Kings Who Die

"'He knew that the time had come when the King must die that the folk might live, and the land be renewed by the willing sacrifice of his blood. So it was he walked to the Dark Mother consenting, with a smile, savoring every moment the more because it might be the last.'
"'Clotho spins, Lachesis measures, Atropos cuts,' Heuradys said with a sigh. 'We don't choose our fate, only how we meet it.'"
-SM Stirling, Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter Twenty, pp. 429-430.

I disagree with:

the King must die;
willing sacrifice;
renewal by blood.

But I agree with:

accepting the inevitability of death;
savoring every moment;
choosing how we meet our fate.

Please read or reread the discussion here of Poul Anderson's "Kings Who Die."

This chapter by Stirling describes a sea food meal that I might (or might not) summarize!

Treated Like Kings

"Kings Who Die."

The previous post focused on a future transport system and this theme continues in Poul Anderson's text:

"'We can catch the transpolar shuttle to Paris if we hurry.'" (p. 17)

However, the main thrust of this passage is a set of social relationships. 

First, there are unpublicized parleys between the US Astromilitary Corps and their enemies. For example, when Bailey visits Asia to return a borrowed craterbug and to give them some alga-blight antibiotic:

"'They poured me full of excellent vodka.'" (p. 15)

Secondly, and even more importantly, is the way that the Corps is regarded at home:

"'The Corps can do no wrong.'" (ibid.)

When Bailey switches off an "Ugga-wugga-wugga, hugga-hugga me, do!" (p. 16) juke box to satisfy his companion, a large tourist gets heavy until Bailey shows his ID bracelet and introduces himself:

"'First Lieutenant Carl H. Bailey, United States Astromilitary Corps, at your service,' he said..." (p. 17)

Silence spreads. The tourist apologizes and buys drinks. Others buy. The spacemen are given privacy but receive smiles and waves. The proprietor, who had welcomed Diaz and had backed him against the tourist, has phoned his family and friends who arrive with castanets, guitar and more bottles. The fiesta continues until dawn.

Corps prestige has developed exponentially... They are the kings who die.

This has been a flashback. We return to Diaz in space and to something else across the Milky Way:

"Another jet splashed fire across the Milky Way." (ibid.)

Angels And Devils?

"Kings Who Die."

That fanciful back cover blurb reads:

Angels Above, Devils Below...

Since the first human stood upright the stars have been a source of wonderment and inspiration. All our heavens have been placed in...the heavens, our hells in the depths of the earth. Angels above, devils below. Mankind between. 

But perhaps heaven isn't so heavenly. Perhaps those who live there are as self-interested and violence-prone as any earthbound mortal. And even if they're not, we will be there soon.

Cause enough for

CONFLICT

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

Who wrote this? By defining a theme and explaining the title, it serves the purpose of Poul Anderson's own Introductions to several of his other collections. 

The casual assumption that any earthbound mortal is violence-prone is a tired cliche. An extraterrestrial who was given the impression that my excursions into town are punctuated by routine acts of violence against other pedestrians and of rage against the drivers of motor vehicles or that I would return home to find that my property had been vandalized by my neighbours would have been seriously misinformed.

Most of the stories collected here are about intra-species conflicts.

I had set out to post about a passage in "Kings Who Die" but was distracted when I found this image of the back cover of my edition of Conflicts. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

"We Are The Kings Who Die..."

The High Queen of Montival tells the Empress of Japan:

"'We are the kings who die that their blood may safeguard their folk, the sacrifice that goes consenting, walking to their fate with open eyes.'"
-SM Stirling, The Sky-Blue Wolves (New York, 2018), CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 291.

References to blood turn me off. If they die in battle, then it is at least clear how their deaths have safeguarded their people whereas ritual sacrifices of blood and a sacramental sacrifice of consecrated wine are less obviously beneficial.

The Empress replies that:

she prefers victory;
she has post-war plans that require her presence;
moments that may be their last are savored more keenly (see the above link).

Some War In SF

In HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds, the Martians brought heat rays and poison gas to Earth.

In Wells' The War In The Air, war went into the air.

