To The Stars

Poul Anderson, The Infinite Voyage: Man's Future In Space (London, 1969).

Chapter 10: More Suns Than One, pp. 123-135.

Chapter 11: Voyage to the Stars, pp. 136-153.

Poul Anderson, "Our Many Roads to the Stars" IN Anderson, New America (New York, December 1982), pp. 261-287 (essay published, 1975; postscript, 1982).

These works will show us the state of knowledge from the late 1960's to the early 1980's when Anderson was writing sf about interstellar travel. Although this information is now scientifically dated (to say the least), it retains a certain fictive or literary relevance just as the Martian canals, which turned out not to exist, had meanwhile found their way into fiction and literature - as indeed had the Martians, inhabiting not Mars but our imaginations.

I will try to assimilate the technical information some time tomoz. 

Trappings And Texts

A book is very different when you reread it sixty years later. Case in point: Clifford Simak's City. In my teens, I focused on the sf trappings: machines, mutants, Martians etc. Now I notice that, in Chapter VI, when a man and a woman converse in Geneva, the text, transcending its trappings, reads almost like a contemporary novel.

In Poul Anderson's works, the novelistic interactions, so to call them, are more closely incorporated into the sf:

Christopher Holm joins an Ythrian choth and becomes estranged from his father even though the latter identifies with the Domain of Ythri and speaks of "deathpride" when confronting a Terran;

van Rijn and Falkayn clash over Mirkheim;

Aycharaych appeals to Flandry to help him to preserve Chereion;

Commonalty Ranger Daven Laure learns that he cannot marry a Kirkasanter...

New blog readers might not understand many of these references. However, explanations can be found by searching this blog and also by reading Poul Anderson's works which the blog urges all its readers to do.

Anderson And Simak

individual flying vehicles replacing road vehicles

robots

Martians

enhanced animals

mutants

telepathy

exploration of Jupiter

an interstellar space drive

parallel worlds

suspended animation

I am trying to list ideas which:

have become standard in sf;

are in Poul Anderson's works;

are also in Clifford Simak's City which I am still rereading.

Anderson: enhanced seals;

Simak: enhanced dogs and ants;

Anderson: mutant time travelers and immortals;

Simak: a hyperintelligent mutant. 

There might be more. But some of Simak's ideas are impossible, even cartoonish, like an anthill with chimneys as the ants, with no increase in brain size, smelt ore.

(Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is another sf work that takes some standard ideas, like telepathy, robots and time travel, and then does something more with them.)

Simak's descriptions of wind and sunsets recall Anderson's:

"The wind talked harshly in the crouching trees and ripped the long grass in sudden gusts. The last rays of the sun struck fire from the distant peaks."

-City, II, p. 46.

"The sun sank in a lake of crimson, hushed finally to the glow of a fire burned low."

-ibid., p. 48.

"They sat for long minutes in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, by the ghostly whisper of an autumn wind in the trees outside."

-ibid., III, p. 71.

(As in Anderson's works, natural sounds do not interrupt but underline conversational silence.)

"...in the west the green-tinged glow that marked the passing of the sun was fading into night."

-ibid., p. 81.

Somewhere in there, a couple of sounds become one with the wind. I will quote those passages if I can re-find them but right now other activities call.

Comprehensiveness And Beyond

In his comprehensiveness as an sf writer, Poul Anderson addressed:

telepathy

teleportation

mutants

longevity

immortality

scientifically rationalized magic

interplanetary exploration

slower-than-light interstellar travel

a generation ship

several scientific rationalizations of faster-than-light travel

several versions of Martians

other aliens

extraterrestrial environments, ecologies and evolutions

cosmological sf

eight future histories, including Heinleinian and Stapledonian models

time travel, with both paradoxes

alternative histories

the Frankenstein question ("Is it right to create human beings?")

robots

conscious artificial intelligence

a predictive science of society

future warfare

dystopian futures

post-nuclear-war Earth

space opera

excellent contributions to several other authors' series

- but not artifacts larger than planets, as in:

the Ringworld Tetralogy and "Bigger Than Worlds" by Larry Niven

the Orbitsville Trilogy

the Bowl Of Heaven Trilogy by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

The Lords Of Creation by SM Stirling

And now we know the answer to an earlier question:

CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy is set on Mars, Venus and Earth;

SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation Trilogy is set on Venus and Mars and in a Dyson Sphere. 

