Spies And Secret Agents

We become used to reading about the activities of fictional spies and secret agents whether or not they bear any resemblance to the real thing.

In Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire, Targovi suspects that Admiral Magnusson plans to rebel so he returns to Daedalus to gather more intelligence, using Axor and Diana as cover. Dominic Flandry suspects that the pretender, Magnusson, might be a Merseian sleeper agent so he arranges a parley under truce that will enable him to ask some leading questions.

In Ian Fleming's last three novels, James Bond poses first as Sir Hilary Bray in order to confirm that the Comte de Bleuville is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, then as a deaf and dumb Japanese miner in order to assassinate Blofeld, then as security consultant Mark Hazard in order to assassinate Francisco Scaramanga.

I draw these parallels simply because I am simultaneously rereading The Game Of Empire and The Man With The Golden Gun. Magnusson interns Flandry. Scaramanga nearly finishes Bond. These are the last works about Flandry and Bond by their respective creators.

Near Death Experiences

We think that:

Lazarus Long is about to die on a World War I battlefield near the end of Robert Heinlein's Time Enough For Love;

James Bond has been killed by Rosa Klebb at the end of Ian Fleming's From Russia, With Love, has fallen to his death near the end of Fleming's You Only Live Twice and could have died after being shot by Francisco Scaramanga near the end of the posthumous The Man With The Golden Gun;

Hanno is about to die at sea on an extra-solar planet near the end of Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years;

Dominic Flandry and Chives are about to die in space near the end of Anderson's A Stone In Heaven.

All five are rescued, Bond three times.

Observations

Although I do not accept Time Enough For Love as a valid continuation of Heinlein's Future History, Long fits on this list.

Flandry, expecting death, presents an excellent reflection on his life and career as we have read them since Ensign Flandry.

Fleming does it best. M's Times "Obit." for Commander Bond reviews not only Bond's life and career but also the sensationalist and inaccurate accounts of that career written by a former friend and colleague! Then we are told how Kissy Suzuki had rescued Bond. His temporal lobe has been damaged, causing amnesia. Anderson fans (maybe) think of "Temporal," the Time Patrol language, alternative timelines and Bond's alternative life as a Japanese fisherman. But he begins to remember something else...

Early Times...

The People Of The Wind, V.

"In early times, an Oherran on a whole choth meant the end of it - enslavement of whoever had not been slaughtered, division of holdings among the victors." (p. 498)

Slaughter or enslavement of every member? I could not possibly regard that as morally acceptable, Ythrians doing it or no Ythrians doing it. However, the text continues:

"Later it might amount to as little as the arrest and exile of named leaders." (ibid.)

Much better and more appropriate! So Ythrian morality progressed just like that of human beings. You can find slaughter in "our" Old Testament. 

However, Oherran remains a deathpride matter. If an Oherran is not accepted, then the Wyvan who cried it has no alternative to honorable suicide. They are like some Japanese. If I lived on Avalon, then I would want to join a choth but one that had rejected deathpride. The Wyvan could just resign.

Choths have varied:

tribe

anarchism

despotism

loose federation

theocracy

clan

extended family

corporation

other concepts

in Oronesia sometimes, a single family

But we are not shown this variety. What we do see is the usual "...internal ordering...by custom and public opinion rather than by prescription and force." (p.496)

Flora's Organization

The Boat Of A Million Years, XV.

Flora is the best immortal because she wants not only to find fellow immortals but also to organize the poor to improve their lives:

"'I want to build something so strong that with it we can say 'no' to the slavers, the lynch mobs, and the lords of state.'" (p. 332)

She says not "I" but "we" and by this she means the downtrodden, which she has been, not just the band of immortals that Hanno hopes to build.

She concludes:

"'...to live independently of the overlords. Only by guiding the poor and helpless toward this can we immortals win it for ourselves.

"'Are you with me?'" (ibid.)

I am with her aim and I like her inclusive use of the pronoun, "we." Pronouns are important. People switch between different referents for "we" without realizing it:

if "we" must compete against the Japanese, then "we" means the speaker's national economy;

if "we" are sinful, then "we" means every human being;

if "we" must do something about the unemployed, then "we" means bureaucrats - it excludes the unemployed themselves.

Flora means not everyone but the majority who need independence from overlords.

There is an Upanishadic verse:

"From delusion lead me to Truth.

"From darkness lead me to Light.

"From death lead me to immortality."

-Brihadaranyaka.

