To Eat Or Not To Eat

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER NINE.

Wells' Martians extract blood from human beings and inject it into themselves. Two members of a Didonian triple entity draw blood from the third. Flandry's reaction:

"Lord, how horrible." (p. 454)

Does he find symbiotic blood-sucking distasteful? No:

"Never to revel in a tournedos or a peche flambee -" (ibid.) (See The Food Thread.)

Flandry is being parochial. He never experiences the pleasures of many other species that have different sense organs.

The six werewolf children of B.B. Wolf and Snow White learn that they have a seventh sibling who is a ghost and does not eat:

"That's it? No hot dogs, or pizza bites, or noodles, or ice cream, or even BIRTHDAY CAKE?"
"Nope. None of that."
"But that's terrible. How can you LIVE without birthday cake?
-Bill Willingham, Fables: The Good Prince (New York, NY, 2008), p. 116, panels 2-3.

Flandry's response is on the same level as theirs.

It would be a very good thing if an intelligent being were able to draw all the energy that it required from air, sunlight, fresh water and cosmic rays. 

Didonians: A Synopsis

In The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER NINE, Dominic Flandry encounters Didonians.

For Didonian mentality, see Didonians.
For their physicality, see Didonians (different).
For their nomenclature, see Didonian Designations.
For their evolution, see Alien Evolution.
For their lack of privacy, see Privacy.
For their alleged mystical significance, see Ch'an and Many-Mindedness And Allness.
For comparisons with other composite consciousnesses, see Ice Ships And Brains, "Let Words Stand In" and Central Empire And Imperial Band.
For Didonian experience of learning, see Aliens in Anderson and Niven.
For anything else, search this blog or read The Rebel Worlds.

Life On Dido

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER EIGHT.

Organisms include pteropods, muscoid and arrowbush;

Didonians have mixed twigs and gravel in the soil to make a hard, broad trail through the forest;

the ground cover, called "carpet weed" and resembling small red-brown sponges, provides a damp but otherwise acceptable mattress for a night's sleep.

See also information on Dido here.

What is wrong with the attached cover image?

Filming The Didonian Rain Forest

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER EIGHT.

I suppose that the visuals could be done with CGI:

not like a Terrestrial rain forest;
unbelievably variant trees;
gnarly, thorny dwarfs;
soaring slim giants;
vines and fungoids covering trunks;
diversely shaped foliage;
no green;
dominant browns and deep reds;
some purples and golds;
a spongy, springy mat underfoot;
"somber richness" (p. 443);
no shadows;
gloom;
much brush;
ankle-deep muck;
small animals flitting among leaves.

Sounds loud in the dense air:

chattering;
cawing;
whistling;
wings.

Non-cinematic senses:

pungent odors - fragrant, sharp, rotten, spicy, ozone or unrecognizable;
air like a steam bath;
weight unchanged (although it might have been).

Anderson-Blish Comparisons

Poul Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy is a fictional biography of Harald Hardrada culminating in his death whereas James Blish's Doctor Mirabilis is a fictional biography of Roger Bacon ending with his death.

Magic works in Anderson's Operation Chaos and its sequel, Operation Luna, and in Blish's Black Easter and its sequel, The Day After Judgment.

Gods withdraw in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy and God dies in Blish's Black Easter.

Blish's flying cities are starships (see Sargassos) and Anderson's starships are compared to "a mobile city" (see Star Ship).

Both authors wrote mostly hard sf but also other genres.

Crash Landing On Dido

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER EIGHT.

Striking the Didonian atmosphere will complete the destruction of Asieneuve. Of the four boats, one has:

a no longer operative fusion generator;
energized accumulators;
two usable drive cones;
undamaged instruments and controls.

Survivors must remove armor to fit in the boat although Flandry stows three suits, mainly for their impellers. Having flown combat aircraft before transferring to Intelligence, he takes the pilot's seat. On first impact with the stratosphere, the boat leaves the ship. Flandry and his co-pilot brake velocity and avoid peaks and a hurricane.

They descend to the correct latitude on the largest continent but their initial velocity is in the wrong direction for their destination, Port Frederiksen. With accumulators drained, they must set down and cannot use tail jacks because the unharnessed men will be crushed if the gee-field gives way. Flandry aims for marsh instead of treetops. The landing disturbs thousands of winged creatures.

Next: an adventurous trek across a planetary surface.

