Njord And Nerthus

In SM Stirling's Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter One, p. 27, the god Njord is addressed as the brother of Nerthus. I think that Njord and Nerthus are male and female versions of the same deity. See Oland And Gods, where Nerthus is referred to as Niaerdh. For earlier blog references, see:

Njord (scroll down)
Nerthus (also the name of a planet) (scroll down)
Niaerdh

"'Nerthus - Naerdha - is still female. In centuries ahead, she will become male, the Eddic god Njordh...'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT p. 566.

Njord is the hero of Anderson's War Of The Gods and a prophetess of Niaerdh is a heroine in "Star of the Sea." Njord and Nerthus are remembered as distinct deities and also regarded as brother and sister in Stirling's Emberverse.

Memory Lane And The Path To Enlightenment

Today I attended the Festival of the Buddha's Enlightenment and imagined Adzel joining us although he would not have fitted up the stairs or through the door of the Meditation Hall. Also, would an upper floor support a Wodenite's weight?

En route to the monastery, we turned off the M6 Motorway at Penrith where I grew up and first read:

The Caves Of Steel by Isaac Asimov;
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester;
Seed Of Light by Edmund Cooper;
Orphans Of The Sky by Robert Heinlein;
The Guardians Of Time by Poul Anderson.

I was impressed to read adult prose fiction about spaceships etc and with the ideas of:

a self-conscious robot;
a society based on teleportation;
circular causality;
a generation ship;
a time travel police force.

Maybe a Poul Anderson fan cannot go anywhere without being somehow reminded of the Technic History or the Time Patrol?

A distant past, the eternal present and an uncertain future - to switch from the Buddha Dharma to the Ythrian New Faith, the shadow of God the Hunter lies across our way of life.

War Commentary

Fictional characters wage war and comment on it.

"War was waste. His parents had told him that more than once, and now he was seeing it with his own eyes."
-SM Stirling, Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter One, p. 12.

"'...as a psychographic historian I realized that the war, poverty, and tyranny which cursed us were not due to any innate evil in man but to simple cause and effect. Machine technology had risen in a world divided against itself, and war grew to be an ever larger and more destructive enterprise. There had been periods of peace, even fairly long ones; but the disease was too deep-rooted, conflict was a part of our very civilization.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT p. 39.

- part of our civilization but there are different actual and possible civilizations. I saw a TV discussion that counterposed peaceful civilization to violent humanity whereas, of course, humanity built the civilization and particular civilizations cause violence, e.g., conflicts for raw materials, trade routes and markets.

Despite the historically recent American Civil War, it is now unthinkable that North and South should go to war. Despite the historically recent World War II, it is now unthinkable that Germany and France should go to war. Such unthinkability can be extended globally.

Soon away on a day trip. Maybe post this evening.

Regeneration

Currently on British television, the Doctor is about to regenerate for the twelfth time. A character who can periodically change script writers and actors can continue indefinitely. In British culture, the two principal time travellers are HG Wells' Time Traveller and the Doctor.

Readers of prose sf acknowledge the Time Traveller and add a few more like Poul Anderson's Manse Everard. Unfortunately, neither Wells' nor Anderson's characters can continue in the way that the Doctor does although a few sequels have been written. But Everard does not need to "regenerate" since he is a beneficiary of the Time Patrol's longevity treatment. We know that he must have vacated his New York apartment by about 2000 but would then have moved elsewhere/when and continued to work for the Patrol. The Time Patrol series, although long, filling two thick volumes, cannot match Doctor Who for quantity, number of instalments, but greatly exceeds it in quality. I have to accept that I will never read any more about the Patrol written by Anderson - but will probably not watch the Doctor's regeneration in his Christmas Day Special.

Tea Or Coffee Again

I have finished rereading Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer so, before turning in, I want to (re)read something different, a contemporary thriller instead of sf although I think that there is only a thin line between them. A novel set now assumes satellite and computer technology that was sf until late in the twentieth century. I also need to stop blogging a short while before trying to sleep so here is a parting shot. Characters in a Swedish novel are always switching on their coffee machines. We discussed the choice between tea and coffee here.

For blog references to coffee, see here (scroll down) and for tea, see here (again, scroll down). There should be more references to coffee than to tea although I am not about to count.

