Immediate Speculative Anticipations

What is going to happen in the immediate future is of concern to everyone on Earth and also is of particular interest to sf writers and their readers because what can happen and what might happen affect the premises of works of fiction. We used to think that regular interplanetary space travel was in our immediate future. We are still living in the Chaos of Poul Anderson's Technic History although real world events have probably already diverged from that timeline.

Questions raised by Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop whom I visited today:

Is it possible to win any current major war without deploying nukes and would anyone do that?

Will a state of emergency be declared in any major country soon?

He thought that, since we know neither what AI companies are doing nor what AI itself is doing, it is impossible to make any predictions about that.

We are definitely living in an unstable future - from the point of view of our younger selves who used to read fiction set in the early twenty-first century.

Death

Addendum: See also Plato on death here.

When I was at school, an English teacher quoted a poem which described sleep as "...our little daily death..." The teacher asked, "Why do we fear death? We do it - lose consciousness - every day." Of course we expect to wake up again but that thought is usually not in our minds on those all too familiar occasions when we have become so tired that we just want to relax, to rest and to become unconscious as quickly as possible. Perhaps someone who is very old reflects as he falls asleep that he might not wake up again and really does not mind? (CS Lewis, not expected by a doctor to regain consciousness, did wake up and asked for a cup of tea!)

Sometimes the feeling of not only not fearing but even welcoming death is expressed in fiction and literature. We find it in Poul Anderson, in Stieg Larsson and in Robert Louis Stevenson quoted by Robert Heinlein.

"He was not afraid to die, he thought sickly, he would welcome the darkness when it came -..."

-"Terminal Quest," p. 11.

(It was this opening part of a single sentence that occasioned the present post although, as sometimes happens, it has led us to longer quotations from other authors.)

"I have to sleep for a while, she thought. And suddenly she realized that if she closed her eyes and let go there was a good chance she would never wake up again. She analyzed this conclusion and gradually came to understand that she did not care. On the contrary. She felt, stealthily, attracted by the thought. To rest. To not wake up."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 32, p. 565.

When this character, Lisbeth Salander, has regained consciousness after an operation to remove a low-caliber bullet from just inside the back of her skull:

"She was surprised to be alive. Yet she felt indifferent. If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about. She would hardly notice the difference. With which esoteric thought she closed here eyes and fell asleep again."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (London, 2010), CHAPTER 3, p. 61.

Stevenson wrote a poem called "Requiem," which Heinlein quoted at the end of a Future History short story entitled "Requiem":

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

This poem is in the public domain.

-copied from here. 

Waking Up

"Terminal Quest."

Rugo wakens to sunlight, birds, wind, chattering leaves, a receding dream, dew, mist, dales, a conveniently low branch for pulling himself erect, green bushes and trees on a hillside and dead leaves underfoot. My point here is that, judging from this description, he might have been on Earth although he is not. This story published in 1951 shows us none of Poul Anderson's extraterrestrial plants or other environmental details.

However, Rugo himself, while clearly intelligent, has four feet and a large scaly head so it is established very early in the narrative that he is not human.

As to what happens next, I have reached that point in the evening - nearly midnight - when, as regular blog readers know, I am disinclined to blog any further! But we have covered some ground today. 

Rugo's Mother

"Terminal Quest." 

Rugo's long dead mother:

"...must have remembered him and been sorry she left, for lately she often came back at night." (p. 2)

When he is dying:

"He wondered if his mother would come for him." (p. 28)

Thus, she:

has not died but left;

returns at night;

might come for him when he dies.

Therefore, Rugo is at the earliest stage of religious experience and belief. It seemed to our ancestors to be a matter of experience that, when our body is unconscious, we leave it and enter another realm where we can meet, i.e., dream about, the dead. Therefore, they have entered that other realm permanently at their deaths and we will at ours.

Our ancestors projected destinations for the dead:

an underworld that was merely the absence of life;

later, a continuation of Earthly social divisions, e.g., warriors to Valhalla, others to Hel (not Hell);

later still, a social reversal with the just poor rewarded and the wicked rich punished;

as an alternative to all of that, reincarnation.

Another view was that the dead would be immortalized not as immaterial souls but as resurrected bodies. 

Christianity, the ultimate religious synthesis, has both: an eternal fate for an immortal soul immediately after death but also an eternal fate after an eventual bodily resurrection to be followed by a Judgement.

Rugo is still at the earliest stage where dreams and the hereafter are identical.

Tomorrow we visit Andrea who lives above the Old Pier Bookshop and who usually says something quotable - if not always repeatable.

Possibilities

In All One Universe, on p. 250, Poul Anderson writes that prediction is impossible because history is chaotic. However, he adds that we discern some regularities, know some natural laws and see some possibilities. Thus, imagination and reason can generate narratives about possible events.

Is the future completely chaotic? We know some possibilities, e.g., nuclear or ecological devastation, but no certainties. In fact, chaos produces the unexpected. In that case, could there be a collection or anthology to examine the consequences of low-level possibilities?

If the assassination attempt on Trump had succeeded...

If the Capitol Hill rioters had succeeded in killing a Democrat politician...