In Poul Anderson's "Kings Who Die," war goes into space.

I know that there is more to war in sf than that! But that is enough for this evening and those are three high points with Anderson admirably succeeding Wells.

See also War, Wells And Anderson.

"Kings Who Die" is in Seven Conquests, Anderson's war-themed collection, which could be read after the two Wells novel.

War, Wells And Anderson

Everyone knows that sf writers follow in the footsteps of HG Wells but it is not always obvious how. Wells predicted not only spacecraft but also aircraft - that nineteenth century nation states armed with twentieth century weapons would wage World Wars. Soldiers on battlefields would be replaced by aviators bombing major cities. Not only armies but also populations would suffer and die in large numbers.

Wells wrote The War In The Air in 1907. He added a Preface in 1921 and another in 1941. The latter ended, "I told you so. You damned  fools." (Wells, The War In The Air, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973, p. 8)

Poul Anderson's collection, Conquests (London, 1981), addresses exactly the same theme as Wells' novel, The War In The Air: future technological warfare. The first story, "Kings Who Die," adds the more familiar Wellsian theme of space travel. In fact, the exportation of institutionalized violence into space is effectively offered as a partial solution to the problem propounded in The War In The Air, and experienced in World War II. The United States and United Asia have learned better than to bombard each others' cities or even each others' Lunar bases. Only soldiers die and only in space.

But why can this endless, carefully controlled slaughter not be ended to make way for peaceful coexistence on Earth and in space? The Unasian General Rostock practices brain-computer symbiosis like a character in Anderson's later novel, The Avatar. From all the data available to him, Rostock deduces that the sacrificial deaths of the revered soldiers is "'...an outlet for the destructive emotions generated in the mass of the people by the type of life they lead. A type of life for which evolution never designed them.'" (p. 35)

Rostock wants the American prisoner Diaz to join with him in devising a solution but first Diaz must help Rostock's fleet against the Americans! Is Rostock's claim to want peace merely a ruse to get Diaz's help in the war? I would be with Rostock in wanting to end war but a credible first step is not to enlist a prisoner's help in waging the war. Diaz agrees, a strange thing for an Anderson hero to do, but it turns out that he is acting under a posthypnotic command that he had agreed to but, of course, willingly forgotten. Appearing even to himself to cooperate, he gets close enough to Rostock to sabotage the latter's computer with an oscillator hidden in his body.

So, by the end of the story, the highest loyalty open to Diaz is to his country, not the more general loyalty to humanity apparently offered by Rostock. I have to agree in disagreeing with Rostock's means, if not his end. (Similarly, Aycharaych asked Flandry to help him preserve Chereion but that would have required Flandry to betray his allies, including his murdered fiancee's family. Good end, bad means.)

How plausible is Rostock's theory that the war is a revival of human sacrifice? This, if true, would be horrific and governments would have to agree to stop the slaughter, then find some other way to address their disagreements. But I think that they should do this anyway.

The Theoretical Basis

"Kings Who Die."

L. F. Richardson is to this story what John K. Hord is to Poul Anderson's Technic History and Oswald Spengler is to James Blish's Cities In Flight.

Rostock claims that he has:

"'...carried Richardson's work a good deal further and more rigorously. I say to you now only that civilized societies must have a certain rate of immolations.'" (p. 32)

- hence this story's title: 

"'Today the machine age has developed its own sacrificial kings. We are the chosen of the race, the best it can offer. None gainsays us. We may have what we choose, pleasure, luxury, women, adulation - only not the simple pleasures of wife and child and hope, for we must die that the people may live.'" (p. 33)

Diaz will wind up defeating Rostock militarily instead of joining forces with him but surely this Richardsonian theory warrants further investigation?

After Genius

I had definitely not read Poul Anderson's "Genius" before and it is an interesting story. After it in the NESFA Press The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson (Framingham MA, 2009), there are:

"The Live Coward"
"Time Lag"
"The Man Who Came Early"
"Turning Point"
"The Alien Enemy"
"Enough Rope"
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Welcome"
"Flight to Forever"
"Barnacle Bull"
"Time Heals"
"The Martian Crown Jewels"
"Prophecy"
"Kings Who Die"
"Starfog"

I had already read all but three of these works and have quickly read the rather lackluster "The Martian Crown Jewels" since acquiring the book so there is not much left before Vol 2, which I have yet to order. However, the remaining stories will be read and commented on.

