Clandestine Lunarians And Others

In Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, the Inrai guerillas do a lot of damage but perform the pivotal role of putting Fenn in touch with download Guthrie. In the preceding volume, Harvest The Fire, a secret organization, the "Scaine Croi," hijacks anti-matter for Proserpina - I think (I am currently rereading this volume).

We enjoy reading about secret organizations without having to encounter them in reality. Two such organizations in twentieth century fiction were the revolutionary Cabal in Robert Heinlein's Future History and Ian Fleming's SPECTRE, the latter uniting former members of the Gestapo, SMERSH, the Mafia, the Unione Corse, the Yugoslav secret police and Blofeld's previous organization, RAHIR.

With such a pedigree, I think that SPECTRE has to be the ultimate fictional criminal organization, overshadowing any others, including even Poul Anderson's Exaltationists whom Manse Everard tracks through time as James Bond tracks SPECTRE through the 1960s.

The History Of The Colonization Of The Solar System

This is not an exclusive list (of course) but various parts of the Solar System are colonized in:

Robert Heinlein's Future History and Scribner Juveniles;

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Technic History, Tales Of The Flying Mountains, Three Worlds To Conquer and Harvest of Stars Tetralogy;

Larry Niven's Known Space future history.

Stages Of Colonization (without specifying which works are relevant each time)
(i) The Moon, Mars and Venus.
(ii) Ganymede.
(iii) The Belt because the asteroids are not down at the bottom of a gravity well.
(iv) The Belt because the asteroids can be terraformed with gyrogravitics.
(v) Venus when it has been terraformed.
(vi) Recognition that Venus can be neither colonized nor terraformed.
(vii) In "Harvest of Stars":
the Moon (Lunarians are adapted to live and breed in Lunar gravity);
Mars (Lunarians and Terrans can breed in Martian gravity);
the Kuiper Belt, including the planetoid Proserpina (colonized by Lunarians).

Thus, there is some progress in ideas about colonizing the Solar System.

Misfits Or Refugees Leave The Solar System

Eight examples by five authors:

Methuselah's Children by Robert Heinlein;

They Shall Have Stars and The Seedling Stars by James Blish;

Orbit Unlimited, The Boat Of A Million Years and Harvest Of Stars by Poul Anderson;

The Stone Dogs by SM Stirling;

Seed Of Light by Edmund Cooper.

These scenarios differ. Misfits feel uncomfortable whereas refugees might flee for their lives. In The Boat Of A Million Years, the handful of mutant immortals, nicknamed "the Survivors," leaves a utopian Earth whereas, in Seed Of Light, a handful of genuine survivors flees from a now uninhabitable Earth.

Resolution of conflicts on Earth and exploration of the universe are two major challenges but it is unlikely that the latter will provide an escape route from the former and, in any case, most people, except in Seed Of Light, would remain to live with or resolve the local problems. Interstellar travel has become a symbol of freedom in American sf but, for most of us, freedom is to be found on Earth.

I discussed Prefaces, Introductions and Forewords in Foreword. Cooper gives us "Proems."

Today, we drive to a Christmas Fair at Leighton Moss. (Scroll down.)

Echoes Of Troy And Carthage

I found a parallel between these two passages:

"The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART FOUR, 1990 A.D., p. 178.

"The book was more than a personal souvenir: it was the symbol of a world that had been swallowed in the immensity of time - a world that was now as legendary as Atlantis, Carthage, Troy. A world that seemed now to belong to humanity's carefree childhood, to an age when only alchemists would dream of transmuting lead into gold ... A dawn world ..."
-Edmund Cooper, Seed Of Light (London, 1979), Part One, Chapter One, p. 22.

Troy, Carthage and Atlantis were destroyed and no longer exist. Poul Anderson wrote about Atlantis and Carthaginians. Paul and Karen Anderson also wrote about lost Ys. See:

Nostalgia For Ys
A History Of Ys
Legendary Stories

Both Anderson and Cooper linked nostalgia for childhood to vicarious nostalgia for times much longer ago. See also remarks about the phrase, "...long ago...," here. 

"Let Words Stand In"

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire, Chapter 1.

It is thirty years since Venator died, thus not very long after the events of the previous volume, The Stars Are Also Fire. Having been returned to individuality, Venator must already have been re-downloaded into an artificial neural network if not yet into a robot body?

By direct linkage, he converses with an aspect of the central intelligence. That aspect:

can merge with many other minds as necessary;

is what it is now only because this is deemed sufficient for the present purpose;

is distantly joined to the apex of the Teramind "...through nodes of ascending power..." (p. 34) like a finger joined to an arm and thus to a body.

The cybercosmic perception of transient, variable individuality might be similar to that of the Didonians?

