Routine Space Travel

We have said this before. A contemporary novel routinely referring to mobile phones, laptops, the Internet and communications satellites would have been sf if it had been published in the mid-twentieth-century but, back then, we expected that the early twenty-first century would be all about routine space travel. Patrick Moore, interviewed by a younger man on British TV, seriously asked the interviewer to send him a post card from the Moon when visiting it as a tourist about ten years from then. Think about all the wrong assumptions implied by that request. In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the stories in Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, showing Luna City, indentured servitude on Venus and the colonization of Mars as well as both Martians and Venerians, are set about 2000. 

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, Manse Everard, recruited by the Patrol in 1954, is told about the future but we the readers learn nothing about it until it happens and not much then either. Gorbachev shows up on schedule in The Shield Of Time, published in 1990. A typical room in the Patrol Academy in the Oligocene has the sort of gadgets:

"...you would have expected by, say, A.D. 2000: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet."

-"Time Patrol," 2, p. 8.

That adjustable furniture occurs in many Andersonian futures but first appeared in The Time Machine.

This post was occasioned by rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Volume III, and was not expected to encompass the Future History, The Shield Of Time, "Time Patrol" or The Time Machine.

What It Means (Or The Meaning Of It All)

The Night Face, III.

Raven, the Lochlanna Commandant, works hard to understand the Gwydiona, especially since they are so unusual to begin with. He tells his men:

"'They say, "Man goes where God is," and it seems to mean...'"

(We have been wondering what "God" means so here we go...)

"'...that work and play and art and private life and everything else aren't divided up; no distinction is made between them, it's all one harmonious whole.'" (p. 566)

Oneness, harmony, wholeness: yes, we can associate these qualities with "God," although some might say that the use of this word with only that meaning is metaphorical.

The Gwydiona fish (work) in elaborately carved and decorated boats (art) with multiple symbolisms to musical accompaniment (more art) and claim that this multifaceted activity is more efficient than compartmentalization. Raven is even prepared to concede that:

"'They might be right...'" (ibid.)

The transcendence of the distinction between work and leisure should be a future social goal. Drudgery should be eliminated. Enjoyable and self-realizing activity, whether "work" or creative leisure, should be maximized. Years ago, my friend, Kevin, sat on a park bench watching his grandchildren on the swings on a Saturday morning while simultaneously selling an electric balance to a customer over his mobile phone. His work and leisure were seamlessly blended. Before mobile phones, he would have had to go home and use the land line: more of a distinction between work and leisure. A trivial example, of course.

I think that the Gwydiona vision is realizable without the downside, the Night Face, which we learn that it has.

Fiction/Science Fiction Interface

A contemporary novel heavily featuring computers, the Internet, communications satellites and mobile phones would have been sf if published earlier in our lifetimes. I am thinking of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and some novels by John Grisham but there must be many other examples. The same would apply to a novel that featured the International Space Station or current orbital flights. James Blish's Fallen Star was a contemporary novel. A character claims to be a Martian and I took him to be telling the truth but Blish said that he was a psychotic and could have had some other kind of psychosis that did not involve thinking that he was an alien. Then the novel has an epilogue set in the near future when crewed spaceships are about to leave Earth orbit to go to Mars so that one section is sf.

I think that this means that the fiction/science fiction interface is an interesting place to explore and Poul Anderson would have been good at this as at everything else.

If we have First Contact in our lifetimes, then references to that in fiction will not be sf. In one sense, we are living in the future now.

The Captain's Com

Mobile phones with internet access have transformed life and are now taken for granted as will be further changes as yet unimaginable. This could be the message of sf:

historical fiction shows how life was different in the past;

sf can show that life will be different in the future;

contemporary fiction can show how life is different for different sections of global society right now;

a long past-and-future historical sequence, with or without immortals or time travellers, might bring everything together;

a far future narrator would be able to comment on everything.

