Aurea

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER TWO.

Capital city of the colonized planet, Daedalus, in the Patrician System.

The original small town has been demolished or engulfed by the newly built sector defence command with its accompanying civil bureaucracy and private enterprises.

Soaring towers and sprawling industry.

Non-stop traffic on streets and elways or in the air.

Settlements elsewhere are enclaves in the wilderness.

A small part of the original town clings to a steep slope beneath the plateau with a view across hundreds of kilometers on this horizonless planet. 

Colonists of Daedalus are of many species from within the Terran Empire.

Targovi, a Tigery trader and covert Intelligence agent from Imhotep, visits an inn owned by a Cynthian, Ju Shao.

Aurea and Daedalus are as fully realized as Olga's Landing and Imhotep although these cities and planets appear only in this single novel.

In Olga's Landing II

Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), CHAPTER ONE.

See In Olga's Landing.

We try to convey the feel of Anderson's descriptive passages and have come close in the above linked post although we omitted some details:

the sky is not just blue but "...clear, deep blue..." (p. 195);

the breeze is cool although -

"It would have been deadly cold before [Diana's] people came to Imhotep" (ibid.);

Mount Horn is twelve kilometers above sea level;

the city holds not only the Pyramid but also the Institute, industries, shops, hotels, apartments and spaceport;

Diana is in the old quarter whose description we have quoted several times before (search the blog for "old quarter" although at least one other such quarter will come up!);

pioneers built in brick and low because of Imhotepan gravity;

in the market, videos show Terran sleaze and a vaz-Siravo dance from the Seas of Yang and Yin;

a gun dealer sells rifles, stunners and illegal Merseian blasters.

Every scene in Anderson's works reads as if the place exists and has not just been created at the stroke of a pen - or on a typewriter or a computer screen. We want to read more but can gain immensely just by rereading.

Three Market Squares On Two Planets

We have discussed the market squares (scroll down) in Lancaster and in Olga's Landing on Imhotep. Today Lancastrians had a procession with two lions and a dragon around the town centre, then music and food in Market Square.

There is also a market-square in Solis Township on Earth in the far future of Poul Anderson's "The Chapter Ends." The statue of the dancing girl on the fountain in the centre of this square is one of the memorable images in Poul Anderson's works, I think because mankind is about to evacuate Earth so that the statue will be left to crumble without ever again being seen.

Searching this blog for "dancing girl" (scroll down) brings up two references to this fountain and two others to a living dancing girl in Tyre.

In Olga's Landing

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER ONE, is one of my favourite scenes in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Sitting on the tower of St. Barbara's, Diana sees blue sky, the small, fierce sun Patricius, two moons, the Pyramid that houses Imperial offices, sunseeker vine climbing the tower, the market square surrounding the tower, life spilling from narrow streets and surging between enclosing walls, shops and booths with multifarious wares, occasional clopperhoof-drawn wagons, muscular Imhotepan colonials, a spaceman and a marine badmouthing "'Merseian bastards,'" (p. 198) Tigeries (land Starkadians), a centauroid Donarrian, Irumclagians, Shalmuans and the first ever Wodenite on Imhotep...

That is where the narrative begins.

We are also informed that:

ice bull herds used to stampede through Olga's Landing when it was only an exploration base;

hot, savoury odours waft from foodstalls and music from taverns;

folk are mostly human but not Terran.

The scene is worthy of a Heinlein Juvenile. Technic civilization is most alive in this moment.

From Page To Screen

Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453. 

I am a stickler for accurate screen dramatizations of novels. However, extraordinary measures would be necessary to translate to screen all the information conveyed in CHAPTER ONE of this novel. Maybe a mixture of voice-over and scrolling script to inform us that:

the sun is called Patricius;

Diana's people had come to Imhotep;

the Pyramid houses Imperial offices;

the transient, multiracial population of the old quarter drifts "...in and out on the tides of space..." (p. 195);

"Who holds St. Barbara's holds the planet." (p. 196)

We would be directly shown the Miniature Computers and other wares on sale in the shops and booths of Olga's Landing, all of them.

Life In The Technic History

Imagining living in Poul Anderson's Technic History, I envisage myself neither as a League merchant nor as an Imperial Intelligence officer but as living a quieter life in one of the many exotic locations:

Earth in the Solar Commonwealth;

Starfall on Hermes;

the Kazan, the Obala or Zorkagrad on Dennitza;

anywhere on Avalon;

Olga's Landing on Imhotep;

beside the Highroad River on Daedalus.

