Portrait Of Jennie

(Please read this post and link it elsewhere. It's a beaut.)

In "On Imaginary Science, " Poul Anderson explained how a careful rereading of Olaf Stapledon's future history and cosmic history helped him to handle the temporal transitions in Tau Zero but he also explained something else, also connected to time.

I read Anderson's Guardians Of Time when it was first published in hardback in Britain (1960?). I had thought that "changing the past was impossible" but a Time Patrol trainer convinced me that it was possible. Later, of course, I realized that these are alternative fictional premises but that the latter is much harder to do right.

I never understood this - at the Time Patrol Academy:

"There were a couple of romances. No Portrait of Jennie stuff..."
-Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 14.

A decade and a half later, married and living in Lancaster, I watched a feature film on TV. I think that I had missed the beginning of the film and do not remember inquiring as to its title. The film can be described as "haunting" and as "not quite time travel." A man keeps meeting a girl who is impossibly older each time they meet. She says something like, "I am growing up for you." I have always remembered that at one point he says something like "Wind blows, sea flows, God knows," to which she replies, "I'm sure He does." I thought that "Grass grows" could have been included in the rhyme. The film ended with some sort of climax at sea. I do not remember the details. I thought that an older woman character was suddenly going to manifest as an older version of the girl but she didn't although something was realized in a scene involving her.

In the1990's, when I read that Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return had been filmed as Somewhere In Time, I thought that maybe this was the film but I read the book and it was an entirely different story - although Matheson's novel is an excellent romantic time travel story like Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife.

Anderson, listing a few of what he calls routine fictional uses of time travel, writes:

"Perhaps the most famous, because beautiful and haunting, is Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie which brings in time travel by sheer fiat."
-Poul Anderson, "On Imaginary Science" IN Anderson, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 2: The Queen Of Air And Darkness (Framingham, MA, 2009), pp. 105-113 AT pp. 107-108.

(But is it quite time travel?)

This evening, I read "On Imaginary Science," googled "Robert Nathan Portrait of Jennie" and found that this was the film whose title I had never known.

Theology

For recent discussions of theology, see:

Axor's Quest
The Ransom Trilogy And The Technic History I, II
Sinful Species
God And Alien...

Three academic disciplines:

(i) Philosophy of Religion, my specialism, studied in a University Philosophy Department like Philosophy of Science, of Politics or of anything else.

(ii) Religious Studies, the study of all religious phenomena from every point of view. ("We teach the two sacred languages: Sanskrit and German.")

(iii) Theology, traditionally the study of Biblical texts for students committed to the Christian faith and preparing for a denominational ministry.

Needless to say, when I say (i) or (ii), people think that I mean (iii). A Professor of Theology that I know (see here), a religious sceptic, has argued that Jesus was a Law-observant Jew and that Mark was written very early and has also written on political uses of Biblical quotations. I did not pursue an academic career but that was obviously the right course for some people.

NESFA Collections Vol 2

The many items collected in this volume include:

short poems;
articles;
stories that I immediately recognized as already read;
stories that I had already read although I had forgotten their titles;
stories that I have read under different titles -

- so it is difficult to find new prose fiction to read! I think that there are two such stories.

An article on the science in science fiction and another on history and science fiction did not disclose anything new whereas "Science and Creation" usefully classifies evolution as not a theory but one of the principles, like thermodynamics and relativity, by which theories are tested.

I will read the two new stories - if they are new - and the article, "On Imaginary Science," and might reread some of the familiar items.

NESFA Collections, Volume 2

I have just received this book (see image), published by NESFA Press, through the post. The long table of contents includes several familiar titles but also many unfamiliar. I am starting with a 1983 Analog article on "Science and Creation."

"Theory" is contrasted with "fact" but also with "practice." Theory guides practice; practice tests theory. If we describe evolution as a "theory," then scientific creationists reply that, in that case, it is "only a theory," not a proved "fact," to which I have heard evolutionists more recently respond that, in that case, evolution is a fact.

As long as we are clear about what we mean, it is less important which words we use. The words change their meanings in any case. Anderson summarizes the scientific paradigm, using the following words:

observations;
mathematical descriptions;
hypotheses;
predictions;
theories;
basic principles -

- and argues that evolution has advanced from theory to principle.

Multiple Comparisons

Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire is comparable to the works of:

Robert Heinlein because it is a volume of a future history;

CS Lewis and James Blish because it addresses theological issues in science fiction;

Rudyard Kipling because it pays homage to Kipling and also because its young protagonist, an orphan in a multicultural society, is drawn into intelligence work on behalf one empire as against another while helping a pilgrim.

I am confident that this list does not exhaust the implications of Anderson's novel, which could easily be categorized as mere action-adventure fiction.

Sinful Species

We were active organisms long before we became reflective subjects. Therefore, we found that our motivations were morally mixed long before we had become capable of making any choice or decision about how to live. Surely this would have been even more the case for the earliest human beings differentiating themselves by their actions from animality?