Despite their exotic interstellar settings, "The Helping Hand" and "Genius" are serious discussions of how societies develop. I thought that I had finished comparing Isaac Asimov unfavorably with Poul Anderson but here again Anderson presents a more interesting account of a ruling group applying to society a mathematically formulated, predictive science of society. Station Seventeen, secretly directing the Empire, is like a Second Foundation but based on intelligence, not on hypnosis.

The geniuses of Station Seventeen, which is an entire planet, are intelligent, perceptive and cooperative enough to share socially necessary menial tasks equally among their entire population rather than relegating a social majority to lifetimes of drudgery. Mass-production will have to wait until mechanical knowledge is sufficient to develop entirely automatic factories because "'...few if any geniuses could stand to work on an assembly line all day.'" (p. 212) However, they "'...are in no hurry to advance their standard of living.'" (ibid.)

Production has, perhaps, four stages:

hunting and gathering;
horticulture and agriculture;
manufacturing, eventually industrialized;
automation.

In our history, the second and third stages necessitated social stratification and competition whereas the eventual production of abundance should make stratification and competition redundant. The geniuses manage every stage of production without either stratification or competition.

A society of geniuses has super geniuses who are as far beyond the ordinary mind as logic is beyond instinct. The surprise ending is a real surprise but also logical. The geniuses have already outwitted the Imperial social experimenters.

Occasional raiders from the Magellanic Clouds are also a neat idea.

Consciousness And Computation

"Kings Who Die."

Rostock is one of those sf characters who have linked their brain to a computer, thus combining conscious intuition with rapid computation. Since this story was published in 1963, what Rostock says about computers must have become dated:

"'In spite of much loose talk about giant brains, computers do not think, except perhaps on an idiot level. They simply perform logical operations, symbol-shuffling, according to instructions given them...

"'...the larger a computer becomes, the more staff it requires..." (p. 28)

Right now, not individual computers but data centres, networks of computing and storage resources, are becoming dangerously big. 

Rostock compares his situation to that of mortals who became gods in the Greek myths:

"'I think they hardly noticed the palaces and music and feasting on Olympus.'" (p. 30)

What a conception of the gods! When, and only when, human labour had produced palaces for a tiny social minority, it was then imagined that supernatural beings dwelt in even greater palaces. But Rostock imagines that what mattered to a new god was how he:

"'...mastered his new capacities... won a god's understanding...'" (ibid.)

Like the change from animal to human?

I can't find this online but I think that the manuscript of one of John Keats' unfinished epics, either Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion, had ended:

"Immortal glory dawned. He was a god."

An Ending And A Question

I have read to the end of "A Man To My Wounding." The first person narrator thinks:

"...we are the kings who die for the people..." (p. 201)

Ideas are being recycled.

The enemy sets out to assassinate not only current political leaders but also talented younger people who might become future leaders. Thus, the assassination system escalates just as war had done and the story ends not with a conclusion but with a question:

"'Where is it going to end?'" (p. 209)

The narrative had seemed to meander but this turns out to have been its destination point. OK. We can now move on to something else.

Anderson And Wells On Religion

It is Easter so the Archbishop of Canterbury proclaims "Christ is risen!" I acknowledge this proclamation as a powerful myth but not as a historical claim. I cannot join the Archbishop in his proclamation because it is generally understood in a literal sense whereas I am able to participate in Buddhist or Pagan rituals where belief is not an issue.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, Dominic Flandry funds Fr. Axor's research. Axor studies Ancient relics, hoping to find evidence of an extraterrestrial Divine Incarnation. It is generally beneficial first that relics are studied and secondly that there is dialogue as to their significance.

In HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come, the One World-State, aiming to control all education, kills the Pope, martyrs an officiating priest, suppresses several religious observances in India and closes all kosher slaughter-houses as well as the chief holy places in Mecca.

