The Blue Carbuncle

Near Christmas (scroll down), we remember and might reread:

"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens;

"The Blue Carbuncle" by Arthur Conan Doyle;

The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth;

"The Season of Forgiveness" by Poul Anderson -

- and I am currently reading about Christmas 2078, just sixty years from now, in Julian May's Magnificat. Also, Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys begins and ends with the Birthday of Mithras.

Because Poul Anderson fans should be interested in Sherlock Holmes, I will now recount that Aileen, our daughter, paid for Sheila and me to attend a dramatization, interrupted by Christmas carols, of "The Blue Carbuncle" in the Shire Hall court room of Lancaster Castle this evening. Watson stood in a witness box to narrate. While he read aloud The Times report of a court case, the witnesses entered the box and spoke.

When Holmes lets the culprit go, he says:

"'I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.'"
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Blue Carbuncle" IN Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Two Complete Adventures (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 96-188 AT p. 187

- thus linking with the theme of "A Christmas Carol."

He also says:

"'Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.'" (ibid.)

Thus, Poul Anderson's Christmas story takes its title from a phrase in Doyle's.

(Another local note: in recent years, Nygel performed an abridged reading of "A Christmas Carol," accompanied by mulled wine, in a nearby library. This year, he is making Father Christmas phone calls to children and hopefully will review a Poul Anderson novel for this blog.)

Christmas

Maybe every fictional series should have a Christmas episode?

Sherlock Homes: "The Blue Carbuncle";
James Bond: On Her Majesty's Secret Service;
Poul Anderson's Technic History: "The Season of Forgivenes";
Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy: Jack The Bodiless, 23.

In the latter two cases, extraterrestrials respond to this particular Terrestrial festival:

Ivanhoans realize that emissaries of the Polesotechnic League are not crassly mercantile because some, at least, have a sense of the sacred;

the Concilium of the Galactic Milieu celebrates Christmas when representatives of the Human Polity are being inaugurated into the Concilium.

How will we respond to alien festivals? (If aliens have festivals, of course.) One Technic History extraterrestrial, Axor, converts to Christianity and seeks evidence of an extraterrestrial Incarnation. Anderson leaves the question open even though Flandry gets funding for Axor's research. Axor is the kind of guy who will uncover interesting facts about the Ancients even if most of us disagree with the premise of his research. Evidence of Chereionite belief in an Incarnation and even of a festival like Christmas is not automatically evidence that there was a literal Incarnation. And I did not intend to engage in debate with Axor when I started to list Christmas episodes of our favorite series.

Christmas II

For posts published on Christmas Day in previous years, see here.

For discussion of Poul Anderson's Christmas story, "The Season of Forgiveness," see:

In The Pleiades 
In The Pleiades II
Ivanhoan Religion

For an illustration of Conan Doyle's Christmas story, see Christmas.

For the embodiment of divinity, see:

Embodied Divinity
Embodied Divinity II

Later: Today, most posts have been on another blog here but have addressed issues relevant to concepts of time and time travel.  

Multiverse: First Impressions

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton MI, 2014).

To my considerable surprise, this new anthology contains no less than three Time Patrol stories:

"A Slip in Time" by SM Stirling;
"Christmas in Gondwanaland" by Robert Silverberg;
"The Far End" by Larry Niven.

So far today, I have read through "A Slip..." once, have read part of "Christmas..." and have yet to tackle "...End."

A while back, I set out my understanding of time travel here and here.

I am beginning to realize that not all of us have the same idea about what goes on in the Time Patrol universe! That is hardly surprising. I will discuss these three stories, then other items in Multiverse, over a number of posts, beginning with initial impressions.

SM Stirling writes in an afterword that Poul Anderson's Vault Of The Ages:

"...introduced me to the solidity of his world-building, something you could taste and smell and feel, and the way his characters inhabited their own reality, and also the mixture of hope and tragic stoicism that marked his universe." (p. 91)

There are four points here:

"...solidity..." I have tried to convey this by over-using the adjective "substantial."
"...taste and smell and feel..." Anderson often appealed to several senses in descriptive passages.
"...their own reality..." We feel that Anderson's fictitious futures are real places inhabited by people who experience their environments as concretely as we experience ours.
"...hope and tragic stoicism..." I have maybe highlighted this less but it is a recurrent theme -

- the Terran Empire will fall but there are hopeful signs that civilization will continue in some places or can be restored;
Time Patrolmen must endure history and know that, despite longevity treatment, each of them will die but nevertheless humanity will be transcended.

The Time Patrol's variable reality is subtle. At any moment of his existence, Manson Everard experiences one timeline and refers to others. Even though the others are said not to exist, they are related to each other successively and causally, e.g. in "Delenda Est":

timeline 1 in which Rome won the Second Punic War;
timeline 2 in which Neldorians intervened so that Carthage won that war;
timeline 3 in which the Patrol counter-intervened so that Rome won the war.

Neldorians traveled pastwards along timeline 1 and initiated timeline 2. Everard and Van Sarawak traveled pastwards along timeline 1, futurewards into timeline 2, then pastwards along timeline 2 and initiated timeline 3.

At each stage, a time traveler exists in only one timeline unless and until he initiates another timeline. Then, he exists in that second timeline unless and until he initiates a third. While in a "timeline 2," he cannot travel pastwards and arrive in a "timeline 1," yet this happens in "Christmas..." Everard and his companion travel pastwards from the twentieth century of a timeline in which the Patrol exists to the geological past of a timeline in which the Patrol was prevented from existing.