Also visiting Ythri, Merseia etc. 

If living in the appropriate era, I might work as a researcher for van Rijn or for the Terran government. If working for van Rijn, I would seek election as a union steward and might have some interesting interactions with our employer. 

St. Thomas's Church in Lancaster always holds General Election hustings where the Parliamentary candidates answer questions. That and other important events are scheduled for this week.

Onward to the future.

Turekian And Ythrians

"Wings of Victory."

Three of the Olga's crew descend to the surface of Ythri: a Star Trek scenario except, of course, that they use a landing craft instead of a "transporter"/teleporter. 

Although the story tells us neither the name nor even the gender of the first person narrator, it is logical that she is the planetologist because it is she that describes the Ythrian environment. In an extended passage at the end, she also fills in for the presumably incapacitated xenologist, Webner, by outlining Ythrian biology which provides the solution to the problem posed by the story.

There has been a lot of interstellar travel even before the first Grand Survey because Hermes has been settled, Cynthia and Woden have been studied and Turekian tells tales of his exploits on exotic planets. Scope for yet another sub-series. The Technic History could have been continued indefinitely.

The very first human-Ythrian communication is nonverbal:

"Two big golden eyes stabbed at [Turekian], burned at him." (p. 89)

"For an instant, Turekian looked squarely into the golden eyes, knew a brave male defending his home, and also shot to miss." (p. 100)

After a lot more history, human beings and Ythrians together will resist the Terran Empire.

The Game Of Empire, Contents Of Chapters

The Game of Empire, CHAPTERS

ONE Diana meets Axor in Olga's Landing on Imhotep

TWO Targovi investigates on Daedalus

THREE Targovi recruits Diana and Axor at sea on Imhotep

FOUR Olaf and Vida Magnusson at home on Daedalus

FIVE Targovi etc travel to and arrive on Daedalus

SIX Tachwyr and the Grand Council on Merseia

SEVEN Diana with General Gatto in Aurea

EIGHT Interstellar war and Helen Kittredge

NINE Diana and Axor embark on Waterblossom

TEN On the Highroad River

ELEVEN The Merseian attack on Gorrazan

TWELVE Dominic and Miriam Flandry at home in Archopolis on Terra

Eleven more chapters... Maybe later.

Axor's Clues

In the chronological order of fictitious events, Dominic Flandry and Dragoika, the latter a female Starkadian land-dweller or Tigery, are introduced in Ensign Flandry. Eight volumes later, in The Game of Empire, CHAPTER ONE features Flandry's daughter, Diana Crowfeather, on the fourth Patrician planet, Imhotep, and CHAPTER TWO features Dragoika's son, Targovi, on the third Patrician planet, Daedalus. Targovi lives on Imhotep and trades on Daedalus. On a leisurely rereading of The Game of Empire, we, or at least I, resent this abrupt transition between planets. We, editorially speaking, want to linger in the old quarter of Olga's Landing on Imhotep with its market place and Hassan's inn, the Sign of the Golden Beetle, where, because of his size, Axor the Wodenite must sprawl on the floor.

We notice that, despite his Christianity, Axor has bought into a set of ideas that we encountered on Aeneas in The Day Of Their Return:

that the Builders would not have been wiped out by any material cause;

that they would have been too widespread, numerous, powerful, knowledgeable and wise for such a thing to happen;

that their long history would have been enough to make them wise;

that instead, they must have turned away from childish things and advanced to a higher plane of existence;

but that they would have wanted to help their successors.

However, Axor does not subscribe to Aenean millenarianism. He thinks not that the Builders will help others by returning soon but that they have already helped others by leaving messages in inscriptions. One such message, if that is what it was, has led him the Patrician System. 

"'...clues of this kind...appeared to me to whisper of the sun Patricius.'"

-The Game of Empire, CHAPTER ONE, p. 211.

I find this language intolerably vague. How can an inscription "whisper"? It hints that something can be found at Patricius?

On Imhotep, Tigery explorers have seen things that they cannot account for. Some islands have either natural formations or ruined walls although Imhotep has never had native inhabitants. On Daedalus, there are reports of what sounds like Ancient ruins in the jungle to the south of the Donarrian settlement, Ghundrung. Axor and Diana set out to explore on both planets. Unfortunately, we do not know of any eventual outcomes.