Merseians And Martians

My mind has been elsewhere for most of today as my body will be elsewhere on Friday this week with a day trip to York. 

Meanwhile, we cannot really compare Merseians with Martians because there is only one fictional race of Merseians whereas there are no one knows how many fictional races of Martians. Poul Anderson's Merseians, at least those of the Roidhunate, like HG Wells' Martians, want to conquer Earth whereas Ray Bradbury's Martians are almost entirely wiped out by chicken pox brought from Earth - just as Wells' Martian invaders are killed by Terrestrial microbes - while at the same (in a different timeline) CS Lewis' Martians are protected from Terrestrial evil by superior beings in the Solar System. What could be more different? And those are just three of the most prominent examples.

The comparison that I have in mind here is with SM Stirling's Martians. Merseians are multicultural. See information about Cnif hu Vanden here and particularly here. By contrast, Stirling's Martians have been monocultural throughout a very long history and this makes it hard to tell how much of their psychology is genetic as opposed to cultural. Is a monocultural species easier to write about or must the author work harder to keep it consistent? As a mere reader, I can only guess.

Thank you all for so many page views for a day when this is the first post.

Grand Canal

There is a Grand Canal in Venice and in China and in a few other places. 

There are at least two on (different fictional versions of) Mars:

Rhysling mentions the Grand Canal in Robert Heinlein's Future History;

another Grand Canal surrounds Mons Olympus in SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings.

Poul Anderson has a lot of Martians but maybe not any canals? 

For James Blish on Martian canals, see Versions Of Mars.

CS Lewis said that he put "canals" on his fictional Mars because "...they are part of the popular tradition." (See here.) However, Lewis' "canals" are deep inhabited river valleys, not artefacts. 

It is appropriate that a fictional Mars should have a Grand Canal and that in fact there are at least two. Fictional Mars is a major part of our heritage.

A Real Mars?

SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings reads as if it is about a real Mars (not our real one, of course!) which other versions merely hint at. That is what writers of fiction try to do. CS Lewis tells us, quite legitimately, that HG Wells' Martians are very different from the real Martians... My other general observations are, first, that I strongly dislike Stirling's Martians' attitudes to life and to each other and, secondly, that I still find them rather complicated and convoluted to read about but that last point just means that I need to persevere as a reader.

And the relevance of all this to Poul Anderson is that, both for comparative purposes and also for their own sakes, Anderson presents more fictional Martians than any other sf writer, even Heinlein.

In a short post, and without initially intending to, we have referred to no less than Stirling, Lewis, Wells, Anderson and Heinlein - and will now stop short of listing others especially at this time of night!

Good night or whatever time of day it may be where you are now.

Martian Meanings

Late at night, tired, I found it easy to post about the Divine, a pet subject after all. However, meanwhile, I was finding SM Stirling's Martians difficult to read and think about. That is not a complaint! Who wants to read only texts that are easy? However...

One of them thinks:

"...I must keep in mind that death from another's volition is possible at any point on one's personal world-line."

-SM Stirling, In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, March 2008), CHAPTER ONE, p. 40.

He means that he must remember that someone can kill him at any time but why express it like that? Because he is a Martian human being, of course.

What is not acceptable, as Bob Shaw said at an sf event years ago, is to describe incomprehensible speech and actions and then to explain it all by the phrase: "Alien motivations!" But the authors that we discuss here do not see fit to conduct themselves like that. Shaw in particular said that it was a point of honour for him to explain everything.

These Martians make their kind of sense and it is our job as readers to understand it, even if not tonight.

The Mars Of Fiction

How much do we know about it? Certain ideas float to the surface:

humanoid inhabitants

an ancient civilization on a drying planet

canals

sword

airships

a board game 

These features are common to Edgar Rice Burrough's Martian series and to SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation series. Some of the ideas also appear elsewhere. The canals on a dying planet are legendary.

How does Mars come to be inhabited?

(i) There just are native Martians.

(ii) In Michael Moorcock's ERB pastiche, Michael Kane time travels to Mars at a time before Martians had migrated to Earth.

(iii) In Lords Of Creation, technologically superior aliens terraformed Mars and transplanted Terrestrial human beings to it.

(iv) In Poul Anderson's Technic History, extra-solar aliens colonize Mars.

(v) Martians existed but are now extinct.

(vi) In works by Anderson and others, Terrestrials colonize Mars and become the "Martians."

(vii) There are even versions of Mars that were never inhabited!

