The End Is A Beginning

The Lords Of Creation.

OK. A local war is resolved but the whole rest of the Dyson sphere remains to be explored so what happens next? Volume IV? Trilogy 2, Volume I? As an early Star Trek film poster proclaimed, "The Adventure Continues..." - or at least should continue. This cannot be the end. The end of the trilogy is only a beginning. Will the same characters return to the Sphere or will we be introduced to what would become a fourth set of characters in the series? The original "Lords" can remain off-stage indefinitely, I think. How far is the Sphere from the Solar System? Instantaneous interstellar transition is a neat trick, not to say implausible. Such things can be made to seem easy in sf - but they would benefit from some kind of explanation.

Even in retro-sf, we are always looking forward to what is going to happen next.

In The Sphere

The Lords Of Creation.

A Dyson sphere with a humanly breathable atmosphere, especially one that has been at least partly colonized from Earth, is a perfect setting for discovering new civilizations by airship instead of by spaceship. Kind of a Trek without the Stars. Given historically recent transplantations of people from Earth, the language barrier can plausibly be as big or as little as the author decides. This particular sphere is in 1 AU orbital distance not from a star but from some kind of light- and heat-emitting artifact.

A series with such a setting could be extended indefinitely perhaps with the newly discovered civilizations becoming progressively more alien and incomprehensible. However, as it stands, this novel completes a trilogy with the previous volumes set on Venus and Mars, respectively.

Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, an earlier fictional Dyson sphere, was created by transforming stellar energy at 1 AU distance from the primary into matter. How did the Lords of Creation do it? The only rule here is: expect the unexpected. 

The Fransay and Britannians are in conflict although they cannot know anything of resentments arising from World War II back on the Round World!

The ending will be unexpected but will then seem to have been inevitable.

The sphere is an obvious setting for an anthology of original stories and Poul Anderson would have been able to create a story fitting perfectly into the Lords Of Creation background.

Some Comparisons

At a Memorial Evening for James Blish, the publisher, Charles Monteith, described Blish's Cities In Flight as "a greater and higher Star Trek." We can make a similar comparison with Poul Anderson's Technic History.

In Star Trek, there are many intelligent species and perhaps two main ones:

Klingons

Vulcans/Romulans

In the Technic History, there are many intelligent species and perhaps four main ones:

Merseians

Ythrians

Wodenites

Cynthians

Wodenites and Cynthians are mainly represented through individuals:

Adzel, then Axor;

Chee Lan - and some others.

But perhaps the closest parallel to Spock is the Chereionite, Aycharaych: pointed ears and a more powerful telepath but on the other side.

Trekkies should read Anderson and Blish.

Dissent And Denial

Imagine, for the sake of argument, an alternative future history in which the Merseians, having got ahead of us in terms of faster-than-light interstellar travel, have, in the mid-twenty-first century, occupied the Northern Hemisphere of Earth and are committing genocide in the South. Would the entire human race unite against the invaders? Yes? No? Might some Northern Terrestrials claim that incorporation into a technologically advanced interstellar civilization was the salvation of humanity and deny that the genocide was happening? We do not know any other intelligent species but we do know our own species!

Sf writers can use fictional aliens to comment on humanity and on contemporary issues. One Star Trek episode referred to the Vietnam War. IIRC, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was not shown in Britain because it mentioned the date of the British withdrawal from Norther Ireland. Futuristic sf is relevant.

Controversial almost to the point of civil war? Certainly. Appropriate subject-matter for sf? Definitely. Like Wells' prediction, then denunciation, of the use of aircraft to bomb cities.

There are at least two kinds of aliens in sf:

those that are used as commentaries (see above);

those that are dramatized scientific speculations about extraterrestrial biology.

Needless to say, Poul Anderson gives us both, e.g., 

the Merseian Roidhunate as an approximate analog of the Soviet Union;

Ythrian biology, psychology, sociology and theology.

In the case of the Merseians, it is the Roidhunate, not the entire species, that is hostile, as Anderson brilliantly shows in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

Can I praise the Technic History highly enough? No.

