Future Conflicts

The Hammer, CHAPTER SEVEN.

Readers of military fiction need to realize that, in addition to directing combat, generals do a lot of organizing and managing. That is the point of the several non-combat chapters in this novel.

"A gong was ringing from the little church of the Spirit of Man of This Earth; by far the minority congregation in the village, but by law the only one allowed to have bell or signal." (p. 425)

We had those kinds of laws in these islands until comparatively recently. In my childhood, in the 1950s, Catholics in England and Scotland were still conscious of being social outsiders and there were particular problems in Northern Ireland. Will mankind reproduce all such conflicts on extra-solar planets in future millennia? I would like to be confident that our descendants will at least be there even if they are repeating all our mistakes.

Twistgrass And Feathers

The Hammer, CHAPTERs FIVE-SIX.

In military sf, I am more interested in the sf than in the military, especially when the action has not started yet. Most of the organisms on Bellevue, men, dogs and plants, are imported but we also find:

"...twistgrass pasture..." (FIVE, p. 390)

"...chicken-sized sauroids with short horns on their noses and lines of feathers down their forearms..." (SIX, p. 396)

It is difficult to imagine alien organisms without merely reassembling parts of familiar organisms:

chicken-sized;
lizard-like;
horns;
noses;
feathers;
arms.

If human beings had not arrived, would some of the sauroids eventually have become tool- and language-using bipeds? Not necessarily. As I understand it, there is no inevitability about the direction of natural selection. Organisms and their environments interact. If unintelligence has higher survival value, then that is what will be selected. However, if only by random processes, evolution moves in every direction it can. According to Poul Anderson's Is There Life On Other Worlds?, overspecialized animals, entirely dependent on a single ecological niche, become extinct when the environment changes whereas a different kind of species able to adapt its behavior might not only survive but also eventually become intelligent. And these sauroids sound as if some of then might start to manipulate their environments. 

Outputs

(Regular blog readers will understand when I say that Ketlan, my son-in-law and technical assistant, is again in hospital. We hope to have better news tomorrow.)

Authors' outputs vary enormously. In my teens, James Blish was my favorite sf writer. This Poul Anderson Appreciation blog has wound up as big as it is first because my appreciation of Anderson's works has progressively increased and secondly because Anderson's output is considerably vaster than Blish's. Does anyone have a figure for the number of novels, let alone short stories, published under Anderson's name? I am not going to try to count them at this time of night. The number of collections is meaningless because their contents overlap too much.

Dornford Yates, whom I also appreciated in my teens, wrote thirty four volumes, either novels or collections, with many overlapping characters but no overlapping contents. Stieg Larsson, who was not around in my teens or indeed as an author in the twentieth century, wrote three volumes although he had planned another seven.

Quality matters more than quantity. These four guys have quality and Anderson also has quantity.

Can anyone identify the titles in the attached image?

More On The Mixed Ecology II

The Hammer, CHAPTER FIVE.

Bellevuean dactosauroids:

are the size of a man's hand;

have fangs, jewel-like scales, skin wings and long tails with diamond-shaped rudders;

live in nests;

hiss;

fly near a man's face;

bank and glide;

eat insects;

are eaten by red-tailed hawks.

(Google has pictures of red-tailed hawks but not of dactosauroids.)

See Mixed Ecology.

I admit to being less interested in the close details of military life and organization but nevertheless can unreservedly recommend SM Stirling's and David Drake's The General series, of which The Hammer is Volume II, to fans of military sf.

Science As Threat?

Thesis
In HG Wells' and Olaf Stapledon's future histories, mankind remakes itself with science.

In Poul Anderson's first future history, the Psychotechnic Institute fails to remake mankind but eventually Galactic human beings mentally control cosmic forces.

Antithesis
In CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, some men, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiment, proclaim a Wellsian-Stapledonian future while trying to use science as an instrument to control the rest of mankind.

Synthesis/New Thesis
In much sf, e.g., in Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's second future history, unchanged human beings live with continued scientific advances, e.g., they lead everyday lives on colonized extra-solar planets and also wage war on and between those planets.

New Antithesis
In Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy, intelligent technology threatens to supersede its creators.

In Anderson's Genesis, intelligent technology does supersede its creators but the Terrestrial post-organic intelligence re-creates humanity...

New Synthesis?

More On The Mixed Ecology

The Hammer, CHAPTER FIVE.

Returning from Poul Anderson's 1950s San Francisco to SM Stirling's and David Drake's colonized planet, Bellevue, we find more evidence of the mixed ecology. A mountain forest contains:

"...reddish-brown native whipstick and featherfrond..." (p. 379)

- alongside imported beech and fir.

Lower down, there are "russet grass," olives, cork-oak, coconut, sisal plantations, cotton, indigo, sugar and rice. Is the "russet grass" native or Terrestrial?

Further on, we read that:

"...tall reddish-tawny three-leafed native grass rippled, under the twisted little cork-oaks and silver-leafed olives men had brought here a millennium and a half ago." (p. 388)

We remember Poul Anderson's mixed ecologies and many local equivalents of grass. Will there really be any extra-solar planets that can accomodate human colonists and Terrestrial organisms as easily as this? 

A Sunset

Before leaving Poul Anderson's Perish By The Sword for a while, it seems appropriate to savor one last sunset:

"A few thin clouds in the west were briefly red. Then daylight drained from the sky. Stefanik continued to sit on his couch and look empty-eyed out the window." (15, p. 140)

Sunsets are a regular blog feature. Here we are also given a human reaction. Stefanik has thought so long about his troubles that his intelligence is giving up just as the sun, the source of light, declines. (But he will have a happy ending at the end of the concluding chapter, 19, and I will now return to other reading.)