Where Axor finds his "clues":

"'...enigmatic remains of occasional records.'" (p. 211);

diagrams etched on walls or slabs that are now nearly blank;

electronically evocable, although badly blurred, molecular or crystal codings;

some incomprehensible;

some possibly signs for pulsars, hydrogen atoms, periods and spatial relationships.

Estimating how the pulsars have slowed and moved helps to identify them and thus the suns to which the records maybe point.

Sounds vague. And how does it help Axor's quest for the Universal Incarnation?

More Everyday Moments And Historical Continuity

Everyday Moments

(i) Conversation in  a wood-panelled waterfront tavern in Boseville on the River Flone on the planet Aeneas in The Day Of Their Return.

(ii) Diana sitting on the tower of St. Barbara watching the market in Olga's Landing on the planet Imhotep in The Game of Empire.

(iii) The Wodenite Axor having to sprawl on the floor at the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle which is also frequented by miners, joygirls and a Tigery in The Game of Empire.

Historical Continuity

Later instalments of a future history series incorporate understated background references to earlier instalments. In "Day of Burning," the Polesotechnic League, represented by David Falkayn, arranges to protect the planet Merseia from the radiation effects of the supernova, Valenderay. In The People of the Wind, the superdreadnaught that is the flagship of the Terran armada is called Valenderay. This and similar connections enhance our appreciation of the series provided that we notice them.

The Pyramid

The Game Of Empire.

Looking from St. Barbara's in Old Town toward the centre of Olga's Landing on Imhotep, Diana Crowfeather sees that:

"...the Pyramid, which housed Imperial offices and machinery, gleamed above the campus of the Institute..." (CHAPTER ONE, p. 195)

Dominic Flandry comes to Imhotep:

"In Olga's Landing he took lodgings at the Pyramid..." (CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE, p. 449)

"...he commandeered an official dining room and gave personal attention to the menu and wine list." (ibid.)

"From this high level, a full-wall transparency looked far over splendor." (ibid.)

Flandry sees:

the city;

scarlet, russet and amber woods;

boulders, crags and native growth;

frozen rivulets and ponds;

the summit of Mt. Horn;

snow glowing on further mountains;

gleaming glaciers.

The dining room is an enclave of Terran air, warmth, gravity, recorded violin music and fragrance.

It is a measure of how far Diana has come that she is now one of Flandry's dinner guests in the Pyramid which, previously, she had glimpsed from afar.

Two Bar Conversations

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTERs ONE-TWO.

Imhotep and Daedalus are the two colonized planets of the star, Patricius. The Imperial sector defence command has been established in Aurea, the capital city of Daedalus. Sector Admiral Sir Olaf Magnusson lives a hundred kilometres north of Aurea. 

Bars are good places for characters to converse and divulge.

On Imhotep

In the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle at Olga's Landing:

six human miners, drinking, talking and playing dice;

with them, two joygirls (one shrieks at Axor's crocodilian smile);

one Tigery, sipping through the chowlock of her helmet;

Diana Crowfeather;

Axor lying on the floor;

the proprietor, Hassan, serving Axor beer from a bucket.

Two nonhumans. Diana and Axor exchange stories. He tells her of his quest and she agrees to help.

On Daedalus

In Ju Shao's inn on a lane along a cliff outside Aurea:

Ju Shao, a Cynthian;

Targovi, a Tigery;

four human Navy personnel, praising Magnusson but bitching about the Empire.

Again, two nonhumans. Ju Shao offers Targovi cowbeef and Winged Smoke. The human beings include Janice Combarelles of Intelligence who does not know that Targovi the trader is an undercover colleague. He gathers intelligence from the conversation. Ju Shao likes Targovi because he stays quiet till he needs to kill, then does it without fuss.

Falkayn's team had a Cynthian. Diana's will have a Tigery. It as if Ju Shao, on behalf of Chee Lan (now long dead, of course) passes the baton to Targovi.

Places Visited In The Patrician System

According to information imparted in a recent combox, Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire is an expansion of a shorter narrative conceived as the premise of a computer game that did not come to be. The setting of the game would have been a planetary system incorporating multiple locations. In any given game, a player would have entered some but probably not all of these locations just as anyone touring through Europe enters some but probably not all of its capital cities and certainly not all of its places of interest. And what happens in the novel is precisely that the characters mention more places than they visit.