Buffer Zone

Any future history series has an indefinite number of potential spin-off series. Star Trek has become a future history because it covers more than one generation. Years ago, in Waterstones Bookshop, I came across a paperback novel, title and author's name long forgotten, which was the opening volume of a series about a Klingon Bird of Prey Commander. Does anyone know whether this Bird of Prey still flies?

One sentence in Poul Anderson's Technic History suggests a comparable spin-off:

"Desai had worked in regions that faced Betelgeuse and, across an unclaimed and ill-explored buffer zone, the Roidhunate of Merseia."

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 3, p. 82.

OK. A Terran Navy special forces team works in the buffer zone where it explores, establishes advance bases, covertly contacts any natives that have not yet been contacted by Merseia and spies on any that have been. The Merseians maintain a similar force, not necessarily all of their own species, although we know that they have no Chereionites to spare.

What would it be like for intelligent species to live in such a zone? Such a series could have legs.

In The Gaps

The Fleet Of Stars, 1.

OK. We are checking what happens in the conversational pauses and we know that this always bears fruit in works by Poul Anderson.

"They were silent for a bit. The sunset flared brighter. A flight of cormorants winged across it." (p. 4)

That was good. Not what we expected but good.

"She caught her breath. The sunset light filled suddenly widened eyes." (p. 6)

So far, the sunset is a major theme.

Shortly after this, Guthrie speaks with distaste about the tame lives of human beings in the inner Solar System:

"'They -' Again he stopped to find words. The wind, already cooling, rustled the leaves above them." (ibid.)

"Cooling" is appropriate!

Further on:

"She stared into the sunset. It was swiftly losing color, the sky above the clouds going from blue to violet." (p. 9)

The sunset is back.

The next time Guthrie pauses:

"The last hues drained from the clouds, and dusk thickened with subtropical haste. She drew her cloak about her against the wind. He ignored it." (p. 10)

Sunset and wind come together.

Another pause:

"Guthrie was mute for another while. Stars were appearing now in the west as well as the east. Among them he recognized Sol..." (p. 12)

After some further reflections but without any further speech:

"He rose. Light from above, in this clear air, and light cast off the sea were ample to find one's way by. 'Let's go home,' he proposed." (ibid.)

A lesser writer would have told us what they said and nothing else.

One of Guthrie's remarks resonates:

"'I can hope that in the end, maybe a hundred years from tonight, my download will come back here and get reborn.'" (ibid.)

"'Every end,' Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, 'is a new beginning. Perhaps in a thousand years my Earthmen will come home again. Or in two thousand, or four, if they still remember home then. They'll come back, yes; but I hope they won't stay. I pray they will not stay."

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CODA, p. 129.

To quote a Star Trek film poster, although to nobler effect, "The adventure continues."

STAR TREK And AFTER DOOMSDAY

Although Star Trek: The Original Series was prematurely cancelled after only three seasons, the Star Trek media franchise has become vaster than any prose sf future history series and has familiarized TV and cinema audiences with dramatic scenes set on the bridges of faster than light interstellar spaceships. We reflect on this Star Trek-prose sf parallelism once again as we reread Poul Anderson's accounts of the starships, Benjamin Franklin and Europa, in his After Doomsday: infinitesimally briefer but also infinitely better than Star Trek.

See also:

On The Bridge

Star Ways

Star Trek ought to serve as a introduction to prose sf rather than as a phenomenon per se. However, people out there are going to continue to have tastes that differ from yours or mine. May we all flourish.

Interstellar Federations, Empires And Conflicts: Blish And Anderson

Star Trek has Klingons and Known Space has kzinti but let's just focus on James Blish and Poul Anderson.

Blish

In Cities In Flight, the Milky Way has four great civilizations:

unknown

The Vegan Tyranny

The Earthman culture

The Web of Hercules

In "This Earth of Hours," the Terrestrial Matriarchy contacts and enters into conflict with the telepathic Central Empire.

A confederation at galactic centre is unnamed in The Star Dwellers, is called the Heart Stars in "A Dusk of Idols" and calls itself the Hegemony of Malis in Mission To The Heart Stars!

