AI Writing

Authors continuing their creative careers in a hereafter? See:

Some Reflections On Death III

Highly improbable. However, might something else happen? Might an AI program be able to reproduce Poul Anderson's literary style and thus to create entire new collections or novels about:

the Chaos

the Grand Surveys

the Breakup

young van Rijn

Jim Ching

Juan Hernandez

Emil Dalmady

the second trader team that Chee Lan joined

Manuel Argos

Tachwyr

Aycharaych

Diana Crowfeather and Targovi

the Long Night

Roan Tom

the Allied Planets

Daven Laure of the Commonalty

the Time Patrol

the Old Phoenix

etc?

If this could be done, then it might be regarded as an artificial but nevertheless authentic extension of the original author's creativity whereas a second human author writing sequels unavoidably contributes his own creativity.

I do not know whether this is possible. One thing is certain - that readers would be deeply divided as to its desirability.

Out Of The East

It is impossible to reread Poul Anderson without finding some passage for quotation or comment. Here we find similar pathetic fallacies in two different periods of two different timelines:

"Night rolled out of the east, like a message from Soviet lands plunged into chaos and murder."

-Poul Anderson, "Marius" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), pp. 13-28 AT p. 14.

"The last thing he heard was thunder. It sounded like the hoofs of horses bearing westward the Hunnish midnight."

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 374, p. 465.

Night from the east. Usually, we think of the sun as coming from there:

"Out of the east, the morning behind them, rode the Anses into the world."

-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Time Patrol, pp. 467-640 AT II, p. 557.

"Above the cliffs, a few eastern clouds turned red."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT XXI, p. 291.

Light from the east, morning; but also sunset colours signifying the end of this novel and of an era.

Wisdom also comes from the east except for Chinese Buddhists whose wisdom came from India, the West! We have gone off the point here. Unless the point is the symbolism of directions - up, down, east, west.

Periods And Volumes

It is a strength of Poul Anderson's Technic History that it covers many future periods:

post-Chaos recovery

the Grand Survey

the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League

the colonization of Avalon

the Time of Troubles

the Terran Empire

the Long Night

the Allied Planets

the period of the Commonalty

- yet concentrates on just two periods. Thus, in the seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga, the Commonwealth and League begin in Volume I and end in Volume III while the Terran Empire begins in Volume III and ends in Volume VII.

It would have been an entirely different proposition if the author had pre-planned seven omnibus volumes and had then schematically distributed his nine historical periods equally throughout these volumes. The series grew unplanned and organically and consequently reads like real history. We get many details as well as a vast panorama.

Pivotal Instalments

When an sf narrative is also an instalment of a future history series, and particularly of Poul Anderson's Technic History series, it has a dual aspect, internal and external. Internally, Anderson's The People Of The Wind presents endless fascinating details about the planet, Avalon. Externally, it has its place in the History where it plays the pivotal role of the first post-League novel. However, many Technic History instalments are pivotal:

"The Saturn Game" - the end of the Chaos and of the world as we know it and the beginning of the transition to Technic civilization;

"Wings of Victory" - first contact with Ythri;

"The Problem of Pain" - early exploration of Avalon;

"The Trouble Twisters" - the founding and inaugural mission of the first trade pioneer crew;

"Day of Burning" - the origin of the conflict with Merseia;

"Lodestar" - the conflict between van Rijn and Falkayn;

Mirkheim - the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League;

"The Star Plunderer" - the Time of Troubles and the beginning of the transition to the Terran Empire;

"Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon" - the two-stage colonization of Avalon;

The Earth Book Of Stormgate - the completion and aftermath of an era;

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows - the end of legitimacy in the Terran Empire;

"A Tragedy of Errors" - the post-Imperial Long Night and the building of new interstellar alliances;

"Starfog" - the beginning of an era of unprecedented wealth in another spiral arm of the galaxy and, unfortunately, the end of the History.

Change

Apart from the sixteen Technic History instalments about the Polesotechnic League and the fifteen about the Flandry period, the remaining twelve instalments convey times of change. 