No, Wells, that is not the way either to challenge traditional beliefs or to establish world peace and harmony! Attitudes to religion change as society changes. Change society, yes; force religious changes, no. Wells looks to:

"...an aggressive order of religiously devoted men and women who will try out and establish and impose a new pattern of living upon our race."

-HG Wells, The Shape Of Things To Come (London, 1974), p. 493.

- whereas I look to our race to find new ways to live and, as part of this, to resist any attempted impositions by aggressive minorities.

An sf writer imagines a technological innovation, then asks how it would affect society. Wells accurately predicted the ways that aircraft would change warfare. In "Kings Who Die," Anderson imagined governments agreeing not to end war but to move it off Earth. Larry Niven imagined that organ transplant technology would make prisons obsolete because electorates would vote to extend the death penalty in order to gain access to transplants from executed criminals. I think that this social change is completely implausible. Sure, some people would want to extend the death penalty but everyone?

Sf writers recognize that technological progress can coexist with social regression:

the Chaos, the Troubles and the Long Night in Anderson's Technic History;

the Second and Third Dark Ages in Anderson's Psychotechnic History;

the "Crazy Years" in Heinlein's Future History Timeline;

Asimov's Fall of the Galactic Empire;

Dark Ages in Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history;

the Age of Frustration in BOOK THE FIRST of The Shape Of Things To Come;

the Cold Peace, the Fall of the West and the Empty Years in James Blish's Chronology of Cities In Flight;

"Europe Murdered," "THE FALL OF THE FIRST MEN" and "The Second Dark Age" in Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men.

The Satorist

Poul Anderson, "Kings Who Die" IN Anderson, Seven Conquests (New York, 1970), pp. 11-40.

(Nearly finished for this evening.)

See War, Wells And Anderson. 

An unexpected word:

"[Diaz] drew a breath which was a good deal shakier than the Academy satorist would have approved of." (p. 11)

"Satorist" is to be found neither online nor in any earlier posts on this blog. Obviously it is a noun derived from the noun, "satori." The latter term is familiar especially since I practice zazen. The Japanese connection is confirmed in the immediately following sentence when Diaz imagines the satorist speaking:

"('If your nerves twitch, cadet-san, then you know yourself alive and they need not twitch. Correct?' To hell with that, except as a technique.)" (ibid.)

Since Diaz, who murmurs, "'Nombre de Dios,' (p. 12) and crosses himself but is trained by a "satorist," is at war with Unasians, this story is set in a period of cultural interaction and conflict. But  how much deeper will we dig into this evening? Only time will tell.

War In Different Periods Of Different Timelines

"...whether the cause be good, bad, or indifferent, the human flesh caught in the middle is just as dead and maimed, the wealth is just as wasted."

-Poul Anderson, Foreword IN Seven Conquests (New York, 1970), pp. 9-10 AT p. 10.

This is a persistent Andersonian point and we recall two echoing events -

Diaz remembers men:

"...who stared without immediate comprehension at a red spurt which a second ago had been an arm or a leg..."

-"Kings Who Die," pp. 35-36.

Manse Everard sees a "...burly Italian peasant...":

"...staring without belief at the stump of an arm..."

-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 173-228 AT 8, p. 223.

And they are not alone. Diaz also remembers:

breath and blood from bursting helmets;

the shuddering, vomiting and defecation of radiation sickness;

gassing the insane because insanity catches in space.

The Italian peasant sits beside a Carthaginian slinger feebly pulling at a javelin in his stomach.

"War is hell."

Conquests And Conflict

Poul Anderson, Seven Conquests: An Adventure In Science Fiction (New York, 1970).

Collection titles remain confusing. Conquests and Seven Conquests are the same collection but different from Conflict although both contain "Kings Who Die" and "Details."

Seven Conquests has an explanatory Foreword whereas Conflict does not. This Foreword states:

art, including sf, must entertain;

entertainment involves telling stories but also examining reality;

reality is more than the little that we have experienced;

there are billions of years and light-years and infinite possibilities;

speculation illuminates past and present;

Seven Conquests is "...a one-author one-theme one-genre collection." (p. 9);

the theme is "...institutionalized violence." (ibid.)