In "A Style in Treason," the Green Exarchy rules half of humanity's worlds and draws tithes from five fallen empires older than man.

Blish stated in private correspondence that interstellar distances were vast enough to allow such conflicts to remain unresolved.

Anderson

The earliest written part of the Technic History was a Captain Flandry story. Thus, the second major period of this future history is dominated by conflict between two rival imperialisms, Terra and Merseia, with Ythri as a third power. Terra has early border clashes with Ythri but permanent conflict with Merseia. 

Anderson's earlier Psychotechnic History begins with attempts to apply psychotechnic science to both society and psychobiology so it is appropriate that the interstellar rival of the later Stellar Union is a humanoid species whose science is biologically, not mechanically, based.

Landing On A Planet

The Peregrine, CHAPTER XV. 

James Blish's Okies control gravity and therefore can land their flying cities on planetary surfaces. New York winds up on New Earth in the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

Often, in sf, large interstellar vessels remain in orbit around a planet while crew or passengers descend by other means. Star Trek has "transporters"/teleportation transmitters, thus avoiding the extra trouble of scenes with ship's boats although the Enterprise does have boats for specialized missions in interplanetary space. A few characters can be shown in action away from the others.

In Ensign Flandry, Flandry hijacks a ship's boat which even has hyperspace capacity.

In the Peregine, a boathouse contains a boat and some "fliers" (?) The latter are soon explained. For the landing, two fliers each bear two men while a boat carries twenty. Although the planet is terrestroid, indeed apparently paradisal, elementary precautions are taken. Ten spacesuited men leave by an airlock which is sterilized while the outer lock is open. One of the crew members who remain on board analyzes the atmosphere, bacteria and spores. The ten return with soil, plants, water and insects to be sterilized in the airlock, then analyzed on board. Nothing is harmful. Then, four parties of four explore in different directions while others remain by the boat and fliers. Each party has maps taken from the air, local details to be added, and will collect samples. Bodies are protected by coveralls, boots and skin-tight gloves. Each explorer carries wrist radio, gun, canteen and medical kit except the non-human Ilaloa who is confident that there is no danger and refuses to wear any extra clothes. She speaks as if she knows the planet:

"'This is the home of peace.'" (p. 131)

Nicki comments on Ilaloa's:

"'...nerve - or foolishness...'" (p. 133)

- but should really be suspicious of her confidence.

A climax approaches.

Six Future Historians

In recent posts, we have referred to the four Campbell future historians:

Heinlein

Asimov

Blish

Anderson

- and two successors:

Niven

Pournelle

- a tight-knit literary group.

Anderson modelled his Psychotechnic History on Heinlein's Future History and contributed:

one story to the Robots sub-series of Asimov's Foundation and Empire future history;

three stories to the Man-Kzin Wars sub-series of Niven's Known Space future history;

one story to the War World sub-series of Pournelle's CoDominium future history.

Blish adapted Star Trek: The Original Series scripts as prose short stories and wrote an original Star Trek novel whereas Niven adapted one of his own Known Space stories as an animated Star Trek episode.

Niven and Pournelle collaborated on several novels, including two volumes of Pournelle's CoDominium future history.

Pournelle and SM Stirling collaborated on at least two Man-Kzin Wars stories.

I have probably missed something.

Comparing Universes

Of course we might have concluded Intergalactic Travel by comparing Poul Anderson's Tau Zero and The Avatar with James Blish's The Triumph Of Time whose immortal characters use their antigravity drive to fly to the Metagalactic Centre where, after the cosmic collision, their bodies become new monoblocs. Blish, like Anderson, followed Heinlein and wrote cosmological sf and a future history series as well as fantasy and historical fiction. Anderson contributed to several other authors' series whereas Blish contributed to one other, Star Trek - as also did post-Heinleinian future historian Larry Niven. We are talking about a pool of authors and subject matters here.

I was a Blish fan long before I became an Anderson fan and my James Blish Appreciation blog would have been longer if Blish's output had been bigger. Having said that, there are depths in Blish's works that we have not penetrated on either blog.

See:

David Ketterer, Imprisoned In A Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish (The Kent State University Press, Ohio, 1987).