Poul Anderson's fiction takes several steps in this direction - without becoming one big series, of course.

We notice the absence of mobile phones in most, not all, future histories. In Poul Anderson's Fire Time, Captain Dejerine's com buzzes while he is conversing with an Ishtarian. Taking the flat case from a pocket, he presses accept and converses with one of his Lieutenants. After he has clicked off and started the return journey to base, he calls Mayor Hanshaw and is relieved to find him at home. Thus, Dejerine's "com" is part of his Naval equipment, not a standard item for every citizen. We have become so used to mobiles that we might not notice this difference.

The Peace Demonstration In Fleurville

The People Of The Wind, IV.

In this post, we revisit one of my combox contentions. Over dinner, Eve Davisson tells Philippe Rochefort:

"'I shan't join the demonstrators, whatever some of my friends may say when they learn I've been out with an Imperial officer.'" (p. 488)

In any film adaptation, between Rochefort in space and Rochefort in the restaurant, we should see brief highlights of a demonstration:

a large crowd gathers, comprising smaller groups unfurling banners and raising placards;

they march through Fleurville, flanked by stewards identified by arm bands or coloured jackets;

not military ranks but a crowd flowing like a river;

individuals with megaphones lead chants;

different sections of the march display and chant different slogans like "Peace Now!," "Down with the Empire!," "No to Terra!"; "All Beings are Brothers!," "Friendship with Ythri!";

some peel off to crowd into coffee shops, then re-join the march;

on-lookers include pro-Imperial counter-demonstrators with placards;

police separate opposed factions;

police challenge some slogans as illegal;

there are some arrests;

an equivalent of a TV crew interviews individuals;

marchers ignore a lone preacher on a soapbox;

the gathering and march are filmed with a hand held camera carried between the actors and extras so that the cinema audience gets a sense of what it is like to be surrounded by the demonstration, not just of viewing it from the outside;

the march ends with a rally in a square near Parliament with speakers on a platform;

speakers include well-known politicians and campaign leaders;

some marchers are still arriving during the speeches whereas large numbers are already leaving to rendezvous with their transport back to other parts of Esperance;

some individuals and groups are content to have marched and not to have heard any speeches;

leaflets are distributed;

most leaflets directly address current politics but there will be alternatives like "Find Peace Through Jesus" or "Support (some sectarian leader that no one has ever heard of)";

alternative newspapers are sold or handed out free;

some queue to sign a petition to the Emperor;

money is collected for march expenses and for related causes;

if there are Krishna Consciousness devotees on Esperance, then they hand out free vegetarian curries (atheists do not refuse free food; Muslims might refuse food that has been offered to an idol);

an individual following a banner tries to move forward through the crowd but is held up by a seemingly endless line of people walking at right angles to his proposed path;

people use mobile phones to re-establish contact with groups from which they have been separated or to ask where their transport pick-up point is;

an ambulance has to be summoned to someone who has fainted;

the antigrav alternatives to helicopters hover overhead.

You might guess that I write from experience. A short scene in a film cannot possibly show everything that I have listed in any detail. However, an attempt to flicker very quickly through many such sub-scenes would generate a confusing impression of a large public event and would give some context to Eve's remark to Rochefort.

Questions About The Technic History

Some comments pick at the fabric of Poul Anderson's Technic History.

Is it implausible that van Rijn and Falkayn experience both the glory days and the beginning of the terminal decline of the Polesotechnic League?

Does antigrav make roads on Vixen and river trade on Aeneas and Daedalus redundant?

When were mobile phones invented in the Technic History?

Is it plausible that Aycharaych was able to hoodwink the Merseians for so long?

Are there any more questions like this?

We appreciate the Technic History as, in my opinion, the very best of the American future history series before we begin to unravel its possible inconsistencies.

Two Generation Ships

 

In 20th century sf, the future of the 21st century included mobile phones and aircars (also here). I expected cars in sf novels to fly and was surprised when one in a later novel stayed on the road.

