We cannot know the future but can imagine and fictionalize about it.

Stories, Sequels And Series

I don't think that I could get into any sf author who just wrote a large number of short stories with no sequels or series. A completely new fictional background for every short narrative? No ideas or characters developed beyond just one story? (I realize that I might be describing Harlan Ellison and someone who is more familiar with his works might want to respond?)

When I first read Poul Anderson's "The Game of Glory," I saw of course that this story was about a character named Dominic Flandry but did not yet know either that there was a Dominic Flandry series or that this series covered one period of a future history series - one of several such series by the same author. I learned that Flandry's enemies, the Merseians, had existed in the period of the Polesotechnic League when I read a reader's letter in an sf mag. Imagine if the only work ever to have been set in the Technic History timeline had been the first Flandry short story!

In Planets And Timelines, we refer to:

Poul Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" and "Time Lag";

James Blish's "A Case of Conscience," A Case Of Conscience, "Seeding Program" and "Watershed."

We have seen how the two Anderson stories connect with others of his works.

"A Case of Conscience" was incorporated into A Case Of Conscience which is Volume III of After Such Knowledge and one volume of the Haertel Scholium. "Seeding Program" and "Watershed" are Books One and Four of The Seedling Stars. All of these works are bettered by becoming part of something bigger.

Planets And Timelines

Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories (New York, December 1973), pp. 3-49.

Poul Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" is definitely the ninth and last instalment in his Rustum future history series whereas the same author's "Time Lag" is much more tentatively and speculatively - although I might be alone in suggesting this - the concluding instalment of a considerably shorter and diffuser "Directorate" future history series. What these two stories have in common is that each is set in a future period when enough time has elapsed that human beings, travelling in slower-than-light spaceships, have colonized several extra-solar planets and there is also some travel between the colonies although there is no longer any contact with Earth. In "Time Lag," at least in the volume of space where the action occurs, Earth is simply too far, a thousand parsecs, away whereas, in "The Queen...":

"Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns." (p. 10)

That fits with what we are told in the Rustum stories. 

One of the reasons why people had left Earth was to preserve:

"...constitutional government..." (p. 6)

We remember the Constitutionalists on Rustum.

Eric Sherrinford says that birds big enough to carry a small child a short distance:

"'...do exist on Beowulf - and on Rustum, I've read.'" (p. 15)

This confirms that Roland and Rustum exist in the same timeline although, having said that, a fictional planet can, like Earth, Mars etc, exist in alternative timelines:

in James Blish's "A Case of Conscience," later adapted and expanded as A Case Of Conscience, Book One, the planet Lithia exists in 2049;

in Blish's "Seeding Program," near future events on Earth differ from those recounted in "A Case of Conscience" and Lithia is not mentioned;

in Blish's "Watershed," set millennia after "Seeding Program," Lithia exists;

in A Case Of Conscience, Book Two, Lithia is destroyed in 2050.

I think that this makes sense. Lithia plays a major role in A Case... and a minor role in "Watershed" and, in each case, its fate, whether imminent destruction or longer term survival, is appropriate to that narrative.

In any case, Rustum and Roland exist in a single timeline.  

An Unwilling Hero

Orbit Unlimited, part four, 9.

On Rustum, Mayor Theron Wolfe explains to Jan Svoboda why he, Wolfe, has pressured Svoboda into becoming a hero:

"'Now that the initial struggle to survive is past, each family has retreated more and more into its own selfish concerns. We can't have that. Man can't live alone. The lost, the sick, the weak, and poor have got to be helped, or how can we depend on their help when our own luck runs out?'" (p. 157)

Too right. Those who believe that morality is a list of divine commands ask secularists where we get our morality from. I reply that we have been naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and that we experience this latter motivation as moral obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like if it is expressed in purely evolutionary terms as I have just done. But there is also a countervailing tendency towards narrow self-interest and Wolfe schemes to shame Rustumites out of this!

(If you see children suffering, do you think, "This must not happen to any children?" or "This must not happen to my children?" The latter can entail that whatever it is must continue happening to someone else's children.)

