Evolutionary Failures Become Evolutionary Stages

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), XIX, 33, p. 599.

This is quite a good list which I might have quoted before:

fish that failed to compete in the sea were forced onto land;

ancestors of reptiles were forced out of swamps;

birds were forced into the air;

mammals were forced to avoid dinosaurs;

apes were forced out of the trees;

Phoenicians, holding a small strip of land, took to the sea;

those who were uncomfortable in Europe went to America or Australia;

those uncomfortable in the Solar System travel between the stars, joining the misfits from other advanced civilizations.

Civilizations become cybernetic and their misfits are organic.

I like the Phoenicians' return to the sea and, of course, sea is a prelude to space.

Blather And Blither

Poul Anderson, Operation Luna (New York, 1999).

Can you:

summarize the views of a politician or a clergyman that you disagree with;

avoid quoting his exact words;

make it perfectly clear that and why you disagree with him;

do this humorously?

It is called satire and Poul Anderson's Steve Matuchek does it effectively. According to Matuchek, Congressman Blather thinks that taxes:

"...ought to subsidize inefficient Wisconsin dairies, mismanaged New York banks, obsolete Texas oil refineries, foreign tobacco sales, and military bases in his district." (8, p. 86)

Imagine if someone with a poor grasp either of English or of politics thought that that was a direct quote from worthy citizen Blather!

The Reverend Blither decries:

"...our utter lack of compassion for panhandlers, drug dealers, muggers, burglars, prostitutes, pimps and, above all, his admirers." (p. 87)

Blither is even more inspiring than Blather!!

When I helped to catch a thief in Lancaster, I did wonder whether some of my political contacts might reproach me for favoring the petite bourgeoisie and persecuting a poor working class boy who only wanted to steal some money!!! But, fortunately, the incident passed without publicity except on this blog.

Space Travel

In sf, space travel is interplanetary, interstellar or, rarely, intergalactic. Extra-solar travel is usually, not always, FTL (faster than light).

Poul Anderson's works cover every option.

Interplanetary
Twilight World
The War Of Two Worlds
Shield
Three Worlds To Conquer
Tales Of The Flying Mountains: stories
Orion Shall Rise
The Technic History: "The Saturn Game"

Interplanetary and STL Interstellar
The Psychotechnic History: "Marius" to "Brake"
Genesis
The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule

STL Interstellar
Tales Of The Flying Mountains: Prologue; Interludes; Epilogue
The Byworlder
The Kith, Rustum, Directorate and Harvest Of Stars future histories

FTL Interstellar
Brain Wave
The Psychotechnic History: "Gypsy" to "The Chapter Ends"
The Technic History: "Wings of Victory" to "Starfog"
The Long Way Home
After Doomsday
The High Crusade
The Star Fox and Fire Time
Planet Of No Return
The Enemy Stars
The Hoka series (with Gordon R. Dickson)

STL Intergalactic and Intercosmic
Tau Zero

FTL Intergalactic
World Without Stars
The Avatar

Time Travel and Space Travel
The Time Patrol series and two time travel novels refer to future space travel but focus on time travel through history.

Cosmic Contexts

Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

James Blish, The Triumph Of Time

Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle, Into Deepest Space

Our universe is destroyed by contraction or by collision or is not destroyed. The authors seem to cover every option. Such vast themes are not easily confined to a single work:

Tau Zero has a prequel;

Into Deepest Space is a sequel;

The Triumph Of Time is Volume IV of a tetralogy which is also a future history series.

These works are closely conceptually connected and I drafted comparisons between them while awaiting the return of my laptop from the excellent repair service.

Into Deepest Space And Poul Anderson's Works

In Into Deepest Space, Richard Warboys from Earth and a female spacefarer called Alcyone converse.

(i) Alcyone has found some biological material that is not dextro- but levo-rotatory. At least one biosphere in Poul Anderson's Technic History is dextro but which? Answer: Dido.

(ii) Warboys asks:

"'...why would a soft creature made more or less of the usual kind of polymerized biological molecules think in any different fashion than a computer made from hard metal?'"
-Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle, Into Deepest Space (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977), 12, p. 159.

Anderson points out more than once that a conscious organism responds with its whole body from the cells up, thus applying its entire evolutionary history, whereas hard metal interacts with the surrounding environment merely according to the laws of physics. A computer "thinks," if that term is appropriate, not with its entire being but only according to an inputted program.

(iii) Warboys almost immediately does state a reason why a computer might think differently:

"'A metallic computer might have properties I can't conceive of - if its brain were superconducting, for instance. But with the Yela we know that we're on familiar ground. It has the usual kind of brain.'" (ibid.)