Although Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky is set mostly inside a single "generation ship" (slower than light, multi-generation, interstellar spaceship), its narrator makes some reference to young people on Earth being able to drive flying cars. I might have to reread this whole short volume to find this particular reference but I decided that, after all this time, it was a good idea to reread Orphans..., in any case. It is the precursor of Poul Anderson's "The Troublemakers." Orphans... is part of Heinlein's Future History just as "The Troublemakers" is part of Anderson's Psychotechnic History which was directly modelled on the Future History.

"The Troublemakers" begins with a quotation from Starward! by Enrico Yamatsu. Orphans of the Sky, PART ONE, UNIVERSE, begins with a quotation from:

"The Romance of Modern Astrography by Franklin Buck, published by Lux Transcriptions Ltd., 3.50cr."

-Robert Heinlein, Orphans of the Sky (London, 1965), p. 7.

Buck informs us that the Proxima Centauri Expedition was sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119 whereas Yamatsu informs us that the Pioneer was launched in 2126. Thus, we read two closely parallel future history series.

Living In The Future

We do not expect futuristic sf to predict or prophesy but we do ask how plausible it might be. Without a chronoscope, an sf writer cannot tell us any details of the future but I suggest that neither is he able to anticipate the extent of technological transformation of everyday life. Poul Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, published 1951-1985, comprises forty three installments covering several future centuries, then several further millennia.

Consider the recent innovations in information and communication technology that we in 2021 take for granted:

PCs

laptops

hand-held computers

mobile phones with internet access

texts

google

email

Amazon

Facebook

social media

apps

zoom

on-line editions of newspapers

many people able to work from home during a lockdown

 

Fax has come and gone. 3D printing is somewhere around. Contemporary novels present higher tech than future histories. People a thousand years in the future in twentieth century sf do not live very differently from people living at the time when the sf was written. The major change to everyday life is flying cars. Heinlein's daily life of the future is mainly people living on the Moon instead of on Earth.

A Pocket Transceiver

Poul Anderson, "Rescue on Avalon" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 422-433.

Jack Birnam, twenty four years old (seventeen Terrestrial), hikes alone in the Andromeda Range which the Ythrians call the Weathermother:

"In case of serious difficulty, he need merely send a distress signal by his pocket transceiver. Homing on it, an aircar from the nearest rescue station should reach him in minutes." (p. 423)

The transceiver is a "...flat object..." (p. 424) that does more than transmit distress signals. It beeps on receipt of "...a general broadcast on the emergency band." (ibid.) Then, having flipped a switch for two-way, Jack converses with Ivar Holm at Andromeda Rescue Station Four. So there are mobile phones in this period of the Technic History. We keep getting mixed messages on this issue.

Mobile Phones Or No Mobile Phones?

"Margin of Profit."

Van Rijn joins his four guests:

"Mjambo, who owned Jo-Boy Technical Services, was talking into his wristphone, but stopped when his host entered." (p. 79)

See:

Mobile Phones and its two links

Phones And Falkayns

A Phone, A Cyanops And A Baburite 

 

We had concluded that there were no mobile phones in van Rijn's period and that they were developed some time during Flandry's, much later, period but now one of van Rijn's guests has one. Maybe the wristphone is a novelty that is used only for Jo-Boy internal communications? 

Phones And Falkayns

Mirkheim, X.

"The portable phone at her belt buzzed." (p. 146)

Here is a mobile phone although I said in an earlier post (see the link) that there were none in the Solar Commonwealth period.

Sandra's vice executive phones with a message from "Admiral Michael" who turns out to be a Falkayn and also the second in command of the small Hermetian space navy. Earlier, "Mike Falkayn," obviously the same guy, had been left in charge of the reserves at home when Sandra led the fleet to Mirkheim. (VII, p. 112)

Have we been told yet that Michael is David's older brother? We did know that David was a younger son. Michael's seniority and his death in combat (see Mirkheim Miscellany) will have grave consequences for David. Times of crisis affect both nations and individuals.