The next three days in Lancaster (for some of us) -

Sunday: Chinese New Year street procession and event;

Monday evening: Zen group or choir;

Tuesday: visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop (we hope).

First Contact

The two most recent posts have shown the position of Ythrians in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Their first story is about first contact when initially nothing was known about this species. Indeed, initially, it was difficult even to identify the dominant species on an obviously inhabited planet.

A Star Trek-parallel scenario: 

the (first) Grand Survey;

the starship, Olga, under Captain Gray, on a five-year mission beyond Alpha and Beta Crucis in the constellation Lupus, 278 light-years from Sol;

a golden G9 dwarf star of half Solar luminosity;

a terrestroid planet, smaller than Earth, with 0.75 G, a thin, dry but humanly breathable atmosphere, some small oceans and two small moons.

The Olga:

verifies by neutrino analysis that there is no artificial atomic energy anywhere in this planetary system;

enters orbit around the terrestroid planet;

gains every possible datum by remote observation before dispatching robot probes to uninhabited regions where the probes establish that life is chemically similar to Earth's and that microorganisms are safe.

There are woods, lakes, plains, mountains, clusters of buildings without defensive walls or streets, primitive mines and evidence of both Stone Age and Iron Age cultures.

This planet will later wage interstellar war against Terra. But not yet.

Relevance In The Technic History And The Time Patrol

Poul Anderson's Technic History suddenly became more immediately relevant to its current readers with the late (1981) addition of "The Saturn Game," set much closer to our present and featuring interplanetary although not yet any interstellar space travel. Before this belated addition, the Technic History had begun with "Wings of Victory," (1972) set some time, maybe, in the twenty-second century and featuring the interstellar Grand Survey, a very different kind of science fictional scenario although one that was familiar enough to Anderson's readers from sf in general and from, e.g., Star Trek in particular. ("Wings..." even mentions a planned comparison of experiences by different Survey crews after five years.) The first four stories collected in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, beginning with "Wings...," were the first four instalments of the Technic History but then the first five stories in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, beginning with "The Saturn Game," became the first five instalments.

Sf that addresses important issues periodically regains relevance depending on what is currently happening in the real world. Thus, Simon Bolivar is discussed in the Time Patrol story, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," and Venezuela is currently in the news or at least competing for space in the news with several other major conflicts! 

"Ivory..." also mentions Solomon and shows us Hiram of Tyre. (For both, see here.) "Brave To Be A King" shows us Cyrus the Great. It may be thought that none of these three ancient rulers is currently relevant but it occurs to me that they might be regarded as perennially relevant by regular Bible readers? Sf readers spend a lot of their time in speculative futures. Bible readers spend perhaps even more time in a theologically interpreted past. And we all meet in the present.

Good News And Bad News

The Good News About History

The good news is that former enemies become allies.

There is a Klingon on the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

An Ythrian helps Terra against Merseia in The Day Of Their Return.

Dennitzans of Merseian descent are not agents of the Roidhunate and do not want their planet of residence to be annexed by their planet of origin. Dominic Flandry and Kossara Vymezal join a march of ychani/zmayi/Merseians to the planetary parliament where Flandry reflects that his only definite ally is Merseian by species.

The Bad News

Former enemies become allies against new enemies! But this might not always be the case on a planetary scale. Years ago, when John Brunner addressed the Lancaster Literature Festival, he quoted one of his own stories where a spaceship captain was called Chang, "a good Terrestrial name."

Questions Answered

War Of The Wing-Men.

Nicholas van Rijn takes over the organization of a war so that both sides will realize the need for a truce so that he will be able to talk to both sides together:

"'Sit down, both you nations, and listen to Nicholas van Rijn!'" (XIX, p. 142)

How did the two nations become so opposed? And how did either develop in the first place?

See Diomedean Evolution.

Chapter XX answers a question that had arisen from reading Chapter IX and that was asked in Diomedean Social Developments. It is good to learn that the text is coherent.

Van Rijn survives adversities and takes the golden road to Samarkand. But there must be bones of dead merchants on other planets.

