From Feudalism To Roidhunate

"Day of Burning."

As I understand it, Europe progressed from feudalism to mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism whereas Merseia combined ancient feudalism with emerging industrialism. In Falkayn's time, there are still castles surrounded by villages and those workers who have been urbanized have preserved the baronial tradition by accepting and participating in the protection rackets of organized crime. That much had happened without any extra-planetary intervention. 

Because the single visit by a Grand Survey expedition made the Merseians aware of their galactic inferiority, racial advancement superseded both curiosity and profit as a motive for scientific enquiry. The Vachs formed a loose confederation while many Merseians joined new pro- or anti-galactic sects/cults. By Falkayn's time, the Vachs, still not fully united, avoid nuclear war on their planet but sometimes clash in space while the Gethfennu crime syndicate runs a vice city on the next planet out in the Korych System.

The Polesotechnic League protects Merseia from supernova radiation on its own terms - i.e., makes a profit - and refuses to share the hyperdrive. Hence, the resentment that motivates the Roidhunate which is what the confederation of Vachs becomes.

In The People Of The Wind, the Roidhunate is a distant but growing threat.

Throughout the Flandry period, the Roidunate is a major and powerful threat.

Post-Empire, it is gone.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Kinds Of Contradictions

"Un-Man."

Real societies contain conflicts, unevennesses and anachronisms. One word for social contrasts and conflicts is "contradictions." These cannot be logical contractions because contradictions in that sense cannot exist. In symbolic logic: not (p and not-p).  However, we can talk about a contradiction between the interests of an employer who must cut costs because of economic competition and an employee who must secure a wage increase to pay his mortgage. Such conflicts or contradictions are inherent in a particular kind of economy.

When Poul Anderson shows us contradictory aspects of post-World War III society, are these logical inconsistencies, i.e., impossibilities, or plausible social conflicts? On the one hand, there seems to be an attempt to house the entire population in high-tech "colonies," not only the large apartment buildings but also floating oceanic colonies. On the other hand, the need for highly trained personnel leads to a selective, stratified educational system generating social friction. Egalitarianism versus elitism.

But not everyone (yet) lives in a "colony":

"Murderers lurked in the slums around Manhattan Crater while a technician could buy a house and furniture for six month's pay." (VI, p. 48)

(There is crime around a Crater in Anderson's Shield.)

The recent past of nuclear conflict is acknowledged, "...Crater...," and there are still slums. Globally, Hindu peasants living in mud huts still cultivate small fields while natives of the Congo drum at rain-clouds.

My provisional assessment: Either the large agricultural and other combines cooperate to satisfy needs or they still compete to accumulate profits. If the latter, then there will continue be a contradiction between wealth and poverty. There will also continue to be environmental destruction because environmental preservation, although a need, is not a priority for profit-seeking organizations.

The Devil's Game: Interval Three

The Devil's Game, pp. 80-96.

"The servants flitted about, setting forth bowls of iced gazpacho followed by a chicken escabeche." (p. 82) (See The Food Thread.)

Read Poul Anderson and learn.

"'La Loi, c'est moi.'" (p. 83)

- said by Louis XIV and Judge Dredd.

"'Scheherazade...'" (p. 83)

"The man at the head of the table smiled, a dusty expression." (p. 83)

What is a dusty expression?

Korea also provided opportunities for post-war crime. (pp. 84-85)

Haverner's study contains:

"...filing cabinets..., reference shelves, functional modern chairs, a bloc of the latest equipment for sending orders and retrieving information around the globe." (p. 86)

Published in 1980, The Devil's Game does not have PCs or the Internet. Some of Anderson's fictional futures have "infotrieves."

When Haverner tells it like it is to Nordberg:

"Somewhere a macaw, starled out of sleep, screeched." (p. 87)

Anderson's character interactions and dialogues are often punctuated by natural sounds, the wind, a storm or, in this case, a screech.

"The click of latch as his door was opened, of fluffy blue mules on his floor, brought Larry awake." (p. 89)

I am not sure what the fluffy blue mules are doing on Larry's floor in this sentence.

We have exhausted not this "Interval" but perhaps my ability to extract information from it this evening.

Review of Perish by the Sword by Poul Anderson

This review of Perish by the Sword by AM Romer will be at the top of the blog for the next week. Newer posts will appear below it.

