Flora's Organization

The Boat Of A Million Years, XV.

Flora is the best immortal because she wants not only to find fellow immortals but also to organize the poor to improve their lives:

"'I want to build something so strong that with it we can say 'no' to the slavers, the lynch mobs, and the lords of state.'" (p. 332)

She says not "I" but "we" and by this she means the downtrodden, which she has been, not just the band of immortals that Hanno hopes to build.

She concludes:

"'...to live independently of the overlords. Only by guiding the poor and helpless toward this can we immortals win it for ourselves.

"'Are you with me?'" (ibid.)

I am with her aim and I like her inclusive use of the pronoun, "we." Pronouns are important. People switch between different referents for "we" without realizing it:

if "we" must compete against the Japanese, then "we" means the speaker's national economy;

if "we" are sinful, then "we" means every human being;

if "we" must do something about the unemployed, then "we" means bureaucrats - it excludes the unemployed themselves.

Flora means not everyone but the majority who need independence from overlords.

There is an Upanishadic verse:

"From delusion lead me to Truth.

"From darkness lead me to Light.

"From death lead me to immortality."

-Brihadaranyaka.

Maybe, in this context, that last line is relevant? Nevertheless, my revision of the verse, which I recite before meditation is:

"From delusion lead us to Truth.

"From darkness lead us to Light."

Flora uses religion and builds a community so I have not gone completely off the point by quoting my revised Upanishad.

Psychology In Alternative Futures

The Boat Of A Million Years, XV.

In the Near East in the eighth century, Aliyat's pimp knew that she was unaging, therefore "'...special, maybe magical...,'" (p. 325) so he did not dare to abuse her and moved her between cities to keep the secret. We learn that, for different reasons, several mortals colluded in guarding the secret of immortality. Aliyat thinks that any immortals without protectors might have lost their sanity and not survived.

Flora found ways to cope with psychological problems like memory overload:

"'By the early twentieth century we had a science of psychology. Crude, largely guesswork, but the idea that the mind can be understood and fixed makes a huge difference. I found autohypnosis did wonders -...'" (ibid.)

Flora summarizes the opening premise of Poul Anderson's first future history series, the Psychotechnic History. Psychology, beginning in the twentieth century, is at first crude and largely guesswork but becomes a predictive science of society with some good and many bad consequences. It remains in the background even after the outlawing of the Psychotechnic Institute so that, in the Stellar Union period, a distinction is made between integrate and unintegrate civilizations although we are told nowhere near enough about this. Psychotechnicians rule in the eventual Galactic period. Immortals explore the galaxy in Boat.

Coming Together

The Boat Of A Million Years, XV, Coming Together.

The immortal who escaped from slavery and the immortal who survived as a prostitute come together and compare experiences. After many centuries, we now know of three pairs of immortals:

Hanno and Wanderer;

Asagoa and Tu Shan;

Flora and Aliyat -

- and one solitary, Svoboda.

One more must be found so that there will be eight "Survivors" in Chapter XIX. Their names change, of course.

After a long day (see the previous post), that is all that I feel capable of this evening. The story of the immortals continues, apparently indefinitely...

A Science Fiction Flavour

"Not only was the Republic itself a venture into the unknown, but later countless utopian communities were established in America, some of them on very strange principles indeed. How could a science fiction writer be more original than, say, the Shakers? The most successful of these undertakings, which is still going strong, took place in Utah. I hope my Mormon friends won't mind my saying that their church, like our country, has a grand science fiction flavor about it. That ecclesiastical division into stakes and wards is pure Heinlein, isn't it? And so, by the way, is the raw courage with which their pioneers entered the wilderness."

-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT p. 199.

(We remember Heinleinian and Andersonian characters colonizing other planets.)

This quotation is appropriate for our experience today. First, we traveled to Windermere by bus since I no longer drive a car. Secondly, on the return journey, we sat opposite two young American women who are training in a nearby Evangelical college. On a human level, I responded to their goodness and honesty. On an intellectual level, I disagreed with their world-view - needless to say. On an imaginative level, I recognized the "grand science fiction flavor" of their perception of Biblical and eschatological history.

What more can I say? Very good people - a pity about some of their views.

Starting Over

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIV.