The Battle Above Dido

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER SEVEN.

Kathryn McCormac's eyes are "chrysocolla." (p. 430)

"'The next planet inward, Dido they call it, past quadrature but far enough from conjunction that there'd be no ambiguity about our aiming for it.'" (p. 434)

Asieneuve falls free around Dido. A barbarian ship, not responding to radio, rushes to rendezvous:

lean shape;
needle nose;
rakish fins;
heavy, hull-integrated armament;
designed to traverse atmosphere.

Flandry orders, "'White flare,'" and "'"Pax" broadcast.'" (ibid.)

The barbarian, a mercenary working for McCormac, fires energy beams and missiles. Asieneuve responds with blaster cannon, countermissiles and larger missiles. There are nuclear detonations. Electromagnetic screens withstand ions but not heat, X-rays, energy beams or torpedoes. Negrav forces slow torps but interceptors must stop them. Despite its advantages of higher speed and altitude, the barbarian is penetrated and damaged and whirls away on a cometary path, blackened and melted.

Beams penetrate Asieneuve. Blast from three nearby explosions shatters machines and kills men. See here. Her engines dead, Asieneuve falls toward Dido.

Sargassos

The Sargasso Sea is frequently (but erroneously) depicted in fiction as a dangerous area where ships are mired in weed for centuries, unable to escape.
-copied from here.

I expected Poul Anderson's "Sargasso of Lost Starships" to be a hard sf story about wrecked or abandoned spaceships congregating somewhere like a Lagrangian point. (For Lagrangian points in Anderson's Technic History, see The Beginning Of Technic Civilization.) Instead, it is almost fantasy-with-spaceships: physically beautiful, psychically powerful humanoids hijack spaceships in the Black Nebula. "Sargasso" has come to mean a place where ships disappear.

In James Blish's "Sargasso of Lost Cities":

the cities, protected by force fields, fly between stars faster than light and thus are "starships";

however, they are not lost but instead have congregated in a common orbit because they have been impoverished by an interstellar economic depression.

Anderson's and Blish's titles are almost interchangeable. Each of these works is incorporated into its author's main future history series.

Three Major American Future Historians

In my teens, I rated James Blish more than Robert Heinlein and Heinlein more than Poul Anderson - Larry Niven was not around yet - but I had not yet read enough Anderson and he wrote a lot more after that.

I hope to have demonstrated that Anderson's Technic History is an ultimate future history series, surpassing Heinlein's in:

number of installments;
length of time covered;
number of historical periods covered;
volume of space encompassed;
interesting characters;
continuing characters;
series within the series;
alien races;
extraterrestrial environments;
analyses of historical processes;
quality of writing.

Heinlein's Future History is, as a series, complete in four volumes because Volume V is a short appendix that does not advance the fictional history. Blish's major future historical work, Cities In Flight, a tetralogy, might be classed as a truncated future history because:

it holds up well as a future history series until somewhere in Volume III but, after that, the antiagathics are keeping a small group of characters alive indefinitely so the reader loses track of the centuries;

the universe is destroyed and new creations begin at the end of Volume IV.

The Technic History, many volumes longer, addresses an indefinite future.

Distant Earth

(A friend has emailed a more flattering photo of Ketlan.)

When I began to read prose sf in the 1960s, I was fascinated by the idea that, in future, Earth might be all but forgotten by human beings then living elsewhere or, whether alternatively or concurrently, that our home planet might be only dimly known by non-human inhabitants of other planetary systems. Poul Anderson and James Blish were two powerful purveyors of such ideas.

"...when revolt erupted, many Navy personnel, like civilians, discovered that those homes meant more to them than a Terra most of them had never seen."
-The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER SIX, p. 423.

"There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known and ineluctable thousands of years away in history. Some of them remembered much more vividly the now-broken tyranny of Vega, and did not know - some of them never had known - even the name of the little planet that had broken that tyranny."
-James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), p. 241.

We are simultaneously "little" and important.

Blish's passage is ambiguous. Earth is thousands of parsecs away to, human or non-human, inhabitants of other systems and thousands of years away to descendants of its own colonials. However, only members of other species would be able to remember the pre-human Vegan tyranny without also knowing the name of Earth.

In both of these future histories, Earth takes its place within an already inhabited galaxy where Earthmen play a leading role for a while and where many of their descendants never see Earth.