I am not fully in accord with the way that Anderson discusses the issue. Should peace parades be decried for being "noisy"? Is United Nations Day "mealy-mouthed"? Sure, opposing Nazism was necessary but let's talk about how to prevent Nazis from coming to power again.

"...we don't understand the phenomenon [of war]. He who claims to have final answers to the question of why men fight and how to stop them from fighting, is merely showing his own ignorance." (p. 10)

No one should claim to have final answers to anything! But I think that we can understand the phenomenon readily enough without being able to stop it so easily.  

Exported Violence

Wells' Cavor unwisely tells the Grand Lunar about Terrestrial warfare.

Stapledon's Fifth Men exterminate the Venerians while colonizing Venus.

Lewis' demonically possessed Weston arrives on Perelandra/Venus shortly after the angelically propelled Ransom.

The crew of Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo find a Nazi base on the Moon.

In Heinlein's Destination Moon, the lunar explorers film an already established based, possibly Russian or alien, on the Moon.

Heinlein's D.D. Harriman, "The Man Who Sold The Moon," cites the threat of Russian rockets based on the Moon in order to sell his own lunar colonization project. Later, the Space Patrol monopolizes nuclear weapons and a clique within the Patrol attempts a coup.

Blish's Colonials exterminate the Vegans.

Poul Anderson's mutants find hostile Siberians on Mars.

In Anderson's "Kings Who Die," two superpowers fight in space instead of on Earth.

Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium exports militarism and imperialism to the stars.

Collections II

In a recent post, I listed fourteen non-series Poul Anderson collections found on a shelf at home. Needless to say, a few more have since come to light:

Fantasy, but that is a bit different because it is mainly fantasy, not sf;

Winners, but that does have a point - five Hugo winners (two of them also belong in different future history collections);

an Ace Double of The Makeshift Rocket and Un-Man and other novellas.

the Un-Man collection contains:

"Un-Man," which belongs in the Psychotechnic future history;

"Margin of Profit," which belongs in the Technic History;

"The Live Coward," which is in at least one of the fourteen collections already mentioned.

Thus, Un-Man and other novellas has no right to exist as a separate collection!

Another complication is that Conquests, already mentioned, was originally published as Seven Conquests. These are not two collections with similar titles but one collection with different titles. There is a great need for Poul Anderson's short story collections to be uniformly rationalized.

Later: Sorry, Conquests was not already mentioned. Conflict was. You see how confusing it gets. I would have listed those two titles beside each other. They both contain "Kings Who Die" and "Details." Each also has one that belongs in a future history collection. Conquests also contains "Wildcat" that is, rightly, in the time travel collection, Past Times. Thus, Conquest's seven stories could be reduced to three - and I am sure that, of those, "Inside Straight" is in one or even two of the fourteen listed collections.

Still Later: And The Makeshift Rocket is "A Bicycle Built For Brew" which is in one or two of the collections so that entire Ace Double is redundant.

"Luckily..."

 

"Kings Who Die."

How many short stories begin and end with the same sentence?

"Luckily, Diaz was facing the other way when the missile exploded." (p. 11)

"Luckily, Diaz was facing the other way when the missile exploded." (p. 40)

In the first sentence, Diaz has survived the destruction of the spaceship in which he had been a crew member. In the concluding sentence, he has sabotaged and escaped from the command ship of the enemy fleet, thus decisively winning the battle for his side, and has also gained crucial military intelligence. He has come a long way and has come full circle. Luck has stayed with him. She favours the brave.

And maybe the insight gained into the underlying sociopsychological cause of the war can help to resolve a conflict which otherwise will remain endless because it is fought only in space and never allowed to harm Earth or even the Lunar bases? 

Five Wars In Four Stories

It is getting late here. Let us summarize the wars that we have read about so far in Poul Anderson's Seven Conquests.

In "Details"

World Wars I and II. (Galactic intervention put Lenin into Russia in 1917! The Galactics later regretted it. In another timeline, the Time Patrol would have to ensure that Ulyanov/Lenin got into that sealed train.)

