On Luna

The Stars Are Also Fire, 22.

In the "Mother of the Moon" period, English has not yet become Anglo. The Lunarian language is mercurial, like Exaltationist. The Federation fears resurgent nationalism on Luna just as, in the Psychotechnic History, the UN fears resurgent nationalism on Earth. Dagny's children have found Edmond's planetoid, spherical, 2000 kilometers in diameter, on a remote orbit but keep its existence secret and Brandir will explore it when he can get a torchcraft.

Moondwellers divide into Lunarians and Terrans born on Earth or in L-5, including avowed Earthlings. There is friction. Lunarians chafe at Federation laws. Much is happening that we do not see.

Ghosts On The Wind

The Stars Are Also Fire, 22.

Lunarian music in Temerir's observatory on Lunar Farside makes Dagny Beynac think of:

"...ghosts in flight before the wind." (p. 290)

Carl Farness tells Manse Everard:

"'Wodan-Mercury-Hermes is the Wanderer because he's the god of the wind.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 390.

 

(Hermes might also have been identified with Hermodr.)

Carl explains further that being the god of the wind makes Wodan:

 

"'...the patron of travelers and traders.'" (ibid.)

 

(Nicholas van Rijn, Master Merchant, refers to Mercury.)

 

Traveling widely, Wodan learns much and therefore becomes associated with wisdom, poetry and magic. Since the dead ride on the night wind, he also becomes the conductor of the dead.

 

Finally, coming full circle for this post, Carl visits the Moon and views the Lunar craterscape in 2319. 

Enclaves

In Coventry, in Robert Heinlein's Future History, there are three sections, for extreme individualists, for extreme statists and for Angels of the Lord. That third group has a reigning Prophet Incarnate in direct line of succession from the First Prophet, Nehemiah Scudder.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, there is a Reservation where people live in the old, chaotic, pre-Fordian way with worship of deities including Jesus and women getting pregnant and giving birth. Huxley said in an Introduction to a later edition that, if he had written the book at that later date, then the Reservation would have included a small community pursuing sanity which, for Huxley, would be through mysticism.

I think that Huxley's point can also be made about the communities on the cybercosm-ruled Earth in Poul Anderson's The Star Are Also Fire. Some of these communities engage in senseless violence. Sure. But some others would value and seek sanity.

Eleven Future Historians

A future history can be about human beings interacting with each other, with alien intelligences or with artificial intelligences and always with their cosmic environment. Poul Anderson's nine future histories address all these options. They, together with his time travel narratives and cosmological sf, complete a substantial literary tradition. (My opinion, of course.)

In HG Wells's The Shape Of Things To Come, mankind remakes itself with science in the twenty first and twenty second centuries whereas, in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the project of mankind remaking itself through science is revealed to be literally diabolical.

Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men recounts the entire future history of mankind, including interactions with Martians and Venerians.

Stapledon's Star Maker recounts cosmic and creational history, summarizing Last And First Men in a single sentence.

In Brian Aldiss's Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand, evolution in our galaxy ends with man and, in the next galaxy, starts with man. (Non-Darwinian evolution, obviously.)

In A Short History Of The Future by RC Churchill, Orwell's, Huxley's, Bradbury's, Vonnegut's etc dystopias are shoehorned into a single narrative. (Huxley: Ape And Essence, not Brave New World.)

In Robert Heinlein's Future History, technological progress is accompanied by social regression although there is an eventual advance toward the first mature civilization. Martians, Venerians and other Solar races are present but peripheral even though the possibility of contact with non-human intelligences had been one of the Man Who Sold The Moon's many selling points.

Isaac Asimov connected his Robots series, about human-AI interactions, with his Foundation series, about a predictive science of society.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, cities fly with anti-gravity while human beings live indefinitely with antiagathics but cannot survive the end of the universe.

In Blish's The Seedling Stars, as in Last And First Men, human beings are adapted to extraterrestrial environments.

In Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, messages from the future help to bring about an intergalactic utopia.

In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, human beings turn out to be mutated Pak breeder colonists of a former Slaver food planet and eventually become genetically lucky while meanwhile interacting with kzinti, Puppeteers etc. (Thus, we are not who we thought we were and we become someone else in any case.)

In Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history, mankind exports war and imperialism to the galaxy and encounters one alien race.

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is about whether mankind can remake itself with a science of the psyche and society. There are some human-alien interactions.

Anderson's Technic History is both about the cycles of human civilizations and about many human-alien interactions.

Anderson's Maurai future history is about whether mankind can survive after nearly destroying its environment.

Anderson's Kith and Flying Mountains future histories are about mankind in space. In Starfarers, the Kith novel, time dilated space travelers interact with aliens while civilizations rise and fall on Earth.

In Anderson's Rustum future history, ideological conflict on Earth leads to extra-solar exile and colonization.

In Anderson's Directorate future history, as in his Rustum history, human beings colonize extra-solar planets despite traveling between planetary systems at only sub-light speeds.

Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history and Genesis are about human-AI interactions.

I was reminded of Anderson's first, Psychotechnic, future history when, while rereading Harvest Of Stars, Volume II, I came across:

"...purely human politics, short-sighted, ignorant, superstitious, animally impassioned, forever repeated the same ghastly mistakes."

-The Stars Are Also Fire, 21, p. 277.

 

The revolt of the primitive against the unnatural state of civilization is the "protean enemy," opposed by psychotechnicians. 

Collision And Resonance

The Stars Are Also Fire, 20.

Edmond Beynac and others explore an asteroid composed of metals that were once fused and therefore were part of a body large enough to melt and form a core. The flat surface on one side is the fracture line where a collision broke this particular asteroid loose from the larger body. The evidence suggests not that the collision shattered that original body but only that several large fragments like the present asteroid were broken from it. The original body, if still in the Solar System, should now be in an eccentric orbit. Beynac's son, Temerir, a Lunarian astronomer, will:

"...search after the great planetoid Father dreamed of..." (p. 275)

This sub-plot has legs.

Beynac's death motivates his sons to:

"'...break the ban of the overlords and set Luna free in space." (p. 273)

Their mother, Dagny, agrees to help politically, another reason to call her "the Mother of the Moon."

Beynac's death:

"What caused the disaster was a shaped minicharge. It should simply have split an anomalous plumbic vein, to produce recoverable specimens. Instead the explosion found a resonance. Weaknesses unstressed for billions of years gave way... A dozen huge, a hundred lesser chunks fell." (p. 270)

Beynac's helmet is smashed open.

That resonance rang a bell:

"'An incipient causal loop is always dangerous, you know. It can set up a resonance, and the changes of history that that produces can multiply catastrophically.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 449.

 

A material resonance shatters an overhang on an asteroidal peak whereas a temporal resonance causes multiple historical changes.

Deaths III

"The last warriors of King Hrolf made a ring around him... the guards and the great captains went down. Hrolf Kraki trod out from the breaking shield-burg. Man after man he felled. No one of them slew him; it took them all."

-Poul Anderson, Hrolf Kraki's Saga (New York, 1973), VII, p. 255.

 

"Grim was that battle. Knowing they would die whatever happened, the Teurings fought till they dropped. Hathawulf alone heaped a wall of slain before him. When he fell, few were left to be glad of it."

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 372, p. 455.

 

"Eyjolf and the housecarls found him in the morning. A wind had awakened. Whitecaps chopped. The rope creaked as Hadding swung to and fro. On each of his shoulders perched a raven. They had not taken his eyes. As the men drew near, they spread black wings and flew off eastward."

-Poul Anderson, War Of The Gods (New York, 1999), XXXIV, p. 295.

 

The wind and the ravens of Odin. We see where Hadding goes:

 

"Leaves rustled, alive with sunlight. He stood beside an ash tree whose trunk was mightier than a mountain and whose crown reached higher than heaven. Those boughs spread as wide as all the worlds..."

-ibid., XXXV, p. 295.

 

"Gunnhild needed no witchcraft to know she was dying...

"Her strength ebbed into the wind. She sat down, then lay down, her face turned seaward. It felt as if moonlight streamed through her."

-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), XXXII, pp. 587, 591.

 

The wind is present again. Mother Of Kings was published posthumously. 

Coincidentally, I am rereading Neil Gaiman's retelling of the myth of Orpheus. Gaiman integrates Orpheus into his Sandman myth. Thus, Orpheus is the son of Morpheus/Dream and consults Dream's older sister, Death, before descending into the Underworld.