Furniture And Phones

(Sometime we find an image for a different work with the same title.)

The Day Of Their Return.

Desai to Aycharaych:

"'Won't you be seated?' The chair in front of the desk didn't have to adjust itself much." (3, p. 89)

More self-adjusting furniture. (I think that I read another example recently but now cannot find it.)

By now, we have become used to such future amenities. However, when Desai enters Tatiana Thane's rooms at the University:

"This layout was incredibly archaic. No doubt the original colonists hadn't had the economic surplus to automate residences, and there'd been sufficient pinch ever afterward to keep alive a scorn of 'effete gadgetry.'" (7, pp. 121-122)

Does this imply no self-adjusting furniture? Sure enough:

"The chair [Desai] found was too high for his comfort." (p. 123)

Commendable consistency in the devilish details. 

Despite the (usual) high quality of the furniture, Desai lacks one very obvious useful gadget. See Mobile Phones.

Differences Between Three Timelines

Our three timelines are Heinlein's Future History, Anderson's Psychotechnic History and Earth Real.

The Future History
There is regular contact with Jovians, Martians, Titans, Venerians, Callistans etc.

The Moon, Mars and Venus are colonized.

"Grace Cormet's telephone buzzed. She took it out of her pocket and said, 'Yes?'"
-Robert Heinlein, "'-We Also Walk Dogs'" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 92-115 AT p. 105.

The Psychotechnic History
There is some knowledge of Martians.

The Moon, Mars and Venus are colonized.

"Calling Prior from a public communibooth, even using a scrambler, was risky too, but it had to be done."
-"Un-Man," VIII, p. 62.

Earth Real
We seem to be alone in the Solar System.
There is one space station.
We have mobile phones.

Chee Lan's Loyalty

Satan's World.

The contradictions continue:

"The builders were not unlike Shenna." (XXIII, p. 572)

"...the Shenna, altogether distinct in appearance and culture..." (p. 573)

Not unlike but altogether distinct?

Van Rijn, in his radio message, has ordered Falkayn and Chee Lan, if they are on Dathyna, to return immediately to the Solar Commonwealth to warn of the imminent Shenn attack. Falkayn accepts this order whereas Chee Lan insists on rescuing her shipmate, Adzel. She adds:

"'And van Rijn, no doubt.'" (p. 576)

- but then adds to that:

"'We have to pick up Adzel, you know.'" (ibid.)

This is an important piece of xenopsychology. Chee Lan's loyalty and perceived duty is:

not to van Rijn as a fellow rational being;
not to van Rijn as a citizen of the Solar Commonwealth or as a member of Technic civilization;
not even to van Rijn as her own employer;
but only to Adzel as her shipmate.

She is descended from predators who hunted alone or in small groups and who built treetop trade routes but not territorial nation-states. Her strong sense of duty stops with kin and friends and does not extend to any universal altruism.

Can rational beings be like this? Hopefully, we will find out what they can be like. I was brought up to believe that the morality that I was taught would be universal but obviously it cannot be as simple as that. "Thou shalt not steal" applies only to beings who (i) are capable of formulating a concept of private property; (ii) have reached a stage in their development where they are able to implement such a concept.

Richard Dawkins has convinced me that we have been naturally selected to help others (when I tripped and fell on the street, a lot of people ran forward to help me up) either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and that we experience this latter motivation not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like when expressed in purely biological terms, but as compassion/charity/solidarity etc. Might there be rational beings who do not share this motivation? Anderson imagines t'Kelans and Cynthians.

To settle their argument, Chee Lan pulls a gun on Falkayn and threatens to tie him up and rescue Adzel (and van Rijn) on her own, although with less chance of success. Falkayn laughs and gives in to her blackmail. In Falkayn's shoes, I would have:

wanted to obey van Rijn's order;
accepted Chee Lan's blackmail but not laughed about it.