The outstanding thing about Perish by the Sword is that Poul Anderson has captured a particular time and place perfectly. It’s like a tourist’s guide to Northern California, 1959. You can see it, hear it, and feel it in the air. Here are the Berkley scientists in their labs and offices, the post-war tech, and Russia forever in the background. Here are the San Francisco Bay houses, complete with sunken lounges and after-work martinis, and the women with their cropped hair, their own jobs and their own sports cars. And here’s the bar, Howl, full of beat poets (of course) and groovy cats, and young men who’ll do anything for ‘the experience’. The sense of place and time he’s given us is awesome; it’s a gift, and that’s the joy of this book. But unfortunately, what is joyless outweighs it.

In an interview (find it here), Anderson explains how he begins to conceive of a book: he wants to say something about a particular topic – a philosophical concept or thought experiment, or an observation on the political and social movements around him, for example – and then develops a story around that. It sounds great for sci-fi. Arguably, the motivation at the core of all sci-fi is the question What if…? But this is where Perish by the Sword falls down.

It reads as though the author has made a decision to write a novel in the ‘detective’ genre, maybe as a kind of exercise, to see if he can do it. He has developed his plot points, the crime and the solution, and the elements of contemporary culture he wishes to include, and then – and only then – has he populated this plot with characters. It’s as though he has precisely mapped out all the moves in a game of chess for both players, and then carefully places the pieces on the board in their required positions, rather than letting the game unfold. The plot is enacted by the characters – it does not grow naturally from them. There is the strong sense that they exist mainly to fulfil plot points and genre requirements, whereas great characters seem to have a life of their own and are caught up in events which they or other characters have created. The result is that I can’t care about them. I don’t care if they live or die; they are items moved upon a game board because the author needs them to move. This results in a distinct lack of tension – because I don’t care enough to be invested, to worry about the wrongly accused or who might next be put to the sword.

Even their names felt carefully constructed, along with their background, psychological profile, linguistic habits, eccentricities of behaviour and interests. Yes, the name Trygve Yamamura indicates his ‘San Francisco melting pot’ heritage, but it will never get this detective into the canon. And Colquhoun (huge, fiery-tempered bloke with a suitably Scottish moniker) was slowing the pace – not because of his character, but because of having to read and then remember how to pronounce his name.

For someone who is a seasoned reader in the crime genre, the perpetrator stood out from the beginning. In fact, it seemed so obvious that I thought there must be a twist, and it was the thought of this that kept me reading… but there was no twist. By the end, when Yamamura gives a straightforward walkthrough of the murder and how it was done, I’d already been waiting some time for the characters to catch up to what I already knew. If this doesn’t happen quickly, it doesn’t matter how brilliant the writer is in terms of language or imagery – frustration sets in. Some elements of the denouement were a surprise, hinging as they did on the tiniest, seemingly throw-away lines and observations. But rather than coming across as ‘clever’, so that the reader has that rush of revelation, Oh, of course! Why didn’t I see it? that characterises the best Poirot stories, it felt almost mathematical: the clues so carefully scattered, gathered together at the end by the detective into a neat equation, but one I had no real interest in working out.

People love to solve problems. The detective story is a sophisticated series of problems and puzzles, and good ones test their readers’ knowledge of human psychology, as well as their familiarity with the conventions of the genre itself. Perish by the Sword was not so much a test for the reader as an illustration of Anderson’s ability to create a plot. The characters were figures made to fulfil the plot’s requirements: the detective, the victim, the suspect, the love interest, the murderer. And the overall reason for the book’s existence felt like it was an exercise for a very intelligent author in ‘writing a murder mystery’. Detective Yamamura occasionally showed glimpses of being his own person, rather than the author’s puppet, but in the end he too felt like a chess piece in an intellectual game. So despite my fantastic tour of Berkley and San Francisco in the late 1950s, I was left cold and, ultimately, bored by the novel – and by the characters who played out their pre-assigned roles and behaviours exactly as planned. 

AM Romer
August 2019

Coincidence Department II

See The Second Feat, Continued.