One Dominic Flandry novel shows us some of the later historical developments for Flock and Fleet on Diomedes. As the publicity for one Star Trek film said, "The adventure continues..."

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.

Captain Van Rijn

The Man Who Counts, VII.

Because there are three human beings, the Drak'ho Admiral asks which of them is captain. Wace explains that the other male is their leader but does not yet speak the language well so that he needs the Lannach'ho prisoner as interpreter. Van Rijn who, through the Lannach, is learning two Diomedean languages simultaneously is playing an elaborate game as usual. He insists that it is he, not Wace, who must speak, however difficult and roundabout this is. The Admiral accepts that an alien aristocrat has the right to speak.

This reminds us, slightly, of Larry Niven's animated Star Trek episode where the kzinti capture three Starfleet officers. Spock is senior but the kzinti cannot talk with a pacifistic herbivore. Uhura is second but the kzinti cannot talk with a female. So Sulu, who maybe looks to some of us like a Jap in an old war comic, has to do the talking.

Not really the same situation. Van Rijn, working hard to appear ignorant and naive to his captors, controls most of what happens.

Death On Mars

Men die colonizing Mars:

"...a mummified corpse in the wreck of a burst sealtent..."

-Poul Anderson, "Un-Man" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), pp. 31-129 AT III, p. 39.

Stefan Rostomily dies in a cave-in when a diggings collapses and bursts his helmet open. (p.47)

"...on Mars, a prospector abandoned his wrecked sandmobile and got ready to attempt the long trek back to Outpost. He would never make it."

-Robert Heinlein, The Star Beast (London, 1974), CHAPTER II, p. 18.

Another strong Heinlein-Anderson parallel, this time involving Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

(Lummox, the title character of The Star Beast, has no hands but is consistently drawn with them.)

Will deaths on Mars be with us soon?

Coya Between Van Rijn And Hirharouk

"Lodestar."

"Standing on the command bridge between [van Rijn] and Hirharouk, Coya stared at the meters and displays filling an entire bulkhead..." (p. 355)

Imagine what that scene would look like on screen:

Coya tall and slender;

van Rijn taller, broad and corpulent; 

Captain Hirharouk 150 centimeters tall, standing on his wings, covered in feathers but with a mouth, not a beak;

in front of them, screens covering an entire inner wall of the Ythrian spaceship.

Hirharouk should speak Planha when he issues orders. 

The Technic History should be filmed and should be filmed well, to surpass Star Trek, Babylon 5 etc. Every single visual and auditory detail matters and should be rendered accurately.

What Happened After

We would like to know what happened to the characters after the story ended. (I mean stories in general, not just any particular story.)

And I remember that some old-style novels did conclude by summarizing subsequent biographies for one or two of the major characters. That constrains what can be written in a sequel. However, many novels are constructed as self-contained units neither requiring nor expecting a sequel.

A sequel published twenty years later can either reflect the passage of time in the real world by commencing its action exactly twenty years after that of the first book or, alternatively, can begin five minutes after that action because fictional time is not real time. 

Poul Anderson never describes the death of a major series character - except Harald Hardrada, The Last Viking, because Harald was a historical figure with a known time and place of death. 

It is useful to have a copy of The Earth Book Of Stormgate alongside The Technic Civilization Saga even though the entire contents of the Earth Book are reproduced in their chronological positions in Volumes I-III of the Saga.

Hloch, fictitiously editing the Earth Book, does satisfy some of our curiosity about what happened afterwards. First, he informs us that the curiously off-stage first person narrator of "Wings of Victory" was called Maeve Downey. She was a planetologist who later wrote an autobiography, Far Adventure, from which "Wings of Victory," about the discovery of Ythri, is extracted. Ythri was discovered after the first three years of the Grand Survey and:

"After five years the survivors would meet and compare experiences."

-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), pp. 15-32 AT p. 16.

Five years: shades of Star Trek! An entire series could have been set during the Grand Survey. But we have only this one story. The Olga, which discovered Ythri, also discovered Avalon which was provisionally named Gray after the captain of the Olga.

And I think that that is all that we can glean about what happened after "Wings of Victory." It is marginally more than the story itself tells us.