A Hunnish World View

Uldin the Hun reflects:

"Abide, he told himself. Honor the Powers and the ancestors, stand by your Shanyu and do his will as you expect your household to do yours, steer your affairs wisely. Then who knows what might come your way?
"And the vortex took him."
-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis, CHAPTER TWO, p. 16.

The "vortex" takes Uldin into the past. This single-sentence paragraph announcing the vortex is an ironic answer to the question that ends the preceding paragraph. Similarly, on p. 14, Oleg smiles "...at everything which lay in his tomorrows..." and the vortex takes him; on p. 20, Erissa asks "'...God Duncan...'" when he will call her back to him and the vortex takes her.

Uldin acknowledges:

the Powers;
the ancestors;
his ruler;
wisdom.

Natural forces transcend human understanding and control.
Language and other inherited skills enable us to transcend animality.
The rule of men preceded the rule of law.
However, a household, and a realm, can be ruled wisely, not just by individual self-will.

Cross, Sun And Sea

"Through the wan light he saw her kiss her amulet and trace a sign amidst shadow, a cross, the sun's emblem."
-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977), CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 54.

See earlier references to the cross and the sun here.

Duncan and Erissa are onboard ship where he:

sees waves ripple and swirl;
hears timbers creak, stays hum, sheets snap and the sail thutter;
feels mild and lively air;
smells sun-baked pitch, ozone and salt.

He reflects that no historical fiction "...could give him the total reality...." (p. 51)

Odysseus

This blog has a lot of references to Odysseus. I said a couple of times that Poul Anderson refers to Odysseus twice but I have now found a third reference. In The Dancer From Atlantis, CHAPTER SIX:

"...Troy was a strong and prosperous city-state; but here before [Reid] stood the Achaeans - Danaans, Argives, Hellenes - the forebears of Agamemnon and Odysseus." (p. 48)

Can Reid change the Iliad or the Odyssey? No. He will struggle to survive and to return home. But he will succeed and will be commended by a futurian time traveler.

After only two posts this evening, I would like to write more but, after a long day out, it is getting late for blogging and I have learned the advisability of switching off the lap top before now.

Rereading The Dancer From Atlantis generates as many posts as Anderson's other time travel novels.

Oleg And Duncan

(Kiev.)

Does this exchange sound familiar?

"'A golden chalice set with precious stones for the Church of St. Boris. Six altar cloths of the finest silk, and scores of pearls sewn on, for St. Mary.' He paused. 'I'd best say that in Russian and Romaic too. And, oh, yes, Norse.'
"Reid couldn't resist japing: 'Your saints have not been born.'
"Oleg looked stricken. The American added hastily, 'Well, I could be wrong, I suppose.' No sense in pointing out that Christ - that Abraham, most likely - was also in the future."
-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977), CHAPTER SIX, pp. 42-43.

Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn makes similar extravagant promises to his patron, St. Dismas. Some of SM Stirling's Christian Nantucketers had theological problems with the fact that they had time traveled to a time before Christ.

Oleg resembles van Rijn in other respects. Not only is he a trader and ship-owner but:

"Reid decided that the Russian's bluff manner must be in a large part a disarming mask over a sophisticated intelligence."
-op. cit., p. 43.

The Kievan state in 1050 A.D.:

holds eight million people, including a dozen nationalities in the city of Kiev;

is as big as the US east of the Mississippi;

has many natural resources that its inhabitants cannily exploit;

is governed by an undespotic monarchy and turbulent popular assemblies;

has a well-informed, literate Russian upper class, more capitalistic than aristocratic, whose life style encompasses stoves, glass windows, silver and gold cutlery, tablecloths, oranges, lemons, sugar and Hungarian grooms for the stabled horses and kenneled dogs.

Anderson rightly values any society that combines freedom with dynamism.

Ancient Mythology

Tomorrow, I expect to be out all day with the Birmingham Buddhist friend who has been mentioned and on Thursday I travel to London so another few days of blog quiescence loom ahead.

In Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis, Chapter Two, p. 19, the Triple Goddess is:

Britomartis, the Maiden;
Rhea, the Mother;
Dictyana, the Rememberer and Foreseer. (See the link for Britomartis.)

These are genuine names of goddesses although I am not clear from the Wiki articles whether they were Trinitized thus. The Triple Goddess is maiden, mother and crone, whatever names are given to each of the Three.

The sun and Son is Asterion, another authentic name, whatever his role. Anderson is imagining a prehistoric, pre-Homeric stage of the mythology, just as he imagines pre-Eddaic Norse mythology in "Star of the Sea."

Detection By Time Travel

In Catching Up, see Stieg Larsson's reference to time travel. A girl disappears from an island that is connected to the mainland by a bridge which is temporarily blocked by a serious traffic accident. It is known who was on the island. Also, the girl was photographed on the mainland shortly before going to the island and it is important to find out who or what she might have been looking at while being photographed.

How would Manse Everard, whose timeline is mutable, or Jack Havig, whose timeline is immutable, have investigated Harriet's disappearance? In a mutable timeline, it is necessary to avoid changing the events being investigated. In an immutable timeline, it is necessary for the investigator to insert himself into known events, e.g., it is known who was on the island so how can a time traveler also have been there?

Everard would hover above on a timecycle and observe events with a telescopic camera. Havig would be able, while time traveling, and therefore both invisible and intangible to everyone else, to stand behind Harriet while she was being photographed and to follow her onto the island. He would also be able, if necessary, either to pass through the overturned oil tanker or to travel to a time before or after the accident and safely cross the bridge then.

Thus, Time Patrolmen and mutant time travelers would easily investigate the disappearance whereas other kinds of time travelers might experience difficulties.

The Experiences Of Time Travelers

I said in Catching Up that I would add an "approach to fiction" to the Science Fiction blog and another to the Logic of Time Travel blog. See:

The Very First Draft Of A Science Fiction Story
Mask

Manse Everard and Carl Farness are Time Patrolmen;
Jack Havig is a mutant time traveler;
everyone else mentioned below is an accidental time traveler.

Everard and Duncan Reid share a Midwestern upbringing.
Everard and Havig share a knowledge of the history of science. Both know that Galileo never said:

"'E pu si muove.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1987 A.D., p. 27;
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), V, p. 46.

Carl's Goths resist Huns whereas Hun Uldin attacks Goths, both in the fourth century A.D.

Oleg Vladimirovitch sees the "...sun-spilling sky..." (The Dancer From Atlantis, Chapter Two, p. 14) whereas Uldin sees "...huge hawk-haunted heaven..." (p. 15) and recalls the tribal camp on summer evenings -

sounds: creaking wagons, noise, laughter, crackling flames, talk, lays, songs;
smells: smoke, roasting meat etc;
tastes: gluttonous eating and kumiss, fermented mare's milk;
sight: whirling flames showing friends' faces among restless shadows;
sex: after getting drunk on kumiss.

Erissa asks her husband to pour a rhyton of Cyprian wine for her eldest son whose father was a god, Duncan. Kneeling, signing herself and praying at the household shrine, Erissa prefigures later visions and practices:

"Cradling Her Son in Her arms, Our Lady of the Ax seemed in the uncertain light to stand alive, stirring, as if Her niche were a window that opened upon enormous reaches." (p. 17)

Time travelers lead colorful lives even before they time travel.

Four Kinds Of Timelines

In Poul Anderson's works, "time travel" occurs in diverse timelines where, e.g.:

(i) many space-time vehicles continually appear from, or disappear into, actual or potential pasts or futures;

(ii) a few space-time vehicles, expending immense amounts of energy, move across Earth's surface while also moving backwards or forwards in time;

(iii) a few mutants move backwards or forwards in time without vehicles;

(iv) two warring groups move backwards or forwards along corridors that have been rotated onto the temporal axis.