In "The Saturn Game," exploration of the Solar System has begun and Earth is being renewed after the Chaos.

In "Wings of Victory," the first interstellar Grand Survey has begun and Ythri is discovered.

In "The Problem of Pain," Ythrians have become spacefarers. Some have studied on Aeneas and are now exploring Avalon.

"Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon" are about the early stages of the colonization of Avalon.

"The Star Plunderer" is about the Time of Troubles and the proclamation of the Terran Empire.

"Sargasso of Lost Starships": the early Terran Empire has just incorporated Ansa.

The People of the Wind: The Terran Empire and the Domain of Ythri adjust their borders while the Merseian Roidhunate grows.

"A Tragedy of Errors": alliances are formed during the Long Night.

"The Night Face": a long isolated planet is re-contacted.

"The Sharing of Flesh": the Allied Planets re-civilize isolated planets.

"Starfog": humanity has spread through several spiral arms, the planet Vixen, which existed in the Flandry period, has established its own colony, appropriately called New Vixen, and a new era of immense wealth is about to begin.

"'Every end,' Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, ' is a new beginning."

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

Posting about the end of Anderson's Technic History recalled the end of Volume I of Blish's future history.

Living In Chaos

Today I have spent some time reading about conflicts on Earth Real, 2023, rather than about the Patrician System and the Terran Empire. (The difference is that fiction is enjoyable.)

At the midpoint of The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume III, Rise of the Terran Empire, Hloch closes The Earth Book of Stormgate, then Donvar Ayeghen, President of the Galactic Archaeological Society, introduces Rear Admiral John Henry Reeves' account of Manuel Argos, Founder of the Terran Empire. At a major turning point in Volume VII, Flandry's Legacy, we finish reading Poul Anderson's final account of the declining Terran Empire and turn to his single narrative set during the Long Night that follows the Fall of the Empire. Meanwhile, Anderson's readers are currently living during the Chaos that precedes the opening story of Volume I, The Van Rijn Method. Our experience can still - just - connect with this fictional future timeline. Thirty-two years separate us from "The Saturn Game." I hope to survive for at least another twenty-one years. During that time, will new space technologies ease the demand for resources and energy and permit exploration of the Solar System? - to paraphrase Sandra Miesel's introduction to her CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION.

The Real World And Time In Ys

I must mentally readjust back from a weekend spent discussing the state of the world to the fiction of Poul and Karen Anderson's The King of Ys. (Also physically tired from travel.)

To compare the present state of the world to Andersonian fiction:

In terms of the Technic History, the Chaos is accelerating. Resources from space are not being used to rescue the ecology and a new, Technic, civilization is not emerging to replace Western civilization.

The Psychotechnic History: World War III did not happen on schedule but might still happen and meanwhile global warming is destroying the environment. No new science of society has been discovered. The Solar System has not yet been colonized.

Flying Mountains: Gyrogravitics have not yet been discovered to facilitate asteroid colonization.

The King of Ys: Lir returns as sea levels rise at the end of the Age of the Fish? Also other demons?

On another note, I want to draw attention to two passages in The King of Ys. First:

"While he still had much to do, most of it of his own making, Gratillonius began discovering time for himself."

-Poul and Karen Anderson, Roma Mater (London, 1989), XX, 2, p. 351.

A page lists his activities:

visiting around town

sailing in the royal yacht

hunting or exploring on horseback beyond the Ysan frontier

sports

reading

passive leisure

drinking and talking late into the night

his own workshop - furniture and other gifts from the King

Secondly:

"The months wheeled onward, through winter and spring and again to summer."

-see here.

My current point is that these passages present plenty of time for additional narratives to be written about the lives of Gratillonius and others in Ys. A short story collection could fit in here.

The Time Of Troubles

 

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Solar Commonwealth covers only the Solar System - or maybe a little bit more? - so why should the Time of Troubles that follows the collapse of the Commonwealth encompass a volume of space stretching two hundred light years outward from Sol? We know that Aeneas in the Virgilian System was colonized very early, that it is two hundred light years from Sol, that it had to defend itself against alien marauders during the Troubles and that, since then, military training has been incorporated into the University curriculum in Nova Roma. It is that two-hundred-light-year-radius volume of space that becomes the extent of the Terran Empire that emerges from and ends the Troubles.

