The Phoebean System And Ireland

The Avatar, IX.

The moons of Demeter are Persephone and Erion. The planets of the system include not only a Zeus and an Aphrodite but also an Ares. In a Demetrian lake, a large dark wassergeist rises, whistles and sinks. Its whistle is "...eldritch..." (p. 85) This is appropriate.

The Troubles impoverished some parts of Ireland. (Not the "Troubles" that some of us remember but those that are still to come in this fictional future.) Uneducated smallholders again believe in the Sidhe. If Others, why not Sidhe?

The two are connected. Caitlin has always felt one with the universe. When her mother, Norah, tramped through Ireland and slept in the open air near Slieve Bernagh, a man of awesome beauty invited her into the mountain where she experienced:

"'...rainbows and suns, purple and gold, wind and wild seas and everything a glory.'" (ibid.)

Nine months later, Caitlin was born. She is our title character. She refers to Lady Gregory.

Novy Mir On Demeter

The Avatar, IX.

Apparently, "mir" can mean:

world

peace

universe

kingdom

quiet

pax

quietude

system

See here. Some of these words have the same meaning so I do not understand why they are listed separately.

"Mir" was a Russian space station. Novy (New) Mir is a Russian-language village on Demeter. Its only public phone, which however has a screen, is on a wall inside its tavern where there is also an ikon. Outside, there is a single dusty street of brightly decorated timber houses and a communal cropland. Broderson sees a cat, a babushka, children, a green valley and sheer mountains. 

Can all of this exist on a colonized extrasolar planet? Yes, because:

geneticists have modified Terrestrial plants;

agrochemists have converted the soil;

ecological technology, mostly microbial, holds back native life.

Thus, the ecology will revert if the colonists fail or withdraw.

Disappearances

A Time Patrol timecycle disappears at one set of spatiotemporal coordinates and appears at another. So does a spaceship following a path around a T machine. However, I think that the two disappearing acts are fundamentally different. The timecycle does not exist between its departure and its arrival. The spaceship does exist. Its world line continues to extend through space-time but in a direction that has taken it out of the field of vision of any observers who have remained at its departure point. I was surprised when a spaceship was described as disappearing in Poul Anderson's The Avatar but I think that this is the explanation. In any case, I am now bound not for a T machine but for the realm of Morpheus.

Not Meant To Know?

The Avatar, VIII.

Discovery of the T machine with its robotic messenger in the Solar System is not First Contact with the Others but is the next best thing. Poul Anderson correctly lists the effects that such an event would have on Earth:

excitement

speeches

crowds

demonstrations

sermons

prayer meetings

press conferences

interviews with experts

tumult

parades

ceremonies

parties

extravagant predictions

occasional forebodings

claims that the Others caused the Troubles -

"...it was too disturbing, too provocative of heresy; there were things man was never meant to know." (p. 74)

Never meant by whom? I had heard that phrase and believed it to be true in my early teens. James Blish wrote a Trilogy, After Such Knowledge, its title derived from a poem by TS Eliot:

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" 

K'thrr'u/Gaoung Ro Mm

The Avatar, VII.

The Betan, Fidelio (not his real name), is not from Beta Centauri or from any other second star in a constellation but from the second planet of a star which human explorers called "Centrum" after a T machine had transported them to it.

Fidelio has two Betan names:

"K'thrr'u'" on land;

"Gaoung Ro Mm" in water.

OK. That is really alien. Human beings have to say "Fidelio." However, Fidelio has two eyes and two ears. That is too terrestroid. I know that two is a sensible number of eyes and also of ears but extraterrestrial evolution is going to find different ways to deploy sense organs. An sf writer like Poul Anderson knows how to alienize. The eyes are large and uniformly blue with nictitating membranes for underwater sight. Fidelio is furred and unclothed, although his reproductive organs are retractable, and three times the size of a Betan female.

His chemosensitivities do not correspond exactly to either taste or smell. Finally, without listing every other detail, he is a six-limbed biped which means that he has two sets of arms like some other fictional extraterrestrials that are known to us. For a cover illustration featuring Fidelio, see here. I think that he is insufficiently alien but this will be a continual debate until we meet some.

