Speculations And "Backwardness"

The word from Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop:

Do major powers have blackmail material on Western political leaders?

What will the world be like a week from now? 

We lack a Time Machine but can wait. This works. Born in 1949, I now know what is happening in 2026. But how much of what is happening now is hidden from us? If blackmail works, then we won't know.

Poul Anderson, "Backwardness" IN Anderson, Kinship With The Stars (New York, 1991), pp. 154-166.

Having mentioned this story, let's reread it.

It is set at a time when there is a Greenland Resort and a Luna City. Regular sf readers have learned to deduce: the future but probably the near future; interplanetary travel but not yet human interstellar travel unless of course we are about to be told otherwise. 

Because the only point of this particular story is to make an observation about how much or how little intelligence is necessary for human evolution, Anderson makes a simplistic and entirely implausible story assumption:

"'Same plants grow on every Earth-like planet, just like the same people and animals. Not much difference...'" (p. 157)

A Terrestrial, in this case the Secretary General of the United Nations, automatically asks, "'Why?'" (ibid.) adding, "'...it can't be coincidence!'" (ibid.)

- whereas the captain of a Galactic spaceship is completely uncurious:

"'I don't know. I'm just a practical spaceman. Never worried about it.'" (ibid.)

How "practical" is it for a spaceman not to wonder about a question like that? Maybe on some cosmic scale this can be coincidence but, if so, then that is something that we urgently need to learn about! But already, in Captain Hurdgo's cheerful indifference, we approach the crux of the story. If his spaceship engine works, then that is all that concerns him... His men - and they are "men" - do not make enquiries in Terrestrial laboratories, libraries or museums but buy junk jewelry in Macy's...

I have not drunk alcohol - at least not regularly or in any large amount - for decades but Andrea (with my consent) put brandy in my coffee. I suddenly felt very tired and this might be my first and last post for today but I must watch some TV news at 10:00 pm. 

Which is stranger: fact or fiction?

From Wells To Anderson

In HG Wells' The Time Machine, a nineteenth century scientist constructs the Time Machine, sets off into the future and learns that mankind will devolve.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol, a twentieth century engineer is recruited by a time travelling organization founded in the future by our evolutionary successors. The Patrol addresses those "...curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion..." that Wells' outer narrator had only hinted at. 

Although Wells and Anderson are not the only sf writers to address the concept of time travel, the treatment of this idea by these two authors is extremely comprehensive. This is my last thought of the day after the completion of a rereading of Anderson's Wellsian narrative, "Flight to Forever."

What comes next? (We don't know yet.)

Good night.

Comrades And Companions

Although Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" is a pulp magazine story, it is peppered with some short but memorable reflective passages, e.g., a paragraph that begins:

"Men lived in their own times..." (p. 182)

- which we have previously quoted in full at least twice in:

Flight To Forever

A Brief Flash Of Light

In 3000 AD, it is known that time travel occurs at least futureward. There was even a Time War when an army defeated in the twenty-third century had attacked the twenty-fourth! Belgotai of Syrtis, an unemployed mercenary, has never time travelled but has developed a cavalier attitude to the concept. He asks "Mahtin Saundahs" to carry him forward to:

"'...some time when a free comrade can fight again.'" (p. 181)

Meanwhile, he will be a good companion:

"'...Ih'll help. Ih'm a good man wid a gun or vibrodagger. Yuh can't go batting alone into de future.'" (ibid.)

Does a time traveller need a companion? The Time Traveller finds Weena in 802,701 AD but she does not, and indeed would not have been able to, accompany him on the Time Machine. Saunders loses Sam but gains Belgotai but must brave the furthest future alone. The Doctor must have at least one companion, however implausible. They just have to entertain a TV audience. Let's leave it at that.

Time Travel Series

Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" is a potential series. 

Imagine:

another small group constructs a time projector independently;

like Saunders, they learn that it is impossible to travel more than seventy years into the past and therefore they continue into the future;

they visit some of the same periods as he did but also others;

not trapped inside an Ixchulhi pyramid, they meet these interstellar conquerors;

each stop that they make is a complete adventure and an instalment of a series which can be continued indefinitely.

Is there any future for time travel series? 