The omniscient narrator informs the reader that Venator and the aspect do not really speak but exchange information and thoughts at nearly light-speed. Then, rather awkwardly, in my opinion, this narrator descends from his omniscient status to become one of us when he advises:

"But let words stand in for that lightninglike discourse. It is not altogether a false analogy." (p. 35)

But it is an analogy. The narrator, instead of remaining as far as possible invisible is directly addressing his audience in the imperative mood and making us realize that the verbal exchange that we are about to read does not really happen. In order to differentiate it from audible speech, the words are not enclosed inside quotation marks ("...") but preceded by a dash (-...).

"Going To And Fro In The Earth"

Poul Anderson is perfectly capable of slipping a Biblical phrase past us without our noticing it although the grandeur of the language makes its impact, nevertheless.

"Once in his drifting to and fro across Earth, Jesse Nicol found a quivira left over from olden times."
-Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, 1997), Prologue, p. 9.

"Trouble is loose, and again there is need for me to go to and fro in the world."
-op. cit., Chapter 1, p. 33.

And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
-copied from here.

First I noticed that the phrase used of Jesse Nicol at the beginning of the Prologue was immediately re-used of our old acquaintance, Venator, at the beginning of Chapter 1, then I thought that it sounded familiar...

And, in this Biblical context, is the name "Jesse" significant?

Nicol drifts to and fro because he is aimless, or at best seeking an aim, whereas Venator will go to and fro purposefully because he wants to:

"...do my work as soon as may be and return to the Oneness." (ibid.)

Nicol appears in this one volume whereas Venator had been in the previous volume but is now biologically dead and will have to go to and fro as a human personality downloaded into an artificial neural network in a robotic body. Each future history series carries its own background material informing later installments.

Harvest The Fire

I have been rereading Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars Tetralogy out of order: Volumes II, I, IV and now III, Harvest The Fire, which is much shorter:

the text begins on p. 9 and ends on p. 190;

unless I have miscounted, there are 22 pages of illustrations (11 double page spreads);

there are 9 blank pages between chapters;

each chapter begins half way down a page;

so many chapters end so far up a page that perhaps another 12 pages could be removed from the total;

amazingly, that still leaves 139 pages which meets my rule-of-thumb criterion for a novel, 100+ pages, although sizes of page and print make that criterion Heisenberg.

We considered the Prologue of Harvest The Fire here and, previously, here.

I will have to decide which work by Anderson to reread after Harvest The Fire. Meanwhile, current other reading, Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy and Edmund Cooper's Seed Of Light, generates comparisons with Anderson.

War And SF

There are many examples but here are three highlights.

(i) HG Wells' The War In The Air (1908) warned against air warfare and Wells added Prefaces in 1921 and 1941, the latter ending:

"'I told you so. You damned fools.'"
-HG Wells, The War In The Air (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1973), p. 8.

(ii) In Poul Anderson's "Kings Who Die" (1962), devastation on Earth is avoided by moving war into space. See "War, Wells And Anderson," here.

In his Technic History, Anderson describes space warfare as if he were a veteran. See Hyperdrive And Combat.

(iii) Edmund Cooper's Seed Of Light (1959) is in the Wellsian tradition in that it begins with a Preface about the threat of nuclear warfare.

Addendum: Of course I should have added that HG Wells describes limited use of atomic bombs in The World Set Free (1914), that many sf writers present post-nuclear war scenarios and that Anderson presents several. These posts are sometimes published in haste between other activities and are frequently incomplete. Christmas preparations have started.

The Peace And Transcendence Of Oneness

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 31.

See the combox here.

Would the cybercosm make people "pampered pets"? Yes:

"'...guidance through centuries into the peace and transcendence of Oneness.'" (p. 397)

"'...keeping bodies safely at home while nourishing spirits and bringing them toward fulfillment.'" (p. 398)

I think that "peace" gets a bad press. It means not passivity but transcendence of the need for armed conflict. I am for peace, transcendence, Oneness and spiritual fulfillment. However, I am against "guidance," when that means subtle control, and "keeping bodies safely at home." Of course, while some explore the galaxy, many will remain in the Solar System but not because a higher power has kept them safely there.

Some will seek peace and transcendence through meditative practices or monastic lifestyles but they will choose that and meanwhile need not cut themselves off from the news of the interstellar frontier - the real frontier. The cybercosm's attempt to distract humanity with a massive lie about an interstellar civilization cannot possibly be in mankind's best interests. We have to make our own way. My only question is: how plausible is it that a global AI would attempt such a deception?

Three Fabulous Cities

Although the planet Krypton was destroyed, one Kryptonian city, Kandor, had been miniaturized and removed and still survives with all its inhabitants in a bottle. (DC Comics.)

The Golden Age of Baghdad will last as long as mankind because Haroun al Raschid gave it to Morpheus who keeps it in a bottle in the Dreaming. (Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, published by DC.)

The city of Ys is known only in legend and fiction because its Gods not only destroyed it but also concealed it behind a "Veil." (The King Of Ys by Poul and Karen Anderson.)

See also Great Cities.