Multiple Space-Time Options

This is not a complete list but you get the idea.

There Will Be Time: time travel and circular causality on Earth.

Time Patrol: space-time travel, circular causality and causality violation on Earth.

Tau Zero: time dilation in space.

The Avatar: space-time travel in space over distances that avoid paradoxes.

There Will Be Time ends with two possible syntheses of time travel with space travel. Either time travellers travel futureward within slower than light interstellar spaceships or travel into the past is mathematically equivalent to faster than light travel so that FTL spaceships can be developed.

Poul Anderson deserves a special Hugo Award as the Most Comprehensive SF Writer.

T Machines

The Avatar, II.

What seems wrong with the following dialogue?

"'...everybody expected you'd be gone for years!'

"'We were.'

"'No. I witnessed your transit. That was, uh, five months ago, no more.'" (p. 4)

After some calculations:

"'For us, approximately eight Terrestrial years have passed.'" (ibid.)

Interstellar explorers have lived for about eight years although only twenty weeks and three days have elapsed in the planetary system from which they had departed and to which they have returned. We have got used to it the other way around. Because of time dilation at relativistic speeds, less time elapses for the space travellers. However, that is not what we are dealing with here. It is further explained:

"'It turns out that the T machine is indeed a time machine of sorts, as well as a space transporter. The Betans - the beings whom we followed - calculated our course to bring us out near the date when we left.'" (ibid.)

This is neither Tau Zero nor Time Patrol but something else. Poul Anderson follows every possibility, of course.

In Their Absence

In After Doomsday by Poul Anderson, an interstellar spaceship with a human crew and one alien passenger returns to the Solar System to find that Earth has been sterilized by as yet unknown aliens.

In The Avatar by Anderson, an interstellar spaceship with a human crew and one alien passenger returns to the colonized Phoebean System and from there is escorted through the T machine gate to the Solar System there to be held incommunicado by order of the anti-stellar clique within the World Union government. (Ships with only interplanetary capacity traverse interstellar and vaster spatiotemporal distances by orbiting around T machines.)

In both cases, heavy things have gone down in the explorers' absence but the enemy is alien in the first case and human in the second. Meanwhile, stuff going down on Earth keeps me away from this lap top.

Problems On Earth

The Avatar, V.

Dan Broderson lists the problems:

Transdeism

New Islam

Asianism

centralization causing secessionism

possible revival of Keynesianism!

Broderson is particularly hostile to Keynesianism. I have just read an article that said that, in major economies, state spending still made up forty percent of GDP even after Keynesianism and that states intervened to bail out big firms under neoliberalism. 

Earth has a Covenant, an echo of Robert Heinlein's Future History, and Broderson says that the best outcome of a breakdown:

"'...would be a kind of Caesar...'" (p. 51)

- an echo of Poul Anderson's Technic History.

Humanity can do better than Caesars - but it is our collective responsibility to demonstrate this in practice. Overthrow Putin and/or (fill in the blank) and don't replace him with just another one. It can be done. 

On Demeter And Earth

The Avatar, V-VI.

Some days, there is too much else going on for new blog posts.

In what is left of Chapter V, Dan and Caitlin discuss personal matters against the Demetrian backdrop summarized in recent posts.

On Demeter, there are garms. On Avalon in Poul Anderson's Technic History, there are draculas. In Larry Niven's Smoke Ring, there are large birds whose mating ritual earns them the name, "flashers." Human beings will take words to other worlds and give them new meanings.

Chapter VI, a second one-pager, is narrated by another "avatar" which has been caterpillar, pupa and moth. An insect is conscious, unlike a tree. This insect describes its sensations at each stage of its life cycle, then adds:

"...One gathered me up, taking me back into Oneness, and presently We knew what my whole life had been since I lay in the egg." (p. 55)

In this second case, the selected organism is conscious of its "Oneness" with the Others. We do not know the whole story yet although we might be starting to guess.

The human story continues in Chapter VII which is maybe where we will go tomorrow.