In Anderson's Time Patrol series, each instalment features a different past (historical or prehistorical) period with discussion (or demonstration) of the consequences of temporal alterations.

The Doctor Who TV series began with a malfunctioning TARDIS (spacetime machine) which performed like a pendulum, swinging backwards and forwards between past Terrestrial and futuristic/extraterrestrial periods. Thus:

the stone age;

Skaro, the planet of Daleks and Thals;

back to the past, I can't remember when.

The two Doctor Who feature films changed the Doctor from an alien Time Lord into an English inventor, like Wells' Time Traveller, and re-presented the first two Dalek stories:

Skaro;

Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

(Daleks and Thals a bit like Morlocks and Eloi; Daleks Invasion Earth a bit like The War Of The Worlds.)

Observations

(i) We notice Wells' influence.

(ii) Wells didn't do series but The Time Machine could have become one.

(iii) And "Flight to Forever" could have become a good additional series.

Not Time

We have discussed time and time travel on the Logic of Time Travel blog and on this blog. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, three independent time travel novels and enough short stories to fill a collection are major works of sf and also major successors to HG Wells' The Time Machine.

Should we devote some time to addressing glaring errors about the nature of time in works by other sf authors? Not too much time.

I try to avoid lengthy quotations but sometimes they are unavoidable:

"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is to-morrow and to-morrow is the past.

"Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No film that one could run backward and see what-once-had-been."

-City, VII, p. 186.

"'We can't travel in the past.'"

-ibid.

"...there wasn't any past, there never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.

"Like two dogs walking in one another's tracks. One dog steps out and another dog steps in. Like a long, endless row of ballbearings running down a groove, almost touching, but not quite. Like the links of an endless chain running on a wheel with a billion billion sprockets."

-ibid.

Writing worthy of Ray Bradbury but making no sense.

This three dimensional spatial universe moves along a fourth dimension to be identified with time? What does it move in relation to? Time is the measure of change within this universe, not a dimension that it moves along. Any such motion would take time. It may very well be the case that we cannot travel into the past but that is not because there is another world directly behind ours moving along a fourth dimension!

See:

Space and Time

We extend, move and endure:

extension is through space;

motion is through space and takes time;

endurance is through time;

endurance is neither extension nor motion.

Causal Circles

I prepare for early train travel tomorrow. My travel reading will be The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers which might lead to some comparisons of mythological writing, historical fiction and time travel paradoxes.

The Anubis Gates, like Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time and Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," is set in a single immutable timeline where past events can be caused but neither prevented nor altered. In such a story, when a causal circle has been completed, the story is complete and there is no room for a sequel. 

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series also features causal circles but in a context of potential causality violation where closure of circles prevents alterations. One paradox is used to prevent another:

"'The single way to make [an incipient causal loop] safe is to close it. When the Worm Ouroboros is biting his own tail, he can't devour anything else.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2016), pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 449.

There are causal circles without time travel in:

Robert Heinlein's "Life-Line";

Brian Aldiss' "Man In His Time";

James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time.

Heinlein's character, Pinero, has invented a machine that accurately predicts dates of death. A young couple consult him. He says that, since there is something wrong with his machine, he will have to give them their readings the following day and then keeps them talking for as long as possible. When they finally leave, they are killed by a clock falling from the front of Pinero's building. That clock would have fallen at that time. If Pinero had not been the kind of guy who would keep them talking but instead had let them leave immediately then either they would have died of some other cause at the time that the machine had predicted or they would not have died so soon, the machine would have predicted later dates of death, Pinero would have given them their readings and would not have kept them talking. What kind of guy Pinero is becomes a causal factor.

Historical Continuity

David Falkayn:

"'Civilization needs more than the few monopolists we've got.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, January 2009), pp. 449-484 AT p. 455.

Coya Conyon:

"I can't say I like most of those money-machine merchant princes..." (p. 456)

The Polesotechnic League become cartelized in Mirkheim.

Centuries later, Chunderban Desai:

"'Technic civilization started on that road when the Polesotechnic League changed from a mutual-aid organization of free entrepreneurs to a set of cartels. Tonight we are far along the way.'"

-A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, p. 274.

A tremendous sense of continuity through a long future history series. 

Now I am trying to hear some news, read two other books and attend the Zen group.

Backtrack

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 3.

