People In Different Timelines

(Nikola Tesla.)

There is a reference to a "Father Flandry" in SM Stirling's Black Chamber, TEN, p. 204. An ancestor of Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry? No. Father Flandry is a celibate Catholic priest and not in the same timeline as Dominic. But there could be a third timeline in which they are directly related.

In the Black Chamber timeline, Nikola Tesla works for President Theodore Roosevelt's National Advanced Research Projects Institute. We anticipate rapid technological advances in the twentieth century of that timeline.

In Lancaster Real, I will visit Ketlan on the Marsh Estate and attend the Zen group at the Friends' Meeting House tomorrow and meet the guys in the Gregson on Wednesday and we will have a big family birthday party here at Blades Street (scroll down) on Saturday. As ever, I strive to blog.

Scotland

I think that there is scope for a fruitful synthesis between the contemporary fiction and the futuristic science fiction of the twentieth century.

John Buchan describes in detail the Scottish landscapes where his contemporaneous characters live, work, hunt, shoot and fish. Dominic Flandry's friends include the Mayor Palatine of Britain. Thus, this Mayor's territory includes those same Scottish landscapes but changed by more than a thousand years of history.

In the Terran Empire period:

Who lives in Britain?
How do they live?
What work do they do?
How urbanized are the British Isles?
How many historic castles, mansions or palaces remain standing?
Does Blades Street, Lancaster, still exist?
Will the Mayor and his guests - including the Emperor and Flandry? - be able to reproduce the kinds of sporting and leisure activities described by Buchan?

I would welcome an addition to the Technic History answering such questions.

On The Shelves

I walk past Waterstones Bookshop (see image and here) between Market Square and Blades Street so yesterday I went in to check the sf shelves: no Poul Anderson or SM Stirling but nevertheless Asimov's Complete Robot, his original three Foundation volumes and The Gods Themselves. Why does Asimov's future history stay on the shelves while Anderson's does not?

I forgot to check on James Blish but that was because I am used to him not being there either. My copy of Cities In Flight in one volume was published in 1981. I admit to not keeping up with most current sf. There was a new anthology of old stories about Mars, including Wells' "The Crystal Egg," which connects with The War Of The Worlds, and Ray Bradbury's "Ylla," the opening story of The Martian Chronicles. We are going for a long walk by the river. Back later.

Some Remaining Details In "Earthman, Beware!"

I list details in Poul Anderson's stories, as in the previous post, because the details are ingenious and because I would soon forget them if I did not write them down.

Four concluding comments on "Earthman, Beware!":

(i) One sentence in this story contains a phrase that became important in a later Anderson series:

"The long night wore on."

(Alight In The Void, New York, 1993, p. 45)

(ii) In the first seven pages of the story, Peggy has tracked Joel to his Alaskan cabin. So far, the story could have had a contemporary setting although with the science fictional elements of Joel's partial telepathy and his robot chef invention. Then suddenly, Joel thinks:

"Maybe he should have gone to Mars or some outer-planet satellite." (p. 36)

With this sentence, we are wrenched into a futuristic scenario where interplanetary travel is routine. We are used to such scenarios in science fiction but are usually given notice of them earlier in a story. Two pages further on, we are informed that Joel invented the ion-jet space drive so it seems that he is responsible for interplanetary travel.

(iii) A single word can trigger an entirely accidental association in one reader's mind. Joel's human foster parents were called not Kent but Weatherfield. I live on Blades St in the city of Lancaster in the county of Lancashire. Since December 1960, a British TV series has shown the denizens of Coronation Street in the fictitious town of Weatherfield, Lancashire. (Apparently, Weatherfield is a hour by motorway from Lancaster. If only I knew which direction to drive in...) So maybe the foster parents' ancestors came from the North West of England...

(iv) When, in the very last sentence:

"Dr Joel Weatherfield, eminent young physicist, rose cheerfully and began making ready to go home." (p. 60)

- he has been made to forget his personal cosmic connection. We are Joel. We are all connected to the cosmos and are usually unaware of it.

What Happened Last Night

For the first time, I publish an image of Blades St, Lancaster. No 44, where we live, is on the left hand side as we view the street but just off the picture. Half the residents are Asian families. This might be noticeable in the picture. Lancaster Castle is sometimes visible in the distance although not in this photo. Last night, a women's blues group occupied our ground floor until 3.00 AM while I, lurking upstairs, meditated, texted, read, watched dvds and blogged although I eventually joined the musicians for food and conversation. This is why there were quite a few posts about Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains. I have got well embedded in this volume and am not much more than half way through Alan Moore's Jerusalem, which is discussed on the Personal and Literary Reflections blog.

Addendum: Sheila says that I have exaggerated the number of Asian families but they USED to be about half.

Fools And Knaves

See:

"Commentary"
Commentary

I quoted Poul Anderson who accuses some demagogues of rousing ignorant hordes by consciously lying. I have now found a similar passage in Dornford Yates:

"...of her wisdom, she knew that the truth was being denied. False prophets were spouting the praises of the new order of life. She tried to believe they were fools: she knew in her heart they were knaves. But their doctrines were hailed with delight by millions of dupes."
-Dornford Yates, Lower Than Vermin (London, 1950), PART THREE, p. 308.

When disagreeing with what someone has said, we can either accept him as honest or accuse him of dishonesty but must have good grounds for that latter assessment. Mere mind reading is unacceptable.

I have seen someone fail to understand a point, then refuse to understand it, indeed to deny that there was a point. This was face saving. He did not want to acknowledge that he had misunderstood in the first place. I base this judgment on my reading of his words and manner, not on telepathy.

Years ago, an acquaintance told me that:

she would never live on our, racially mixed, street;
it was a terrible environment in which to bring up a child;
we were patronizing Asians by living next door to them!

The economic reality was that we had moved to Blades St. because its houses were half the price of similar houses in other parts of town but, being racist, my acquaintance knew that our motivation could only have been based on inverted racism.

I read authors with whom I disagree because they write well but a welcome by-product is the broadening of perspectives gained by imaginatively entering into very different world views. I do not accuse the sometimes arrogant Yates of knavery. Poul Anderson was a fellow pilgrim and seeker of the truth that makes us free.