Think about the extra-solar planets that had been colonized and civilized during the Commonwealth period: Hermes; Aeneas; Altai; Ansa; Vixen; Dennitza; Esperance; Ramanujan; Hopewell; Germania; Nuevo Mexico. Does it seem likely that any of these planets is among those human colonies that became barbaric and that joined the Baldic League which invaded the Solar System and sacked Earth twice during the Troubles?

"The Star Plunderer," the only Technic History instalment to be set during the Troubles, was inappropriately included in a collection entitled The Long Night. The Long Night is the longer period of interstellar chaos that follows the Fall of the Terran Empire. "The Star Plunderer" has found its proper place as the fourth of six instalments collected in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire. Another appropriate place for this story would have been as the second of three stories to be collected in a volume intermediate between the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy and the Ythrian diptych in the original publishing order of the Technic History.

"The Star Plunderer" describes an interstellar scenario that is simply different both from the one described in the (earlier) Polesotechnic League series and from that described in the (later) Dominic Flandry Period series. Is this story a plausible intermediate stage?

Wars In Different Worlds

The War Of Two Worlds.

These Martians are humanoid, differing from Terrestrials only in details like height, colouration and number of fingers. Contrast Wells' version. It is plausible that this particular set of Andersonian Martians would be nicknamed "Marshies." (I, p. 10) Will we ever interact with extra-terrestrials in the same sort of way as we interact with each other: liking them, hating them, giving them nicknames etc? I doubt it but am prepared to be proved wrong at any time by a spaceship arriving in the Solar System.

The War Of Two Worlds, like Anderson's Psychotechnic History and Twilight World, begins among post-war ruins: two versions of World War III and the first war between worlds. Unfortunately, we currently see such ruins on TV news. That war has just passed its first anniversary. A rich world destroys thousands of lives and immense wealth.

In Manhattan, because there is no other means of transport, Arnfeld walks past gaunt buildings, empty windows, gaping doorways and shuffling pedestrians and through a raw, whimpering wind. Of course this wind whimpers. 

In Anderson's Technic History, Earth avoids World War III but suffers the Chaos now and is sacked during the Troubles and again during the Long Night. We see the ruins during the Troubles. Some scenes are common to many timelines.

Quieter Times

"The Plague of Masters" ends appropriately:

"[Flandry] stood for a time under the stars, breathing the night wind. Then faintly across ten kilometers, he heard the crash and saw the flare of guns." (XVI, p. 147)

Time, stars, wind and guns: basic themes.

Nias Warouw, who had wanted to remain a big man on a small planet, has no alternative but to seek his fortune elsewhere - yet another story that we would like to see continued.

The next instalment should be not "Hunters of the Sky Cave" but "The Game of Glory" but is it time to consider another future history for a while?

In the Psychotechnic History, we are interested in the, admittedly implausible, descriptions of technological progress so soon after World War III. That conflict occurred in a single year, 1958, when I was nine and attending a boarding school in Scotland. After that, everything diverged. One man's death matters. A different President matters. Hungary, Suez and Berlin have different outcomes. I am summarizing not Poul Anderson's texts but Sandra Miesel's italicized introduction. Miesel becomes the Hloch of the Psychotechnic History:

"1958, the year the H-bombs fell, set human history careening in a new direction. So obvious is this nexus, an entire genre of fantastic fiction asks the question, 'What if World War III had not happened?' Although romantics prefer to imagine alternative twentieth centuries as lost paradises of peace and plenty, the opposite is likelier to be true."

-Sandra Miesel, The Psychotechnic League IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Vollume 1 (New York, October 1017), pp. 3-4 AT p. 3.

"Nexus" is a key concept in Anderson's Time Patrol series. Miesel comments on our reality through a character in another reality, as Anderson does in "Eutopia." (And, in Alan Moore's Watchmen, a superhero comments that the US would have gone mad as nation if it had lost in Vietnam.)