When, in Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire, Fr Axor notes that all of the oxygen-breathing species encountered so far are prone to sin, he does not deduce from this datum that each species' sinfulness results from a wrong moral decision made by their first parents. Therefore, it is possible that he subscribes instead to the Irenaean theology/theodicy which refers not to a primordial Fall but to a necessary condition of moral development.

The Ransom Trilogy And The Technic History II

See previous post.

I am killing two birds with one stone here. By listing my disagreements with CS Lewis (see also here), I will outline a secularist world view that is more common in sf, including Poul Anderson's works, to which we will return.

I think that:

human reason resulted from natural selection and proto-human activity;
the very first human beings cannot have been monotheists;
monotheism arose as a refinement of earlier beliefs (one personal cause, not many), not as a kind of knowledge;
also, the very first human beings would have made practical decisions about how to cooperate in order to survive but not moral decisions about obedience or disobedience to a divine command - an idea that surely originated later;
impeccability would not have entailed immortality;
any extraterrestrial races will not be physically perfect and immortal like Lewis' Venerians.

Poul Anderson presents scenarios consistent with this perspective. Extraterrestrial intelligences, if encountered, are usually morally imperfect and always physically mortal. In the Technic History, Axor, a Christian, acknowledges that:

"'...every oxygen-breathing species ever encountered is in no state of grace, but prone to sin, error, and death.'"
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 209.

But this would be a problem for CS Lewis who inferred that the Fall occurred once on Earth but not necessarily elsewhere so how would he respond to Axor's known space full of nothing but Fallen races? Has every first generation capable of making moral choices made the wrong choice? Every single one? Or is the "Fall," the universality of greed, hate and delusion, not after all the result of a choice made by the first parents of each rational species? Is it instead part of the natural development of psychophysical organisms in every world, as taught by Buddhism?

The Ransom Trilogy And The Technic History

(One omnibus edition of CS Lewis' Interplanetary, Space or Ransom Trilogy was inappropriately entitled The Cosmic Trilogy.)

(i) In the Ransom Trilogy, the author and the central character are Christians whereas, in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, the author is agnostic and a few of the many characters are Christians. In this respect, the Technic History parallels James Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy but that would be one too many comparisons for this post.

(ii) While still at school, I read Lewis' popular theology even before his fiction. No doubt a distinction should be made between what Lewis believed and the details of how he presented it in fiction. For example, he believed that unFallen races were possible and, in one novel, described an unFallen Venerian race but without any attempt at a scientifically accurate account of Venus. Nevertheless, I am confident that a considerable degree of Biblical literalism was central to his faith as well as to his fiction.

(iii) Lewis definitely believed that:

human reason resulted from divine intervention, not from natural selection;
the very first human beings knew of their relationship to God but nevertheless made a wrong moral choice/sinned/fell;
consequently, all their descendants constitute a Fallen race;
an unFallen race would be not only impeccable but also physically immortal (!);
nevertheless, being in complete control of their bodily functions, they would control population growth.

(iv) In the Ransom Trilogy, Lewis presents the Fall as a merely Terrestrial affair. On Mars, three mortal rational species live in a state of natural goodness under angelic governance whereas the Venerians are self-governing unFallen human beings descended from a single couple. It seems that Terrestrials are also descended from a single couple. Hence, Biblical literalism. Also, human superiority...

How does this compare with Anderson? Sorry to be episodic, folks, but family responsibilities call so we will continue to consider theology later.

"...it is enough that we are on our way"

Because I practice zazen, I tread the same path as Adzel and as Kim's lama although approaches differ, to say the least. Dogen, a pivotal figure in the Soto Zen lineage, wrote:

"It is futile to travel to other dusty countries, thus forsaking your own seat."
-Dogen, "Rules for Meditation," recited in Serene Reflection Meditation groups.

Adzel traveled because of his work as a planetologist but then retired to a monastery whereas the lama walks the length and breadth of Hind, supported by a mendicant-respecting culture.

More generally, society moves though it does not know where to:

"We do not know where we are going. Nor do most of us care. For us it is enough that we are on our way."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 556.

I do not know what will happen next with the blog - Anderson's Genesis, Kipling's Kim, Anderson's The Game Of Empire, then what?

See also here.

Time And Empire

(There are more beautiful Kim covers on the Internet than I will be able to use on the blog.)

British Empire versus Tsarist Empire reads like an earlier version of United States versus Soviet Union or Terran Empire versus Merseian Roidhunate. Must such imperial conflicts recur throughout history? Certainly not. The Roman Empire did not have a comparable opponent and Poul Anderson shows us future intelligences seeking knowledge, not power.

Some graffiti near here says that every revolution (read: major change) seems impossible beforehand and inevitable afterwards. Most people most of the time accept their status quo, then when it changes, accept their new status quo! Intelligent beings, whether human or not, are able to change their natural and social environments and to inhabit qualitatively different social environments.

In science fiction, we value future interstellar empires and civilizations that have transcended social conflicts.