Wolfe's manipulativeness matches that of Mayor John Amalfi in James Blish's Cities In Flight.

Wolfe And Ware

I have come across the given name, "Theron," only twice, both times in fiction. This is an off the wall connection between two authors but there you go.

In Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited

Theron Wolfe was a merchant on Earth and becomes mayor on Rustum. He is a manipulator, browbeater and blackmailer although only for the best of purposes. 

In James Blish's Black Easter/The Day After Judgement

Theron Ware is a black magician who controls more demons than anyone else. His experimental release of multiple demons causes World War III and Armageddon and he then tries to influence the supernatural balance of power after Armageddon. (A great guy to have around, I'm sure.)

Is there any connection between Wolfe's and Ware's manipulations? I doubt it but you never know.

The Fourth Achievement

See Three Achievements And One Disappointment and its addendum.

Also in Poul Anderson's Technic History and first published in an anthology of original stories:

"The Dipteroid Phenomenon" IN Four For The Future, ed., Harry Harrison, 1969.

In the Technic History, we know "The Dipteroid Phenomenon" as "The Sharing of Flesh."

Four authors each wrote two stories for Four For The Future:

Anderson's other story, "High Treason," is non-series;

James Blish's first story in this anthology, "A Hero's Life," was later expanded as "A Style in Treason" and incorporated into his Haertel Scholium, a non-linear future historical sequence;

although Brian Aldiss never wrote series, he made his second story a sequel to the first;

Harry Harrison was not only the editor but also one of the authors.

Of course, Anderson contributed to other original anthologies covering:

Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars;

Isaac Asimov's Robots and Diplomacy Guild;

Jerry Pournelle's War World -

- but we have been through all or most of those details before.

Having eaten breakfast and posted twice, I am about to walk to the gym.

Not Time II

See Not Time. 

This line of thought has been occasioned by reading an sf work not by Poul Anderson but by Clifford Simak. However, there is an underlying issue here that Anderson gets right but that most people most of the time get wrong and the people who get it wrong include not only Simak but also HG Wells and James Blish! - so let's stay with the line of thought for a while. (N.B.: Neither Wells nor Blish confuses the nature of time as much as Simak.)

The Issue

Matter moves through space and motion takes time but we then think of time itself as a dimension that we move along. Clearer thinking is needed. If you sit under a clock in a waiting room from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM, then you are fully and equally present at 9:00 AM and at 10:00 AM and at every intermediate moment. You do not in any sense move from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. There is a 9:00 AM with you in it but there is no subsequent 9:00 AM with you not in it because you have moved away from it. Nor can you accelerate and arrive at 10:00 AM before me. We both arrive (if that is the right word) at 10:00 AM at 10:00 AM. 

Wells

The Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that our bodies extend along the Fourth Dimension whereas our immaterial mental existences move along it.

Blish

"'...the consciousness of Robin Weinbaum is moving along that entity in that invisible direction.'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), p. 116.

("...that entity..." is Weinbaum's body extending in four dimensions.)

Simak

In City, VII, on pp. 196-197, there is a passage that I will try to summarize rather than to quote in full. It is claimed that we had thought that we were passing through time whereas really we were moving along with it. Seconds did not pass. Instead, a single second moved along and we moved with it! What does that mean? He stays with the idea of motion through time but then tries to differentiate between two kinds of temporal motion. If something moves along through time, then the time that is moved through is measurable in units including seconds. Therefore, the moving entity is not itself one of those seconds.

Anderson

There is none of this in Anderson. In his Time Patrol series and in his There Will Be Time, our bodies extend along the fourth dimension - as in Wells and Blish although not in Simak - but there is no suggestion that any immaterial entities move along those bodies from their births to their deaths. Every moment is the present moment for any organism that is conscious in that moment. There is no moving present.

The Masterworks

At the back of my copy of Clifford Simak's City, there is a two-page list of eighty nine (or thereabouts) titles in this SF Masterworks series. Only one, Tau Zero, is by Poul Anderson.