Hanno and Wanderer work behind the scenes to bring to an end the conflict between whites and Native Americans. Wanderer helps Quanah Parker who covers up for Wanderer's longevity. Quanah knows Theodore Roosevelt. Wanderer is active in the Native American Church which I first read of in a book by Aldous Huxley.

Having done what he can for his people, Wanderer leaves with Hanno, saying:

"'It's time for me to start over.'" (8, p. 314)

Leaving that period of history behind them, the immortals move forward. They will come together. The remaining chapters of Boat are set in:

1931

1938

1942

1975

      ?

Tyre, Carthage, Gallia, Britannia, Roma and Byzantium are gone. The remaining year dates are familiar to Poul Anderson's readers: our twentieth century and a science fictional future.

War And Peace

In Poul Anderson's Technic History

(i) Some unscrupulous Polesotechnic League traders sell spaceships and nuclear weapons to barbarians.

(ii) Nicholas van Rijn does not incite wars in order to sell weapons to both sides! On the contrary, he either avoids conflictive societies or makes peace in order to do stable business with both sides.

(iii) Lord Hauksberg has criminally unrealistic ideas about making peace with the Roidhunate of Merseia although the problem is with the regime, not with the species, as later shown in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

In Other Works

(iv) Gunnar Heim becomes a privateer in The Star Fox.

(v) Hanno becomes a pragmatic peace lobbyist in The Boat Of A Million Years.

Other examples abound.

Picking Up The Threads

Reading is intertwined with the rest of life and with other reading. I have been away from our house, and therefore from this lap top, because of building work in the house.

I must pick up the threads of Poul Anderson's extremely rich novel, The Boat Of A Million Years. I had reached the point where Hanno proposed to lobby politicians for peace. Concurrently, I was reading a book about Jiddu Krishnamurti, friend of Aldous Huxley. The latter had proposed a peace plan pre-1939. Therefore, I drew a parallel between Hanno and Huxley. I am glad that Huxley tried even if only to prove that such a plan was not going to be accepted at that time! This was my slant on Hanno's reference to lobbying for peace and almost certainly would not have been any other reader's slant. We each bring to bear our own perspectives and other reading but Anderson's works at one point or another raise every such important issue for our consideration. 

When I have meditated and recovered from a long drawn out on-line communication with HM Revenue & Customs, I might reread and post a bit more this evening. There is still much to be reread in Boat.

Making Peace

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIV, Men of Peace, 4.

Hanno tells the Native American Peregrino/Wanderer:

"'I'll be glad to listen later... Also to any ideas you may have about making peace. I told you I have money. And I've always made a point of getting wires in my hands. You savvy? Certain politicians owe me favors. I can buy others. We'll work out a plan, you and I.'" (pp. 292-293)

Hanno is a man with money, made from sea trade, who invests not in armaments but in peace. While World War II was building up, Aldous Huxley argued with governments that:

preventing war would require sacrifices;

the most powerful would have to make the biggest sacrifices;

but these sacrifices would be smaller than those demanded by war or even by the then current preparations for war.

Thus, Huxley, like Hanno, tried. If more people had tried, then they would have succeeded. 

(I know, of course, that, beyond a certain point in time, events had been set in motion and were just going to take their course. Then the question becomes how to prevent it from happening again.)

Antithesis

We have referred to Hegelian philosophy. The previous post and its combox present a Hegelian triad.

Thesis: Scientific knowledge.

Antithesis: Environmental damage.

Synthesis: Environment repair and enhancement through further application of knowledge.

James Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy, deriving its title from a TS Eliot quotation, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?," poses the question, "Is knowledge evil?," although Blish's own answer was "No."

We are living in the antithesis (see above) when the melting of the Arctic leads not to international cooperation but to increased economic competition for trade routes and resources.

Hegel thought that syntheses were inevitable. They are not. We have to work at them.

Science And Technology

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIV, 3.

Tarrant/Hanno explains to Quanah that a scientist:

"'...is a man who seeks for whatever truth lies hidden behind things. How do the sun and the stars shine? How did the earth and life come to be? What really happened in the past?'" (pp. 287-288)

The past is historical, geological and cosmic. 

Quanah replies that he knows this and he also knows the consequences:

"'Thus you whites have found ways to do and make many terrible things, and the railroad runs where the buffalo grazed.'" (p. 288)

Knowledge is power. Science, "knowledge," has proved itself. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?