More Martians

Reading SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation series made me consider writing a post about Mars and Martians in works of sf, including, of course, those of Poul Anderson, but that is a big subject and maybe we have done it before? Consequently, I searched the blog specifically for the phrase "composite Mars" because I had remembered that two authors, Larry Niven and Alan Moore, had each constructed a Mars inhabited by a small number of the Martian races already created by other authors. (Moore has Gulliver Jones and John Carter watching the Wellsian Martians departing to invade Earth etc.) The search result was beyond my imaginings and makes me want to regard the matter as having been adequately addressed at least for the time being!

In fact, see also the blog search result for:

Poul Anderson's Martians

World Con, '62

Poul Anderson is a minor character in SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation series. We will come back to that. 

No wonder I could not remember whether:

"World Science Fiction Convention

"Chicago, Earth

"Labor Day, 1962"

- was in Lords Of Creation, Volume I, The Sky People, or in Volume II, In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. It is at the end of Vol. I as a preview and at the beginning of Vol. II as the PROLOGUE (although maybe not still present as a preview in later editions of Vol. I?). 

We are still rereading The Sky People, rediscovering obscure ERBian references like "Vepaja," but have skipped ahead to the preview.

If you read this preview/PROLOGUE, then read the Wikipedia account of the 1962 World Con, then you will find that Stirling has got the names of Con attendees and even of the Guest of Honour right.

In Stirling's alternative historical Con, sf authors say a lot of things relevant to their works and this could lead to a detailed post on my Science Fiction blog. In fact, it probably will lead to something on that blog but, for present purposes, we will confine ourselves to "Poul" and to "the editor of Astounding." (Later: See Mars Books.)

While the authors watch transmissions from a Martian lander, Poul:

had brought in a case of Tuborg and is described as a postwar Young Turk (The Sky People, p. 314);

addresses "Arthur" on p. 315;

grumbles that the Viking horns worn by fans were not historical on p. 316;

comments on Martian sea level and highland air on p. 317;

is said to like messing about with boats and to murmur about pointing into the wind on p. 319;

guffaws that the Martians have put the lander in a sack when the screen goes dark after a tarpaulin has been thrown on p. 322.

The Astounding editor insists that Terrestrials are the most advanced Solar species on p. 319. This was a disagreement with Asimov.

Campbell:

edited Heinlein's Future History, Asimov's Foundation and Robots, Blish's Okies and Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn;

published Heinlein's Time Chart;

made suggestions that affected Foundation, Okies and the Technic History.

In the case of the Technic History, Campbell's suggestions were the ideas that became the Ythrians and Mirkheim.

Solar Planets In The Pulps And Later In Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Anderson And Stirling

Follow the link from "Northwest Smith " in Planetary Adventurers.

Ninety years ago, pulp sf writers treated the Solar System like a galaxy of inhabited planets with breathable atmospheres and even jungles on moons of Jupiter. Such an approach even affected Robert Heinlein's Future History although that series is primarily about the future development of human society, not about human-alien interactions. Isaac Asimov admitted in The Early Asimov that he wrote in this tradition even when he knew better.

We can see later writers emerging from the tradition. In James Blish's Cities In Flight and Mission To The Heart Stars, Martians had existed but are now extinct. Poul Anderson has half a dozen versions of Martians. There are Martians in his Psychotechnic History and in the original version of his "Margin of Profit" although, when that story was revised to fit into his Technic History, these "Martians" had become extra-Solars who had colonized Mars. Anderson also has Venerians in "Sister Planet," Jovians in Three Worlds To Conquer and Mercurians in "Life Cycle." 

When SM Stirling wrote a series in which Mars and Venus turned out to be more or less how earlier sf writers had imagined them, he also worked towards an explanation. A scientist working on Venus says:

"'Sam thinks...and I think...that two hundred million years ago, in the earliest Jurassic...this planet was different. Radically different from what we have now; as far as we can tell, it didn't have life at all. And we don't have any idea what changed it.'"

-SM Stirling, The Sky People (New York, October 2007), CHAPTER TWO, pp. 40-41.

But they will find out.

Water On Mars

In "The Martian Way" by Isaac Asimov, as far as I can remember, Earth stopped shipping water to Mars so the Martian colonists started to import it from the Saturnian rings.

In Protector by Larry Niven, a human protector exterminated the Martians by deflecting an ice asteroid onto a collision course with Mars.