Maybe, in this context, that last line is relevant? Nevertheless, my revision of the verse, which I recite before meditation is:

"From delusion lead us to Truth.

"From darkness lead us to Light."

Flora uses religion and builds a community so I have not gone completely off the point by quoting my revised Upanishad.

Divine Wind

The Boat Of A Million Years, X.

Some readers might think that I have missed a point, then find that I return to address it. Many readers will know that I have missed a point because I do not know most of this history that Poul Anderson deals with.

Asagoa tells Tu Shan that the Divine Wind wrecked Mongol ships. I already knew that kamikaze meant "Divine Wind" but it was good to read about the historical winds. 

People my age do not remember the War but do remember hearing about it as a recent event. It had a long shadow as I have said here before but maybe eighty years later we are getting out of that shadow. In Ian Fleming's second last James Bond novel, published in 1964, twenty years after D-Day, Tiger Tanaka, the Head of the Japanese Secret Service, tells Bond that he had volunteered for kamikaze but the War ended first. Both Bond and Poul Anderson's character, Manse Everard, had been in the War before their series began. Everard time travels back to 1944. Bond, like most human beings, can only reminisce.

Boat has yet to arrive at World War II.

What Does Aeneas Need?

The Day Of Their Return.

Jaan to Ivar:

"'What Aeneas needs is twofold, a uniting faith and a uniting secular leader.'" (17, p. 203)

Aeneas does not need a uniting faith. Every Aenean has the right to seek or practice a faith. Every group of male Jews of twelve or over has the right to form a synagogue. Every group of Catholics has the right to hear a priest say Mass. Every group of Evangelicals has the right to meet to study the Bible. Every group of Buddhists has the right to meditate, either individually or as a group. We thank the King, i.e., society or the state as personified by the King, that we are not persecuted for doing this. (Once, I went to a Youth Hostel Quiet Room to practice zazen and was joined by a Japanese man who seemed to be reading his Bible.) Should anyone campaign for his faith to become the uniting faith? No. And such a message will no longer be heeded.

Nor do I think that Aeneas needs a uniting secular leader. An anti-Terran movement, if such a movement is needed, will throw up many popular leaders, not just a single figurehead. To make an analogy with ecclesiastical organizations, Britain has both an Archbishop of Canterbury and a Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The present King, while still Prince of Wales, once said that the General Assembly was the nearest approach to a Scottish Parliament. (Now, of course, there is a Scottish Parliament.) The difference between an Archbishop and a Moderator represents a lot of history and also different approaches to organization in general: hierarchical or democratic. What Aeneas needs, I suggest, is a planetary congress of delegates from regional and local councils, each of which would appoint a convener. 

Stellar Union

Poul Anderson, "The Pirate" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3 (Riverdale, NY, July 2018), pp. 137-165.

We are glancing ahead and have by no means abandoned the virgins of Atlantis just yet.

Captain Murdoch says:

"'Faustina, meet Trevelyan Micah of the Stellar Union Coordination Service.'" (p. 140)

I was looking for the full name of the Stellar Union and found it here. No doubt this is not its only appearance but I have come to realize how few works are necessary to outline a future history. It is like one of those minimalist Japanese paintings that are a few brush strokes and a lot of blank paper.

The Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire are built by a lot of words unlike the Solar or Stellar Unions.

FIRE TIME, FOREWORD

Fire Time, FOREWORD.

A judge, Daniel Espina, has asked for a private interview with some self-confessed mutineers whom he must sentence. Like Guion, who interviews Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly in the same author's The Shield of Time, Espina seeks something more subtle than another bunch of data. He wants to know how something feels. His request to the mutineers leads into Chapter I of the novel.

Espina is a good guy trying to understand a difficult situation. He is comparable to Guion but contrasts sharply with various characters in Frank Herbert's Dune series who engage in personally nasty power conflicts at the top of their society. We do not know what it is like to live in that society. Espina lists some of the kinds of "mankind" in the World Federation:

a prosperous Japanese engineer;

a gang lord in the Welfare district of a North American city;

a Russian mystic;

a Dry African peasant.

We were introduced to a Welfare district at the beginning of The Star Fox and have come a long way since then.

What People Read

Question and Answer.

