Apes And A Waterfall

The Night Face.

"'We've both had encounters before now with animals on the verge of intelligence, not to mention fully developed nonhuman races.'" (VIII, p. 613)

Here is one further reminder that nonhuman intelligences still exist in this post-Imperial period of the Technic History even though they do not appear. 2001: A Space Odyssey coped with the problem of what aliens look like by just not showing them. These four stories could have been written from that perspective although now CGI makes the visuals of any kind of screen aliens possible.

Chapter VII informed us that parallel evolution had made anthropoid animals, apes, common on terrestroid planets. We had not known that till now.

Chapter VII also described:

foaming water;

"...a shifting pattern of light and shadow..." (p. 604);

dancing rainbows;

swirling currents;

riverbed stones seeming to ripple;

a waterfall ringing in the cool, damp air;

a high, wheeling bird of prey.

Familiar descriptive details in new combinations.

Gods

Sorry to harp on about theology but it makes a change from politics and all of these issues come out of Poul Anderson's texts. I have found four uses for the word, "god." 

(i) Ordinary gods who may be many in number and limited in scope. Odin and others are characters in fantasy novels by Anderson.

(ii) The highest and most powerful god, in transition to being regarded as the only god.

(iii) Ultimate reality personified as "God."

(iv)  Ultimate reality intuited mystically, no longer personified but sometimes still called "God."

The Mosaic and Muslim divine name progressed through stages (i), (ii) and (iii) and can be used in sense (iv) by heretical mystics.

Clearly, (i) and (iv) are completely different in meaning but are at opposite ends of a spectrum. I buy into the meaning of (iv) but do not insist that the word, "God," continue to be used. Indeed, it simply causes endless disagreements and misunderstandings.

The Gwydiona in Anderson's The Night Face apply the word, "God," not to intuited reality but to periodic insanity. Maybe this is sense (v). 

Religions In The Technic History

Nicholas van Rijn and Admiral Cajal are Catholics. Philippe Rochefort and Fr. Axor are Jerusalem Catholics. We are not told whether these are the same church. Life would be simpler if they were but life is not always simple. Jerusalem Catholicism is mentioned in the very first Technic History instalment, "The Saturn Game," but becomes a major player when Axor seeks the Universal Incarnation in the last volume of the Flandry period, The Game Of Empire.

The third Technic History instalment, "The Problem of Pain," introduces the Ythrian New Faith of God the Hunter and contrasts it both with the Old Faith of bloody polytheist sacrifices and with the Christianity of Peter Berg, a human being from the planet, Aeneas. In The Day Of Their Return, we learn that Aeneans are apocalyptic, believing variously in Christianity and in the imminent return of the Ancients.

Also:

Adzel's Mahayana Buddhism;

Merseian ancient polytheism and racist monotheism;

Ikranankan demonology but standard polytheism in the Twilight Zone;

Gwydiona pantheism.

A rich mixture.

Ylem, Creation And Chaos: Scientific Oaths

The Night Face.

The Nuevamerican, Miguel Tolteca:

"'...good ylem, Commandant...'" (I, p. 547)

"'By all creation...'" (p. 549)

"To Chaos with being a gentleman..." (VII, p. 604)

Science replaces religion as a source of oaths. "...all creation..." has come to mean just the universe, not the created order as such.

There may be other examples but that is my lot for this evening. Earth Real is providing us with enough excitement and drama for several sf novels. 

A Sense Of Humour

The Night Face, VII.

"'Maybe God likes a joke now and then. But if so, Vwi has a pawky sense of humor.'" (p. 602)

For the first time, a Gwydiona refers to God as a person. 

A guy I knew hitch-hiked in the US and kept meeting Evangelicals who assured him that, if he asked Jesus for anything, it would be given. When no car would stop and he was in danger of missing a plane, he thought, "I'll try anything once," then prayed: "God, I want the next car to stop and to take me directly to the airport in good time for the plane." The next vehicle was a coach and it passed him by. He thought, "That's that." Then the coach stopped and reversed. A head stuck out and called, "Hi. We're going to a Billy Graham rally and we wondered if you would like to come with us!" He said, "No, thanks," and to God, "You and I are finished. I don't like your sense of humour." But he referred to that experience as his encounter with God and claimed to know Christians who received, as they believed, humorous responses to their prayers. 

Discussing Poul Anderson's texts opens up the whole great tapestry of human experience.

Super-Language?

The Night Face, VI.

In the Holy City, Elfavy lists what she calls "languages":

speech

mathematics

music

painting

choreography

myth

Uniquely on Gwydion, trained semanticists have developed myth as a language free from primitive confusions with science. That is why the Gydiona can always explain their mythical symbols and stories in elaborate detail. They remind me of Poul and Karen Anderson's Ysans claiming that, unlike Christians, they do not confuse their myths with facts. 

