Active Optic Nerves

Elliot S! Maggin tells us in Superman: Miracle Monday (Caveat Corner Books, 2017) that Clark Kent can project heat and x-rays from his eyes because his optic nerve has an active as well as a passive mode, my only points at this late hour being first that Poul Anderson would have been able to invent ingenious rationales for all of Kent's superhuman abilities and secondly that Anderson would also have been able to match Maggin's Biblical resonances, e.g.:

"Then, as happened to Abraham's aged wife Sarah, the Heavens gave [Martha Clark Kent] a son." (Chapter 2, p. 17)

And, in a list of earlier heroes:

"Young David killed the giant Goliath with the spin of a smooth rock in a land where walls fell at the sound of trumpets and the Creator of Heaven and Earth spoke through the mouths of men in rags whose eyes burned with the lights of Eternity." (Chapter 4, p. 35)

Superheroes began as sf, then became a distinct genre: Frankenstein is pivotal between Gothic and sf; Superman between sf and superheroes. What's next?

Proserpina And Dagny

At Appleby, a Romany fortune teller told me that I will live to 95, that I do a lot of work on a computer and am surrounded by books, that I should write two books and that I should have worked for Queen and Parliament.

Back home, I wander through the five-dimensional maze of Poul Anderson's future histories. "The Horn of Time the Hunter" led to Starfarers. Then the Special-X in Starfarers recalled the Intellect and other metamorphs in the Harvest Of Stars history. In Harvest The Fire, download Venator spied on Proserpinans so I now seek out the earlier history of Proserpina in The Stars Are Also Fire. In that earlier volume, human Venator spies on a Lunarian whose:

"...queries had come near the matter of Proserpina. If she reached it, that could prove deadly." (3, p. 49)

But we are not at this stage told what Proserpina is. "...the matter of Proserpina..." sounds like the Matter of Britain etc.

There is more skillful future historical writing when, at the beginning of Chapter 4, a Dagny Ebbeson meets an Edmond Beynac on the Moon. These names are significant first because we have already been told that Dagny Ebbeson is a granddaughter of Anson Guthrie and secondly because we have also been told that a Dagny Beynac will later play a major role on the Moon.

 

Poul Anderson constructs not only novelistic narratives but also centuries of fictitional history.

When You Say...

The Star Are Also Fire, 3.

Venator asks Lilisaire:

"'When you say "dwellers," I suspect you mean Lunarians, not resident Terrans, not even those Terrans who are citizens. And...if you say "Lunarians" to me, do you perhaps mean the Selenarchic families - or the Cordilleran phratry - or simply its overlings?'" (p. 46)

This question is always applicable. Someone once said:

"When I say 'religious,' I mean of course 'Christian.' When I say 'Christian,' I mean of course 'Protestant.' When I say 'Protestant,' I mean of course 'Church of England.' When I say 'Church of England,' I mean of course 'High Church.' When I say 'High Church,' I mean of course 'in my opinion.'"

I am just about to make my first ever visit to Appleby Fair so there will be no more blog posts until considerably later.

Anson Guthrie And Now

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1995).

Concerning Anson and Juliana Guthrie:

"...after seven years their company dominated space activity near Earth and was readying ships to go harvest the wealth of the Solar System." (p. 19)

Will that be true of someone else in the next seven years?

Guthrie:

"'Oh, sure, nowadays the words are "environment" and "social justice," but it's the same dreary dreck, what Churchill once called equality of misery.'" (p. 23)

But surely something does need to be done urgently about the environment? Meanwhile, of course, no one aims to equalize misery.

Two Future Histories

We do not necessarily read a future history series in chronological order of fictional events.

Poul Anderson's Technic History

In the original reading order, Volumes V and VI were The People Of The Wind and The Earth Book Of Stormgate. The People Of The Wind introduces the human-Ythrian colony planet, Avalon, centuries after Nicholas van Rijn's death whereas in "Lodestar," collected in the Earth Book, van Rijn converses with his granddaughter shortly before she marries David Falkayn who will later found the Avalonian colony.

 

Anderson's Harvest Of Stars History

Volumes I and II are Harvest Of Stars and The Stars Are Also Fire. In Harvest Of Stars, the deceased Anson Guthrie's personality has been downloaded into a neural network and some human beings have been adapted to live comfortably in Lunar gravity whereas, in The Stars Also Fire, Guthrie, while still alive, converses with his granddaughter long before she comes to be known as the Mother of the Moon.

