Why An Interstellar Civilization Might Be Unstable

The Peregrine.

See:

Why Should An Interstellar Civilization Be Unstable?

We receive some answers.

The Shar of Barjaz-Kaui on Davenigo/Ettalume IV has started to tax traders. The Nomads cannot overthrow him by force because the Coordination Service knows of Davenigo. (Otherwise, the Nomads would have overthrown the Shar by force...?) Next best thing, the Nomad ship, Adventurer, and maybe also Bedouin, will try to subvert the Shar's government and to replace him with someone friendlier. If that is what some Nomads get up to, then no wonder the Cordies have to work overtime. And some Nomads have strayed a long way from their original "...undying voyage..." (CHAPTER II, p. 7)

Even more blatantly, the Stroller has sold guns to a race deemed unready for such technology and the Cordies have found out. Other Nomads do not condemn the Stroller but learn to watch their step with the Cordies for a while. Nomads are indeed disruptive.

More generally, Trevelyan Micah explains to Braganza Diane that:

human beings have visited a million stars and this number continually increases;

many visited stars have one or even more planets inhabited by intelligent beings with alien psychologies;

these beings' responses to an interstellar civilization are unpredictable and could be catastrophic.

The Cordies, unlike the Nomads, are concerned about the interests of all intelligent species.

This One

Poul Anderson captures slight differences in modes of speech. On Aeneas, Nords speak Anglic without the articles, "a" and "the," e.g.:

"'Do I have choice?'"

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-240 AT 7, p. 121.

"'I don't think "supernatural" is right word... I'd call Cosmenosis philosophy rather than religion.'" (p. 128)

- although I have found one instance of the indefinite article:

"'What are we? Sparks, cast up from a burnin' universe whose creation was meanin'less accident?'" (p. 129)

Aenean Riverfolk replace "a" with "one":

"'That was one coffin.'" (12, p. 169)

In the Psychotechnic History, Nomads sometimes replace "I" with "this one." Peregrine Joachim Henry says of himself:

"'This one has been sort of curious for the last few years...and he's been keeping his eyes open.'"

-The Peregrine, CHAPTER II, p. 9.

However, Joachim immediately reverts to the first person pronoun:

"'You might think I was a Cordy, the way I've been reconstructing the crime.'" (ibid.)

In spiritual practice, "this one" might be more appropriate than "I." Who or what is present in all experience and thus also in meditation? First, an individual subject of consciousness. Second, the universe conscious of itself through the individual. I usually call these the individual self and the universal self but "this one" and "the One" would be simpler. This one is not separate from the One which is much more than this one. This one exists by responding to others and must also respond to the One which is experienced as transcendent other. That other is personified but persons are self-conscious individuals, thus individual subjects, not the universal subject. 

City

The Peregrine, CHAPTER III.

Flying soundlessly over western North America, Trevelyan Micah sees:

vastness

greenness

forest

rivers

grass

isolated houses

small villages

reflected sunlight -

- and reflects that transportation, communication and socioeconomic unity have made Earth a single city.

Are vastness and greenness a "city"? It all depends on how we use words. Lancaster City District encompasses not only streets and buildings but also fields and countryside. As the train hastens through the village of Galgate, then between more fields with the University on a hill to the right, a recorded voice announces that we are now approaching Lancaster whereas all that we are really approaching is Lancaster Railway Station. We are already well within the boundaries of the city.

Cities include parks and the planet-wide city on Terra in the Terran Empire period of Poul Anderson's Technic History includes massive landed estates.

Future cities are big in sf.

Six Instalments

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

Peregrine Joachim Henry tells the Nomad Captains' Council:

"'I even talked my way into the Cordy office on Nerthus, and got a look at their Galactic Survey records." (p. 11)

The Nomads were founded in "Gypsy."

Nerthus was introduced in two stages in "The Acolytes" and "The Green Thumb."

The Coordination Service office on Nerthus had to deal with a Galactic Survey man in Virgin Planet.

Coordinator Trevelyan Micah, having already appeared in the chronologically earlier "The Pirate," will shortly join the Nomad ship, the Peregrine, when it stops at Nerthus.

Thus, these six instalments form a closely integrated future history series. They are not the whole of this second part of the Psychotechnic History but they are most of it.

Nomad Life

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

See: Captains' Council.

There were twelve families in Traveler I under Captain Thorkild Erling. When a ship becomes overcrowded, its young crew members found a new one. After three hundred years, there are over thirty ships, including Traveler III, each carrying an exogamous tribe of about fifteen hundred. Each captain is elected from within a single family. Wives join their husbands' ships. The President of the Captains' Councils is always the Captain of the Traveler, currently Traveler Thorkild Helmuth.