There are:

1 title by Robert Heinlein

1 by Larry Niven

1 by Frank Herbert

1 by Clifford Simak

2 by James Blish

2 by Greg Bear

2 by Michael Moorcock

2 by Kurt Vonnegut

2 by Ursula le Guin

2 by Richard Matheson

3 by Robert Silverberg

3 by Samuel R. Delaney

3 by Brian Aldiss

3 by Olaf Stapledon

3 by Frederik Pohl + 1 by Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth

5 by HG Wells

5 by Arthur C. Clarke

14 by Philip K. Dick

- and thirty other authors are represented by only a single title. (This includes two titles with two authors.) If anyone else has a copy of this edition, please check my numbers. I don't always get the same total when I re-count.

(Blish's two titles are his Tetralogy in a single volume and Volume III of his Trilogy, Volumes I and II being historical fiction and fantasy, respectively.)

Needless to say, I disagree with any scale of values that gives Anderson one volume and Dick fourteen.

Who Represents SF?

My copy of Clifford Simak's City (SF Masterworks, Gollancz, London, 2010) has arrived and I am honestly uncertain as to whether I will summon up the motivation to reread it from cover to cover whereas, decades ago, I had rated it highly. I ordered City via eBay because recently on this blog I compared four stories set on Jupiter:

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson

"Bridge" by James Blish

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Of these stories, "Call Me Joe" is alone in not being part of a series - although three different Andersonian series do include Jupiter-related stories. "Bridge" was incorporated into Blish's They Shall Have Stars which I have recently reread with interest. "Desertion," which I was able to reread online, was incorporated into City, hence this purchase. 

The cover quotes Robert Heinlein as saying, "To read science fiction is to read Simak." What? I can think of several more significant names and would substitute Anderson for Simak. Heinlein himself - early Heinlein - is surely more important? Inside, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov and James Gunn write highly of Simak. Asimov tried to imitate his style.

By contrast with this, James Blish, whom I rank with Anderson, did not respect Simak's works.

The Introduction by Gwyneth Jones quotes Heinlein:

"The reader who does not like Simak stories, does not like science fiction at all." (p. v)

Clearly untrue!

Jones informs us that Simak was:

"Never remotely interested in 'technology', or in factual 'science'..." (p. vii)

But science fiction is about the relationship of human beings not only to each other but also to the universe revealed by science including the potentialities of technology. Sf began with Frankenstein: can a scientist create life?

Simak himself is quoted as saying that, disillusioned by World War II and the Atomic Bomb, he wrote the City stories only to create a momentary refuge. When Jones expands on this, I find it difficult to paraphrase and therefore will have to quote at greater length than I would have preferred:

"For a moment, in these tales, a Man sits in his armchair, his loving Dog at his knee, a glass of whisky at his elbow; pondering the lives of small creatures in the quiet woods around his homestead. Asking nothing, demanding no reward or second chance for the failed experiment of human civilization; inventing nothing that isn't already held in this moment, he spins a dream of blameless wonderland." (ibid.)

Inventing nothing? That is not sf! Just before the passage quoted, Jones describes the City stories as having:

"...only the most perfunctory futuristic trappings." (ibid.)

That human civilization will fail, will even destroy itself, is one of the possibilities that has to be faced and is faced by sf writers, including Poul Anderson. Retreat to a homestead in the quiet woods in the present moment and not in any future endeavour is one possible response to this...

However, Jones goes further:

"Perhaps all of science fiction secretly lives in Simak's moment, and is made of the same stuff as City - a paradoxical hybrid of nihilism and wish-fulfilment; tempered by a stoic acceptance of the cold equations." (p. viii)

No, it does not. Acceptance yes but not either nihilism or wish-fulfilment. Poul Anderson takes us to the further reaches of space and time both in mythical worlds and in the physical universe insofar as it was understood at the time of writing.

Meanwhile here and now: for me, today has become very indulgent, staying in a dressing gown and adding to the blog instead of stirring out of the house. The next few days will have to involve a lot of physical exercise and much less computer time.