Interstellar Space And The Whole Galaxy

 

"The great canvas of interstellar space comes alive under his hand as it does under no other."

-Gordon R. Dickson on Poul Anderson, quoted on the back cover of Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1995).

 

"Blish's scale is the whole galaxy, a view that has to be awe-inspiring if he can only make you see it: and he does, I think, more successfully than any previous writer."

-Damon Knight, quoted on the back cover of James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981) and I should still have somewhere Knight's In Search Of Wonder which this is quoted from.

 

I agree with both. In the 1960s, I got into Blish through Earthman, Come Home, Volume III of Cities In Flight, but took longer to get into Anderson. Blish told me that he enjoyed Anderson's works although he thought that the flamboyant character of Nicholas van Rijn was about played out.

 

We have previously quoted passages exemplifying the "great canvas of interstellar space" and "the whole galaxy."

Antihydrogen

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 13.

100 tonnes of antihydrogen frozen solid in a 13.5 meter diameter sphere is enclosed in a larger sphere of ordinary matter but prevented from touching it by diamagnetism induced in superconducting rings which, like the antihydrogen, are kept at under one degree kelvin by a paramagnetic refrigeration system powered by a fission generator. Sensors and feedbacks are necessary to maintain the balance.

The omniscient narrator informs readers that antimatter with its negative protons, positive electrons and contrary spins is:

"...mathematically equivalent to holes in the vacuum..." (p. 174)

Really? Holes in the vacuum? I know that vacuum is not just empty space but I am having trouble with a kind of matter, even one called "antimatter," equating to holes in the vacuum. Is ordinary matter like hills?

Two Hijackings

In Ian Fleming's Thunderball, SPECTRE hijacks a nuclear bomber and murders the bribed pilot. In Poul Anderson's Harvest The Fire, the Scaine Croi (the Sheathed Knife) hijacks an antimatter transport ship and Pilot Jesse Nicol takes steps to discourage the conspirators from murdering him.

The Scaine Croi hijacking is a very gentlemanly affair. The sophotect guarding the antimatter informs Nicol that he is "'...totally aberrant...'" (CHAPTER 13, p. 177) and asks him to explain his actions! Nicol responds by apologizing and switching off the sophotect, like HAL in 2001.

Thunderball and 2001 are two iconic works. Harvest Of Fire, unfortunately, remains with the literary ghetto of genre sf. Keith Ferrell, Editor of Omni, wrote that Harvest Of Stars was:

"An important work - not just of science fiction but of contemporary literature."

-quoted on the back cover of Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1997).

 

But this is an exaggeration.

Venator, Everard And Van Rijn On Misery

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 12.

Venator to Nicol:

"'Study some history, and you'll see how much wreckage, misery, and death was due to idealists. Earth is well rid of their sort.'" (p. 163)

If Nicol studies some history, then he might learn different lessons but then he can discuss the issues with Venator.

Manse Everard:

"'I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics...'"

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 5, p. 42.

 

I would find it hard to argue about history with a Time Patrolman.

 

Nicholas van Rijn:

 

"'The troublemakers, they are those what are not contented with God's gifts of good food, drink, music, women, profit. No, they bring on misery because they must play at being God themselves, they will be our Saviors with a capital ass.'"

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT IX, p. 136.

 

Profit is hardly a gift from God. It is a relationship between people. Not everyone has van Rijn's opportunities to enjoy good food, drink etc. In "Lodestar," he has to be told that the beings in Supermetals are not playing games but seeking freedom for their peoples. 

Feast In The Proserpinan Spaceship

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 11.

The cuisinator is nanotechnic so the food should be and is delicious. Also, Lirion has stocked good wine.

Brilliant light patterns play on the bulkheads of the saloon.

The air is jasmine-scented.

Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 3 plays.

If we add that the air is pleasantly warm, then we get five senses.

Another aspect of a meal is the conversation. Nicol finds it easy to dissemble because he and the two Lunarians are of different civilizations with different tones, expressions and body language. He persuades them to accept some tests in three Earth gravities. They will be incapacitated, leaving him free to search the ship for weapons.