Alice References

Alice (Wonderland or Looking Glass) references permeate popular culture and we do not need to be told what they are. Thus:

White Rabbit
Mad Hatter
Red Queen
White King
etc

For this blog, see search results for:

Alice In Wonderland (scroll down)
gyres (scroll down)
Alice Through The Looking Glass (scroll down) 

For Comics Appreciation, see here.

Thus, Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling do not need to explain when they tell us that:

"A small girl in antique dress slept in an armchair before a mirror; a white-haired figure with a pipe and smoking jacket was seated beside her, only the figure was an anthropomorphic rabbit..."
-"The Asteroid Queen," Chapter VII, p. 130.

- or when:

"The rabbit touched the young girl on the shoulder; she stretched, yawned, and stepped through a large and ornately framed mirror on the study wall, vanishing without trace."
-op. cit, p. 131.

Thus, both Alice books are referenced.

Alice

Perish By The Sword, 10.

We can find in a text only what is there to be found. However, every Poul Anderson text has a wealth of content. For example:

"'An un-birthday present.'" (p. 98)

- is a literary reference:

‘It’s a cravat, child, and a beautiful one, as you say. It’s a present from the White King and Queen. There now!’
‘Is it really?’ said Alice, quite pleased to find that she had chosen a good subject, after all.
‘They gave it me,’ Humpty Dumpty continued thoughtfully, as he crossed one knee over the other and clasped his hands round it, ‘they gave it me—for an un-birthday present.’
-copied from here, Chapter VI, Humpty Dumpty.

Quiz question: How many Alice references are there in Anderson? You can check here (scroll down) although not all blog references to Alice are Anderson quotes.

In Robin Hood's Barn

Orbit Unlimited.

Literary References 

Alice

Mephistopholes

Donne

Dante's seventh circle

Christian leaving the City of Destruction

 

Historical References

Egypt

Babylon

Rome

India

China

the Puritan Commonwealth

the Periclean era

the Renaissance

the Rome of Commodus

Massachusetts

Maryland

Pennsylvania

 

Religious References

a white church

a smiling idol

monastic orders in four milieus

English Puritans

Quakers

Catholics

Mormons

a Buddha

Jewish Zealots

Russian Old Believers

 

Philosophical References

Socrates

Spengler

Machiavelli

 

Astronomical References

Epsilon Eridani

E Eridani

Curiouser

Ensign Flandry, CHAPTER TWO.

When Runei comments that Abrams' chess move is curious, Abrams tells him that:

"'It'll get curiouser.'" (p. 18)

This is an Alice reference by Poul Anderson that I have not noted before despite having previously quoted James Blish's use of this same phrase from Alice. See here.

See also other blog references to Alice, here.

Cultural References

The Winds Of Fate.

A senator thinks that his client has a:

"Lean and hungry look..."

-CHAPTER SIX, p. 100 -

- anticipating Shakespeare.

A farmer who finds it hard to adjust to the urgency of saving and investing in new equipment says:

"'...all the Gods damn it, you have to run fast these days just to stay in the same place!'"

-CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 158 -

- anticipating the Red Queen's Race in Alice Through The Looking Glass.

Realistically, Artorius has to face an angry crowd of people displaced by the nova res ("new things") but is able to offer them alternatives: land grants with financial help or new employment with good wages. At this early stage, the economy is still expanding in such a way that the displaced can be not replaced but relocated. (I just thought of that way of putting it now.) This is in CHAPTER TEN on pp. 138-139.

Jeremy thinks:

"'Lay on, MacDuff..."

-CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 107 -

- more Shakespeare, but, in this case, Jeremy remembers it.

Artorius corrects Jeremy's "'The game is afoot, Batman!'" with "'The game is afoot, Watson...'" in CHAPTER ELEVEN on p. 166.

The Batman is a great detective and there are stories in which they meet.

After tracking down those references, your friendly neighbourhood blogger needs a food and drink break.

