Plain Speaking/More Political Wisdom

(I wanted an image of Caesar and remembered that he appeared in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman but we didn't need a caption with arrows. The boy is Augustus.)

Poul Anderson, Shield, XI.

Nathan Abrams, a director of General Atomics, has political influence comparable to that of a US Senator. Jan Trembecki, Abrams' confidential secretary, speaks truth to power:

Caesarism has arisen in the US in response to the problem of survival in a thermonuclear age;

Caesar should not be overthrown at the price of a weakening civil war;

disruption of precariously balanced social forces could cause economic chaos, opening the way for dictatorship;

the popular will wants a strong man because freedom is not worth starvation;

(Marcus, director of Military Security, seems to be the "Caesar" in question);

Marcus has many admirers because Abrams' kind have failed to solve "'...foreign enmity, overpopulation, maldistribution, educational lag and social vacuums.'" (p. 86);

the American upper classes falling out like Marius and Sulla would make things worse.

As Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, "Everardus the Goth," said to another historical Roman general:

"'There, was that plain-spoken enough?'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 16, p. 606.

I agree with Trembecki's list of problems except "overpopulation." If we have four people and three lunch packs in a car, then we say that there are too few lunches, not that there are too many people. There is indeed "maldistribution" of food but every extra mouth to feed is an extra pair of hands to produce food or something else to exchange for it.

Trembecki sounds like Anderson's Chunderban Desai. This book is an sf thriller - and a political treatise. 

Political Wisdom

Poul Anderson, Shield, X.

"'...every leader has to make compromises; otherwise he'd set everybody against him and get nothing accomplished.'" (p. 83)

Poul and Karen Anderson present a perfect example in Gratillonius who is neither a trader like Nicholas van Rijn nor an intelligence officer like Dominic Flandry but a king presiding over an assembly. See The Council Of Suffetes.

Two historical examples are cited:

Lincoln had foolish Cabinet members and leatherheaded generals (apparently);

there were Stalinists and anti-Stalinists in the Soviet Union.

An "anti-Stalinist" might be either a would-be dictator or an opponent of dictatorship. The latter had to be eliminated to make way for power struggles between the former.

As If For The First Time

This blog is based not on reading but on rereading. See A DEFENSE OF REREADING BOOKS by Sean M. Brooks, here. We have amply demonstrated not simply that Poul Anderson's works are worth rereading but that someone who has merely read, e.g., the Time Patrol series once years ago has missed almost the entire experience. Can s/he remember the generations in "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," the divergent timelines in The Shield Of Time, Part Six, the mythological, historical and science fictional narratives in "Star of the Sea," the ingenuity of "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" etc?

Occasionally, a previously read work has been forgotten in its entirety, as I am currently discovering with The Summons by John Grisham. Not only do I not remember the solution, I had not remembered what the mystery was, let alone characters, plot, settings etc. It really is like reading it for the first time. Those who read Anderson's The Avatar or Orion Shall Rise just once decades ago might well find that this is the case with those novels as well in which case it is highly advisable to begin rereading without delay. The enjoyment is bound to be greater the second time.

Furniture And Food

Poul Anderson, Shield, X.

"He nearly fell into a lounger and let it mold itself to hips and ribs." (pp. 81-82)

Like aircars, landing flanges and vitryl,  self-adjusting furniture is another standard prop - and, as here, there are often characters who sit on the edge of the lounger and do not let it adjust.

On the run from the law but guests in a wealthy household, Koskinen and Vivienne are treated to:

coffee
orange juice
French rolls
butter
cheese
caviar
iced vodka

We enjoy reading both when the characters flee for their lives and when they are able to relax and eat.

Conversations

SM Stirling commented here that:

"All fiction is in conversation with all other fiction..."

Sometimes it seems that all literature is one long series:

Troy (Homer);
Rome (Virgil);
the Holy Roman Empire (the Song of Roland);
English history (Shakespeare);
the British Empire (Kipling);
forward to the Terran Empire (Poul Anderson);
sideways to the Angrezi Raj (Stirling).