A Murder

(A building in Dalton Square, Lancaster. Bear with me.)

Perish By The Sword.

OK. I guessed the murderer right but was not sure and was misled when suspicion seemed to fall on another character. I find the detailed and complicated explanation of the solution the least interesting part to read in a detective novel.

A fictional murderer has not just killed someone. He has also practiced an ingenious and intricate deception which the fictional detective is clever enough to unravel, then to explain to his fellow characters and, incidentally, to the (intrigued?) readers. The deception in Perish By The Sword involves:

psychological manipulation, as in Poirot's last case;
a ladder at a window;
a tape recorder connected to an intercom;
a samurai sword stolen, then hidden inside laboratory equipment;
a scene acted out at a window by the murderer and a prostitute;
the simulation of a ghost...

In an interview, Alan Moore explained that:

he wanted to write graphic fiction about a murder as a human event with complicated causes and consequences, not as an Agatha Christie/Cluedo parlor game ("Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick");

he though that the Whitechapel Murders ("Jack the Ripper") were too old hat;

therefore, he considered Buck Ruxton, whose former house is in the image (we would have read an Alan Moore graphic novel set in Lancaster, not in London);

however, the Ripper Anniversary came around, sparking a lot of new literature and speculation;

thus, it became easier to research the Ripper;

the result was From Hell.

For one recent human consequence of Ruxton's murders, read:

Ms Rogerson’s family still live in the area and were seriously unamused when a city centre pub round the corner from the Ruxton house decided it would be fun to retheme itself as ‘Ruxton’s’ back in the ’80s. The change didn’t stick (neither did the two themes after that) and the pub is currently called The Boar’s Head.
-copied from here.

(A short comic strip by Alan Moore tells exactly the same story about a London pub that briefly called itself "Jack the Ripper.")

I cite the fictional treatment of real murders to contrast with the novelistic treatment of fictional murders.

Please remember these names:

"Polly" Nichols;
Annie Chapman;
Kate Eddows;
"Long Liz" Stride;
Marie Jeanette Kelly.

We do not know his name. We do know theirs.

Now back to Poul Anderson's fictional murderer and a question for blog readers. Given all that has been said, what would be an appropriate fate for this sword-stealing and -wielding villain?

Science As Threat And Two Other Genres Implied

Perish By The Sword, 18.

Yamamura and two companions enter a laboratory at night:

"...the corners were full of murk, and the larger pieces of apparatus - furnaces, switchboards, pumps - seemed not so much scientific as inhuman." (p. 171)

Inhuman? Alien? Threatening? How do some people perceive science? And a future supposedly dominated by it?

In the laboratory, automatic processes continue:

plating qualities are tested;
an acid bath devours a sample;
spring steel is endlessly bent.

"Sometimes [Yamamura] wondered if such robots were not as mortally dangerous, in the long run, as the [samurai sword] he carried." (p. 172)

He has just summarized an entire science fiction tradition from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein through Isaac Asimov's "Frankenstein complex" to Anderson's own Genesis.

Needing to know where the murderer had hidden the sword that had been his murder weapon, one of the companions asks:

"'If only it could talk, huh?'" (ibid.)

Yamamura replies:

"'Don't wish for that!...You wouldn't like what you heard.'" (ibid.)

In Anderson's fantasy novel, Operation Luna, a magical sword speaks to comical effect! - which takes us in precisely the opposite direction from dangerous automatic machinery.

If Poul Anderson is not comprehensive, then I do not know who is. Check out the range of issues that we have to discuss when appreciating his texts.

Yamamura's Ideal?

Perish By The Sword, 15-16.

As I approach the climax of a Poul Anderson novel, the text resists and delays my arrival at its conclusion by increasing the number of noteworthy features that it presents. Anyone reading Poul Anderson's first detective novel simultaneously with following this Poul Anderson Appreciation blog must immediately recognize that I focus neither on plot nor on action but on what others might regard as peripheral aspects. We will soon know how the narrative ends but, for me, not tonight. I want to finish this post, then watch some of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.

Our alternating viewpoint characters have been Mike Stefanik and the private detective, Trygve Yamamura. Stefanik:

"...let content pervade each cell until he almost understood that ideal Trig Yamamura spoke of." (15, p. 145)

So what is this "ideal"?

Yamamura, sprawling with feet on desk after some fresh air and a few knee bends, reflects:

"Relax. Give the nervous system a rest, as well as the thews. Unstop the senses, let street clangor and smells and chill flow through, make yourself a part of existence. That was what Nirvana meant, not oblivion as much as oneness. The ideal of the Zen sect was to stop speculating about the other side of mortality and try to become integral here, now, with this world where all things were beautiful and holy.
"The phone rang." (16, p. 151)

Yamamura swears in Norwegian! (At least, it looks like swearing.)

True story: I read these passages this evening immediately after returning home from Lancaster Serene Reflection (Soto Zen) Meditation Group where we sat facing the wall, then heard a talk from a monk. So what would the monk have said about Anderson's text? Mainly, find some word other than "ideal." An ideal is neither a practice nor an awareness but an idea. Also: do not make yourself part of existence but sit with whatever comes up; do not try to become integral but let your essential integration show itself in its own time, at its own pace. Any particular meditation session might be full of mental turmoil but, if so, sit with that, let it go and maintain the practice for decades and life-times. (Philosophically, I do not accept rebirth but am quoting the tradition.)

My typing of the last unbracketed sentence of the preceding paragraph was interrupted by a Buddhist friend texting: "we are willing to be with whatever arises."