There is one possibility that I think we can rule out:

If (name a current world leader) had a Road to Damascus conversion to the exact opposite of his current world-view...

We know enough about human psychology to rule that one out.

Will we all wake up tomorrow morning? 

More Strangers

(Today, we, editorially speaking, heard a talk by Lord Reay - see also here - and suggested that it contained so much information that it should have been a series of talks.)

Poul Anderson, "Terminal Quest" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993), pp. 1-28.

See:

Terminal Quest

In fact, just read or reread that previous post. It contains more information about this story than I had expected it to. 

Here is another intelligent, two-armed quadruped whose planet has been colonized by "Strangers" who turn out to be human beings but this story has a different ending which is prefigured by the title.

What did we miss while discussing "Strangers"? Human beings are "Night Folk" because the sunlight on the colonized planet is lethal to them so that they must spend daylight hours inside shuttered buildings or venture out only when completely covered up.

After "Terminal Quest," we might return to All One Universe and reread some other pieces in that collection.

Concluding "Strangers"

 

See Continuing "Strangers."

OK. We have reread to the end and there is maybe not much more to be said. There are human beings but we do not read their points of view. We are not told either how they had come to this planet or how they came to be stranded upon it. There is an explanation of the climate change: a heavy sun and a large moon frequently alter the planet's rotation. The "Night Folk"/human beings help the Wold People without harming the Charioteers. Poul Anderson's characters are always problem solvers. 

When Ak'hai'i realized that he must appeal to the Night Folk, he had a quieter than usual Andersonian moment of realization:

"I came back to my body knowing what I must do." (p. 7)

Next: "Terminal Quest." This is unappealing at present but we will have a crack at it.

Continuing "Strangers"

See "Starting Strangers."

Something that I did not mention before: there is only one "moon." We are used to more on extra-solar planets!

Something that I have learned by rereading further: the narrator and his species sit on their tails like the same author's Merseians and Mithrans.

I am having a strange experience as a reader. I know that I have previously read every item in Poul Anderson's All One Universe. We are currently rereading the first story in this collection, "Strangers," because, like a couple of others that we have reread recently, it is about human beings colonizing an already inhabited planet. However, I have no memory of the content of the story and might as well be reading it for the first time.

Although the narrator, Ak'hai'i, and his people are physically very unlike human beings, their predicament is all too familiar from other works by Anderson. The climate is changing, populations are on the move and the Wold People are attacked by militarily superior Charioteers with iron weapons.

When Ak'hai'i goes to the Night Folk for help, he describes the individual whom he approaches and we recognize one of us, a human being. And that is as far as I have reread over breakfast this morning.

Today: a talk in Lancaster Museum by a hereditary member of the House of Lords.

This evening: Zen group for me and choir for Sheila.

In the gaps: rereading "Strangers" and Stieg Larsson and reading about the Spanish Civil War.

Starting "Strangers"

I am not getting drawn into rereading "Strangers" and will soon be engaged in other activities here but of course I will persevere on a future occasion. Let us in the first instance consider a few phrases in the opening passage. 

"...Lost Motherland." (p. 3) Implies a matriarchal society?

"...the northern horizon flickered with the campfires of the dead." (ibid.) Aurora?

"Wind lulled and ruffled my fur." (ibid.)

The wind is always with us and this narrator is not human.

"I am no saint or familiar of the Unseen..." (ibid.) What is the Unseen? Is it just believed in? Might it also be experienced? Would that experience be projected or objective?

"...the Watermother says I should..." (ibid.) Again with matriarchy?

The narrator recalls:

"...what happened long ago." (ibid.)

This might remind us of Anderson's Didonians recalling their contact with humanity.

"...I crouched down, not to be seen against the western stars and the Sky Flow." (p. 4)

Is the Sky Flow another description of the Milky Way that we have previously missed?

The Future

"If, somehow, a writer knew the future, s/he could not write a story set in it. There would be too much strangeness, too much explaining to do. (Think of yourself going back just a hundred years in time and trying to tell people what it was like up ahead.)"

-Poul Anderson, All One Universe (New York, May 1997), p. 250.

I have imagined a novel written and set in 3000 AD, temporally transported to 2000 AD, translated and published without explanation. It would refer to then recent events without explaining them just as we can refer, e.g, to World War II, or just "the War," without having to explain that. Such a novel would be incomprehensible, disregarded and long forgotten by 3000 AD.

Sf can be not only set in our future but also show characters dealing with their futures, eg, HG Wells' Time Traveller and Anderson's Martin Saunders in "Flight to Forever." One of Anderson's Time Patrolmen reflects:

"It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.

While reading headlines in 1955, he would know something of our situation in 2026.

Characters in James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time receive increasingly incomprehensible messages from successive periods of their future.

Fictional series can hint at future events long before divulging them. Near the beginning of The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, a fictional introduction refers to a recent (to the author) "Terran War" which does not occur until the end of Volume III. 

Through seven volumes, Julian May refers to a Metapsychic Rebellion which finally occurs in a concluding volume.

We cannot know the future but can imagine and fictionalize about it.