Incidental And Interconnected Other Reading

Notionally:

during the day, when I am not doing anything else, I reread and post about Poul Anderson;

in the evening, I read works by other authors.

However, these "other authors" often generate comparisons with Anderson. Notable examples are:

Neil Gaiman
SM Stirling
Julian May
Stieg Larsson

Nowadays, English pubs and cafes have shelves of books that you can read while sitting there. Thus, in the Leighton Moss cafe, I recently enjoyed rereading selected chapters in Larsson's Millennium Trilogy Volume III. At Ketlan's place, I reread Volume I of the graphic adaptation of the Millennium Trilogy. These experiences have inspired me to reread the Trilogy Volume I even though I in fact reread the entire Trilogy relatively recently. This might generate more comparisons with Anderson. Meanwhile, there should be more today about Orbit Unlimited.

Coffin Disapproves

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four, 4, p. 114.

Joshua Coffin, visiting the Svobodas, sees that they:

"...had well-filled shelves, though this was offset by authors like Omar Khayyam, Rabelais, and Cabell, right out where children could read them."

We have quoted Khayyam (scroll down) (and see here) on the blog. James Blish edited the journal of the James Branch Cabell Society.

Why should children not read these works? What sort of education and culture would Coffin preside over if he had the power to impose his beliefs and values?

The Rustum Night Sky

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four, 4, p.113.

There are three interesting features.

Raksh, the outer moon...
at its closest and when full, "...twice the angular diameter of Luna seen from Earth...";

"...you saw it change size and phase while hanging in the sky."

Sohrab, the inner moon...
crossing the sky "...fast enough for a man to watch."

Constellations
Orion
Draco
Ursa Major
Cassiopeia
Sol above Bootes

Rustum is only twenty light-years from Sol, not enough to change the constellations.

Anchor Or Anker

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four.

"The few dozen timber buildings which were Anchor village..." (1, p. 98)

"Anker's lone optician was not yet prepared to make contact lenses." (3, p. 109)

"Anchor was at work under the stars." (3. p. 112)

The Swift and Smoky Rivers meet at Anchor. (p. 98) Mayor Theron Wolfe's office above the library overlooks the Swift. (p. 108)

So the capital village of the Rustum colony is either named after the philosopher, Torvald Anker, or symbolically called "Anchor" - or maybe it is a bit of both?

Sun And Sky On Rustum

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four, 1.

"It was too big, that sun, and too bright, and at the same time too orange; it crept too slowly down a sky too wan a blue." (p. 98)

How many environmental factors are wrong here? The size, brightness, shade and speed of the sun and the shade of the sky: five. And they add up.

However:

"Or so those colonists felt who had been adults on Earth. The new generation, like Svoboda's busload of first-graders, found it merely natural." (p. 99)

But would the new generation not have had an instinctual/ancestral reaction against a planetary environment too different from that of Earth? See Distances And Vastnesses and its combox.

On Rustum

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four, 1.

We have seen Jan Svoboda on Earth and in space. Now he flies a school bus on Rustum.

As in Julian May's Galactic Milieu, extra-solar colonists include exogenes.

Rustum has 1.25 Earth gravity so people who grow up there should be shorter and broader than on Earth? On the higher-gravity planet, Imhotep, in Poul Anderson's Technic History, people are muscular and never fat.

On the massive planet, Jinx, in Larry Niven's Known Space future history, some colonials are almost as wide as they are high as Anderson tells us in one of his contributions to the Man-Kzin Wars period of Known Space. See Jinx And The Old Red Dwarf.

The four parts of Orbit Unlimited are called:

"Robin Hood's Barn"
"The Burning Bridge"
"And Yet So Far"
"The Mills Of The Gods"

The first title means that it is a roundabout route to get the Rustum colonization mission launched. The second means that they cannot go back. The third means that they nearly don't make it. The fourth means - I will find out.

The second part ends:

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us." (5, p. 70)

- as powerful an image as "The Horn of Time the Hunter" in the Kith History.

Orbit Unlimited: Some Terminology And Another Realization

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part three.

