"Terra"

The literary ghetto of pulp magazine sf developed its own cliches and terminology, e.g., the Latin" Terra" used as a name for Earth. However, contrast that use of the word, "Terra," with the sophisticated civilization of the Terran Empire in Poul Anderson's Technic History. In A Stone In Heaven, the Imperial legate on Hermes requests figures for Hermetian production and consumption of palladium, a metal that is essential to protonic control systems which in turn are essential to any military machinery, but his agents are unable to collect the relevant data. The Grand Duke of Hermes claims to suspect that there is a conspiracy to discredit him whereas in fact it is he that is engaged in secret weapons production.

Again, he vetoes any attempt to request Imperial assistance for the nearby Ramnuans, an intelligent species threatened by an Ice Age, even though such an Imperial effort would be bound to boost the declining Hermetian economy. The Duke has something to conceal on Ramnu.

Thus, we get a sense of a history, an industry and an economy that are as convincing as if Hermes and the other planets with which it interacts were real places. This is historical fiction with a future setting.

How Bureaucracies Work

"...coming as she did from a primitive world of basically terrestroid biochemistry, she must get a checkup at a clinic licensed to renew her medical certificate. That was a ridiculous formality - even had she been exposed in shirtsleeves to Ramnu, no germ there could have lived a minute in her bloodstream - but the bureaucrats of Terra were adamant unless you held rank or title."
-Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 1-188 AT II, pp. 16-17.

If no Ramnuan germ can infect a human being, then why does Banner/Miriam need a checkup and, if she does need one, then why do people of rank or title not? The answer is that Poul Anderson knew how bureaucracies work.

This happens when she arrives on the planet, Hermes. Its sun, Maia is:

"...(not to be confused with giant 20 Tauri)..." (III, p. 32)

- so why was it given the same name? Hermes' Maia is in Sector Antares.

Buddhism And The Blog

Appreciating Poul Anderson's fiction involves giving respectful consideration to major religious traditions like:

Christianity - Nicholas van Rijn,  Kossara Vymezal and Fr. Axor;

Buddhism - Adzel.

- and also imagining nonhuman religions but that is another matter.

Since it is blog policy to discuss any issues as they arise from works of fiction, readers are invited to express their opinions about religion etc. Whenever appropriate, regular correspondent, Sean M. Brooks, defends Catholic beliefs and conservative politics which enriches the blog because it is something that I cannot do.

I can say something about Zen meditation. It is contrary to meditation practice to become so psychologically attached to any activity that we would be devastated if the activity had to end. I try to convey that blogging is just one part of life but it can become a very big part. If Google were to terminate all free blogs tomorrow, I would just have to say, "It was good while it lasted."

The Kulembarach Clan

On the planet Ramnu:

the Forebear, Kulembarach, led her family from the Ringdales to the lands south of Lake Roah and east of the Kiiong River while the Ice was receding to beyond the Guardian Mountains;

later, traders from West-Oversea brought ironworking and writing;

some of the Kulembarach clan joined the College when the Seekers of Wisdom arose;

when the Mount Gungnor volcano awoke and the Golden Tide enriched the land, the clans established the Lords of the Volcano;

the Kulembarach were among those who welcomed the strangers from the stars;

Kulembarach's tomb, the Shrine, is a dolmen surrounded by terraces, houses, statues, gardens, fountains and works of art;

the Ice is returning.

Ends Of Eras

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, both Mirkheim and A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows are good "end of an era" novels although they are completely different eras.

Mirkheim is the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League and is the last time that we see the League, van Rijn, Falkayn and the trader team. Despite its "end" status, Mirkheim is the opening installment of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire. In the following installment, Falkayn's son, born near the end of Mirkheim, is an adult and his son has been born.

Every end is a new beginning, as we are told at the end of James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, - and even more forcefully at the end of the concluding Volume IV when the mutual annihilation of two old universes is followed by the creation of several new universes. See here. I am meant to be discussing Poul Anderson but comparisons between future histories are inevitable.

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows is, appropriately, the concluding installment in Volume VI, Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra. What ends in this novel is not the Terran Empire but:

legitimate rule in the Empire;
the threat to the Empire posed by the last surviving Chereionite, Aycharaych;
Dominic Flandry's second chance of happiness with a woman that he really wanted to be with.

