New Books

 

There will now be an intermission while I read some books received as presents.

Although Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) is rarely referenced in Poul Anderson's works, this blog has had several occasions to refer to him. The following quotation is more generally relevant to all imaginative fiction:

"This collection is respectfully dedicated to the wonderfully restless shade of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was the first, in my encounters, to put great and ponderous wooden fighting ships in the sky. His were held aloft by the mysterious Eighth Ray of Barsoom, while ours are lifted by artful carpets, but it's the same primal force at work in both cases.

"Thank you, old ghost, for a lifetime of inspiration."

-Bill Willingham IN Bill Willingham and others, Fables: War and Pieces (New York, 2008), p. 4.

Also received:

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Penguin Books, 2021).

It has. Anderson's Terran Empire harks back to Rome, not to Britain, and will be left with no time to reflect on how its imperialism has shaped it. Anderson commented elsewhere:

"We might glance at Great Britain, too, whose chief patrimony was merely coal, and at how it became affluent but now seems on the way back to genteel poverty."

-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT p. 195.

(Not always genteel.)

Also:

"...the Irish remember Oliver Cromwell in much the same way that the Jews remember Hitler, and for much the same reason..."

-Anderson, op. cit., p. 201.

 

An Irish fellow student observed that there is a difference between the kind of old men encountered in Irish bars and those encountered in English bars and he thought that the latter country's imperial past explained the difference. An old man in an Irish bar told me, "The only good thing England did for Ireland was that, if it hadn't been in the way, we'd've had the French or the Spanish over and they'd've been worse!"

Connections And Parallels

Because the Emberverse titles are listed in the wrong order in the back of my copy of The Sunrise Lands, I have got The Sword Of The Lady before The Scourge Of God but will acquire and read the latter before reading the former.

Of interest in the Acknowledgments of The Sword Of The Lady:

apparently, the opening paragraph of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is quoted as an ancestral epic in Chapter Seventeen;

Stirling refers to the song, "Fiddler's Green," which is yet another link to Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Gaiman's Fiddler's Green is a place in the Dreaming but escapes and wanders the waking world as a person called "Gilbert," modelled on GK Chesterton whose Fr Brown series we have just mentioned.

From (i) works of fiction by different authors and (ii) works of fiction about alternative histories, we can wind up with (iii) stories in which different authors' fictional narratives are set in alternative histories, as shown in Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix stories. In Bill Willingham's Fables graphic novels, characters from fairy tales live in hiding in New York, having been driven out of their homelands on parallel Earths. Since the Trygve Yamamura novel that I am currently reading features Italian characters and concerns and since Pinnocchio has a big role in Fables, I find a powerful if obscure conceptual connection between this Yamamura novel and that graphic novel series. The connection is strengthened by the fact that we have just discussed parallel universes in relation to detective fiction.

As Anderson's Time Patrol finds chaos lurking behind time criminals, Stirling's Emberversers seem to find something else lurking behind their human enemies?

(Tomorrow looks like being even busier and less blog-friendly.)

End Game

"Ricia's gamin(e) smile breaks forth."

-"The Saturn Game," IV, p. 69.

My other two editions of "The Saturn Game" have "gamin," not "gamine," let alone "gamin(e)." "Gamin" is masculine. "Gamine" is feminine. "Gamin(e)" is how a dictionary would indicate both genders but is not usual in texts.

Even after Garcilaso's death, Scobie and Broberg continue their psychodrama which involves:

a Pythoness

an old man with one eye, a grey beard, a wide hat and a blue cloak (say no more)

trolls

a dwarf

the White Witch (Narnia!)

a giant

Kendrick's spear forged by Wayland

orcs besieging a tower (Middle Earth!)

(I have just read about Wayland Smith in Bill Willingham's Fables.)

Realizing that their fuel cells will run out long before they are able to climb out of the bowl into which they have fallen, they must choose between a heroic or peaceful death in the fantasy or full consciousness of their deaths in reality. They choose the latter but the only way to terminate the game is for Kendrick to kill Ricia, then himself. There is a double space between paragraphs...

The reader wonders: when Kendrick kills Ricia, then himself, does Scobie kill Broberg, then himself? They are trying to escape from the fantasy but do they succeed? Yes:

"'That was...a nightmare.' Broberg sounded barely awake." (p. 70)

In an Andersonian moment of realization, she realizes that they can use Garcilaso's fuel cell to light a beacon that will enable Danzig to locate them. The game had sustained them as they climbed to a height from which the beacon would work but then they had to return to reality so that Broberg could think clearly.