Places Visited

On Imhotep

Olga's Landing old quarter, including the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle

a single continental forest like the Land of Trees Beyond

Toborkozan

sea between the northern continent and the Larboard and Starboard Islands

Naval HQ in the Pyramid in Olga's Landing new quarter

 

On Daedalus

the capital city, Aurea

Ju Shao's inn perched on a cliff with an infinite view

a prosperous businessman's house in Aurea

Targovi's van parked in the outback

Olaf Magnusson's home in a terraformed tract facing primeval Daedalus

the veterans' colony at Paz de la Frontera

the Highroad River

the Cynthian community of Lulach (also here and here)

Zacharia, an island in the Phosphoric Ocean

Targovi's Van

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THREE.

Flying cars are so common in some futuristic sf that I am sometimes surprised when a car doesn't fly but I did not expect Targovi's van to. It is a scratched, dented metal box with a control cab, passenger benches, gravs, retractable wheels and pontoons and hidden capabilities. The gravs, wheels and pontoons mean first that this is a land, sea and air vehicle and secondly that it does not need wings unlike the van-like flying car design in the attached image.

On Imhotep, Targovi flies in his van from the Olga's Landing spaceport to Toborkozan to visit his mother, Dragoika, then intercepts the ship Firefish as it transports Diana and Axor to the Starboard and Larboard Islands in search of Forerunner ruins. Extending pontoons, Targovi lays alongside, accepts a towline tossed to him and flies across on a gravity impeller. If only travel were that easy.

I am just about to drive my car to the garage for its twelve month service. Should be back here later.

Appointed Or Chance Met

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER ONE.

We can be told how series characters met in their opening installment, in a flashback or in a prequel. There are perhaps two main ways that a group of people can come together.

The team of David Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan exists because Nicholas van Rijn appointed a Master Merchant, a planetologist and a xenobiologist of different species as his first trade pioneer crew whereas the team of Diana Crowfeather, Axor and Targovi exists because Diana, having "...passed her life among Tigeries and Seafolk...," (p. 214) already knew Targovi and happened to spot Axor in the old quarter of Olga's Landing. Axor might believe that their meeting was ordained... When he says that Diana is a godsend, she replies that she is no saint but God does not send only saints - assuming that He sends anyone or anything, of course.

We read about van Rijn, Falkayn, Adzel and references to Cynthia before that team is formed. Diana is Flandry's daughter, Targovi is Dragoika's son and Axor is a Wodenite like Adzel. So both of these teams are well grounded in earlier Technic History.

Diana thinks that Axor looks tired and reflects that he has trudged a long way in Imhotepan gravity which is only 30% greater than Terrestrial whereas Wodenite gravity is two and a half Terrestrial.

Anderson Celebrates Life II

See Anderson Celebrates Life.

Never more so than in the opening chapter of The Game Of Empire where the old quarter of Olga's Landing on Imhotep in the Patrician System:

"...had grown, but more in population than size or modernity - a brawling, polyglot, multiracial population, much of it transient, drifting in and out of the tides of space."

-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 195.

"Life spilled from narrow streets and surged between the walls enclosing the plaza." (p. 197)

 

Booths sell multifarious wares including "...miniature computers of the inner Empire...," recorded vaz-Siravo dances from beneath the Seas of Yang and Yin, illegal blasters found in wrecked Merseian spacecraft and hot, savory food. (ibid.)

 

From the top of St. Barbara's tower in the middle of the market square, Diana sees the new quarter with the Pyramid, housing Imperial offices, the Institute campus, industries, stores, hotels and apartments. (p. 195) She keeps her sleeping bag and few possessions in "...a ruinous temple..." (p. 196)

The crowd, mainly human beings physically adapted to different planetary environments, also includes members of several other intelligent species. This is human life in an exotic setting.

Where's Olga?

A Stone In Heaven, II.

From his battlemented tower on an extinct volcano in the middle of the Hermetian continent, Greatland, Edwin Cairncross, Grand Duke of Hermes, sees:

Antares;

 

Mogul, sun of Babur, the Hermetian Protectorate;

 

Olga, the constellation that contains, invisibly of course, the extinct sun of Mirkheim;

 

the Milky Way;

 

not Sol, which is too far away.

How many Olgas are there in the Technic History?

The Grand Survey spaceship, Olga, discovers Ythri and Avalon;

the explorers of Avalon include Olga Berg;

Olga's Landing is a city on Imhotep;

Olga is a constellation on Hermes.