(iv) Warboys continues:

"But god, what a brain - a thousand yards in diameter. No wonder the damn thing is able to outsmart us.'" (ibid.)

He assumes that a spherical Yela spaceship is not a crewed vehicle but the metallic body of a large organic brain, a flying cyborg.

(v) When Alcyone doubts whether a computer can think, Warboys assumes, and she confirms, that she thinks that:

"'...there is a law of nature which requires a structure to possess molecules of a certain kind before it can be conscious, before it can think...'" (ibid.)

They miss a point previously discussed on this blog in relation to Poul Anderson's works. The issue is not what kind of molecules a structure possesses but what it does with its molecules. Any structure, whether metallic or biological, that merely manipulates symbols according to programmed rules is conscious neither of the meanings of the symbols nor of anything else. It may be that only biological structures are able to transform unconscious sensitivity into conscious sensation but that is an empirical question.

(vi) Warboys hypothesizes intelligence on a pulsar:

"'I don't see why life shouldn't be based on nuclear properties as well as on chemical properties... It might be based on nuclear magnetic moments...'" (p. 166)

- as in Anderson's The Avatar. (Scroll down to "4th")

Cosmic Technology

Might superior technology affect stellar events or cosmic processes? In Poul Anderson's The Avatar, human explorers meet an advanced race that manipulates a new monobloc, thus influencing a future universe. In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time, Hevians and New Earthmen occupy the metagalactic center where they become new monoblocs after the mutual annihilation of the matter and antimatter universes while the Web of Hercules, controlling matter-antimatter interactions, leaves a record for the inhabitants of the new universes. By contrast, Fred Hoyle's and Geoffrey Hoyle's characters merely infer the existence and activities of superior intelligences, e.g., one character hypothesizes a natural conflict between the highest order intelligences of biological and nuclear life.

In fact, a quasar used to fire a laser beam into the Milky Way is counterattacked by a relativistic spaceship used as a projectile but can war be waged across thousands of millions of light-years at sub-light speeds? The human ship, swept along in the alien's magnetic field, is not destroyed as an irritant by either side but merely shunted into the inverse universe, its crew never learning either the cause or the outcome of the galaxy-quasar conflict. Why does the intelligence associated with the quasar maintain the spaceship's phase relationships through a black hole-white hole transition?

Sf narratives by Anderson and others usually culminate in their characters' comprehensive comprehension of whatever has happened to them whereas it is far more likely that much that they would want to know would remain unknown to them:

"We did not have time to learn everything that we wanted to know."
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 466-596 AT CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 596.

Three Cosmic Journeys II

Poul Anderson, Tau Zero
James Blish, The Triumph Of Time
Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle, Into Deepest Space

In all three works, the monobloc expanded as gas which condensed as stars which congregated as galaxies.

Comparisons

(i) In Blish's cosmology, spiral galaxies, connected by bridges of stars, congregate as spiral metagalaxies which in turn spiral around a common center. Thus, there are three levels of spirals.

In Anderson's cosmology, clusters of galaxies congregate as widely scattered "clans," completely unlike Blish's spirals within spirals within spirals.

The Hoyles' universe comprises galaxies, quasars, black holes and white holes.

(ii) Blish's mobile planet flies from the Greater Magellanic Cloud to the metagalactic center, occasionally sighting a faint, remote galaxy. The journey is inwards, towards a center.

Anderson's relativistic spaceship continually accelerates through vast volumes of dark inter-clan space by revolving around the centers of galaxies, clusters and clans until the universe visibly ages, then contracts. The journey is ever outward until there is no longer any outward direction because the universe has collapsed.

The Hoyles' relativistic spaceships accelerate up from the galactic plane towards the quasar, thus intensifying incoming radiation until the earliest stellar condensations become visible.

(iii) Anderson's universe oscillates.
Blish's universe collides with its antimatter counterpart.
The Hoyles' universe has an inverse counterpart.

(iv) Anderson's characters survive an oscillation.
Blish's characters briefly survive the collision.
The Hoyles' characters survive a black hole-white hole transition.

(v) The Hoyles' characters witness the beginning of this universe.
Anderson's characters enter the next universe.
Blish's characters create new universes.

(vi) Blish's characters occupy the site of the monobloc where they become new monoblocs.
Anderson's characters orbit the new monobloc, then fly outward with it.
The Hoyles' characters enter the inverse universe.