In the spaceship lounge, the Martian Dissenter is reading, this time not the Bible but Milton. I read somewhere that, in English Puritan homes, the Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost were considered the only appropriate Sunday reading. PL can be regarded as a prequel and intervel to the Bible. On the street in Birmingham, a Muslim propagandist gave me a free copy of the Koran. While I was sitting looking at this, a guy walking past told me that I should be reading the Bible because that is the proper book. When I went to practise Zen meditation in a Youth Hostel quiet room, I was joined by a Japanese man who seemed to be reading his Bible. There is a Buddhist story that the true scriptures are written on blank pages but people do not realize this so they are given something to read. In the beginning was the Word or the Deed?

Zen And Technic History

I am reading an illuminating book about Zen received as a present. Zen is a rich blend of Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditions now Westernized. Adzel from Woden is converted to Mahayana Buddhism in San Francisco during the Solar Commonwealth period. 

In Satan's World, the threat to Technic civilization is external, not internal, although maybe the ease with which the Shenna are able to infiltrate that civilization highlights one of its weaknesses. Technic merchants sell arms to barbarians in "A Little Knowledge." In "Lodestar," conflicts within Technic civilization even cause conflict between van Rijn and Falkayn: a pivotal story. In Mirkheim, the Technic conflicts become a civil war when an apparently external threat is shown to be essentially internal. One of the two League cartels has backed and exploited what looks like the external threat of an alien imperialism.

The following stories show the longer term consequences: the colonization of Avalon; the collapse of the Solar Commonwealth; the founding and expansion of the Terran Empire; its war with the Domain of Ythri; the later history of the Empire and the even longer term consequences of its eventual Fall.

Today I might be mainly reading Alan Watts.

Accessible Texts

Yesterday my lap top went into the shop for an overnight service. Now it is back. Meanwhile, other, not entirely unrelated, reading has generated reflections relevant to Poul Anderson although placing him in a wider context.

The accessibility of a text to a reader is first a function of which language it is written in. Obviously. A Chinese or Japanese text is impenetrable to most of us here. However, there are several other factors. How long ago was the text written? Is it poetry, prose, drama or graphic story-telling? How dense or complicated is it? How archaic, obscure or specialized is its vocabulary? To which genre does it belong? What literary conventions or references does it assume familiarity with? An English text can be effectively unreadable. We have become familiar with the cliches that have accumulated within sf but imagine if the only sf that we had ever read was the pre-cliched texts of Wells and Verne.

Some Texts Referring To Fairies As Supernatural Beings Distinct From Gods, Angels Or Demons

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595 or 1596)

Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queen (1590-1596)

Percy Shelley, Queen Mab (1813)

George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)

Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (1974)

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (1989-1996)

Accessibility

I have seen A Midsummer Night's Dream performed maybe five times. (Plays are written to be seen and heard, not read.)

I have never considered reading The Faerie Queen or Queen Mab.

I have just broken off a first reading of Phantastes and turned to a rereading of The Sandman as infinitely more accessible. (Yet Phantastes "baptised" CS Lewis' imagination when he read it in about 1914.)

I made perhaps two attempts to read A Midsummer Tempest before getting properly into it but now commend it as Anderson's most literary work.

The Sandman is endlessly rereadable.

Gaiman parallels Anderson in fantasy but has written no sf. Thus, both Gaiman and Anderson rework Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. The Dreaming incorporates all myths, including Odin, Thor and Loki. Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End parallels Anderson's Old Phoenix.

Near Future Venus

In his Time Patrol series, Poul Anderson avoided giving information about the near future Earth but did impart information about Venus:

"Go back and kill Hitler and the Japanese and Soviet leaders - maybe someone shrewder would take their place. Maybe atomic energy would lie fallow, and the glorious flowering of the Venusian Renaissance never happen. The devil we know...."

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

"Piet Van Sarawak (Dutch-Indonesian-Venusian, early twenty-fourth A.D.)..."

-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Time Patrol, pp. 173-228 AT 1, p. 174.

Both these stories were published in 1955. In 1967, a Russian probe showed that Venus was in no shape to be colonized or to flower in a Renaissance any time soon. SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time," published 2014, shows that the Venus that we know had to be drastically terraformed before Van Sarawak could live there in 2332. 

In The Name Of Cosmos: Nomad Ritual

The Peregrine.

At the beginning of the Nomad Captains' Council on Rendezvous:

"'In the name of Cosmos, rendezvous,' [the president] said formally. Joachim didn't pay much attention to the ritual that followed."

-CHAPTER II, pp. 7-8.

But we would like to see the ritual.