In The Fleet Of Stars, 5, the Nantai etaine mines a lode of water which is sold by a Lunarian organization called a courai. 

Mars loses water because molecules escaping into the atmosphere are cracked apart by ultraviolet radiation with the oxygen binding to rocks and the hydrogen escaping into space. 

Because the Synesis - the cybercosm-dominated civilization in the inner Solar System - has stopped sending water, the Martians now have four options:

live underground;

leave Mars;

build ships and robots to get ice from the Kuiper Belt;

deal with the Proserpinans.

The fourth option seems best: free human beings together against the cybercosm.

Life On Mars

Fictional accounts of Mars:

when first explored;

as inhabited by Martians;

as colonized by human beings.

The second and third kinds can be combined, e.g.:

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury;

Red Planet by Robert Heinlein.

The Fleet Of Stars, 5, describes Mars when it has been colonized for centuries by two human species:

Terrans, who evolved on Earth;

Lunarians, who had been adapted to live in Lunar gravity although not on the Lunar surface so that their entire lives have to be spent inside enclosed habitats, spaceships or spacesuits.

Both species can breed in Martian gravity which is greater than Lunar but less than Terrestrial. Earthlings stride, Lunarians bound, Martians of either species lope.

This might be one of the most carefully contrived accounts of life on Mars as that planet might really be like. It is many years since my single reading of Red Planet and I have not read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy which, I now learn, covers the period 2026-2212.

SF Questions And Answers

Science fiction is a single extended discussion about ideas, possibilities and consequences. Therefore, many stories can be read in the context of others.

Will Robots Displace Human Labour?

Isaac Asimov: no, because laws will be passed to prevent the use of robots on Earth.

Poul Anderson: not as such because the first non-specialized humanoid robot is unemployed! However, more generally, automation does cause mass unemployment.

What Will Happen If Earth Is Invaded?

HG Wells: Terrestrial microbes kill the Martians.

Anderson: militarily superior humanoid aliens sell their services to the highest bidder among Terrestrial governments, thus conquering Earth economically.

How Can Human Lifespans Be Extended?

Robert Heinlein: first by breeding for longevity, then by exchanging old blood for artificial new blood.

James Blish: by a range of drugs called antiagathics.

Larry Niven: by teleporting the chemicals associated with aging out of the body.

Anderson: by shielding human beings from all radiation which means that they will have to remain deep underground.

Anderson: by a single antithanatic.

Anderson: only by occasional mutation.

Anderson: by periodic rejuvenation.

Will A Generation Ship Crew Mutiny and Lose All Knowledge Of The External Universe?

Heinlein: yes.

Anderson: no, because the laws of psychotechnics will be applied to manage social conflicts within the ship.

Can A Time Traveller Become Her Own Mother?

Anderson: no, because each of the children would have only half of her chromosomes.

Heinlein: yes, if she can have a full sex-change.

These are only examples.

Life On Mars

This post, occasioned by rereading James Blish's Welcome To Mars, is not comprehensive but does cover successive stages of the fictional treatment of Mars, our point as always being that Poul Anderson makes several alternative contributions.

In works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury and CS Lewis, Mars is humanly habitable. One novel and one short story by Lewis are set on different versions of Mars.

In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, a human protector diverts an ice asteroid onto a collision course with Mars and thus exterminates the Martians although some of their species still survive in the Map of Mars in the Ringworld.

In Anderson's Psychotechnic History, there are native Martians. In his Technic History, there are extra-solar colonists of Mars. In his The Fleet Of Stars, there are human colonists of Mars. In his The Winter Of The World, interplanetary travel has ceased but Mars is green, indicating that it has been terraformed and has now become humanly habitable.

Writing About Now

Sf, however futuristic, is always about the time at which it was written. When I had finished assessing the threats to humanity from Poul Anderson's Alori and Merseians and from Larry Niven's kzinti - their predecessors were HG Wells' Martians -, I concluded that we seemed to be threatened only by ourselves, a remark that pulls us right back to the present. We have projected ourselves onto alien aggressors. CS Lewis reversed this process when, replying to Wells, he presented a Terrestrial scientist exporting literally diabolical evil to the sinless Venus.

Contemporary novels can bring us almost to the present and can contain content that was sf: satellites, computers etc. We cannot read a novel about what is happening right now today although I once bought a novel and a newspaper in the same railway station newsagent and found that the former was ahead of the latter.