A Sea Battle And Two Literary References

SM Stirling's Nantucketers and Tartessians fight a sea battle, appropriately in a novel entitled On The Oceans Of Eternity. One page gives two literary references. One of the things that Alston wants to live to do again involves reading Flecker. We already knew that she was a Flecker fan. See here.

The noises of the battle include:

"...shot crashing home like the tattoo of hail on a roof magnified to Brobdingagian size."
-SM Stirling, On The Oceans Of Eternity (New York, 2000), Chapter Nineteen, p. 388.

"Brobdingnagian" has become a literary word for "big." CS Lewis' Ransom, speaking to Jane Studdock, breaks off in mid-sentence:

"He broke off sharply and a new look came into his eyes. At the same moment a new thought came into Jane's mind, an odd one. She was thinking of hugeness. Or rather, she was not thinking of it. She was, in some strange fashion, experiencing it. Something intolerably big, something from Brobdingnag, was pressing on her, was approaching, was almost in the room. She felt herself shrinking..."

- a touch of Alice In Wonderland -

"...suffocated, emptied of all power and virtue. She darted a look at the Director which was really a cry for help, and that glance, in some inexplicable way, revealed him as being, like herself, a very small object. The whole room was a tiny place, a mouse's hole, and it seemed to her to be tilted aslant - as though the insupportable mass and splendour of the formless hugeness, in approaching, had knocked it askew. She heard the Director's voice.
"'Quick,' he said gently, 'these are my Masters. You must leave me now. This is no place for us small ones, but I am inured. Go!'"
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London, 1979), Chapter Six, section II, pp. 88-89.

Ok, they're big. Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson use "Brobdingnag" as the name of a really big planet. See here.

Miltonic References

This blog celebrates substantial popular fiction with deep literary roots. Poul Anderson's character, Svoboda, refers to both Alice and Dante. This led to a combox comparison of Dante with Milton, then to a combox discussion of Milton's "Better to reign in Hell..." as quoted both in Star Trek and in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Earlier, I had compared Milton's Precosmic Chaos to Anderson's and Heinlein's accounts of Hell. (For Heinlein's account, see Heinlein's Hell.)

Milton and/or Dante are referenced in novels by CS Lewis, James Blish, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle and Sir Philip Pullman and no doubt others.

The Red Queen's Race

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part one, 1.

Svoboda (and see here) had never found time to get a prosthetic foot because:

"You had to run pretty fast just to stay where you were." (p. 8)

See the Red Queen's race, to which Anderson obviously refers. (Indeed, reading on, we find that he explicitly refers to "Alice" in the very next sentence.)

"The Red Queen's Race," a time travel story by Isaac Asimov (see here), is much more coherent than his time travel novel, The End Of Eternity, and is discussed here.

I do not expect, when turning the page, to find a single sentence that generates references to both Lewis Carroll and Isaac Asimov but this is one good reason to read Poul Anderson.

Orbit Unlimited: A Few Details

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part one, 6; part two, 1-3.

Commissioner Svoboda's office has a "...full-wall transparency..." (6, p. 34) which enables him to view the city towers. See references to "viewalls" here.

Having mentioned Alice, Svoboda again shows his erudition by mentioning Dante's seventh circle. (ibid.)

The extra-solar colonists debating their predicament include "A very young man..." (2, p. 50) The Time Traveler's dinner guests debating time travel include "...the Very Young Man." (The Time Machine, I, Introduction, p. 11)

The very young man is told that his girl on Earth "'...will be an old carline...'" (2, p. 52)

Going EVA, Joshua Coffin sees:

"...the bright cataract of the Milky Way..." (3, p. 53)

See, specifically, the cataract of the Milky Way on Aeneas here.

Conquistador, Prologue II

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

After decades of science fiction publishing, past and future exchange places:

Conquistador is copyright 2003;
its Prologue is set in 1946;
Chapter One is set in 2009;
I am reading it in 2015.