As part of the ritual of landing on an E-planet:

"'In the name of Cosmos, sanctuary,' said the boat's captain, Kogama Iwao, formally."

-CHAPTER XV, p. 131.

How many things are said in the name of Cosmos and what else happens in the rituals?

In the cabin of a Nomad captain:

"...against another wall was the customary family altar."

-CHAPTER VIII, p. 58.

What is on the altar and what rituals are performed in front of it? Some of this would have to be invented for visual adaptations.

Religions affect each other. Catholic priests keep consecrated Communion wafers in a tabernacle on the altar. In a Buddhist monastery, I heard someone ask, "What's in that box on the altar?" The answer was "The Scripture of Great Wisdom." A Jewish layman showing some students, including myself, around a synagogue said that, when the Rabbi has read from the Torah scroll, he holds it up above his head for the congregation to see. He commented: "Shades of the elevation of the Host!" I read that maybe Taoists constructed their Trinity in response to the Buddhist Tripitaka. Japanese homes can have both a god altar and a Buddha altar.

So a lot of us are familiar with altars but what is on them? Are there images of "Cosmos"? No subordinate deities are mentioned. James Blish's Okies refer to "gods of all stars" but only abstractly.

When I told a Polish man that there is a mosque on our street, he asked not about abstract beliefs but only about a concrete image: "Do they have crucifix?" When a pupil drew a picture of Solomon's Temple and placed a cross above the door, I pointed out that the cross would not have been there. Instead of realizing, smiling and saying, "Of course not!," he asked, very puzzled, "Why not?" People take for granted what they are used to seeing - and cultural differences can be immense. So what is on the Nomads' altars?

UNCLE And Un-Men

Fictional heroes sometimes spend their time identifying a chief villain and locating his secret HQ. Blofeld moved from Paris to an Alp to a Japanese Castle of Death. The Man from UNCLE TV series repeatedly referred to the enemy HQ, THRUSH Central. In his UNCLE novels, David McDaniel invented three mobile THRUSH Centrals and, beyond them, a THRUSH Island that had to be eliminated by a naval attack. A character thought that she had been on the island but did not know where it was.

Poul Anderson matches this in just a few pages of "Un-Man." The Un-Men neatly trick the leader of the "gang" into leading them to his global HQ which is under a mobile sea station. The story ends quickly as the gang is beheaded in a single page but this UN action is the equivalent of the protracted UNCLE campaign against THRUSH. We appreciate Anderson's heroes-versus-villains scenarios but are also grateful that he wrote a lot more than just that.

You And We

"Un-Man."

VI, pp. 47-48 interestingly analyse post-World War III society. One sentence reads:

"Modern technology had no use for the pick-and-shovel laborer or for the routine intellectual; so you were faced with a huge class of people not fit for anything else, and what were you going to do about it?" (p. 47)

Who are "you"? Sometimes the pronoun used is "we." "What should we do with the unemployed? "We" means different things in different contexts. In "How can we compete with the Japanese?," "we" means this country considered as a competitive economic unit. In "Are we inherently evil?," "we" means the whole human race. In "What should we do with the unemployed?," "we" means a minority of social administrators - or maybe the electorate choosing between contesting political parties proposing alternative policies about unemployment. If "we" means the whole of society, then it includes the unemployed who surely are able to articulate what they want to do.

There was an earlier reference to a free-marriage group. Now we realize that that was not just an esoteric futuristic allusion. Poul Anderson has thought through the implications of technology and of his post-World War III society. The family no longer has an economic or social basis. Different social patterns are emerging. We recognize the origins of the individualism of the later Solar Union period.

Izanami And Izanagi

 

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

When interstellar travel was just beginning, Matthew Zachary and Yukiko Nomura constructed the single cell that became ancestral to the Zacharians. The cell divided and the second cell was made male. Zachary and Nomura nurtured the cells exogenetically, then adopted the infants who were named Izanami and Izanagi. This couple became the parents of the Zacharians.

Despite my interest in mythology and practice of Zen, I know almost nothing about Japanese mythology. Having googled Izanagi, I find the stories unedifying.

When Kukulkan Zachary has recounted the origin of the Zacharians to Diana Crowfeather:

"There was a long silence. Man and girl left the street for a road that swung out between trees and estates, toward the western promontory. Patricius declined, its light going tawny. The wind blew cooler with a tang of salt." (p. 380)

A long silence seems necessary to digest the story. Three senses: tawny light; cooler wind; salt tang. Four, if we include heard silence. As ever, the wind seems to comment, this time by blowing cooler. The silence is broken:

"'And you marry only among yourselves?' Diana asked finally.