Obeying orders is kind of important, to avoid chaos. I would never, except in extremely exceptional circumstances, join any military organization where I might potentially be ordered to "Fire!" at living human targets. However, I once attended a trade union conference where it was announced that there was a bomb alert and that everyone should leave the building. As we were leaving, the Union General Secretary, who had been chairing the session and had announced the bomb alert, said, "I can see some people at the back of the hall flapping their arms at me as if to say that the alert is over but I have not yet been told this by anyone from Security so can everyone please continue to leave the building." Almost immediately, he said, "I have now been told by Security that the alert is over. Can everyone please return to their seats?" Needless to say, I followed his directions, not those of people taking it upon themselves to flap their arms about!

On another occasion, returning home, I was faced with a situation where one neighbor was cavorting around brandishing what looked like a bread knife while another, clutching his side, addressed me with, "Get the police, will you!" Needless to say, I did not stop to ask questions but went straight into the house to make an emergency call for the police. This was before mobile phones and it would have been advisable to enter the house before making the call in any case. The decision to call the police, whether appropriate or not, was not mine. I merely implemented it.

If someone is going to cavort about with a bread knife, then I am going to send a uniformed policeman in there before I go in. In fact, the mere sight of an approaching police car was enough. "The pigs are coming." Instant disappearance of perp. I do not live on a street where such incidents are frequent. Once, long ago, two white youths insulted and upset an Asian girl. The girl's father and elder brothers besieged the youths' house and (fortunately) were unable to break down the door. The police came and were thoroughly unhelpful. A City Councillor, who was a street resident, asked the police sergeant to take the two youths into custody for their own protection. The police reply was: "Those two youths are causing no problems. You people are, by gathering and shouting on the street. Go back to your homes." Question: "What should we do if the youths come out and shout more abuse?" Answer: "Call us out." Reply: "But we did call you out and you are blaming us." Fortunately, the two youths left the street soon after and other racists have had the good sense either to stay away or to keep quiet. My involvement: Sheila woke, said, "Something is happening on the street," got dressed and went out to investigate. I slept through it.

Not really a digression: Chee Lan's response to Adzel's (and van Rijn's) plight has caused me to revisit a wide range of relevant experiences.

The Day After Tomorrow

"Day after tomorrow" sf begins like contemporary fiction, then adds one change, typically perhaps a single technological innovation, although there can also be extraterrestrial incursions, environmental alterations or even human changes. However, the bigger the change, the more quickly the action moves away from a contemporary setting. Thus, Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, about a global increase in intelligence, begins in the author's present but ends in perhaps the most extraordinary of his many fictional futures.

IN CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, set shortly after World War II, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments performs secret experiments but is destroyed by a covert extraterrestrial incursion so that the contemporary setting is preserved. This novel concludes a Trilogy.

In Robert Heinlein's "Life Line," set in 1951, Pinero invents and utilizes the "baronovitameter"/"chronovitameter" but he is killed and it is destroyed so that the contemporary setting is preserved. However, in subsequent installments of the Future History, the future intrudes on the present with further technological innovations. (We now live in a future and a twenty first century with numerous innovations: radio; radar; television; color television; computers; personal computers; lap tops; mobile phones; satellites; satnav; space probes; a space station; self-driving cars.)

A "day after tomorrow" story is the perfect beginning for a future history series. We will compare the beginnings of a few future histories.

A Telephone Call

Poul Anderson, The Byworlder, III.

I used to have to use public telephone kiosks a lot. Now they are fewer because of mobile phones. At home, we call from mobiles but keep the land line for Internet connection.