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Doll's House, personified Desire looks at the symbol of her older brother, personified Dream, and says:

"Big brother...I'm watching you."

Thus, a fantasy character alludes to a dystopia - two antithetical genres both addressed by both Anderson and Stirling.

Vitryl And A VIP

Poul Anderson, Shield, X.

"They were conducted through a sliding vitryl [scroll down] door into the building." (p. 81)

A flying taxi has delivered Koskinen and Vivienne to the twenty third flange of a building where they then ascended a ramp to a terrace with brooklets, moss, roses, a plum tree and a view of gardens, a beach, the glittering sea and wheeling gulls. Inside the building, they enter a solarium with a twenty foot high fountain and lily beds on a flagged floor. They are about to meet someone important.

Aircars landing on flanges of tall buildings with vitryl doors are standard stuff that could appear in many fictional futures. Another way to write sf is to avoid all cliches and to start from scratch, assuming no expectations on the part of the readers - try to imagine a future society that has nothing in common with any previously imagined future. I can't. Sf has become a curious combination of shorthand cliches and genuine originality.

Centralia And Muties

Poul Anderson, Shield, X.

"The bulk of Centralia marched over the horizon." (p. 78)

I googled Centralia and learned.

Vivienne says:

"'I must look like a perfect mutie.'" (p. 79)

This is the first indication that, after two "atomic wars," there are mutants and that "mutant" is abbreviated as "mutie," as in Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky, where "mutie" also means "mutineer."

We might have met muties in or near the Crater which, however, is the lair of criminals dominating the surrounding "low-levels": crime and poverty but not, as yet, mutations.

The end of a Poul Anderson novel resembles a mathematical limit that can be approached but never reached. The further we read into the text, the more we find to blog about.

Mistland And Godland

(Another illustration by Dan Adkins.)

Poul Anderson, Shield, X.

"...Koskinen glimpsed the rising sun. In that light megalopolis became a romantic, tower-pierced mist-land, where the two rivers and Long Island Sound lay like molten silver. There were not many other cars to be seen. The taxi fled eastward, faster than he wished. Before long the city gave way to garden-scape rolling back from wide beaches, only an occasional Center breaking its serenity." (p. 78)

 This passage, quoted out of context, does not make clear that "cars" means "aircars" and that the taxi carrying Koskinen is such a vehicle. Thus, he views the city from above. (In the attached image, he is falling at an earlier point in the narrative.) That "cars" fly is almost assumed in some sf although, of course, it is always also stated.

The mist-land recalls a previously noted "godland."

"We Shall All Be Changed"

CS Lewis' Elwin Ransom and Poul Anderson's Peter Koskinen return to Earth from Mars.

Ransom
Ransom's colleague, Lewis, writes:

"Even the journey to Mars was bad enough. A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover."
-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 1, p. 150.

Ransom returns from Malacandra, then from Perelandra, able to converse in Solar with the space-dwelling eldila and becomes the Pendragon of Logres.

Koskinen...
...remembers oneness with the Martians and:

"...perhaps the grisliest thing he had found on Earth so far was the isolation of human beings from each other.
"But what else could result, when a man was one atom in a deaf, dumb, blind, automated machine?"
-Poul Anderson, Shield (New York, 1970), IX, p. 72.

Time spent off Earth enhances awareness of problems back on Earth.

Four Senses In "Low-Level"

Poul Anderson, Shield, VIII and IX.

VIII is action as Koskinen and Vivienne escape from the Crater, under cover of a Chinese attack, into "...the labyrinth called low-level." (p. 66)

In the opening paragraph of IX, they are in a low-level alley:

gloom;
trickling light;
dust and paper on the wind;
a pneumotube;
tangled power lines;
sky-glow;
growling;
pounding;
automatic machines and traffic;
cold air;
faint sulfur smells -

- four senses.