"[Kivi] was a short stocky man, with the high cheekbones and slightly oblique blue eyes of the Ladogan." (2, p. 73)

"...the rattle of fantan sticks on a magnetized table..." (4, p. 89)

"He listened, agreed it was practical, but claimed it was not practicable." (4, p. 89)

Fine shades of meaning: one use of "practical" is synonymous with "practicable."

Technical problems also have a human side: how to persuade or induce someone to do what needs to be done. Robert Heinlein addressed this problem in one Future History story, "-We Also Walk Dogs."

Svoboda has a gradually dawning realization of how to solve the human side of the problem:

"A wisp of an idea stirred." (4, p. 91)
"And the knowledge grew within him." (ibid.)
"To lay his plan out openly was to destroy its value." (ibid.)

I will let blog readers (re)read the story. What matters is that it works. The ships leave and the colonists stay.

"And Yet So Far"

Like "Que Donn'rez Vous?" in Tales Of The Flying Mountain and like both "Holmgang" and "Brake" in the Psychotechnic History (for both these stories, see here), Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, part three, "And Yet So Far," is a story with a technical problem and therefore a technical solution.

In "And Yet So Far," a wrecked spaceship orbiting in a zone of lethal radiation carries equipment indispensable for the Rustum colony. When Fleet Captain Kivi has said that the level of radiation precludes the retrieval of the equipment and therefore that the colonists who do not want to continue in these changed circumstances "'...can return home with the fleet...'" (p. 86), we read:

"But that will be all of us! Svoboda cried. The few who are stubborn enough to remain will be too few to survive under any conditions. You have just sentenced the Rustum colony to death, and thereby everything the colony believed in. It's all been for nothing.
"'I'm sorry,' said the Finn." (ibid.)

That Svoboda's four sentences are italicized means that he inwardly thought them. However, the facts that he "cried" them and that Kivi replied mean that he outwardly uttered them. So I think that the punctuation is wrong.

It occurred to me just in time that the technical solution would be heralded by a moment of realization and, sure enough:

"The gross matter of a man's body could pace in circles, worrying, till an unweighable thought stopped him in his tracks. If only a thought could stop a spaceship in its orbit with the same ease. But an idea was not a magnetic field.
"Or was it?
"Svoboda leapt from his chair. He banged his left arm against the headrest." (p. 87)

We recognize all the signs of a moment of realization but nevertheless will have to read on to learn how an idea can be a magnetic field.

Rustum Orbit

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part three, 3.

The fleet is in orbit around Rustum while the spaceship crews help the colonists to get established on the surface. Jan Svoboda, a colonist, reflects that the spacemen make repeated decades-long interstellar journeys, each time returning "...to an Earth grown more alien..." (p. 84) In fact, the spacemen explore uninhabited extra-solar planets, then return to a changed Terrestrial society with the consequence that Earth (maybe) becomes the most alien of the planets that they visit?

"The spacemen were explorers. Their mystique could not be reconciled with that of the Constitutionalists, who had dragged these ships to Rustum because of a preoccupation with details of government which the spacemen found ridiculous. No wonder we don't get along with each other. The two parties belong to two different civilizations." (p. 84)

Here are the seeds of the interstellar Kith culture although that is in a different series. The Kith become not only explorers but also traders. Their FTL counterparts are the Nomads in the Psychotechnic History.

Finally, for this post:

"Kivi scowled at the thin foam of the Milky Way." (p. 85)

Coffin's Coffin

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part two.

In order to influence a vote in favor of continuing the journey to Rustum, Joshua Coffin fakes a radio message from Earth and endangers a man's life. Realizing that he is no longer fit to captain a ship, he opts to join the Rustum colony instead of returning to Earth.

When Coffin returns to his ship, he sees the receiver web growing until it seems to snare "...a distorted Milky Way." (4, p. 62) Checking the radio recording, he finds "...only cosmic noise." (4, p. 65) See earlier descriptions of this noise here.

"Now if he had just -
"Coffin grew rigid." (4, p. 63)

This is the moment of realization when it occurs to Coffin that he can fake a message. He skillfully reproduces the offensive style of the hostile Terrestrial government. While doing this, he also thinks of the "cosmic noise" as:

"...the squeals and buzzes and the crackling talk of the stars." (4, p. 66)

Stars do not literally talk but that could be a premise for a different sf story.