Political Heroes

Fictional heroes include not only soldiers and swordsmen but also skillful political leaders who sometimes get beneficial measures passed through hostile assemblies, e.g.:

Poul and Karen Anderson's King Grallon of Ys;
the French representative in the World Federation Parliament (see here);
James Blish's Mayor John Amalfi of the Okie city of New York;
SM Stirling's High King of Montival;
Neil Gaiman's version of the comic book teenage President, Prez;
no doubt many others that I have not thought of.

Such fiction addresses an important question: what do people expect from their leaders and how much can the leaders deliver?

"...Few Enough Of Us Around..."

In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, Hanno follows every rumor or clue that might lead him to a fellow immortal. When at last he succeeds, elaborate circumlocutions are necessary before the truth can be divulged. Even then, caution and suspicion keep them apart for nearly another millennium. At last, Hanno convenes a small group.

However, after many centuries of outliving mortals, might two immortals not be able to recognize each other at a glance? In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Wake, Hob Gadling travels as the single passenger on a cargo-carrying tall ship which he discretely owns. Only the captain knows that the passenger is also the owner. When a stowaway is apprehended, the captain would put him off at Aden. However, Gadling has a word and the Indian gentleman's passage is paid. Gadling has instantly recognized a fellow immortal.

"There's few enough of us around. Least we can do is watch out for each other."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Wake (New York, 1994), p. 88.

A good philosophy - to be extended to all of humanity, of course, especially to the unfortunate mortals...

Sea Flows; Wind Blows

A passage in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End struck me as evocative and Andersonian - and also familiar, as if I had posted about it before. I had. See Wild Wind And Wild Magic.

In the Bible, the sea represents precosmic chaos. In Poul Anderson's works, the wind sometimes represents the elements that pre-existed and still threaten civilization. See The Wind II. The wind wails in pathetic fallacies and almost becomes a character although I would have to search further to find the posts where I discussed the almost-personified wind. There is a lot about the wind (search result) on the blog.

Later: See the role of the wind in Marital Rape, in Prose Packed With Meaning and in Ys Gleams; Wind Mourns.

The title of this post refers to Portrait Of Jennie.

After Or Between

See A Midsummer Tempest X.

Rereading Neil Gaiman's Worlds' End, I again compare Gaiman's Inn at the End of All Worlds with Anderson's inn between the worlds. For some comparisons, see the above link. (Douglas Adams has a Restaurant at the End of the Universe but that is a different kind of place.)

Anderson's Taverners have a charter once granted by some power unknown whereas Gaiman's Indian landlady came to her inn from another journey that still awaits her when she tires of working in the inn. She allows one guest, Charlene Mooney, to stay and work there with the result that, when Charlene's traveling companion returns home, he finds that there is no record of there ever having been a Charlene Mooney. He has returned to a world like the one he left. Maybe Charlene will eventually replace the current landlady.

When the current landlady raises her right arm, the shadow of a left arm appears on the wall behind her. She is, appropriately, the four-armed Kali, Goddess of Destruction. There is devotion to Hindu deities in SM Stirling's Angrezi Raj. See Religious Diversity II and Krishna.

The Feelings Of A Time Patrol Operative And A Japanese Empress

"'An operative who had no emotions about the human beings encountered on a mission would be...defective. Worthless, or downright dangerous.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part One, p. 5.

"...ninjo, feelings and compassion...that must have its place too, or you become an empty suit of armor that walks and kills, and then a blight upon the world."
-SM Stirling, Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter Eighteen, p. 378.

History, Holmes And The Hound

This evening, as an alternative to reading or blogging, I watched television for a while and, of course, found something relevant. Tony Robinson of the Time Team which we mentioned here walks through historical Britain (see here) and, in an episode shown this evening, visited Cromer where Sheila and I on holiday two years ago learned something that was directly relevant to Sherlock Holmes and thus indirectly relevant to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol. See here.

Since Holmes exists in the Time Patrol timeline, so must the Hound of the Baskervilles. However, contrary perhaps to some popular misconceptions, this "Hound" is not supernatural. Doyle believed in Spiritualism but kept Holmes scientific and secularist. The Hound Of The Baskervilles is said to be the most often filmed novel and one film version introduces a seance in Baskerville Hall - kind of appropriate in one way though not in another. In any case, the Time Patrol series remains historical sf, not fantasy, and is not tainted with supernaturalism by its inclusion of the Great Detective who debunked the Hound.

