Biocentrism?

Poul Anderson's later Time Patrol stories refer to quantum mechanics:

a time traveler arriving from a prevented future is like a macroscopic quantum event;

causality can be violated not only by time travelers but also by quantum fluctuations;

the Patrol, counteracting both kinds of violations, holds time to a single course where life and freedom are possible.

That third point sounds like the Strong Anthropic Principle.

I cannot buy the similar-sounding argument in Biocentrism:

before consciousness, the universe was indeterminate;

consciousness determined that the previously existing universe was one that would generate consciousness.

But why did consciousness begin?

An influx of new books means an interruption to rereading old books but normal service will be resumed in the New Year.

At This Time Of Year...

Relevant Christmas Presents
(i) Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology - relevant to both Gaiman's and Poul Anderson's works.

(ii) Julian May's The Many-Coloured Land (Pliocene Exile, Vol. I) - an author's note refers to Mananaan, the Son of Lir.

(iii) Robert Lanza's Biocentrism, which argues against mainstream cosmogony.

(iv) The next volume of Bill Willingham's Fables. (Scroll down.)

There may be more next week when it is my birthday.

Three Nines And Another Historical Reference

There were Nine Witch Queens in Ys and Nine Worthies during the Middle Ages and a group called the Nine discovers time travel in the Time Patrol timeline.

James Blish also refers to one of the Nine Worthies. When a colleague thinks that a Fundamentalist must be too simple-minded to lead an army, John Amalfi advises him to learn about:

"'...Godfrey of Bouillon...The leader of the First Crusade.'"
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 466-596 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 488.

As we recently saw with the Battle of Bannockburn, history remains relevant to futuristic sf.

I may or may not post tomorrow but, in any case, Happy Christmas to all blog readers.

Three Futures

By 802,701 A.D., human beings have devolved into Morlocks and Eloi, visited by the Time Traveler.

A million years in our future, human beings have evolved into Danellians who found the Time Patrol.

Two thousand million years in our future, the Eighteenth and Last human species lives on Neptune and some of its members mentally time travel through the lives of the earlier species on Earth, Venus and Neptune.

Three future visions, each involving time travel.

I have not been (re)reading so I reiterate: Wells, Stapledon and Anderson forever.

Who Is Among Us?

Are there aliens, mutants, telepaths, immortals, time travelers or disguised supernatural beings hidden among us? We could list yet again the relevant works by Poul Anderson. Some of these categories overlap:

mutant immortals in The Boat Of A Million Years;
mutant time travelers in There Will Be Time;
immortal time travelers in Time Patrol.

Some time travelers do not depart from the present but arrive from the future and, in this respect, resemble visiting aliens. In fact, Olaf Stapledon's time traveling "Last Men" are from Neptune.

There are immortals born in antiquity who have lived through history and time travelers born recently or not yet who have lived through years or decades of history.

Julian May's Pliocene/Intervention/Galactic sequence incorporates all or most of the above categories into a single fictional history.

Literary References

Literature is full of literary references. Platonic dialogues refer to Greek drama which retell Homeric myths. Maybe only Homer had no one earlier to refer to?

Sherlock Holmes appears in Poul Anderson's first Time Patrol story. Although I had already read some Holmes storoes, I did not recognize the private investigator and his companion in "Time Patrol" as Holmes and Watson on first reading but I was very young. It was obvious on a later rereading.

How many Holmes references are there in modern fiction? Here is another. In Julian May's Intervention,  a confidential agent tells the Swiss banking regulatory board that the Edinburgh University Parapsychology Unit will soon publicly demonstrate extracorporeal excursion, thus ending banking confidentiality. A frail, ill-looking banker tells the agent that the chief Scottish parapsychological researcher is a menace to civilization and that something must be done about him...

The sinister banker is called Herr Reichenbach. If May had not intended a Holmesian allusion, then she would not have used that surname. Just another of our Anderson-May parallels.

A Historical Precedent

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VIII.

Brother Parvus thinks that the bedraggled villagers look more French than English. (National humor.)

The Wersgorix hesitate to attack this new unknown enemy that has already unprecedently captured a fortress. The prisoners shudder at the camp's wolfish guffaws. Sir Roger will try to parley with the cautiously approaching enemy. He makes a weapon of bluff and also knows a relevant precedent:

"'...my father was at Bannockburn, where a handful of tattered Scottish pikemen broke the chivalry of King Edward II.'" (p. 52)

History is always with us even in Anderson's sf. Even when I had read this far the first time, I did not expect, or suspect, that Anderson would take his Englishmen all the way to interstellar victory, conquest and empire.

What Next?

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VIII.

Many Wersgor ships approach and hover above. How will Sir Roger prevail this time? I will find out but not tonight.

Brother Parvus assures Red John that, if the enemy have magic, then he need not fear:

"'...for the black arts do not prevail against good Christian men.'" (p. 51)

But, in James Blish's Black Easter, the black arts do prevail and what happens then? Blish was obliging enough to write a sequel, The Day After Judgment.

Very often, a single phrase in one work encapsulates or implies the theme of another work. For example, one of the Time Traveler's dinner guests mentions the danger of using time travel to verify accounts of a historical battle, the essential point of Ward Moore's later Bring The Jubilee, and how to counteract that danger is the essential point of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series.

The line of thought in this post connects:

The High Crusade (Anderson)
Black Easter
The Day After Judgment
The Time Machine
Bring The Jubilee
Time Patrol (Anderson)

My advice to blog readers: in the New Year, read or reread all these works.

The De Tournevilles

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VII.

See "Finding An Unexpected Connection" by Sean M. Brooks here.

William of Normandy conquered England in 1066 (see Poul Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy);

an Earl Godfrey was outlawed for piracy;

an illegitimate grandson of William married an illegitimate daughter of Earl Godfrey, thus founding the de Tourneville line (p. 49);

Brother Hugh de Tournville was a Knight of Malta in the fourteenth century;

Sir Roger de Tourneville led an English expedition into space later in the fourteenth century.

I suspect that William is the only historical figure in this list.

An Ocean From A Wet Dishcloth

I am frankly amazed that so much information can be extracted from a light weight novel like Poul Anderson's The High Crusade:

the Nine Worthies and a comparison with GK Chesterton;

the Third Heaven and comparisons with Dante and Milton;

the contrast between adventure fiction and speculative fiction but also their incorporation into a single future history series here;

comparisons with ERB and Michael Moorcock here;

medieval and modern concepts of survival after death here.

I will continue to reread and post about this novel as Christmas festivities allow. (An academic once said to me that we lose about a week at Christmas.)

Johan might submit a second article. Hopefully, Nygel and Ali, either independently or jointly, will review a Trygve Yamamura novel in the New Year. We approach the end of the second decade of the third millennium of our era.

The title of this post is taken from an obscure sf story.