Three Cosmic Journeys

If we can reach another planet by traveling through space, then Earth and that planet are in the same universe. Thus, we cannot enter another universe by traveling through space. However, in:

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

The Triumph Of Time/A Clash Of Cymbals by James Blish

Into Deepest Space by Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle -

- intergalactic travel does become intercosmic.

Anderson's characters are in flight long enough to survive this universe;

Blish's characters fly to a place where they can survive a cosmic collision and create new universes;

the Hoyles' characters fly to a quasar where they are diverted through a black hole-white hole system into the inverse universe.

How can anyone remain alive long enough to make an intergalactic journey?

Blish's characters use an FTL (faster than light) drive and anti-agathics;
the Hoyles' characters use time dilation and induced hibernation;
Anderson's characters use extreme time dilation.

FTL would make an early return journey possible although that is not relevant in this case. However, it does enable Blish's characters to reach their destination in time for their purpose. Anderson and the Hoyles describe the relativistic effects of slower than light travel.

Far And Near II

Several authors present a consistent picture of accessible nearby universes. Such access is either technological, like Anderson's parachronion or Lewis' chronoscope, or "magical," like Lewis' wardrobe or the grimoires used by Anderson's Holger Carlsen. However, any comprehensive multiverse incorporates both technology and magic.

Cars near Windsor Castle twist around onto a wonderful road on a Utopian Earth. (Wells)

Narnia is entered through household objects, a wardrobe and a painting. (Lewis)

Ransom and his colleagues view a parallel Earth through a chronoscope. (Lewis)

Two country inns, the Old Phoenix and the Worlds' End, open onto many universes. (Anderson and Gaiman)

Holger Carlsen experiences flame and darkness on a Danish beach in World War II, then wakes on dead leaves under a tree in a medieval forest. (Anderson)

John Rolfe puts his head through a rippling silver screen on a basement wall, Tom Christiansen finds an unpolluted condor and a caged dodo and a Gate opens to show a sabre-tooth above a dead giant sloth. (Stirling)

A window between worlds hangs unnoticed in the air beside the Oxford ring road. (Pullman)

A man on Earth Prime looks up and shouts, "Look! Up in the sky!" It's...it's nothing." (Maggin) (A man who can fly is passing overhead but is also passing between universes and has appeared only momentarily above Earth Prime where he is a fictional character.)

Iason the Eutopian hates America, a guest in the Worlds' End learns that there are many Americas and Steve Matuchek broadcasts telepathically to other Americas. (Anderson, Gaiman and again Anderson)

A wooden gate exists in both worlds and Titania's palace is:

"...as close as the harvest moon in the evening sky, as distant as a dream on wakening; near as a rainbow, and so remote you could walk for ever and never reach it...not far."
-Neil Gaiman, The Books Of Magic III: The Land Of Summer's Twilight (New York, 1991), p. 6, panel 1; p. 33, panel 4; p. 34, panel 1.

Titania also states that the distant realms do not exist but are imaginary and give the real world meaning. Apart from the Fairy Queen thus letting the cat out of the bag, these eight authors present a single scenario to which Poul Anderson contributes:

Iason visiting America, then Westfall;
Holger Carlsen in the Carolingian universe;
the Matucheks in the goetic universe with access to Heaven, Hell and Yggdrasil;
Prince Rupert of the Rhine in the Shakespearean universe;
Valeria Matuchek meeting Holger, Rupert and others in the Old Phoenix.

Far And Near

Other universes are far, near or both: far - or even unreachable - in one direction but near in another. Eutopia is:

"...more than infinitely remote."
Poul Anderson, "Eutopia" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 112-141 AT p. 124.

Nothing is more than infinite but there are different infinities. A multiverse of space-time continua is more than a single continuum which is more than an atemporal spatial volume which is more than a plane with is more than a straight line even if all five are infinite. No point is infinitely remote because any two points are separated only by a finite distance even if they are on an infinite line. It is impossible, merely by moving along a single straight line, to reach a point on a parallel straight line. However, it is possible to rotate through ninety degrees, then to move at right angles between two parallel lines, thus to cross from a point on one line to a point on the other. A Flatlander cannot reach a higher plane by moving on his native plane but some trans-planar force might lift him up.

"He could travel to the farthest of those stars which had begun twinkling forth against purple dusk - were it possible to exceed the speed of light - and not find Eutopia. It lay sundered from him by dimensions and destiny. Nothing but the warpfields of a parachronion might take him across the time lines to his own." (ibid.)

"The parachronion hummed. Energies pulsed between the universes. The gate opened and Iason stepped through." (ibid. p. 139)

Thus, the "infinitely remote" is instantly reached by stepping through a gate.