Elfavy claims that the Bale time experience of being God could be described only in a fusion of every language, including some that human beings have not yet imagined, then adds that such a super-language would be self-contradictory. Why? Aspects of reality seem paradoxical to us, as in quantum mechanics, but they cannot fundamentally contradict each other. Therefore, a super-language describing every aspect of reality should not contradict itself.

Raven asks whether, in Bale time, the Gwydiona perceive or commune with total reality. Excellent question. Raven is trying to penetrate Gwydiona evasion. My response: perception of total reality, impossible; communion with it, why not? Elfavy responds:

"'That's merely another set of words...'" (p. 599)

Of course it is but what else can he use? More evasion. Her own words have implied an apprehension, if not a comprehension, of total reality but the truth is that that is not what happens at Bale time.

Living In Myth

"'...that which was myth in one world might always be fact in another.' PERELANDRA"

-CS Lewis, "Forms of Things Unknown" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1977), pp. 124-132 AT p. 124.

- a perfect recipe for several fictional multiverses like the one associated with Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix.

In SM Stirling's Emberverse, when high tech stops working, the survivors revert to living in mythical, not historical, time. An early pivotal event becomes a defining myth. Some characters start living as if Tolkien's Middle Earth were true history, not fiction.

In Poul Anderson's The Night Face, the Gwydiona, inhabitants of the planet Gwydion, mythologize every experience. On a young planet, volcanic smoke carries deadly heavy metals. Travelers passing near a suddenly erupting volcano must run and take shelter in the Holy City which is usually entered only on an annual special occasion. However, they need not feel that this is inappropriate because, while they are running for their lives, their leader explains that, since the sudden volcanic eruption was an expression of the Night Face called Chaos, they can restore the balance by entering the Focus of God even when they are not God. In fact, by entering the City while they are merely human beings, they will enact a parable of human reason and science. This satisfies them.

National Perceptions

Growing up post-War, I "knew," when I was very young, that Germans were bad and indeed confused them with "germs." (I write this not as an attempt at humour but because that was how my childhood mentality processed verbal inputs.)

In my teens, I read:

"'...that is the way of the Boche. He's never so happy as fouling another's nest.'"

-Dornford Yates, Cost Price (London, 1949), CHAPTER I, p. 19.

"'...German hands are too filthy to finger such a treasure.'

"Be sure I agreed with him."

-(ibid., p. 20)

"'Austria is a gentleman: Germany is a cad.'"

-op. cit., CHAPTER IX, p. 277.

"'Jonathan's right,' said Jenny. 'Germany is a cad. She is the cad of Europe, as England is the peer.'"

-ibid.

(Jenny Chandos is a beautiful character but, like all of Yates's heroes and heroines, she is a mouthpiece for her author's opinions and for no others. Yates was living in France but had to get out before the Germans arrived.)

I regret to record that I did not regard these remarks as reprehensible. How was I being brought up? Two American sf writers to the rescue: first, James Blish told me that he liked many things about Germany, including the language. Secondly, Manse Everard of the Time Patrol reflects that Nazism:

"...would not, could not have come to power in the country of Bach and Goethe, except through the unique genius of Adolf Hitler."

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1935, p. 424.

Bach and Gothe: filthy cads?

The Concept Of Chaos

The war of Law and Chaos is waged in Poul Anderson's fantasies, Three Hearts And Three Lions and Operation Chaos.

Anderson's Time Patrol agents counteract temporal chaos.

Chaos is one of the Night Faces on the planet Gwydion in Anderson's The Night Face.

However, in some other novels by Anderson, the villains are those bureaucrats, ideologues or even artificial intelligences who regard human freedom as unpredictable and chaotic, therefore to be controlled and suppressed. 

Either way, chaos is clearly a key concept or set of concepts.

Internal Enemies

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the "protean enemy" of mankind is mankind itself, the revolt of the primitive against civilization.

The phrase, "the enemy within," is applied to subversives - or to social critics regarded as subversives. To cite an example that might not be contentious here, Putin regards Russian peace protestors as pro-US whereas probably they are just anti-war. A deeper meaning of "the enemy within" might be the conflicts that are present within a society whether or not anyone protests about them. A still deeper meaning might be the psychological conflicts within individual members of society, as in the "protean enemy."

A fictional hero like James Bond fights only external enemies, an endless succession of them. If the Bond series were to be doubled in length, that would simply double the number of successors of Rosa Klebb, Doctor No, Goldfinger etc. At first sight, Dominic Flandry is of the same stamp. External enemies abound. However, Flandry also acknowledges the self-inflicted internal problems that will bring down the civilization that he defends even if he does defeat all of its external enemies. (Fleming never got anywhere close to acknowledging such a thing.)

Earlier, the Shenna were an external threat to Technic civilization but it was the conflicts within the Polesotechnic League that eventually brought it down. In Flandry's time, the Merseians are not entirely an external threat because they acquired the hyperdrive from the League - as well as a lot of resentment of how they were treated by the League.

In The Night Face, the Gwydiona are clearly denying and repressing something. There is evidence of violence on their planet - but it cannot have been committed by them!