The novel ends with:

the bombardment of Chereion;
the prayer of Bodin's return, which signals the beginning of a happy era on Dennitza.

Despite all this, we are pleased when Flandry returns in the first two of the six installments collected in Volume VII, Flandry's Leagacy. In this volume, he is first named at the very end of the opening chapter of A Stone In Heaven. We were not necessarily going to see Flandry again but fortunately we do.

More Reflections On The Blog

Coincidence? Google emailed me to confirm my current mobile number just after I had mentioned in the combox here that, on a previous occasion, they had sent a verification code to an out-of-date number.

I have had some more time to reflect. We will have to see how this pans out but one possibility is that the number and frequency of posts on this blog will significantly decrease. After all, I interrupted rereading Poul Anderson's Rogue Sword in order instead to reread vast swathes of his Technic History. I now approach the concluding volume of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga but remain specifically focused on the two novels in that volume to feature Dominic Flandry and feel no inclination, after so long a digression, to return to the more pedestrian Rogue Sword.

I have analyzed the Technic History from "The Saturn Game" to "Starfog" and from Avalon to Zorkagrad and now have an inner comprehension of the entire series. Sometimes I think of posting about a particular passage only to search the blog and find that I have already done so. If you are interested in this magnificent future history, then please read or read it, maybe with some help from this blog.

Having said all that, we are not finished yet. I will finish rereading the concluding chapter of A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows and will then reread at least some passages of A Stone In Heaven and The Game Of Empire.

Two Old Red Suns

In the Time Traveler's "Further Vision":

"At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 14, p. 91.

Flandry on Chereion:

"In cloudless violet, the sun stood at afternoon, bigger to see than Sol over Terra, duller and redder than the sun over Diomedes; squinting, he could look straight into it for seconds without being blinded, and through his lashes find monstrous dark spots and vortices. It would not set for many an hour, the old planet turned so wearily."
-A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XX, pp. 592-593.

Chereion's sun sounds unpleasant to look at!

Wellsian connections are always good.

Some Reflections On The Blog

Regular commentators, David and Nicholas, please tell us what you think!

My Concerns
(i) Will I stop finding relevant material to write about ? If inspiration starts to dry up, then I could get into a routine of posting less often than several times a day.

(ii) It is so easy (!) to renew a resident's parking permit online that I must now wait till Monday to phone County Hall for help with the application.

Could circumstances like a forgotten password and/or a google glitch mean that I suddenly lose access to the blog? If anything like that happens, then I will inform a couple of regular correspondents by emailing them from a family member's email account.

These are the fears of someone to whom computers are a mystery. If anything goes wrong, then everything goes wrong. Meanwhile, I hope, it will continue to be business as usual for a while.

Public Figures

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XVIII.

When Dominic Flandry has said, "Sayonara," to Kossara in St. Clement's Cathedral:

"Bodin Miyatovich and his wife waited outside... Walkers cast glances at the three on the stairs, spoke to whatever companions they had, but didn't stop; they taught good manners on Dennitza." (p. 577)

Somewhere in Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy, a planetary head of state and her colleagues walk the short distance from a government building to a restaurant specializing in a local species of fast-growing mushrooms. The proprietor makes no mention of the fact that she has just seen them speaking on live TV on a large screen on the wall of her restaurant. Good manners.

I think that there should be less distance between the public and public figures so that it would be less of a sensation to see them outside a Cathedral or in a restaurant immediately after they have been on TV. In Britain by now, anyone who wants merely to see our head of the state, the Queen, should have been able to do so and most of us must know someone, if not several people, who have met her. "Long to reign over us..." has gone on for a long time!

As sf readers, we always wonder about the near and further future and to many of us here it will be a real sensation to have a different monarch.

A Science Of Humanity

The premise of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is a science of humanity as precise and predictive as physics. John Searle argues that this is impossible.

His argument, if I understand it:

Geology and meteorology can be grounded in physics because rocks and weather are determined by interactions between particles whereas economics cannot be grounded in physics because coins, notes or other artifacts are money only if they are believed to be money and, since "...money can have an indefinite range of physical forms..., it can have an indefinite range of stimulus patterns on our visual systems" (FIVE, p. 80) and these patterns cannot produce "...exactly the same neurophysiological effect on the brain." (ibid.)

OK?