When I started to read sf in the 1960's, year dates like 2003 or 2004 could all too readily appear in a text but never in a publishing history! Such years were, and sometimes felt as if they always would be, "the Future." And do not be fooled into thinking that "2009" is in the past. When this novel was published, it was in the near future. Thus, the characters could, for example, refer to a President of the United States who is not the man that we remember as holding office in that year. If the author wants to prevent his text from becoming dated too quickly, then he will avoid any such references so that later readers might not notice that 2009 was then a near future, not a recent past.

The Prologue is headed First Side/New Virginia. We are to learn what "First Side" means. "Virginia" might make some of us think of John Carter. I gather that New Virginia is in Iowa. The viewpoint character, John Rolfe VI, was wounded by a Nambu machine gun and received a Silver Star. His grandfather, John Rolfe III "...lost a leg at Second Manassas, leading a regiment of the Stonewall Brigade..." (p. 2).

John Rolfe VI trained at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and endured Beast Barracks.  He served in Baker Company and used a Garand rifle. As a Democrat, he "...hadn't forgotten whose idea Reconstruction was or who went around waving the Bloody Shirt afterward..." (p.4) He had a "...Tidewater childhood..." (p. 5)

Our Rolfe (VI) finds his equivalent of Alice's rabbit hole or the Narnian wardrobe in his basement when a silver sheet replaces one of the walls. On the other side of the sheet, he sees an unfamiliar landscape which includes:

"A grizzly. Old Eph himself, a big silvertip male..." (p. 7)

Finally, John Rolfe I had waded onto the Virginia shore carrying a rapier. He sounds like an ERBian hero and a worthy ancestor of Johns III and VI.

From Fiction To Myth

Myth and fiction intersect. Odin is a myth but also a character in works of fiction by Poul Anderson, Neil Gaiman and Marvel Comics/film script writers. I suggest that any fictional character who has come to be universally recognized even by those who have not read the book/seen the film etc has thereby become a modern myth, e.g.:

Alice in Wonderland;
Sherlock Holmes;
Rip Van Winkle;
Victor Frankenstein;
Count Dracula;
James Bond;
Superman;
Mr Spock.

Having become part of the general cultural background, such modern myths are referred to by other fictional characters who, like us, regard them as fictional characters. Thus, in SM Stirling's Against The Tide Of Years, one character quotes Spock from Star Trek and another mentions Yoda from Star Wars. Against the Tide Of Years is set in the timeline of Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy, not of either Star Trek or Star Wars. However, Stirling's time travelers began their lives in a twentieth century which, until the mysterious Event, was indistinguishable from ours.

In Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge is astounded when his companion does not recognize the name "James Bond" but soon learns that she is a time traveler from a later period. Anderson's Time Patrolman Manse Everard refers to "'...real Sherlock Holmes work...'" (Time Patrol, p. 529) in circumstances that are consistent with Holmes being a widely known fictional detective, as we would expect. However, the Time Patrol timeline contains an unnamed "'...private inquiry agent...'" (p. 21) who exactly fits the description of Sherlock Holmes. Anderson is playing with the idea that a fictional character (Holmes) might be not fictional but real to other fictional characters (the Time Patrolmen).

Finally, in a certain kind of imaginary multiverse, what is fictional in one universe is real in another. Thus, two men answering the descriptions of Holmes and Watson show up at Anderson's inter-cosmic inn, the Old Phoenix. And Anderson seems yet again to have covered every possibility: the real, the fictitious and the ambiguous.

Full References
 Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 467-640 AT section 6, p. 529.
Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN op. cit., pp. 1-53 AT section 3, p. 21.

Late Evening Post

There is a time of the evening when you want to add one more post to the blog but do not want to have to do any more reading to do it. 

On BBC TV, Alice Roberts has just summarized theories about Stonehenge, including both the idea that the stones celebrate summer and life and also the opposite idea that they celebrate winter and death, the latter recently propounded by yet another TV presenter, Neil Oliver.

Poul Anderson's works cover many periods of history and also include two references to Stonehenge. Thus, TV viewing, like other reading, can be blog-relevant.

Domestics: laid up with a cold, although not too incapacitated to blog, I will have to miss a day-trip to London this Saturday.