The ERBian Dimension II

I do not think that Poul Anderson refers anywhere to ERB? We have listed Old Phoenix guests in:

Guests In The Old Phoenix
Guests In The Old Phoenix II
Guests In The Old Phoenix III
Open To Everything
Multiverse
A Lensman In The Old Phoenix
A Large Gathering In The Old Phoenix
Anonymous Historical Characters
Anonymous Historical Characters II
Anonymous Historical Characters III
Anonymous Historical Characters IV 
The Old Phoenix

- and they did not include Greystoke or Carter etc.

SM Stirling wrote an ERBian pastiche - see A Paxton and the link from it - and this is the sort of thing that Anderson would have done. I have argued that an Andersonian rationale of ERB's absurdities would have been a good idea. See here.

The ERBian Dimension

When we discuss the works of Poul Anderson and of related authors, new portals continually open onto vast vistas of unexplored territory - or onto texts read once decades ago which therefore seem new now.

A passage in Poul Anderson's "House Rule" (see here) reminded me of ERB's The Moon Men, Chapter I, because the latter contains a first person account of an Arctic adventure initially involving Eskimos. However, ERB's narrator had not had a forced landing.

The Moon Men was published in 1925;

Chapter I is set in 1969;

its opening paragraph refers to the "...close of the Great War..." (p. 7) in 1967;

Chapter II begins:

"I was born in the Teivos of Chicago on January 1st, 2100..."
-Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Men (New York, Ace Books, undated), p. 18.

Thus, ERB, like several more recent authors, wrote a future history series:

Heinlein's Future History Volumes I and II cover the period from 1951 to 2000 whereas Volume III is Revolt In 2100;

in James Blish's Chronology of Cities In Flight, 2105 was an agreed arbitrary date for the Fall of the West;

in the Chronology of Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the Solar Union is founded in 2105.

Future histories unfailingly fascinate.

Nexus

In Poul Anderson's works, a "nexus" can be within a timeline or between universes. At a nexus within a timeline, it is very easy for a time traveler or a quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy to change the entire future. Therefore, the Time Patrol polices these nexuses. At a nexus between universes, inter-cosmic travelers can meet and might gain knowledge that would change the entire futures of their timelines. Therefore, Taverner polices the conversations in his Inn of the Old Phoenix which occupies one such nexus. Thus, there is a conceptual continuity between the mutable timeline of the Time Patrol and the multiple timelines of the Old Phoenix.

There are limits both on how long guests can stay in the Old Phoenix and on how often they can visit it. The narrator of "House Rule" suspects that:

"...the hostel exists on several different space-time levels of its own." (p. 65)

- but I do not know what this means or why it should affect guests' visits.

Anderson's Time Patrol guards a past;
James Blish's Service guards a future;
Taverner guards many pasts and futures.

Thus, one man has a bigger job than two organizations.

Notes On "House Rule"

Poul Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, The Armies Of Elfland (New York, 1992), pp. 64-76.

In this edition, Anderson, introducing the story, tells us that:

"That inn beyond every world, the Old Phoenix, first appeared in my Shakespearean fantasy novel, A Midsummer Tempest." (. 64)

He adds:

"I have returned to it a couple of times and hope to do so again." (ibid.)

A Midsummer Tempest is copyright 1974;
"House Rule" is copyright 1976;
"Losers' Night" is copyright 1991.

These are the only Old Phoenix stories that I know of, which implies that Anderson had not returned to the Old Phoenix before writing "House Rule." (?)

He had hoped to return to it again! The Old Phoenix deserves at least a single volume entirely to itself.

The narrator of "House Rule" had been on "...a flight which had been forced down above the Arctic Circle..." (p. 69), where some Eskimos had been helpful. This does not sound like Poul Anderson but does it sound like an adventure of ERB in the introductory passage of his second Moon book? (I am not going to look that up right now.)

On this occasion in the Old Phoenix:

"The talk was mainly Leonardo's. Given a couple of goblets of wine to relax him, his mind soared and ranged like an eagle in a high wind." (p. 66)

A striking simile. I want to comment on some other aspects of the story but find that I have already done so. See Open To Everything.

Addendum: OK. The Armies Of Elfland is copyright 1992. Thus, when Anderson wrote that he had returned to the Old Phoenix a couple of times, he was referring to "House Rule" and "Losers' Night."