Poul Anderson's and Gordon R. Dickson's Hoka character, Hector, referred to Sassenach guile. This led to a combox discussion of "Perfidious Albion." Dornford Yates refers to "Perfide Albion" in As Berry And I Were Saying. However, Yates attributes this view of Britain to the French. In his opinion:

the French expected the British to follow their lead in surrendering to the Germans and were put out when they did not;

then they expected the British to be conquered and were put out when they were not;

winning the war put an end to Frenchmen profiting on the black market;

very few French resisted the German occupation;

the occupation would have been impossible if more had resisted it.

I do not subscribe to Yates' sweeping nationalistic generalizations. He loathed Germans.

For black marketeering immediately after WWII in a Poul Anderson novel, see Post-War Crime.

World War II

I am rereading George Smiley's reminiscences about World War II. James Bond has an ambiguous relationship to the War. Either he was in Intelligence before the War or he joined Naval Intelligence, and then only by lying about his age, during the War, depending on which book you read.

How does the War impact on Poul Anderson's fiction? See:

War In Art And Life
War In Art And Life II
Continuing Consequences Of World War II In Life And Fiction
"Operation Afreet" 
The War II
After The War
Post-War Crime II
Defender Of Two Worlds
Etienne Fourre II

As ever, there was more already here than I had realized before I started to search for it.

Post-War Crime III

I was fascinated by Poul Anderson's account in Murder In Black Letter of the revival of crime after World War II. See here and earlier. Anderson focused on the US Army in Italy. Comparisons with Ian Fleming made me realize how many of the latter author's villains are "post-War":

Le Chiffre was a displaced person, claiming amnesia;
Hugo Drax, also claiming amnesia, is a Nazi continuing the War;
former Luftwaffe officers help Goldfinger;
von Hammerstien was Gestapo, then ran Batista's Counter-Intelligence;
there are ex-Gestapo men in SPECTRE which uses Communist cell organization;
Tanaka, now an ally and friend, had volunteered for kami-kaze.

WWII has a long shadow.

Additionally, James Bond once goes after Italian drug runners. Read Yamamura, Flandry and Bond.

An End And A Beginning

(The image shows Marsyas, apparently.)

Reading the end of Poul Anderson's Murder In Black Letter and the beginning of SM Stirling's The Scourge Of God, suddenly there is a lot to post about, more than will fit into a single post.

"...his face the mask of flayed Marsyas..."
-Murder..., Chapter 19.

An abstruse mythological reference. See here.

In Murder...

Interrupted twice. Let's publish this unfinished post now - and more later.

(Rereading a James Bond short story after reflecting on Post-War Crime recently.)

Post-War Crime II

For the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, World War II has a kind of temporal gravity. We are continually pulled back to it.

Recruits to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol identify themselves by name followed by place and year of recruitment, thus:

Manson Eeverard, New York, 1954;
Charles Whitcomb, London, 1947.

Despite that seven year difference, Everard and Whitcomb are members of the same Academy class which is recruited from the period 1850-2000 and which also includes a young physicist from 1972. Described as a girl, she must have been born post-War. Everard's and Whitcomb's dates of recruitment inform us that they had been in the War. In fact, Whitcomb had just been demobbed from the RAF. What better recruit to the Patrol? Except that his proximity to the War motivates him to commit a time crime: to try to prevent his fiancee's death in an air raid in 1944, just ten years before Everard's recruitment. The War is always close and even closer for Time Patrolmen.

When Everard becomes involved to help his friend, he loses any innocence that he might have retained after his first trip, in normal time, through World War II. At the very end of the opening story, "Time Patrol," Everard returns to his home base from London, 1944:

"Everard climbed weakly aboard the hopper. And when he got off again, a decade had passed." (Time Patrol, p. 53)

Of course a decade passes between 1944 and 1954 but the morals of the story are that:

Everard has now experienced time travel for real;
he feels as if he has aged ten years in a very short subjective span.

Post-War Crime

"He came to Italy as a Quartermaster officer in the war. Perfect chance for black marketing, if a man didn't mind taking a few risks. The miracle is not that a few QM people went bad but that most stayed honest...by the end of the war he was in touch with some pretty big figures in the Italian underworld, and saw the opportunities. He came right back after his discharge and went to work at it full-time... He got in on the postwar reconstruction of crime, along lines borrowed from gangland and Communism."
-Poul Anderson, Murder In Black Letter, Chapter 16.

It makes sense:

in the chaos of war and post-war reconstruction, there would be opportunities for black-marketeering and other criminality;

when legitimate society reconstructed itself, so did the Mafia;

there were opportunities for people in the US Army;

Communists had had to adopt a secretive "cell" organizational form that was adaptable to criminal activities.

