Different Descriptions

Poul Anderson often:

describes natural scenery;

does so by appealing to at least three of the senses;

describes the Milky Way, usually as seen from space but sometimes also as seen from a planetary surface.

Other authors might:

describe scenery in completely different terms from Anderson, appealing only to sight;

describe the night sky again in completely different terms and without referring to or naming the Milky Way.

"The Milky Way" meant a patch of light in the night sky. Then it was learned first that our sun is one star in a galaxy and secondly that that patch of light is the disc of our galaxy as seen from some parts of the Earth's surface. Thus, "the Milky Way" became the name of our galaxy.

Since other galaxies were recognized as such only in 1925, the year before Poul Anderson's birth (see Significant Dates), literary references to the Milky Way understood as a galaxy are very recent and form part of the perspective of modern sf writers even when they appear in non-sf works.

Real Life

I am rereading Poul Anderson and Dornford Yates but, pulling back from the page, real life reveals:

today, the fifth school strike about the climate;

tomorrow, the Pride march through Lancaster;

on Sunday, some of the Lancaster Canal Bicentenary celebration events, including a photo competition that Aileen and Yossi will enter.

In haste.

Reduction Of A Planet

The People of The Wind, XVII.

When the Imperial armada englobes and attacks Avalon, fireballs in space hurt eyes and cast shadows on the surface. The wrecked and abandoned artificial planetoid, Hell Rock, detects and fires on the enemy but is weak enough to be bypassed. The remnant Avalonian navy gathers and skulks one or two a.u.s away.

The armada systematically reduces orbital fortresses in hundreds of orbits at hundreds of angles. Continually resupplied from the surface, the fortresses are mostly automated and some have remained undetected. Squadrons repeatedly attack at high acceleration and recede at unpredictable vectors. Missiles rising through atmosphere against gravity "...from zero initial speed..." (p. 626) cannot hit such ships and stop trying. On the moon, Morgana, mountains crumble and valleys become molten.

The armada focuses on those fortresses that would threaten the intended landing force and also on those surface defenses that start to destroy ships as they approach the atmosphere.

Yet again, Poul Anderson writes like a veteran of space combat.

Esne?

Whereas JRR Tolkien invented fictional languages, CS Lewis and Poul Anderson merely referred to them -

Lewis: Solar;
Anderson: Planha, Eriau, Temporal etc.

We do not read a single word of the Time Patrol language, Temporal, although another time traveler speaks one sentence in Latin:

"Es tu peregrinator temporis?"
-see here.

Blog Central Analysis Of That Sentence
(i) Because "es" is a second person singular verb, it already means "thou art" and need not be preceded by the pronoun except possibly for emphasis.

(ii) A question would be asked not by changing the word order but by adding "-ne" to the verb. Thus:

"Esne Peregrinator temporis?"

However, an English-speaking time traveler might follow the English language practice of changing the word order.

Later: In fact, Anderson has:

"'Loquerisne latine?'"
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 173-228 AT p. 183.

("Do you speak Latin?")

Sympathetic Treatment Of Disagreeable Characters

Poul Anderson gives sympathetic treatment to characters that he disagrees with. Some other good writers do not:

Dennis Wheatley, writing thrillers as propaganda during World War II, proved that Germans were inferior from the shapes of their heads;

Frederick Forsyth expresses open contempt for his left wing characters;

Dornford Yates' Mansel and Chandos agree with each other that the Germans are a filthy race.

Anderson does not use such unpleasant language even of his invented Merseians or Gorzuni. His writing is refreshing after the prejudices of the three British thriller writers listed above.

History And Future History

Reading novels set in successive decades of the twentieth century, then rereading Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization underlines how well this series projects world history into the future:

there are major conflicts;
enemies become allies;
eras come and go;
events experienced as the end of everything are perceived very differently by later generations.

"'Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, the fall, the Long Night...every such thing - behind us. In space and time alike. The people of the Commonalty don't get into wars.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 722.

"There had been a fight. The reasons - personal, familial, national, ideological, economic, whatever they were - had dropped into the bottom of the millennia between then and now. (A commentary on the importance of any such reasons.)"
-op. cit., p. 728.

And, in a novel whose protagonists receive messages from many periods of their future:

"'If an Englishman of around 1600 had found out about the American Revolution, he probably would have thought it a tragedy; an Englishman of 1950 would have had a very different view of it. We're in the same spot. The messages we get from the really far future have no contexts yet.'"
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), AN EPILOGUE, p. 127.

Futuristic sf presents an excellent perspective on history.