Skip visits a tavern and uses a public phone. Knowing that the No Funds bulb would light if he used his credit card, he borrows the proprietor's after showing cash. The phone has a screen and a recorded image of a young woman says, "'Data service. May we help you?'" (p. 26) Skip avoids contacting a more expensive live operator by typing essential search words. He memorizes the answer rather than pay for a printout.

His question was: "What Keeper caravans are where?" (p. 27) Answers:

Morgan's is in Connecticut on an erosion contract;
the Friends of Earth are reforesting in Wisconsin;
the Terrans and others are on an Environment Authority rescue mission in Egypt;
Commonweal are controlling a flood in Alabama;
etc.

We are learning a lot about the state of the planet and about how Skip earns his living.

Dual Details On Diomedes (And The Spiral Arm)

See:

Mobile Phones
An SF Prediction

Although Dominic Flandry has a pocket phone in "The Warriors from Nowhere," he calls Chives from a public phone booth on Diomedes in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

In conversation with Susette Lagard, Flandry says:

"'No mind can conceive, let alone remember, the planets and races we've discovered in this tiny offside corner of the solitary galaxy we've explored a little.'"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT VIII, p. 450.

Although he does not mention the spiral arm (and see here), his phrasing is sufficiently familiar. We inhabit a finite globe and can ignore what is above its atmosphere whereas Terran Imperials cannot ignore the galaxy and galaxies beyond known space.

Mobile Phones

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, there are no mobile phones in the Solar Commonwealth period. See:

Three Details In How To Be Ethnic...
Adzel And Technic Civiization

In the much later Terran Empire period, Chunderban Desai, High Commissioner of the Virgilian System, visits Prosser Tatiana Thane at the University of Nova Roma. When he returns to his office, the phone informs him that he has had an emergency call. He had not left a number where he could be reached. Thus, Desai does not have a mobile phone.

However, less than two decades later in another part of the Terran Empire, Dominic Flandry uses a "pocket phone." See:

An SF Prediction

So was the technology of mobile phones developed over a thousand years later in the Technic History than on Earth Real?

Ordinary And Extraordinary

In fantasy and sf, ordinary people regularly find themselves in extraordinary situations. For example, Poul Anderson's Malcolm Lockridge finds that he has time traveled. Yet we are confident that nothing like this will happen to us. So why do we so readily suspend disbelief when reading The Corridors Of Time? Some people don't, dismissing sf as unacceptably implausible.

However, each of us has already adjusted to regular use of technology that was science fictional earlier in our own lifetimes. A mainstream novelist setting a novel a few years in the past has to check the state of information and computer technology in that year to make sure that he gets it right. As we have adjusted to personal computers, laptops, the internet, mobile phones now with internet access and text messages, Lockridge adjusts to temporal corridors.

The way things happen is never the way they were imagined. Extrasolar planets were undetectable until recently. Now it is known that there are many and that some might bear life but such life has not yet been confirmed. Scientific progress, even if rapid, advances through stages. I still do not expect an extrasolar spaceship to enter Earth orbit in our lifetimes. And, if I were taken along a temporal corridor, then I would not then engage in heroic adventures like Lockridge who escapes from captivity no less than three times. But that is an observation about action-adventure fiction, not specifically about sf.

Life On Jupiter II

See Life On Jupiter.

Because high mountains are rare, Jovian life has not had time to adapt to them. Theor climbs with all six limbs over rattling talus slopes - another indication of how Earth-like this version of Jupiter is. I tried to find an image of talus with as little life as possible.

Ammonia vapor blown from the sea condenses into rivers. Cloud banks are brown, onsy or tawr and Theor's feelers detect unfamiliar taste-odors. Thus, three senses, two combined.

A friendly voice on the communicator would have comforted Theor. I think that about mobile phones. Texting a friend is like praying, knowing that the prayer is heard and might be answered.

On the subject of prayer as such, a Mormon missionary advised me to ask God the Father in the name of His Son for the truth on religious matters so I did, before meditating. What answer I received is between me and God, of course.