The Spirit Of Van Rijn

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Search this blog for:

Daedalus
Imhotep
the Patrician System
Olga's Landing
Diana Crowfeather
Axor
Targovi
the Highroad River
Lulach
Zacaharia
Magnusson
etc

- and you will find more information about Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire than I can remember or intend to repeat! But, so far, it remains possible to find more to post about by rereading the text. Some time is spent in what I call "blog maintenance," making slight corrections and adjustments to spelling, grammar, punctuation, paragraph spacing, links etc. I think that this improves the blog although no one else is going to notice it.

The Cynthian, Wo Lia, a wandering gambler and occasional racketeer from Catawrayannis, was stranded on Daedalus by the interdiction on civilian space travel. Aiming to set up in business in the Cynthian town of Lulach, she has agreed to travel there, simultaneously employing the disguised fugitive, Targovi, as a performing animal that dances and does tricks while she plays a flute and collects coins. On arrival in Lulach, she puts Targovi's cage in the stable of the inn but later returns to release him. Now she must put on an act. How much commercial activity is dramatic performances? See Smug And Something Else and its links. John Buchan has an American character, John S. Blenkiron, who carries on in this manner but his purposes are political, not mercantile. Wo Lia's performance perpetuates the spirit of Nicholas van Rijn:

"Wo Lia waited a while before scurrying back and screaming for the landlady. Her priceless trained animal, the mainstay of her livelihood, was gone! She had cast about unavailingly, finding no trace. Had it escaped because the stablehands were careless? Had it been stolen? She demanded help in searching, the entire staff, the patrol, a posse of citizens. If the magnificent, irreplaceable creature was not found, she would have compensation. She would demand justice, she would file suit, she would not cease until she had her rightful due!" (pp. 328-329)

Meanwhile, Targovi, with mane and black dye removed and now wearing clothes, looks nothing like the escaped animal.

(I am unable to link to the Wikipedia article for "John S. Blenkiron," hopefully just for atmospheric reasons. Later: It is done.)

Not Reading But Hearing

Can we call someone who lives in a particular timeline a "timeliner"? Technic History timeliners hear the stories that we read.

Coya Conyon:

"'...when I was a youngster...I'd hear about the latest adventure of the fabulous Muddlin' Through team...'"
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT I, p. 33.

Diana Crowfeather:

"'...even we, on our remote and lately embattled frontier, have heard the fame of Wodenites, from the days of Adzel the Wayfarer to this very hour.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 201.

Fr. Francis Xavier Axor:

"'I have, yes, I have encountered tales of Admiral Flandry's exploits...'"
-ibid., p. 213.

In The Game Of Empire:

"Westward Diana could see no horizon..." (p. 195)
"'I'm Diana Crowfeather.'" (p. 203)
"'Oh, my father's Dominic Flandry.'" (p. 212)

That third statement makes a difference, seventeen pages into the text.

The future historical background references that I did not list in Olga's Landing Old Quarter are:

Foredwellers/Ancients/Elders/Others/Old Shen/Builders
Chereionites
Aeneas
Dominic Flandry
Starkad
the Breakup
the Commonwealth

Poul Anderson explains why certain characters were introduced in the Technic History:

"...the exploratory team [van Rijn] organized - David Falkayn, Chee Lan, Adzel and Muddlehead, their ship's insufferable computer. They showed up because it wasn't logical that the old man should have all the adventures."
-Poul Anderson, AFTERWORD IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 681-682 AT p. 681.

"At last the time came for a new generation to take over the saga..."
-INTRODUCTION IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 191-192 AT p. 191.

That new generation are Flandry's daughter and Dragoika's son and it is unfortunate that Anderson was able to write only one novel about them.

Olga's Landing Old Quarter

A tame clopperhoof draws a wagon. Anyone making an authentic screen adaptation of Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire would have to decide what a clopperhoof looks like. Human beings whose families have lived on Imhotep for generations are dark-skinned and aquiline-featured and should not look like dark-skinned Terrestrials. (There is a squat, black, planetary population in Larry Niven's Known Space - on Jinx?)

Like any good installment of a future history series, The Game Of Empire mixes old and new information. By this time, the series is so well-established and rich that there is much familiar information. There are references to:

Imperial offices
the Troubles
the Terran Empire
the inner Empire
the vaz-Siravo
a Merseian onslaught
Mother Terra
a regenerated arm
a centauroid Donarrian
Irumclagians
Shalmuans
Anglic
Toborko
Woden
Greater Terra
Adzel the Wayfarer
Tigeries
probably more but I must go out