In "Kings Who Die"

An interminable war beyond the Moon between the United States Astromilitary Corps and the Cosmonautical Service of the People of United Asia. (World War III taught the powers to move war off Earth.)

In "Wildcat"

A Cold War culminating in a nuclear exchange that destroys all life on Earth in the twentieth century.

"Cold Victory"

The Martian and Venerian colonies intervening to help the anti-Humanist counterrevolution and to restore Earth to the Solar Union in a future history that had begun in the aftermath of World War III.

That is four of the seven stories. What are the other three about?

Aurora

"Kings Who Die."

We are focusing on details and not getting to the heart of the story yet but give us time. A weekend stretches ahead.

"A few years ago [Diaz]'d spent a furlough at Antarctic Lodge. He and some girl had taken a snowcat out to watch the aurora, thinking it would make a romantic background. But when they saw the sky, they forgot about each other for a long time. There was only the aurora." (p. 12)

For the Northern Lights in Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time and in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, see:

 The Winter Hunters

And on a personal note:

It is sometimes reported that the Northern Lights are or will be visible in Britain, even in places to the south of us here in the North West of England. One night, my daughter, Aileen, and I drove to Morecambe Bay; on another occasion to a hill inland but both times saw nothing. When I told her the story of people being carried away by the Northern Lights, she suggested that this might have a basis in reality. Some people, fascinated by the lights above their heads, might have wandered too far for safety in the dark...

The Bitter Bread

In several works by Poul Anderson -

the Maurai future history;
Twilight World;
Vault Of the Ages;
Shield;
Tau Zero;
"Kings Who Die";
"License";
"The Bitter Bread"

- society does what it deems necessary to survive the damage caused by a third world war and to prevent a fourth.

The occurrence of such a war in the near future was one of the standard assumptions of post-World War II science fiction (sf). Isaac Asimov's Empire series made this assumption whereas his Robots series did not. Thus, when the two series merged, an inconsistency had to be ironed out: the radioactivity of Earth in the Imperial period resulted not after all from a nuclear war in the near future but from attempted genocide during the intermediate Outer Worlds period.

In "The Bitter Bread," (Explorations, New York, 1981) after the Armageddon War, a puritanical form of Christianity becomes the state-sponsored ideology. Anderson does a typically expert job of showing us a future society that is not what we expect but that, of course, is taken for granted by the people living in it. Astronautics coexists with older forms of social organization. Homosexuality and fornication are illegal while Earth is ruled by a line of "Protectors" with names like Enoch IV and David III. This is not what we want but is what we could get after a global social breakdown - I do not say after a global nuclear war because I do not think that we could have anything after that.

Still reading this story for the first time, I have not yet encountered any unfamiliar vocabulary but maybe a couple of proof-reading points:

"...hills where sheep still gaze..." (p. 82) presumably should have been "...hills where sheep still graze...";

"...sending messages or gifts to the men they would never remeet in his life" (p. 83) should have ended "...this life"?

This story is yet another new combination of familiar Andersonian ingredients. The next ingredient is an unusual stellar system, in this case one containing both a recent blue giant supernova and the neutron star remnant of an earlier supernova. The first explosion should have flung the two stars apart so why are they still orbiting one another? It is theorized that a still earlier explosion had expelled these two bodies on a trajectory that had preserved their proximity.

The stated reason for sending human explorers:

"'We could not tell what observations to program [unmanned probes] for. Only man has the flexibility to see the unforeseeable.'" (p. 91)

- exactly echoes Anderson's words in his Introduction that I quoted in the previous post.

A third ingredient is space explorers coping when their technology fails, as in The Enemy Stars and some other works.

One final point here: a pastor objects to a single woman traveling in close quarters with men because it would be difficult for her not to reveal "'...what should not be revealed...,'" because she "'...could not help arousing lust...'" and because the mere sight of her by men condemned, by circumstances explained in the story, to lifelong celibacy might "'...weaken their resolve to accept the will of God...'" etc. (p. 100) (There is more like this.)

I can only find the pastor's remarks obscene. I suspect that some of us would have preferred death in the Armageddon War rather than survival into a society controlled by people with ideas like that.