Fables

Late night other reading, sometimes political prose, other times graphic fantasy:

How many mysterious beings live secretly among us - in works of fiction? In different works, Poul Anderson has time travelers, immortals and aliens. Other candidates are mutants, superheroes, werewolves, former gods etc. In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, a former Babylonian goddess is an exotic dancer. See Temple Prostitution.

In Fables, Bill Willingham adds another group, exiled fairy tale characters living secretly in New York. And such characters could have showed up in Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, where the guests include Sherlock Holmes, Huckleberry Finn, Nicholas van Rijn and Sancho Panza - all fictional to us but real to themselves.

Good night and may Morpheus send sweet dreams.

Fictions And Fables

A subset of the parallel universes idea is that characters who are fictional in one universe are real in another. Thus, Robert Heinlein's Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways, Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn and inhabitants of the universe where Shakespeare's characters coexist can all visit the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix. Thus also, in Bill Willingham's Fables, fairy tale characters are exiled to "mundy" (mundane) New York when a multiversal empire conquers their homelands.

Alan Moore's The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen has every literary and fictional character coexisting on a single Earth but that gets a bit crowded.

At This Time Of Year...

Relevant Christmas Presents
(i) Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology - relevant to both Gaiman's and Poul Anderson's works.

(ii) Julian May's The Many-Coloured Land (Pliocene Exile, Vol. I) - an author's note refers to Mananaan, the Son of Lir.

(iii) Robert Lanza's Biocentrism, which argues against mainstream cosmogony.

(iv) The next volume of Bill Willingham's Fables. (Scroll down.)

There may be more next week when it is my birthday.

Werebeasts

See:

Where We Were-
Wolf
Parallel Reading
"Operation Afreet"

Other Authors

"There Shall Be No Darkness" by James Blish is a scientifically rationalized werewolf story, well written but badly filmed;

in Bill Willingham's Fables graphic novels, Bigby (Big Bad) Wolf is a werewolf;

Mike Carey's Lucifer features a were-tiger.

Poul Anderson

In Operation Chaos, Steve Matucheck is a werewolf. Before the War, he was a Hollywood actor, playing in Call of the Wild and Silver Chief. 

"I weigh a hundred and eighty pounds, and the conservation of mass holds good like any other law of nature, so I was a pretty big wolf." (III, p. 19)

Matuchek fights a were-tiger:

"Tiger Boy stood close. In man-shape he was almost seven feet tall and monstrously fat." (V, p. 28)

"Tiger Boy" is:

"...paying the price of being a really big werebeast..." (p. 30)

By contrast, "...a fennec, the small fox of the African desert..." (ibid.)

is, in human form:

"...naturally, a dwarf barely one foot high." (ibid.)

"Poul Anderson immerses you in the future... Anderson puts you into a whole new world."
-Larry Niven, back cover blurb on Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011).

Anderson immerses us not only in his Technic History but also in an Earth with werebeasts.

The Two Sides Of Empire

A fictional hero can be either an agent of empire or a resistance fighter.

Whereas Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry is the titular character of Agent of The Terran Empire:

"Entire companies of the Emperor's most diabolical soldiers - trolls, giants and worse - were tasked with [the wolf's] capture or destruction."
-Bill Willingham, Fables: Legends in Exile (New York, 2012), p. 130.

- and:

"'There's thirty, forty men with guns all coming for us. Imperial soldiers, what's more.'"
-Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (London, 1998), 14, p. 308.

So which side are we on? Usually, when reading fiction, on the side of our hero but which side is he on?

"'Why do you stand with Josip? You know what he is.'"
-The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 475.

It is possible to appreciate Anderson's fiction while not always agreeing with his heroes. And, meanwhile, we have to take sides in real life with no author to point the way.

Other Reading About Telepathy

We saw here that a telepath who can read only surface thoughts talks to a prisoner in order to bring associations into his conscious mind.

Thus, we read, in a book received as a present today:

D'jinn, disguised as a slave girl: Gather all who serve Yussuf's ascendancy together tonight for an important meeting.

Sidi Nouman: Is that wise? In the past we've never congregated more than two or three at a time. Those were always Yusuf's orders.

D'jinn: No Matter. I simply needed to ascertain the fullness of the list which appeared in your mind the moment I inquired of them.
I've captured it complete, and so you are of no further use to me, Sidi Nouman, famous abuser of horses.
-Bill Willingham, Fables: Arabian Nights (And Days), (Burbank, CA, 2006), p. 59, panels 5-6.

Fantasy And Reality

It would have been very easy - all too easy? - for Poul Anderson to write a fantasy story corresponding to the role play game played by characters in his hard sf story, "The Saturn Game." This does not happen. The fantasy remains only in the minds of those characters. We happen to know that another way for denizens of the Technic History to encounter magic is to visit the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, but that has no impact on the uncompromisingly scientific setting of "The Saturn Game."