It is as if the author has systematically considered every possibility:

(i) many vehicles;
(ii) few vehicles;
(iii) no vehicles;
(iv) corridors instead of vehicles.

In (i), the vehicles do not move but merely disappear and reappear.
In (ii), the vehicles and their occupants, described as "moving," really only age/endure/durate at a reduced rate.
In (iii), the mutants do likewise.
In (iv), the corridor-users really do move along the temporal dimension of the external universe.

In (i), time travelers can "change the past"/violate causality.
In (iii) and (iv), they cannot.
(ii) is ambiguous. The dying futurian, Sahir, asks Duncan Reid to contact other time travelers who will arrive a year hence and says:

"'They'll come through time, to this day, bring help, surely -'"
-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977), Chapter Four, p. 33.

Does he think that there might be a divergent timeline in which he is rescued?

Catching Up

It has been a nightmare. Changing broadband suppliers meant first that nothing worked and secondly that getting it fixed was a seemingly endless hassle where nothing that was supposed to work worked and the worst of it was that this was exactly what I had expected to happen and it is not fully fixed yet.

Catching Up
While 'netless, I drafted posts and did other rereading. I wondered how Poul Anderson's different time travelers might tackle the mystery investigated by Mikael Blomkvist in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Then Mikael himself reflected:

"The key to the mystery was what it was that Harriet saw in Hedestad. He would never find that out unless he could invent a time machine and stand behind her, looking over her shoulder."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), Chapter Sixteen, p. 277.

Thus, a Wellsian concept and phrase are used, and commonly understood, even in a contemporary thriller. (Wells himself referred to "Morlocks" in a contemporary novel. See here.) I will publish a post about how the mystery of Harriet's disappearance might have been investigated either by the Time Patrol or by Anderson's mutant time travelers. (Later: see here.)

The characters in Anderson's Harvest The Fire include a conscious AI simulation of Jorge Luis Borges, who pioneered what I call "approaches to fiction." An "approach" is a statement of a fictional premise that is not developed into a complete narrative. Thus, Borges' "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is not a novel but a fictional review of an imaginary novel although it does summarize the plot of this nonexistent work. There are some "approaches to fiction" on these blogs. I will add one to the Science Fiction blog and another to the Logic of Time Travel blog. On this blog, I will discuss both "Kinds of Timelines" and "Experiences of Time Travelers." I will continue to reread The Dancer From Atlantis and should soon have some previously unread works by Anderson to discuss.

I might continue to lose Internet access and will also be in London from Thursday afternoon until late Sunday. Regular blog readers might recognize this as an annual pilgrimage is not too inaccurate a word.

There has been some creative thinking during the blog absence.

Time And (Sex In) Space

(This post has been carried across from the Science Fiction blog here. Paul sends his apologies but his conversion to a different broadband carrier is proving problematic. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.)

Time

In an unfinished novel, "The Dark Tower," CS Lewis argues that physical time travel is impossible and then presents mental transference between timelines.

In two stories and one novel, Robert Heinlein presents three classic statements of the circular causality paradox.

In many stories and novels, Poul Anderson addresses every aspect of time travel.

(Sex In) Space
In Heinlein's " - All You Zombies -," the time traveler changes sex and is both his own parents. While female, she joins the:

"'Women's Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section...'"
-Robert Heinlein, " - All You Zombies - " IN Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag (London, 1980), pp. 126-137 AT p. 128 -

- known in other periods as:

"'Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial LegionS'..."
-ibid. -

and:

"Women's Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen..."
-ibid.

Heinlein makes the same points as Lewis in "Ministering Angels":

it is recognized that men sent into space for extended periods will need a release of tension;
"'But most volunteers were old hookers...'" (ibid.)

By the time of Anderson's Young Flandry Trilogy, space travel is no longer difficult or dangerous so that more acceptable young women can be sent to extrasolar Naval bases.