Evolution And Devolution II

The previous post also omitted these comparisons:

Poul Anderson presents mankind evolving into physically time traveling Danellians;

earlier, Olaf Stapledon had presented mankind evolving into mentally time traveling Last Men;

earlier again, HG Wells had presented mankind devolving into Time Traveler-visited Morlocks and Eloi.

Beautiful contrasts! Wells and Stapledon are universally recognized as major science fiction writers. Anderson should be similarly recognized. His Danellians are literary successors and conceptual sequels to the Morlocks and Eloi and to the Last Men.

And now I must return to other tasks, possibly also meditation group this evening since there will be a visit by a monk. And Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy deserves a post on another blog.

For something on Millennium, see here. 

Evolution And Devolution

HG Wells imagined:

in a paradisal Terrestrial environment, social classes devolving into distinct species, Morlocks and Eloi, the former eating the latter;

Martians degenerating into machine-protected brains living by extracting blood from humanoid organisms;

Selenites artificially adapting members of their species solely to perform specific industrial tasks.

Aldous Huxley imagined future humanity adapting its members for socially stratified roles.

Olaf Stapledon imagined:

eighteen successive human species;

some artificially adapted to inhabit Venus and Neptune;

Neptunians devolving into animality and later re-evolving intelligence.

Poul Anderson continued such evolutionary speculations by imagining extrasolar planetary environments, then explaining why, e.g., his fictional Diomedeans and Ythrians had evolved as they did in their particular environments. Thus, Anderson is Wellsian and Stapledonian. In his Harvest Of Stars future history, artificially adapted and specialized human beings have become redundant and are ghettoized.

SM Stirling's alternative histories include one in which Mars and Venus are humanly habitable because they were somehow terraformed a long time ago but I have yet to read any installments of this series.

(I did not want to go upstairs to check how many future human species Stapledon had imagined so I googled it instead. I will devolve into a brain attached to a finger pressing a keypad.)

Addendum, 18 Mar: Regular readers might notice that I have added a sentence to the paragraph about Anderson. It is difficult to remember every relevant detail while posting. Today is likely to be taken up with chores and preparation for a Latin class tomorrow, thus less time for posting.

Stapledon To Stirling

The alert reader will have noticed that the previous post did not refer to Poul Anderson. However, it did highlight two major stages of a literary process in which Anderson's role is pivotal.

Olaf Stapledon - a major post-Wells future history;
a cosmic history.

Poul Anderson - every kind of science fiction, including:

Tau Zero, its time scale modeled on Stapledon's future and cosmic histories;

a major post-Heinlein future history;

several works set in alternative timelines.

SM Stirling - a specialist in long series set in alternative timelines.

Although Stirling is not the only alternative historian, he is the one who has so far caught my attention with his The Peshawar Lancers, dedicated to (and worthy of) Poul Anderson.

Trust

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

I think that the secular bases of morality are as follows:

we were naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and we experience this motivation as moral obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like when expressed in biological terms;

as members of a social species, we have collective interests, like speaking a common language, that transcend a simplistic selfishness-altruism dichotomy.

It follows that lists of commandments and precepts are formulations of an evolved morality, not divine instructions. However, could humanity lose its moral basis?

"When men hunted each other to eat, there could be no trust, and trust was what let even the wildest men work together. Usually man-eaters had no groupings larger than an extended family, and often they barely retained the use of speech and fire. Human beings were not meant to live like that..." (pp. 118-119)

Loss of speech would be loss of humanity. In Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men, Venerian human beings artificially adapted in haste to colonize Neptune spread across the Neptunian surface but degenerated into animality, one species retaining the custom of gathering in a circle to hear a single individual howl. Later, quadrupeds migrating into an area dense with tall plants began to walk upright, thus freeing forelimbs for manipulation and growing new fingers above the vestigial digits of their ancestors.

Stirling's cannibals have not degenerated that far yet but, if they lose speech entirely, then they will no longer be human.

Histories Future And Alternative

How are future histories and alternative histories connected? First, both are fictions. Secondly, Wells wrote both. I have mentioned his future history often enough. Men Like Gods is a novel about a visit to a parallel Earth. A Modern Utopia is a speculative discussion of an alternative history.

American sf writers followed Wells. Robert Heinlein's Future History and Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History were neither prophecies nor predictions but nevertheless were each intended as a fictitious account of one single linear future timeline. When our future had become our present and had diverged from the fictions, then the future histories retroactively became alternative histories. To prevent this from happening again, Anderson started his Technic History further in the future.

An alternative history can be presented as such without having to be a future history first. SM Stirling's Angrezi Raj timeline diverged in 1878. His "Shikari in Galveston" contains many passages narrated from the point of view not of the visiting Imperials but of the North American natives, thus presenting a more rounded account of this alternative Earth, although there still remain many other countries that Stirling could show us.

The natives have reverted to patronymics. "Robre sunna Jowan" is "Robre, son of Jowan" and "Sonjuh dowtra Pehte" is "Sonjuh, daughter of Pehte." I still have fifty pages to read so I expect to learn more about the Second British Empire.

Worlds And Words

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

Science fiction writers show words changing their meanings in the future. In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig, time traveling to his future, meets a young woman who, when asked what she does with her time, replies that she jokes a lot. An amateur comedienne? However, when she and he share a picnic with no one else present, she announces that she had figured they could joke after eating but why not before and after?

(Addendum, 15 Mar: Also highly relevant is Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors." See comments.)