 

Hail Anderson and Gaiman.

Deaths II

See Deaths and combox.

I missed one:

"...Skafloc was dead in her arms."

-Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (London, 1973), XXVIII, p. 207.

"...Mananaan Mac Lir took away Freda and the body of Skafloc, that he might himself see to the welfare of the one and the honoring of the other."

-ibid., pp. 207-208.

Mananaan is a god of the sea whose name tells us that he is a son of Lir, one of the Three of Ys.

"Here ends the saga of Skafloc Elven-Fosterling." (p. 208)

Like Hamlet, Skafloc dies but only at the end of the narrative so he remains on stage till then.

Thus, we have reviewed deaths in Andersonian works of heroic fantasy, historical fiction and science fiction.

(What is wrong with that cover?)

Deaths

We do not see the deaths of Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Dominic Flandry, Manse Everard or Gratillonius so which important characters do die in Poul Anderson's texts?

Anson Guthrie, but he was first downloaded.

Harald Hardrada:

"The arrows sleeted down.

Harald did not feel the shaft that smote him...

"Thunder and night rolled over him.

"When their king died, the Norse were driven back."

-Poul Anderson, The Last Viking, Book #3, The Sign Of The Raven (New York, 1980), XIV, 4, p. 265.

David Falkayn's older brother:

"...Alpha Cygni had taken a warhead...

"In this wise died Michael Falkayn, older brother of David and, since their father's death a pair of years ago, head of the Falkayn domain."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT X, pp. 156-157.

Edmond Beynac:

 

"Thus the scene where Edmond Beynac died."

-The Stars Are Also Fire, 20, p. 269.

 

We are told this before Beynac dies. And his wife, Dagny, had had a premonition, remembering Kipling:

 

"What is a woman that you forsake her,

"And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

"To go with the old grey Widow-maker?" (18, p. 241)  

Other Imaginative Fiction

Appreciating Poul Anderson's works also involves appreciating much other imaginative fiction. Recent posts have mentioned:

HG Wells' Selenites, both their name and their nature;

Rhysling, Dahlquist, the Stones, the Covenant and some other features of Robert Heinlein's Future History;

some of these same features in Heinlein's Scribner Juveniles;

Asimov's Robots;

Arthur C. Clarke's novels of Lunar colonization (does the attached cover image remind you of any Anderson cover?);

multiple aspects of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman;

Doctor Who;

a novel with a forgotten title and author's name.

Remembering an idea or a plot but not who wrote it is a common experience of sf readers and CS Lewis makes two such acknowledgments in his The Great Divorce. An American "Scientifiction" magazine had contained a story in which a traveler to the past found raindrops that pierced him like bullets and sandwiches that he could not bite because, being past, they could not be altered. No need for a Time Patrol then. Also, no possibility of circular causality. But, of course, this "traveler" had not physically entered the past.

"Scientifictionists" also taught Lewis about traveling by changing size. Some sf characters found that nuclei were miniature stars and that their electrons were miniature inhabited planets. James Blish's characters in "Nor Iron Bars" entered a quantum mechanical microcosm but I do not think that Anderson ever trod that particular path.

Marco Polo And Extratemporal Encounters In At Least Four Timelines

Some sources:

Poul Anderson, "The Only Game in Town" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 129-171.

Neil Gaiman, "Soft Places" IN Gaiman, The Sandman: Fables And Reflections (New York), pp. 124-148.

Doctor Who, during the period of the first Doctor.

Section 2 of "The Only Game in Town" begins:

"Anno Domini One Thousand Two Hundred Eighty:..." (p. 133)

- then tells us what Kublai Khan, Marco Polo and several others, including two Time Patrolmen, were doing in that year.

"Soft Places" begins:

"Anno Domini 1273.

"A sense of mounting panic rises in Marco's chest." (p. 125, panels 1-2.)

 

- then shows us Marco Polo's encounters with people from other times.

 

Marco did not record his meeting with the Doctor because he thought that time travel would not be believed.

 

I have read one other work that concluded with an extratemporal encounter with Marco but remember neither title nor author's name. The text ended:

 

"Mar. Co. Po. Lo. A strange name in a strange tongue."