Still citing Miesel:

Fourre struggles against "Chaos" (p. 19) although not "the Chaos" of the Technic History;

famine, plague, want and radioactivity are slowly conquered (well, not very slowly);

the Years of Hunger are followed by the Years of Madness - which sound like Heinlein's Crazy Years;

there are quieter times, global peace, prosperity, space exploration, the Psychotechnic Institute, happy developments...

Space and psyches are external and internal frontiers - or are they? Does this word apply to both? Physically, all that is inside our brains is interacting neurons but they somehow cause consciousness. Mobile organisms interacting with their environments become increasingly sensitive, then conscious, through neuronic interactions. If we understood this process, then we would understand ourselves.

Living In Myth

"'...that which was myth in one world might always be fact in another.' PERELANDRA"

-CS Lewis, "Forms of Things Unknown" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1977), pp. 124-132 AT p. 124.

- a perfect recipe for several fictional multiverses like the one associated with Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix.

In SM Stirling's Emberverse, when high tech stops working, the survivors revert to living in mythical, not historical, time. An early pivotal event becomes a defining myth. Some characters start living as if Tolkien's Middle Earth were true history, not fiction.

In Poul Anderson's The Night Face, the Gwydiona, inhabitants of the planet Gwydion, mythologize every experience. On a young planet, volcanic smoke carries deadly heavy metals. Travelers passing near a suddenly erupting volcano must run and take shelter in the Holy City which is usually entered only on an annual special occasion. However, they need not feel that this is inappropriate because, while they are running for their lives, their leader explains that, since the sudden volcanic eruption was an expression of the Night Face called Chaos, they can restore the balance by entering the Focus of God even when they are not God. In fact, by entering the City while they are merely human beings, they will enact a parable of human reason and science. This satisfies them.

The Concept Of Chaos

The war of Law and Chaos is waged in Poul Anderson's fantasies, Three Hearts And Three Lions and Operation Chaos.

Anderson's Time Patrol agents counteract temporal chaos.

Chaos is one of the Night Faces on the planet Gwydion in Anderson's The Night Face.

However, in some other novels by Anderson, the villains are those bureaucrats, ideologues or even artificial intelligences who regard human freedom as unpredictable and chaotic, therefore to be controlled and suppressed. 

Either way, chaos is clearly a key concept or set of concepts.

Takes On Time Travel

It would be true but misleading to say just that Poul Anderson wrote a lot of good time travel fiction. What is "time travel fiction" in some people's heads? Spaceships transport characters to adventures in space or on other planets and, similarly, time machines transport them to adventures in historical or future periods? Like the Time Traveller and the Doctor? Yes, in Anderson's "Flight to Forever," near future characters construct a long, cylindrical "time projector" and, travelling inside this primitive temporal vehicle, they explore the furthest future with several encounters and adventures en route.

But the Time Patrol series is the opposite of all that. A twentieth century man joins a time travelling organization founded in 19352 AD and, working for that organization, the Patrol, he conducts missions in several concretely realized historical periods. In The Corridors Of Time, another twentieth century man is drawn into a time war between two future civilizations whose representatives travel up and down history in corridors rotated onto the temporal axis. In There Will Be Time, a twentieth century man finds that he can time travel by an act of will. And that is not a complete list.

"Flight to Forever" is crude pulp magazine fiction especially when contrasted with the increasingly elaborate and sophisticated Time Patrol series. However, it includes several memorable passages, e.g.:

"...he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER THREE, p. 238.

"'...this last farewell to the days when we fought with our own hands, and fared between the stars, when we were a small band of sworn comrades whose dreams outstripped our strength.'"

-ibid., CHAPTER SIX, p. 275.

"CREATURE FROM OUT OF TIME, LEAVE THIS PLACE AT ONCE OR THE FORCES WE USE WILL DESTROY YOU!"

-ibid., p. 281.

"So good-by, Sol, he thought. Good-by, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend." (p. 284)

(Martin Saunders travels further than Wells' Time Traveller.)