Let's backtrack. In Production Of Anti-Matter, we summarized a conversation between Venator and Lirion but missed one part. 

Lirion says that, without more energy from anti-matter, the Lunarians at Proserpina will be imprisoned in sameness. Venator asks whether they have:

"'...no inner resources.'" (p. 69)

Lirion scoffs. Machine intelligence admires its own:

"'Abstractions, mental constructs...'" (ibid.)

- but that is not:

"'...for living creatures...'" (ibid.)

Like passivity versus violence, this is another false dichotomy. Organic intelligence encompasses pure mathematics and its application to the empirical universe and everything else: emotions, social interactions, artistic creativity, spirituality, whatever else we might think of. Stop splitting up the truth and fighting over the parts!

A parable told by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

The Devil's friend saw a man picking up a small piece of the truth. The Devil said, "It doesn't matter. He is only going to organize and systematize it."

Farewells

We recently posted about the elegiac tone of Poul Anderson's "The Pirate" and quoted from the opening pages but missed a sentence that straddles two pages:

"'You don't have to go, not yet,' Braganza Diane said, a little desperately because she cared for him and our trumpeter blows too many Farewells each year." (pp. 212-213)

How could we have forgotten that? Well, we do remember tones but misremember details. And this reminds us of a passage in Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows where Flandry and Kossara, as members of their respective armed forces, speak of remembering their dead... (Can anyone out there locate this passage?)

There are other details to notice in the opening pages of "The Pirate." The Dordogne country is not only:

"...in the fullness of time..." (p. 212)

- but also:

"...steep, green, altogether beautiful..." (ibid.)

As in The Peregrine, written earlier but set later, Trevelyan is summoned by a "machine" (p. 212) but this time he updates his terminology, referring to his summoner neither as a computing machine nor an integrator but as a "computer"! (p. 213) (We still use the archaic phrase, "time machine," because of Wells.)

After all this build-up, all that remains is to reread the story and to re-accompany Trevelyan and Smokesmith on their mission to the planet called Good Luck.

Moving Space

Years ago, in his New Maps Of Hell, Kingsley Amis explained the sf "hyperdrive" as follows: although a spaceship cannot move through space faster than light, if a volume of space were somehow to be moved through the surrounding space, then it would be able to carry along with it a spaceship that remained stationary within it. I thought that that made some sort of sense at the time. 

Observations

I have never encountered that explanation of hyperspace in sf;

we do encounter many different explanations;

the cleverest is Poul Anderson's quantum hyperdrive with which a spaceship makes many short quantum jumps without traversing the intervening spaces, therefore without running up against the relativistic light speed limit;

the speculative Alcubierre drive does involve moving space insofar as expansion and contraction are forms of motion.

We have discussed Anderson's several faster than light (FTL) drives. See blog search result.

I am fairly sure that Anderson said somewhere that he devised a different scientific rationale for FTL every time that he used the concept. (His physics degree enabled him to do this.) However, searching for this quotation, I found James Blish saying it of Lester del Rey!

Brian Cox argues that future theories should not contradict but incorporate relativity just as the latter incorporates Newtonian physics. Yes, but that might allow for some way around instead of against the light speed limit which is what sf writers try to imagine. But will any warp drive require impossible quantities of energy? Some ideas work in theory but only in theory like a T-machine would have to have infinite length or something?

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.

Space-Time Travel

"Space-time travel" has two meanings.

(i) Poul Anderson's Time Patrollers space-time travel in the sense that they change their spatial as well as their temporal coordinates. This is time travel with space added.

(ii) A spaceship that revolves around a T machine, as in Anderson's The Avatar, space-time travels in the sense that it make an interstellar journey that can end before it begins. This is space travel with time added.

Considered separately, space travel and time travel are entirely different, e.g., The First Men In The Moon and The Time Machine. However, space travel can also involve time dilation, e.g., Anderson's Tao Zero. 

I am thinking in sound bites this morning, folks.

Kinds Of Time Travel

 

Bob Shaw used to deliver "Serious Scientific Talks" at sf cons. Paraphrasing part of one such talk from memory:

"Most people think that, if you are struck by lightning, it'll kill you. If you read science fiction, you know that a far more likely result will be that you will be flung into some period of the past. Which period depends on three factors: your weight, measured in pounds; the voltage in the lightning; which period the author has been mugging up on."