It would have been even easier for the play and film, Shadowlands, to alternate between the events of CS Lewis' life and scenes from his Narnia series but that also does not happen. When one of Lewis' future stepsons enters a bedroom and looks in a wardrobe, it is only a wardrobe.

Near the end of Bill Willingham's Fables graphic series, the military forces of the mundane world enter Fabletown, previously magically concealed from their sight, where the mayor, the former King Cole, awaits them... A new and fabulous age dawns and the series unfortunately ends.

Fables And Fantasies

I think that Poul Anderson's causality violation/historical alteration caused not by extra-temporal intervention but by quantum fluctuation was an original contribution to time travel fiction. Usually, imaginative authors present new treatments of familiar ideas.

Familiar Ideas
(i) Exotic beings hide among us.
In Poul Anderson's works: aliens; "a-mortals"; futurian time travelers.

In Bill Willingham's Fables, fairy tale characters are disguised as "mundanes" in New York. A journalist who discovers this clandestine community of ageless people thinks that they are vampires.

(ii) Alternative Earths in parallel universes; what is fiction on one Earth may be real on another.
Poul Anderson: several novels and short stories.
Fables: the "Fables" are exiles from other Earths somehow based on or derived from the mundane Earth.

An Obscure Connection

OK. Here is a really obscure late-night connection. You are going to love this one.

(i) Ichabod Crane is a traitor to Fabletown in Bill Willingham's Fables: The Mean Seasons.

(ii) Googling Ichabod Crane, we remind ourselves that he is a Washington Irving character.

(iii) We also learn that Will Rogers played Ichabod Crane.

(iv) "[Manse Everard] wasn't a celebrity hound, but after he'd decided that roping was an art that might come in handy, he'd gone to the trouble of making acquaintance with an expert in 1910, who agreed to teach him. His hours with Will Rogers were among the pleasantest of his life."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B. C., p. 81.

Thus, through several layers of fiction, the Fables Ichabod Crane has the most tenuous possible connection with Poul Anderson's Manson Everard of the Time Patrol. Fortunately, I don't have to invent any of this stuff. I just read it.

To Eat Or Not To Eat

The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER NINE.

Wells' Martians extract blood from human beings and inject it into themselves. Two members of a Didonian triple entity draw blood from the third. Flandry's reaction:

"Lord, how horrible." (p. 454)

Does he find symbiotic blood-sucking distasteful? No:

"Never to revel in a tournedos or a peche flambee -" (ibid.) (See The Food Thread.)

Flandry is being parochial. He never experiences the pleasures of many other species that have different sense organs.

The six werewolf children of B.B. Wolf and Snow White learn that they have a seventh sibling who is a ghost and does not eat:

"That's it? No hot dogs, or pizza bites, or noodles, or ice cream, or even BIRTHDAY CAKE?"
"Nope. None of that."
"But that's terrible. How can you LIVE without birthday cake?
-Bill Willingham, Fables: The Good Prince (New York, NY, 2008), p. 116, panels 2-3.

Flandry's response is on the same level as theirs.

It would be a very good thing if an intelligent being were able to draw all the energy that it required from air, sunlight, fresh water and cosmic rays. 

Fables And Fantasies II

Writing is an inherently individual activity. Presumably, even two collaborators do not sit at a desk together. However, literature is a collective enterprise. Everything is written in a context and has influences. A single author cannot address every possibility but a community and a tradition can. Poul Anderson gives us the Old Phoenix Inn where many fictional and fabulous characters from different universes meet. Bill Willingham gives us Fabletown in New York inhabited by:

King Cole
Snow White
Rose Red
Prince Charming
the Big Bad Wolf in human form
Briar Rose, the Sleeping Beauty
Boy Blue
Bluebeard
Goldilocks
The Frog Prince
Jack Horner aka the Giant Killer etc -

- all exiled from their Homelands. We recognize many potential patrons of the Old Phoenix and are confident that some of them would have showed up there if that series had continued for longer.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

Three Fictional Examples

(i) In Poul Anderson's Technic History, David Falkayn and the Polesotechnic League save Merseia from supernova radiation. Merseians, resenting outside help, become mankind's worst enemy.

 

(ii) In James Blish's Black Easter, magicians release major demons to find out what they will do if unrestrained for an entire night. They fight and win Armageddon.

 

(iii) In Bill Willingham's Fables, overthrowing a magical empire causes the release of the even greater evils that it had suppressed.