Thus, in novels of the fifties and sixties, the War was more than a recent event. It and its aftermath provided motives for the characters. Some of James Bond's villains are WWII left-overs. In the recent UNCLE film, Napoleon Solo:

was in the US Army in Europe;
smuggled art works;
had to choose between prison and joining the new CIA;
worked with Waverley of British Naval Intelligence and Kuryakin of the KGB against a new common threat;
thus became part of a new team, UNCLE.

Pretty smart stuff.

When Do Time Criminals Come From?

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, the discovery of time travel in 19352 AD makes possible a new kind of crime - we might call it "time crime," although that phrase is not used -, any deliberate attempt to "change the past." Who declares that such activity is a crime and on what authority? ("How and with reference to what do the Venerable Ones so declare?" - as the Buddha asked about philosophers that he disagreed with.)

Well, the government of any society that has time travel has the right to make laws about how it should be used. However, this law is enforced not by any government agency but by the Time Patrol which is independent of governments, can act against them in the interests of history and is not answerable to any human being. On the other hand, the Patrol, which operates in secret before the discovery of time travel, can function and recruit openly after that date. It will then liaise with governments for as long as such institutions continue to exist.

We might think that time criminals, like any time travelers, must originate after 19352 and indeed the Neldorian time bandits are from the 204,000's. However, all that any time criminal needs is access to a temporal vehicle and, by their very nature, such devices are to be found before their invention. We know of four cases of such vehicles being stolen or misused at earlier dates:

Rozher Schtein from 2987 steals an Ing time shuttle, then tries to change events in post-Roman Britain;
Charles Whitcomb from 1947 retrieves the shuttle but uses it to try to change events in World War II Britain;
a Conquistador from 1533 steals a timecycle in1610 and tries to change the history of the Conquest;
the Exaltationists, said to be from a period before the development of time machines, steal several timecycles and become dangerous time criminals.

However, since the Exaltationists are said to be from the 30,000's, we have a contradiction. I suggest that time travel was discovered in 19352 but that its existence was not made public until some time during or after the 31st millennium.

More On Merseians

A few points missed in the post on "Merseians."

Afal Uroch, whom we mentioned, is not only of the Vach Rueth but also of partial Lafdiguan, republican, ancestry as shown by the yellow tint to his green skin. Although Terrans think of Merseians as "gatortails" or "greenskins," their skin color varies. Although yellow is here mentioned as a sign of Lafdiguan ancestry, when Chee Lan met Olgor hu Freylin, Warmaster of the Republic of Lafdigu, the latter's skin was described as darker than that of Merseians from around the Wilwidh Ocean. She also met Haguan Eluatz, chief of the Gethfennu, Merseian organized crime, whose skin shone black.

We mentioned that a Merseian cruiser was called Tryntaf. When Chee and her companions were in the Korychan System, Tryntaf Fangryf-Tamer, Vach Isthyr, was captain of the space cruiser Yonuar of the United Fleet of the Great Vachs - opponent of Lafdigu, Wolder and the Nersan Alliance. In Flandry's time, the Vachs under the Roidhun, who is of Vach Urdiolch, rule Merseia.

We have now had three mentions of fangryfs:

Tryntaf was nicknamed Fangryf-Tamer;

a fangryf hunted above Tachwyr's castle when, standing on a tower top, he addressed the Grand Council on a multiple screen communication set;

the Merseian Space Navy has Fangryf-type six-male gunboats.

The text informs us that the Fangryfs are "...about midway between the Terran Comet and Conqueror classes..." (Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy, New York, 2012, p. 309) So now we know! During the Terran War on Avalon, Philippe Rochefort commanded an even smaller vessel, with a three-being crew, called a Meteor.

When there were believed to be many gods, they had to be differentiated by name. When it came to be believed that there was only one, a differentiating name ceased to be necessary. In some languages, the word "deus," "god" etc came to be used as a name, thus "Deus," "God" etc. The Merseians did not do this. Their monotheists continued to refer to "the God," thus implying that there is no personal relationship between the individual worshiper and the deity. Transcendent, not immanent, he deals with the Race, not with its members.

"...a God beyond infinity..." (A Circus Of Hells, London, 1978, p. 112)