We know of time travel as an accidental freak of nature in works by Mark Twain, L. Sprague de Camp and Poul Anderson.

HG Wells introduced technological time travel and was followed by many, preeminently by Anderson.

A few fictional beings time travel without technological assistance. Superman used to do it by flying faster than light while rotating either clockwise or anticlockwise. The mutants in Anderson's There Will Be Time time travel by an act of will while remaining on the Earth's surface.

The T machine idea combines time travelling with space travelling: Anderson's The Avatar.

As ever, Poul Anderson is in every category.

Keening And Chanting

"Star of the Sea," 1.

Poul Anderson lets us escape from time travel paradoxes into historical fiction within a single narrative. When Germanic barbarians besiege Old Camp, their women keen rhythmically:

"...ha-ba-da ha-ba, ha-ba-da-da." (p. 471)

Although Anderson spells it out for us, I cannot hear this beat in my head. However, it reminds me that I once saw a mass picket pushing policemen down a street as if in a big rugby scrum. The pickets were chanting something that I initially did not understand:

"Da - da-da-dadada!

"Da - da-da-dadada!

"Da - da-da-dadada!"

Then I discerned the words. It was an ironic reproach to the police:

"Job - only doin' it!

"Job - only doin' it!

"Job - only doin' it!"

Lupercus the Roman legate reminds (some of) us of Dominic Flandry involved in the suppression of the planet, Brae. Lupercus also has something in common with the viewpoint character of section 2, Manse Everard: two men doing a job. Both must respond to a threat to the Roman Empire albeit for different reasons. 

The Roman Empire exists in different timelines. In one, it is guarded by the Time Patrol. In another, it inspires the Terran Empire. The Romans know nothing of either.

The Patrol does recruit one Roman from Caesar's time who:

"'...never got it through his head that a machine can't be treated like a horse.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 14.

I did not expect to wind up with that when I began to write this post.

Problems With Time Machines

"Flight to Forever."

A ten-foot high, thirty-foot time projector is a conspicuous object to leave lying in the open especially on a city street even at night while Saunders sets off on foot to explore the city.

The Time Traveller has a problem when the Morlocks lock his Time Machine in the White Sphinx. 

A Time Patrol agent can send his timecycle aloft to hover on antigravity to be called back down when needed.

The TARDIS is supposed to camouflage itself but has got stuck looking like an antiquated British police telephone box.

Wardens and Rangers have to find time portals concealed underground.

Jack Havig doesn't need anything except maybe a place where he can disappear inconspicuously.

Six examples, four from Poul Anderson. 

The Automatics

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT p. 215.

Saunders, Hull and MacPherson had sent two small automatic time projectors from 1973 to 2073. (We remember the Time Traveller's model Time Machine and the Time Patrol's message shuttles.) These "automatics" should have returned automatically but didn't. Saunders and Hull travel to 2073 in the big projector. They are now in an open pit instead of the basement of a house. There is no sign of the automatics. Hull thinks that they had started back but blew out on the way. But, if they blew out in, e.g., 2063, then, other things being equal, they should have lain where they were for ten years and still have been there in 2073. But maybe other things were not equal. An animal or a human being could have moved them.

Starting back, Saunders and Hull encounter increasing resistance the further they go. In 2013, they find the automatics:

"...tarnished with some years of weathering." (p. 215)

They had got a little further back, then stopped and lay where they were. Saunders examines them and finds that their batteries are completely drained. Now we know that the automatics were not in 2073 because, in 2013, Saunders took them into the big projector to examine them.

Greater adventures lie ahead. This is just the beginning. 

Ending The Day On A Whimsical Note, Maybe

Maybe I have spotted a minor literary parallel that no one else has.

Everyone knows of parallels between Ian Fleming's James Bond and Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry although Flandry not only pre-existed Bond but also was conceived by Anderson as an sf equivalent of Simon Templar. (Roger Moore played both Templar and Bond.)

Many people might perceive Modesty Blaise as a female equivalent of James Bond although she is and has always been an independent and original character, beginning in a newspaper comic strip before branching into novels and films.