And that is a good place to close for this evening.

Unbounded Darkness

"Star of the Sea," 6.

I have quoted the following passage before. It is one of Poul Anderson's finest.

"The Ambrosia dealt in Surinam-Caribbean food. On Stadhouderskade, in a quiet neighborhood near the Museumplein, it was intimate, right on a canal. Besides the pretty waitress, the black cook came forth to discuss their meal with them beforehand in fluent English. The wine was just right, too. Maybe the sense of evanescence, this warmth and light and savor no more than a moment in an unbounded darkness, something that could come to never having been, gave depth to pleasure." (p. 522)

This reads like a real experience.

The concluding sentence is a culmination of a pulp sf tradition in which time travellers change the past so that only they remember that which, to everyone else, has never been. But only Poul Anderson created an organization and a series based on that tradition.

The "unbounded darkness" recalls the "night and chaos of time" in Anderson's "Flight to Forever."

Three top stories by Anderson:

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" shows domestic life during the Solar Commonwealth, just as it was said that Robert Heinlein's Future History gave the future a daily life;

"Lodestar" shows social change in the Solar Commonwealth through the prism of the generation gap between van Rijn and his granddaughter;

"Star of the Sea" shows us, among several other things, late twentieth century Amsterdam.

Chaos And Law And Order

In Michael Moorcock's multiverse: Lords of Law against Lords of Chaos.

In the DC Comics multiverse: Lords of Order against Lords of Chaos.

In Poul Anderson's multiverse: Law against Chaos.

In a single but mutable timeline: the Time Patrol against chaos.

"...Superman...seemed forever to be slugging it out with the forces of Chaos."

-Elliott S! Maggin, Superman: Miracle Monday (Caveat Corner Books, 2017), Chapter 8, p. 79.

More late night other but blog-relevant reading. Although a prose novel, Miracle Monday shares the continuity of the second of the three listed multiverses.

Anderson's works are as far-reaching although comparatively understated.

And Gods

Late last night, I forgot two other bizarre comparisons for the previous post:

Mike Carey's Lucifer, now Machiavellian rather than malevolent, advises a British schoolgirl, Elaine Belloc, when she succeeds her grandfather as God;

when James Blish's Satan succeeds the previous incumbent as God, the theological revolution affects even the text which changes from punctuated prose to indented prose to Miltonic verse to a drama script.

For once, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, in which the Adversary is routinely defeated, seems almost tame by comparison! But, as this blog shows, Anderson excels in most aspects of imaginative fiction, e.g., time travel, future histories, cosmological sf and historical fantasies.

Good And Bad On Both Sides?

See A Cosmos Of Enemies.

Sheldon Wyler and his ultimate employers, the Seven In Space, are unscrupulous and Merseian aristocrats become enemies of mankind so you might ask: who is good among the enemies of the League? Well, van Rijn transforms the Baburites into customers and Anderson manages to transform even that arch-schemer, Benoni Strang, into a partially sympathetic character right at the end. Also "enemies of the League" potentially include members of all those societies that the League leaves behind in its accumulation of wealth. Clearly, Wyler means to include such societies in his remarks. Some of these societies band together into Supermetals but others might have joined the Baburites. Potentially - only potentially - David Falkayn became an enemy of the League when he was moved to break his oath of fealty to van Rijn. That action could have resulted in an open conflict between Falkayn and his fellow Master Merchants. Fortunately, van Rijn was flexible enough to accommodate that situation.

Manse Everard broke the laws of the Time Patrol but in circumstances that made the Danellians recognize his worth on their side of the war against temporal chaos. And these reflections have again taken us past midnight. Good night.

The Eyrie And The Future

There Will Be Time, XII.