See:

A Newspaper And A Novel

We are pleased to accompany Anderson and others into the futures.

Contradiction

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

"No doubt of it, man wasn't built to sit in a metal shell and hurry from star to star. It wasn't strange that so many had dropped out of Nomad life." (p. 5)

I have commented on this twice before but let's make more of a point of it this time. There is a major contradiction in American science fiction in my opinion. On the one hand, interstellar travel is the ultimate symbol of freedom (I think). I heard a woman at a Con, probably a Trekkie, proclaim through the mike, "We are going to the stars!" Are we? Not in this generation. On the other hand, a spaceship is "a metal shell." The starfarer is enclosed, almost as if in a tomb.

However, people embarking on interstellar voyages ought to be able to take more spacious environments with them. James Blish argued that antigravity would be able to move cities, even planets. Poul Anderson's asterites, in Tales Of The Flying Mountains, use gravity control to set off for Alpha Centauri within and on the surface of a mobile planetoid. So let's abolish all these metal shells.

The Nomads and the Kith are good but, like Martians, they are old sf.

Differences Of Scale

We are following some lines of thought starting from What Is Possible?

Problems with slower than light interstellar flight begin with the fuel problem that is common to all space flight. How do you carry enough fuel? The more fuel you carry, the more fuel you need to carry it. Secondly, organisms do not live long enough to complete an interstellar voyage and are not adapted to spend long periods of time away from the kind of environment in which they evolved. A spacecraft surrounded by vacuum with cosmic rays sleeting through it for decades and centuries is not a hospitable environment.

Brian Aldiss wrote once that human beings populated their Terrestrial environment with other intelligences, nature deities and spirits etc, which do not exist, then populated the Solar System with Selenites, Martians etc which do not exist and now populate extra-solar planets with other intelligences which (he thought) do not exist either. A lot more has been and is being learned about the number and characteristics of exo-planets so I think that, with increasing probability, ET's can be out there but how many, how near, and how easy to contact?

We have projected consciousness into nature and onto the heavens and are still doing that in a different way, i.e., we have traversed oceans and continents and built civilizations and empires and imagine ourselves continuing to operate in this way in the galaxy where, however, the spatiotemporal scale is completely different. Quantity affects quality. There has to be some scale on which we cannot operate so where is the dividing line?

Public Image

The sf community comprises:

writers

editors

publishers

readers

Con-goers, who might not read much

critics

artists

cartoonists

some TV and film types

What is this community's public image? I don't know but it must have changed since the times decades ago when James Blish wrote criticism as William Atheling, Jr.

We observe developments in our lifetimes, like the emergence of the off-shoot Star Trek fandom, and read about earlier developments, like the emergence of the literary ghetto of sf mags. Fortunately, Poul Anderson emerged from and transcended that ghetto, created several major series and also contributed to well-known series created by several other authors so that he could have augmented Star Trek. (James Blish adapted TV scripts into prose fiction and wrote one ST novel.)

Because someone at a New Year's Eve party enquired about my interests and activities, I mentioned blogging about an sf writer called Poul Anderson. The name meant nothing so I added that I also discuss other writers connected with Anderson like HG Wells. That name connects.

Asked whether I read a lot of sf, I replied that I used to but no longer do and that Anderson sets such a high standard both of descriptive writing and of creative imagination that I will no longer accept mere sf backdrops. I do not want to read about a spaceship landing on a planet unless I can also read a detailed description of the environment on that planet. 

The most obvious Wells-Anderson link is The Time Machine-the Time Patrol although we should also add There Will Be Time, The Corridors Of Time, "Flight to Forever" and other time travel works.

There is an obvious link between Wells' The War Of The Worlds and Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds - both about Martians invading Earth - as well as the latter's "The Soldier From The Stars," about a different way to conquer a planet.

Wells' The First Men In The Moon is about a first journey to the Moon whereas Anderson's Tau Zero is about an ultimate journey beyond the end of the universe. Both are about space travel. Wells imagines a substance opaque to gravity whereas Anderson's narrative remains within the parameters of relativistic physics.

Learn the difference between British and American future histories, then read:

Wells

Stapledon

Aldiss

Heinlein

Anderson

(Not just them but they make a start.)

Anderson's last future history, Genesis, synthesizes British/Wellsian and American/Heinleinian models and readdresses the Frankenstein question: is it right to create human life?

We can connect with the general public by mentioning Wells and Frankenstein.