"'Yes. We must...'" (ibid.)

And there is the problem.

C And Axor

 

"...with regard to multiplicity of incarnations, modern biological and astronomical discoveries do not exclude the hypothesis that there are rational creatures elsewhere in the cosmos. While this, together with the incredible vastness of the universe, squares with Buddhist and Hindu imagery, it may be embarrassing for Christians, since it might seem to imply that God will have become incarnate elsewhere - and this takes the edge off Christian criticism of the Hindu conception of avataras, etc.; though the Christian doctrine [of Incarnation] remains the simplest we know, and is the doctrine more consonant with rigid monotheism."

-Ninian Smart, World Religions: A Dialogue (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1969), 8, p. 136.

This book, entirely written by Smart, is a fictional dialogue between:

C, a Christian;

J, a Jew;

M, a Muslim;

H, a Hindu;

CB, a Ceylonese Buddhist;

JB, a Japanese Buddhist.

C, speaking in the quoted passage, thinks that extra-terrestrial incarnations might be embarrassing for Christians whereas Poul Anderson's Fr. Axor thinks on the contrary that "the Universal Incarnation" would validate his faith.

1933

There Will Be Time, I.

Jack Havig is born in February, 1933. At this stage, the text is mainstream fiction - although the narrator, Robert Anderson, paves the way by referring to genetic codes as not yet thought of and to Einstein's work as not yet dwelling among men.

Anderson lists recent bad news:

the Japanese conquest of Manchuria;

a bonus march on Washington;

the Lindbergh kidnapping;

Hitler becoming Chancellor -

 

- and good news:

 

a new President;

the imminent end of Prohibition -

 

- adding that:

 

"...springtime in these parts is as lovely as our autumn." (p. 10)

 

Thus, Poul Anderson begins this novel by referring to spring and autumn, a beginning and end - and both are good. 

On Yet Another Beach II

See On Yet Another Beach.

In A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XVI, Kossara prays behind a boulder far down the beach from the ychan fisher village of Nanteiwon which looks small between gray sea and sky. Is it somehow appropriate to pray in such an intermediate place, between sky, sea and land?

Kossara lost her parents, two brothers and a sister in the attack on the Vymezal estate. She, who will later be canonized, asks the Father of Creation to receive them, Jesus to absolve them, Mary to comfort them and the light of the Holy Spirit to shine upon them.

Is it irreverent to compare this prayer with others? Prayers are expressions of aspiration and goodwill. One view is that, to be efficacious, they must be addressed to a specific named deity. Another view is that Someone hears every prayer...:

"He has different names in every country (for he is worshipped in different forms and in many tongues, but it is always Odin they worship)."

-Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (London, 2018), p. 2.

 

When Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, trains the disguised James Bond to pose as Japanese, Bond must offer a prayer to the sun goddess. Watched by two Shinto priests and surrounded by other supplicants, he approaches the shrine, bows, tosses a coin, claps his hands, bends his head, claps again, bows again and withdraws. When he admits that he did not make any prayer because he was concentrating on remembering the sequence of motions, Tanaka replies that the goddess will help him to concentrate more in future. Does Tanaka believe that this is literally true? Does Bond refrain from expressing skepticism out of diplomacy? (He is indeed in the Diplomatic Section and on a diplomatic mission, no longer 007 but now 7777.) The pagan view is that belief does not matter.

Favorite Anderson Novel?

Early morning post.

The People Of The Wind might be my favorite Poul Anderson novel: great characters, character interactions and inter-species interactions, imaginatively and sympathetically described Ythrians, future historical continuity and cross-references, exotic Avalonian setting - like the unique Japanese setting of Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice. Of course, several other works share such features. Mirkheim has an even larger cast of characters and a more important historical turning point.

The two main themes of The People Of The Wind  are perhaps living in troubled times and flying high. It begins:

"'You can't leave now,' Daniel Holm told his son. 'Any day we may be at war. We may already be.'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT I, p. 437.

 

It ends:

 

"Muscles danced, wings beat, alive to the outermost pinion. The planet spun toward morning. My brother, my sister have found their joy. Let me go seek my own.

"Snowpeaks flamed. The sun stood up in a shout of light.

"High is heaven and holy."

-op. cit. XIX, p. 662.