Partly because some important facts are being concealed from him, Jack Havig needs a lot of time to learn what is wrong with Caleb Wallis's time traveling organization, the Eyrie. As Havig says to Robert Anderson:

"'Think, Doc. Recall how intelligent men like, well, Bertrand Russell or Henry Wallace took extensive tours of Stalin's Russia, and came home to report that it did have its problems but those had been exaggerated and were entirely due to extraneous factors and a benevolent government was coping with everything. Don't forget, either, the chances are that most of their guides did think this, and were in full sincerity obeying instructions to shield a foreign visitor from what he might misinterpret.'" (p. 88)

This is one of my fears for the future: a repeat of Russia, friends and comrades urging us to support a dictatorship, even denying that it is a dictatorship or claiming that it is "Only for the duration..." See More Latin. But I think that a mere collapse of the present system is much more probable. Can we expect a continued Chaos with no dawn of Technic civilization, a Time of Troubles with no Manuel Argos or a Long Night with no later civilizations, a negative Technic History?

Meanwhile, Wallis turns out to be a white supremacist and Hitler admirer who threatens Havig with torture and mutilation if he does not cooperate. Enough said. In fact, way more than enough said.

Cross-Temporal Comparisons

From tomorrow, we will be at a holiday venue near here for six nights and I will be hoping for an Internet connection. Without that, the blog will revert to "...the night and chaos of time..." (see here) for a while.

Let us compare and contrast:

the Time Traveler on the Time Machine;

a Time Patrolman on a timecycle;

the Doctor in the TARDIS;

Martin Saunders in the time projector.

 

First, the Time Traveler and the Doctor are universally recognized whereas Anderson's characters are anything but. However, they are eminently comparable.

The Time Traveler visits AD 802,701 and successive periods of the "Further Vision" and returns to the late nineteenth century.

The Time Patrolmen that we know visit mainly prehistory and history but also present a patchy future history. See The Time Patrol Timeline.

Martin Saunders visits many periods of a very long future history before returning to 1973 around the circle of time. See "Flight To Forever" Timeline, Part I, here, and Part II, here.

The Doctor visited first the Terrestrial Stone Age and secondly the planet Skaro, inhabited by Daleks and Thals, and thereafter, for many seasons, alternated between historical and future or extraterrestrial settings. Thus, a future history could have been constructed although one of the writers, Terrance Dicks, told some of us, including Tom Disch, in a pub conversation during the Lancaster Literature Festival years ago that consistency was not maintained. Doctor Who, like Star Trek and Superman, has untapped potential.

Some Say...

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

The Wild Hunters are described as anguished and damned. (p. 151) The Carolingian universe embodies a Christian judgment upon a folklore motif.

"Swiftly, swiftly, over the rime-gray wold, under the last stormclouds and the sinking moon, gallop, gallop, gallop." (p. 151)

The Hunters are in the sky, where their horses' hoofs somehow manage to be audible, whereas those who gallop across the wold are Holger, Carahue and Alianora, fleeing before the Hunt. Holger tells his horse that:

"'...we ride against striding Time, we ride against marching Chaos.'" (ibid.)

Dominic Flandry shows us that the Long Night can be delayed but not prevented.

At the end of this last chapter - which is followed by a two-page "NOTE" -, Poul Anderson steps back from his narrative about a man who remembers a life as a twentieth century engineer. When he lifts the sword Cortana, Holger Danske/Ogier le Danois sheds his magical disguise and is recognized by Carahue as he regains his memory and knows himself. Anderson relays to his readers two alternative accounts of what others say about the Defender:

"...some say he waits in timeless Avalon until France the fair is in danger...
"...some say he sleeps beneath Kronborg Castle and wakens in the hour of Denmark's need..." (p. 154)

This is true and not fiction. It is true that some have said that Ogier is in Avalon whereas others have said that he is beneath Kronborg.

This exactly corresponds to the way in which Thomas Malory concludes his account of King Arthur:

"...some men say in many parts of England that Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again...

"...many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS."
-see Grallon And Arthur.

Anderson returns to his narrative for a single sentence:

"He rode out on the wold, and it was as if dawn rode with him." (p. 154)

Thus, we step out of fiction, then back into it. Anderson's "Star of the Sea" alternates between different kinds of writing:

reimagined mythologies;
historical fiction;
science fiction;
a prayer.