Behind Enemy Lines

See:

An Occupied Planet
Flandry On Vixen

Dominic Flandry goes behind enemy lines on the occupied planet of Vixen in We Claim These Stars!/"Hunters of the Sky Cave"/"A Handful of Stars." Thus, there are similarities to occupied France during World War II.

Flandry reflects that hunting skills are transferable to resistance fighting. Another set of skills is even more appropriate. Some fictional heroes, operating outside the law, wage secret wars, whether plausible or not, against the criminal underworld. Then Dornford Yates' Richard Chandos tells us that:

"During the war I had paid flying visits to France - by sea and by night."
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er Do Well (Cornwall, 2001), p. 2.

And the Germans put a price on his head. Our heroes are known to their enemies' high commands:

Chandos to the Germans;
Bond to SMERSH;
Flandry to the Merseians;
etc.

Real And Fictional Changes

Technic civilization lasts from the end of the Chaos until the Fall of the Terran Empire. Thus, it encompasses the periods of the Solar Commonwealth, the Troubles and the Empire. Mirkheim describes sociopolitical changes on Earth and Hermes toward the end of the Commonwealth period. After Mirkheim, Falkayn, having assessed what is happening in human space, leads a group of colonists into Ythrian space.

How do these fictional changes connect or compare with the real global changes that occurred during the twentieth century when Poul Anderson was writing the Technic History series? Regular blog correspondent, Sean, thinks that the Chaos began at Sarajevo in 1914. It culminates in major upheavals in the early twenty first century.

We have seen in recent posts that some people who lived comfortably before 1914 thought that civilization was coming to an end after 1945. (See also here.) In this sense, their predicament was that of David Falkayn except that they were not able to emigrate to another planet. Big changes can be unpalatable but life continues until it stops.

In the Lake District just north from here, large buildings that were built as private residences are now appreciated and enjoyed by larger numbers of people because they are preserved by the National Trust or adapted as outdoor sports centers etc. I hope that we will solve current problems but also that we will not restore the social values that prevailed before 1914.

Opposite Legacies

Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn and Dominic Flandry do not all marry but do all have children. Future history implies future generations.

Of Dornford Yates' leading characters:

Jonathan Mansel neither marries nor has children;
Berry Pleydell marries but does not have children;
Boy Pleydell marries twice but does not have children;
Richard Chandos marries twice but does not have children.

Does this seem improbable? I suspect that Yates, writing nostalgically about the end of an era, did not want to show a later generation struggling to make ends meet while having to survive without being able to afford domestic servants after the sale of their ancestral home.

Whatever happens, Anderson's characters look to the future, not to the past.

Times And Places

Any novel or short story collection is to us a visible, tangible artifact with a receding publication date whereas, to its characters, a fictional narrative happens in a world that may be very like or very unlike ours and that has its own chronology. A contemporary novel is assumed to be set in the year of writing or of publication and, if it diverges too far from that, then it is not contemporary.

Poul Anderson writes:

"London, 1944."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT p. 44.

That place and that year are enough to tell us in general what is happening. However, Anderson goes on to describe it:

"The early winter night had fallen, and a thin cold wind blew down the streets which were gulfs of darkness. Somewhere came the crump of an explosion, and a fire was burning, great red banners flapping above the roofs." (ibid.)

(Another sf reader remarked that authors of time travel fiction usually state that a character is at a particular time and place whereas Anderson tells us what it is like.)

"Time Patrol" has a history, originally published in a magazine in 1955, then collected and recollected in subsequent decades, culminating in 2010, if not by now more recently.

1984 is the title of a 1949 novel by George Orwell whereas 1984 is the publication date of Past Times by Poul Anderson and the date of fictional events in Anderson's 1990 novel, The Shield Of Time. See 1984.

CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength was published in 1945 but its Preface, dated Christmas Eve, 1943, tells us that:

"The period of this story is vaguely 'after the war'."
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT p. 354.

In 1943, Lewis did not know that the War would end in 1945.

Of my recent Dornford Yates acquisitions, some are copies printed before or during World War II and one, Red In The Morning (Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, London and Melbourne), is a first edition presenting this interesting information:

"First published     1946
"BOOK
"PRODUCTION
"WAR ECONOMY
"STANDARD
"THE TYPOGRAPHY OF THIS BOOK CONFORMS TO THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARD" (p. 4)

What I have typed as lines 2, 3, 4 and 5 are printed inside an image of an open book with a lion lying sideways on top.

Second hand books are artifacts from past times.