In Neil Gaiman's sequel to Alan Moore's Miracleman, "London" means an event as "Hiroshima" does for us and "Kidding" has become a swear word because of what the Kid did in London. (Alan Moore had asked, "What would someone with Superman's strength and speed but not his scruples do?" He then answered this question with extremely detailed instructions to a comic strip artist.)

In SM Stirling's "Shikari in Galveston," a Bengali trader surprises us by telling Eric King that the local savages "'...are a clean people...'" (p. 80) Clean? King has just complained of sweat, squalor, smoke, sewage and stink. However, the trader's use of the word "clean" does not refer to hygiene. He spells it out:

"'From the time of the Fall.'" (ibid.)

King understands:

"King nodded...that was one of the fundamental distinctions in the modern world, between those whose ancestors had eaten men in the terrible years after the hammer from the skies struck, and those who hadn't. The only more fundamental one was between those who still did, and the rest of humanity." (ibid.)

And I am certain that the use of the word "clean" would be extended in precisely this way in those circumstances.

Tomorrow there will be a family outing for Mothers' Day (we have two mothers in the household) so maybe not much time for posting. Before turning in this evening, I have had to stop reading Stieg Larsson in order to post and must now stop posting in order to watch Smallville. Retirement, as expected, is an endless choice between enjoyable activities.

A World That Wasn't

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

In fiction, there are three kinds of history: past, future and alternative. Much of Poul Anderson's fiction is set in the past or the future with a smaller number of works set in alternative timelines, including one series with magical instead of scientific technology in the twentieth century.

Later science fiction writers, Harry Turtledove and SM Stirling, have specialized in the third kind of history, each generating several lengthy series set in divergent timelines. Worlds That Weren't is an anthology of original alternative history stories by four different authors. SM Stirling comments in his afterword, pp. 149-152, that "Alternative history has many uses..." (p. 149) and that one such use is to restore the terra incognita that our twentieth century banished from Earth and even from Mars and Venus. An even more fundamental use is to remind us that our timeline, in which an asteroid killed the dinosaurs but no such catastrophe has as yet killed humanity, is just one of many possibilities.

We know of Stirling's Angrezi Raj timeline from 1878, the point of divergence, to 2025. In "Shikari in Galveston," Eric King and Ranjit Singh, both of the Peshawar Lancers, are in North America during the reign of Queen-Empress Elizabeth II (1989-2005). In The Peshawar Lancers, their sons, Athelstane King and Narayan Singh, also both of the Peshawar Lancers, are in India at the end of the reign of King-Emperor John II (2005-2025) and at the beginning of the reign of King-Emperor Charles III (2025- ). Narayan, but not Eric, survives into the later narrative. Eric never suspects that his daughter, Athelstane's sister, will become Queen-Empress.

These two works, set in different continents, are separated by a generation and thus are well on their way towards becoming a fictitious history. I have yet to read "Shikari..." to its conclusion - but it must compete for reading time since I have been drawn back into Stieg Larsson's trilogy!

Eclipse And Universes

We have a near total eclipse due next Friday morning - a sufficiently Andersonian event, I think - so I will be asked to drive the family to a suitable observation point.

Right now, I am passing back and forth between several fictional universes:

the Terran Federation of Poul Anderson's The Star Fox and Fire Time;

the Angrezi Raj of SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers and "Shikari in Galveston";

Stieg Larsson's Millennium;

the Smallville, Metropolis and Arctic Fortress of the Smallville TV series.

Copyright permitting, a fictional character would also be able to travel between these and other such universes. If I were able to write fiction, I would do Jane Austen's Mr Collins en route to dine with his Patroness the Right Honorable Lady Catherine de Burgh at Rosings only to encounter a time traveling Batman who would need his help but whom he would regard as a demon.

Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix scenario easily allows for any and all such bizarre inter-cosmic encounters.

Previous Other Reading

(The image shows Manchester Central Library.)

Everyone who reads one author also reads others, usually. Any writer's works are read not in a vacuum but in a particular social and literary context which differs for each reader. For example, I reread Poul Anderson's Fire Time in Lancaster while remembering a Stieg Larsson thriller whereas someone else might read Anderson's Tau Zero for the first time in New York while remembering a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott. Etc. Each reader of this post can fill in their own details.

Thus, Poul Anderson fans can discuss:

Which other authors do you read?
Are they connected?
If so, how?
Do they come before or after each other in a literary sequence? (I have discussed this a lot.)
Which authors seem to be completely unconnected? (We look for connections because nothing exists in isolation from everything else.)

In this vein, I have occasionally mentioned other reading on the blog:

Montalbano;
David Attenborough;
PG Wodehouse;
Iain M Banks;
Tolkien;
Virgil;
Modesty Blaise;
Stieg Larsson -

- and, in many of these cases, I have found comparisons to make with Poul Anderson.

Other Reading

Having watched the Swedish film, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I have got into rereading the novel which is long and volume I of a trilogy. Thus, maybe less time posting on this blog for a while. However, the anthology containing SM Stirling's one other work set in the Angrezi Raj has been ordered and there are still several NESFA collections of Poul Anderson's shorter works to track down.

I have previously discussed how to film scenes from two of Anderson's works - Mirkheim and "The Game of Glory." The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a British TV serialization of Pride And Prejudice and some other TV dramatizations are sufficient proof that a novel can be accurately adapted from page to screen, despite all appearances to the contrary.

In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the story is shortened merely in order to reduce it to the length required for a cinema film. However, I think that any filmed adaptation of a novel should be a serial, whether it is made for the large or the small screen. Authentic dramatizations of Anderson's Time Patrol series and Technic History and of SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers (dedicated to Anderson) would be awesome.