Endings

For the end of Poul Anderson's The Star Fox, see here. Heim thinks:

"Life isn't a fairy tale..."

For the end of Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer, see here. Fraser thinks:

"Life isn't a a story book..."

For the end of Anderson's The Game Of Empire, and thus also of his Dominic Flandry series, see:

Flandry's Testament
Flandry And Bond II (also the end of the Bond series)
The Wisdom Of Flandry

Flandry says:

"'We play the game move by move...the game of empire, of life, whatever you want to call it...what the score will be...who knows?'"

None of them promises us a happy ending - but we enjoy the game.

The Evolution Of The "Hidden Folk" On Jupiter

Poul Anderson's Ythrians have no legs properly so called but walk awkwardly on the tips of their wings and are primarily fliers.

How did the Jovian "Hidden Folk" evolve with legs? What was there for them to stand or walk on in the sky before they built an aerial town from hovering plants?

How did the Hidden Folk develop opposable thumbs? How does any animal? Based on something that I had read, I used to think that, on Earth:

quadrupeds evaded predators by climbing into trees;
they stayed in the trees long enough to develop opposable thumbs for grasping branches;
also, in the trees, they were free to chatter, which is the physical basis of language;
descending from the trees, their descendants walked upright with forelimbs freed to grasp, manipulate and make tools;
they also cooperated and conversed, thus becoming human beings.

Now I am told that the evidence indicates that bipedality preceded opposable thumbs so where did the bipedality come from? Once bipedality did exist, natural selection would favor the ability to manipulate the environment.

Jupiter Then And Now

Internal structure

Jupiter is thought to consist of a dense core with a mixture of elements, a surrounding layer of liquid metallic hydrogen with some helium, and an outer layer predominantly of molecular hydrogen.^[37] Beyond this basic outline, there is still considerable uncertainty. The core is often described as rocky, but its detailed composition is unknown, as are the properties of materials at the temperatures and pressures of those depths
-copied from Wiki.

In Poul Anderson's Three World's To Conquer (London, 1966), Chapter 15, p. 105, Jupiter has:

a metallic core;
thousands of miles of solid hydrogen;
a shell of ice.

When an equilibrium is broken so that the pressure in one volume drops below a critical value, a mass of ice changes to a less dense crystalline phase in a large explosion. Liquefied water bursts through the planetary surface, cooling and congealing into the mountainous cone of a volcano. Thus, Jovian volcanoes are molten water whereas seas and clouds are ammonia.

Down To Jupiter II

OK. I do not follow all the technicalities here:

the shell catches rain;
a volcano provides heat;
heat boils away ammonia, leaving raw sodium;
Theor throws pieces of sodium into the volcano, causing explosions;
these flashes of light duplicate a military drummer's call for help;
the Nyarran army sees the signal and sends forgar riders to rescue their Reeve.

After an epic journey, Theor is reunited with his people. Now he and Mark Fraser have only thirty six pages left in which to win their respective wars.

Tomorrow, I will be on a day trip to the monastery so there will be less time for blogging.

Down To Jupiter

Poul Anderson, Three Worlds To Conquer, Chapter 15.

Anticlimax: Theor is back down on the Jovian surface. However, his trip through the sky has served its purpose. We have been given an overview not of history but of evolution:

life probably began at high altitudes;

Nyarrans and Ulunt-Khazul are different species of the same genus whereas the Hidden Folk are not even of the same phylum;

their common ancestor was an animalcule.

Theor is now in a forest of thick-boled yorwar trees with hollow upward-floating branches and lung-like leafs that build complex molecules out of methane and ammonia, releasing hydrogen. This photosynthesis, dependent on synchroton radiation, lightning and the sun, requires maximized internal surface. The trees are low but many.

Rocks, comprising water crystallized with silicon and magnesium compounds, shatter like obsidian, providing Theor with a coup de poing and spearheads. With the hand-ax, he makes a shaft from a larrik bush and secures one of the points with fibers from the plant. Then he follows the track of a skalpad, a large, shelled, six-legged animal, drives his spear first into its throat pouch, then into an eye, finally killing the animal with repeated blows from the ax. He wants both its meat to eat raw - Jovians do not yet cook much - and its shell for another purpose.