Why do I link Modesty with Flandry? Flandry's earliest published story was entitled "Tiger by the Tail" because, in it, enemies of the Terran Empire took Flandry prisoner and wished that they hadn't. Modesty's earliest story was entitled "La Machine" because, in it, Modesty goes up against a French murder outfit of that name. When La Machine captures Modesty, her assistant, Willie Garvin, says that they have - a tiger by the tail.

OK. A very minor literary parallel.

I will now return to reading Modesty Blaise for the rest of this evening.

A Neat Office

Brain Wave, 12.

"Helga began arranging her papers and stacking them away. Her office was always neat and impersonal, a machine could have been its occupant." (p. 106)

I worked in an office just before computers arrived and became ubiquitous. My attitude was that anything that came into my in-tray went into one of three places: out-tray; hanging file; waste paper basket. Thus, at the end of a day, there was nothing left on the desk but two empty trays and a telephone. Someone looking for a particular document was told that there might be a copy on Paul's desk. Having checked in my office, she returned puzzled and said, "There's nothing on his desk. It's as if he's left." My mother said, "They'll think you don't do anything." Colleagues always had stacks of papers, including out of date agendas and circulars, plus desk surfaces covered with layers of letters, minutes etc. When we began to work mainly on computers, I found it less easy to keep track of documentation which did still arrive.

Time to get ready to go out for the evening.

Trains And Time

"You can say what you like about Mussolini. At least he made the trains run on time!" 

I have heard that saying quoted more than once with varying degrees of amusement, irony or sarcasm but  have not been able to trace its source. I even started to say to a colleague, "You can say what you like about Mussolini...," only to be interrupted by him saying, "And I do!"

Trains in the North West of England and in Scotland did not run on time today. Hot weather was blamed. Road transport would be arranged for anyone travelling further than Edinburgh.

Might time travellers have similar problems? Suppose it took a subjective hour to travel an objective million years starting from 2025 but a subjective day to travel the same distance starting from 2125? Might the service deteriorate over time?

Let's stay with the idea of a man from the "present," or from the near future, somehow transported into a reasonably remote future:

HG Wells, The Time Machine;

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever";

James Blish, Midsummer Century;

Philip Jose Farmer, The Stone God Awakens;

Larry Niven, A World Out Of Time.

Two Acknowledgements Or Admissions

First, I have not read The Stone God Awakens although I am reliably informed that it belongs on this list.

Secondly, I will now add Robert Heinlein's The Door Into The Summer to the list even though its protagonist sleeps for only thirty years. He has something else in common with some of these other guys.

Wells' Time Traveller travels from "now" (1895 or so) to 802,701 AD and beyond and returns.

Anderson's Martin Saunders travels from 1973 to the furthest possible future and returns around the circle of time.

Blish's John Martels is time projected from 1985 to 25,000 AD and stays in that era.

Niven's Jerome Branch Corbell becomes a "corpsicle," a frozen corpse, in 1970 but someone injected with his memory RNA is still alive, with a renewable rejuvenation technology, three million years later!

Heinlein's Daniel Boone Davis survives from 1970 to 2000 by suspended animation, lives into 2001, time travels to 1970 and returns to 2001 by suspended animation.

1970 is in there twice. Also 1973 and 1985. All our yesterdays, now. But we never tire of reviewing them. At least I don't.

Two More Biblical References

The Avatar.

Chinook lingers near a large T machine that seems to be a cosmic junction. The crew hope to be spotted by someone else passing through:

"'Somebody happening past who's not too advanced to pay attention, the way we're not too advanced to notice a fellow man in the woods. Or else somebody who's so very far along that his eye is on the sparrow.'" (XLI, p. 354)

We had the sparrow reference recently here which will be why Broderson mentions it again.

Next Chinook travels to a time between seventy and a hundred billion years after the crew's births when:

"'No stars are left alive except the dimmest [the meek shall inherit], and they are now dying, while the galaxy itself is disintegrating.'" (XLIII, p. 360)

This is not the kind of "meek" that the Gospel verse anticipated but Anderson's author's mind seems to have automatically spotted any possible textual opportunity for a Biblical reference.

Joelle thinks that, if they travel further into the future, then they will learn whether the universe oscillates - as in Anderson's Tau Zero - or expands indefinitely - as was thought at least until recently.