An entire sub-series could have been written about Nomadic history.

Poul Anderson's Four Time Travel Novels

The Shield Of Time is part of the Time Patrol series.

There Will Be Time is very different in several respects and is an addition to the Maurai future history series.

The Dancer From Atlantis is historical science fiction and is one of three novels set BC, the other two being Conan The Rebel and The Golden Slave.

The Corridors Of Time covers different past and future periods and therefore might be classified alongside The Boat Of A Million Years and a collection of short stories set in various past periods.

For these reasons, I shelve these four works separately.

Trade And New Horizons

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

Dialogue between two Nomad captains, Peregrine Joachim Henry and Vagabond MacTeague Laurie.

Joachim: "'Canopus is still free territory; no ship has a claim on it yet.'"

MacTeague: "'Why go on a Jump when you've got all the trade you could want right in your own territory?'"

Joachim: "'I suppose your crew agrees with you?'"

MacTeague: "'Well, most of them. We've got some, of course, that keep hollering for "new horizons," but so far they've been voted down.'" (pp. 5-6)

The first Nomad ship, the Traveler, had travelled not around a known trade route but outward into the unknown. Something has been lost or at least has changed. In CHAPTER XI, Trevelyan senses disappointment in the first captain's later writings. That captain, a Thorkild, had narrated "Gypsy." Following Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson well knew how to construct a future history series.

Contradiction

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

"No doubt of it, man wasn't built to sit in a metal shell and hurry from star to star. It wasn't strange that so many had dropped out of Nomad life." (p. 5)

I have commented on this twice before but let's make more of a point of it this time. There is a major contradiction in American science fiction in my opinion. On the one hand, interstellar travel is the ultimate symbol of freedom (I think). I heard a woman at a Con, probably a Trekkie, proclaim through the mike, "We are going to the stars!" Are we? Not in this generation. On the other hand, a spaceship is "a metal shell." The starfarer is enclosed, almost as if in a tomb.

However, people embarking on interstellar voyages ought to be able to take more spacious environments with them. James Blish argued that antigravity would be able to move cities, even planets. Poul Anderson's asterites, in Tales Of The Flying Mountains, use gravity control to set off for Alpha Centauri within and on the surface of a mobile planetoid. So let's abolish all these metal shells.

The Nomads and the Kith are good but, like Martians, they are old sf.

The Domestic And The Dramatic

That is a comprehensive post title. I have contrasting aspects of Poul Anderson's works in mind.

Thesis: Domesticity.

Antithesis: Drama.

Synthesis: Domestic Drama.

A fictional narrative can begin dramatically by hastening "into the midst of things" See Rogue Sword.

After a double layer of introductory passages, a dialogue between Morruchan Long-Ax, the Hand of the Vach Dathyr, and Master Merchant David Falkayan begins:

"'No.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Day of Burning" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, January 2009), pp. 149-194 AT p. 152.

Falkayn must wonder what he has said wrong now. Consecutive readers recognize Falkayn but must begin to learn about Merseians.

The Peregrine, CHAPTER V, begins even more emphatically:

"'NO!'" (p. 31)

- in the middle of an argument, and this is where the drama becomes domestic.

Dramatis Personae

Peregrine Captain Joachim Henry

Peregrine Thorkild Sean

Peregrine Thorkild Elof, Sean's father

Ilaloa, a female Lorinyan (non-human but humanoid)

Landlouper MacTeague Nicki, widow of Sean's brother, thus Peregrine and Thorkild by marriage

The Domestic Drama

Sean and Lorinya want her to accompany him as his wife, against Nomad law.

Elof : "'NO!'"

Nicki, sharing quarters with her brother-in-law, welcomes Ilaloa.

Elof appeals to Henry who rules that Sean can keep a pet!

Domestic life in the Psychotechnic History as in a couple of Technic History instalments.

Moving Books

Over a year after moving house, we have moved a tall bookcase between rooms and I have taken this opportunity to reorganize its contents. "Aldiss" precedes "Anderson" alphabetically but I have many more volumes by Anderson and have arranged them, before any others, as follows:

Prehistory

History

Alternative Histories

The Time Patrol

Contemporary Fiction

Future Histories

Individual SF Novels

Anderson Collections

Anderson in Anthologies

Non-Fiction

It is going to be easier to find what I am looking for. 

My "B"'s: Blish, Bradbury, Burroughs but the greatest of these is Blish.

Others will come after and still others will be donated to Oxfam.