"...looks kind of faux Victorian...like something out of Lord Dunsany." (p. 169)
Coincidence.
Also, I found a cover image for Time And The Gods by Dunsany and have thought that Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and "Star of the Sea" could appropriately be collected under a new title as The Gods Of Time.
And now I propose to return to mere reading for what is left of this evening.
In "Wireless" by Rudyard Kipling, an experimental radio set seems to initiate a rapport between a contemporary man and John Keats. I have not read this story but, from Poul Anderson's description of it, I accept his classification of it as borderline fantasy-sf.
When I was a philosophy student, a lecturer in Aesthetics suggested a definition of the form: "Art is (fill in the blank)." I cannot remember how he filled in the blank but what I do remember is that another student immediately responded with "What would you say about the borderline case where...?" The lecturer quite reasonably replied, "Why should I say anything about it? It is a borderline case."
I could not possibly agree more. Definitions are not water-tight compartments. A borderline case is not a counterexample. That should be printed on T-shirts and distributed free to philosophy students. Also, when someone suggests: "All A is (fill in the blank)," our first response should be to understand what he is saying and why he is saying it, not to think of counterexamples. That can come later.
I agree with Anderson that sf accepts the scientific worldview whereas fantasy does not.
In this article, Poul Anderson speculates that the earliest language was not signals between animals but stories symbolizing the mysteries of life. I think that language is more likely to have begun with signals.
When I was a philosophy student, we studied a set of unpublished notes which argued that when we tell someone something, we:
try to cause the other person to believe something;
try to cause him to believe it by causing him to know that we want him to believe it;
think that it is unlikely that he would come to believe it if he did not know that we were trying to cause him to believe it.
I think that a possible origin of language is as follows. Proto-human hunters, cooperating with each other, are stalking their prey from different directions. One individual, noticing that one of his companions is in turn being stalked by a predator, mimics a scream of fear or pain. His intention is neither to enact fear or pain, as in a dramatic performance, nor to pretend that he himself is in fear or pain but to warn his companion who, having heard that mock scream, will look around him, will see that he is in danger and will then understand that the sound had been intended as a warning to him. Thus a re-useable word meaning "Beware!" or "Danger!" has been coined. Practical communication is likely to have preceded symbolic narration.
is a metaphor in Poul Anderson's Technic History/Dominic Flandry novel, A Stone In Heaven;
exists literally in Anderson's myth-retelling heroic fantasy novel, War Of The Gods;
exists in one of the many parallel universes in Anderson's Operation Luna.
We can handle any of these options but can we conceptualize a single universe that somehow incorporates every mythology? In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, when Lucifer Morningstar retires as Lord of Hell, he expels the demons and damned, locks the now empty Hell behind him and gives the key to Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming. Various pantheons petition Morpheus to give them Hell, including Odin who hopes to survive the Ragnarok by sheltering in Hell! In Lucifer, Mike Carey's sequel to The Sandman, Lucifer visits Loki bound under the Earth. We read:
The spaceship is haunted not by ghosts but by teleporting aliens with telekinetic powers. There is a Star Trek episode where some extra-galactics pose as Hallowe'en items. In Poul Anderson's "Interloper," extra-solar aliens secretly controlling Earth (the ultimate conspiracy theory) and sporadically glimpsed by human beings, have generated myths about demons. However, these malevolent beings are opposed by a clandestine nocturnal Terrestrial species, also sporadically glimpsed, led by King Oberon. The magic in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos is given a scientific explanation in his Operation Luna. Thus, the apparently supernatural can be rationalized scientifically. A less frequent narrative option is sf-fantasy overlap:
scientifically powered superheroes meet magically powered superheroes, but "superheroes" is a hybrid genre;
Poul Anderson's multiverse incorporates scientific and magical universes but there is no direct contact between them;
decades ago, in an American comic book, supernatural forces defended Earth against alien invaders and the British sf comic strip hero, Jet-Ace Logan, learned that superstitious practices like hanging up garlic against vampires worked.
Another long way is taken by Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, from the exploration of the Saturnian system in the twenty first century to the exploration of the Cloud Universe cluster in another spiral arm of the galaxy several millennia in the future. Technic civilization has risen, fallen and been replaced between these two end-points. I reread the Technic History - and Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy - the way some people reread The Lord Of The Rings.
This must be the only story by Poul Anderson in which the aliens are not just generally humanoid in form but completely indistinguishable from human beings as in an average Star Trek episode. We take this to be impossible as stated later in the Technic History:
"The natives of Donarr have the not uncommon centauroid form..." (p. 372)
If centauroids are not uncommon, then why are so many of the intelligent species that we see in the Technic History bipedal? It is easier to write about bipeds. I usually forget the descriptions of bodily features because they are not permanently in front of us as they would be in a visual medium and the aliens are usually essentially humanoid in any case. There are quadrupeds in Poul Anderson's Fire Time and After Doomsday as well as in his Technic History.
Try to imagine an alien body that is not just an amalgamation of parts of Terrestrial animals. The description of the Donarrian refers to a rhinoceros, a gorilla, an ape, canine tusks and a mouth. See also "Aliens in Anderson and Niven," here.
A Donarrian serves under Flandry and there is a Donarrian settlement on Daedalus.
Basil Donovan wears two tarnished insignia, stars for a captain and silver leaves for an Ansan earl. The blue-skinned, rhinoceros-bodied, gorilla-armed, ape-faced, tusked Donarrian, Wocha, has been Donovan's slave all their lives and was his batman during the recently concluded space war against Terra. Ansa has been defeated and occupied. After becoming very drunk in the Golden Planet among the bombed buildings of Lanstead, Donovan leads the singing of an Ansan rebel song, starts an anti-Terran bar fight and is arrested. Sam Olman, a peasant still loyal to the now dis-ennobled Donovans, is bayonetted in the fight.
I like to think that, even if "Sargasso..." is a fiction within the fiction, its author researched Ansan history and chose a real Earl Basil as his hero. Thus, we can imagine that that historically real former earl and space captain did get drunk and start a fight even if we do not swallow the main narrative in which he accompanies a Terran expedition to the mysterious Black Nebula.