In "A Slip...," Manse and Wanda travel directly from the 2332 AD of a "timeline 1" to the 1926 AD of a "timeline 2." I think that, to arrive in a timeline 2, they would have had to travel pastwards along timeline 1 to some time before the moment of change, then futurewards again, as in "Delenda Est."

One last first impression for this post. In "Christmas...," Everard recalls:

"His rescue of Tom Nomura's girlfriend back in the early Pliocene, just as the Mediterranean was getting born." (p. 218)

But Tom, not Manse, saved Tom's girlfriend - unless Manse recalls a different timeline?

Christmas And Easter Messages

James Crossley shows how political leaders present nuanced Christmas or Easter messages (plural):

sometimes, Christmas must be protected from a perceived (or imagined) cultural threat;

at other times, these festivals express values held by people of all faiths or none;

or, slightly less inclusively, they express values held by Christians and also by people of other faiths or none.

Slightly different wordings reflect shifting attitudes. Politicians speak with the presumed prejudices of their electorates in mind but how often do they challenge prejudices?

In "The Season of Forgiveness," Poul Anderson speculates that the celebration of Christmas on an extra-solar planet might overcome the natives' mistrust of Terrestrial merchants who, initially, had seemed to hold nothing sacred. Let us hope that the sharing of festivals does have such a positive outcome in the future history that, hopefully, lies ahead of us.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all blog readers. See here.

Only 82 pageviews yesterday when there were no new posts but so far 7922 today: what is going on? - unless it is just that the counting mechanism is malfunctioning.

I have finished proofreading a novel but have yet to email my suggested minor corrections etc. It is good to read a feel-good novel at Christmas especially in the current climate. After Christmas, we should get back to rereading Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History and, after that, who knows?

I hope that the world will be in better shape this time next year but it will take longer than that to sort out. To conflate two periods of Anderson's Technic History, the Chaos continues and the shadow of God the Hunter is over all.

Christmas

Perhaps every fictional series should have a Christmas story - or a Jewish etc equivalent? I can cite three prominent examples:

in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (see here);
in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, "The Season of Forgiveness";
in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

There are other Christmas stories but are they parts of series?
There are other series but do they have Christmas stories?
Now blog readers can tell me what I have missed.

Christmas And Comments

Happy Christmas and thank you for 293 page views so far today despite no posts until now. For posts on another blog, see Alma. Alan Moore, like Poul Anderson, addresses the idea of time travel and even has characters who are able to walk along the temporal dimension.

Ketlan, still in hospital but able to use his lap top, hopes that he has solved a problem that had recently prevented a regular correspondent from commenting. Further, Ketlan informs me that Chrome users, previously unable to comment, now are able to do so. This might solve a problem that I know existed for at least one other blog reader a while back.

I look forward to receiving comments from old and new correspondents after Christmas and in 2018.

Happy Christmas

 

OK. Too busy to blog. My advice, read or reread:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

"The Blue Carbuncle" by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Shepherd by Frederik Forsyth

"The Season of Forgiveness" by Poul Anderson

Anderson's story is both a Christmas story in the Dickensian tradition and an instalment of Anderson's main future history series. The best of two worlds.

Voices

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

"'You should find this house more hospitable when we summon you,' Pele said. Conviviality provides opportunities for the probing of character. 'At present, I have my work to do. Good day.'" (p. 345)

Would you be able to read this passage aloud, making clear which parts are spoken by Pele and which are comments by the narrator? For Pele's dialogue, you would have to imitate her aged female Zacharian voice with its slight accent. For the rest, you would have to adopt a completely different narrator's voice and tone. Easy enough for those who can do it.

In a TV drama about the Abdication of King Edward VIII, an actor with his back to the camera spoke in Churchillian tones so that we knew who he was even when he turned to face us and did not look like him. A 1940's festival in nearby Morecambe was advertised with a photograph of a Churchill look-alike. (See the attached image.) Seeing the guy at the Festival, I approached him and said, "I didn't expect to meet you here, sir!" He replied in an incomprehensible high-pitched whine!

At Christmas one year, a guy I knew performed an abridged public reading of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," with mulled wine, at a local library. He gave the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come a pronounced Scottish accent. No warrant for this in the text but it served to differentiate him from the others. The same guy performed telephone calls to children from Santa Claus. 

Have we gone off the point again? Not really. Read carefully every line written by Poul Anderson for what it means to you. All human and nonhuman life is in there.

Stating The Obvious

Poul Anderson, "The Season of Forgiveness" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 131-145.

There is another circumstance in which people tell each other what they already know: when rehearsing arguments. When two guys argued about the Spanish Civil War (see here), the first guy summarized a sequence of events even though the second guy kept saying, "I know! I know!" because the first guy thought that those events led to the conclusion that he wanted to reach.

The Argument In The Opening Pages Of "The Season Of Forgiveness" 

Apprentice Juan Hernandez proposes a Christmas party.

 

Master Trader Thomas Overbeck:

There is too much work for frivolity.

 

Hernandez:

It is important on Earth.

 

Overbeck:

Christmas is a date on a chronopiece adjusted for Earth;

the Ivanhoan year is two thirds longer than Terrestrial;

the Ivanhoan day is sixty hours;

although it is cold here, this is the local summer;

they are both stating the obvious;

decorating the dome and singing "Jingle Bells" would make the tradition ridiculous.

 

Hernandez:

in the Terrestrial southern hemisphere, Christmas is in summer;

nobody knows when the Nativity happened;

the ship, due soon, will bring small children who will feel better if welcomed by a familiar party.

This argument carries a lot of information that is old news to the characters but new to the readers.

Multiverse: Gondwanaland II

Robert Silverberg, "Christmas in Gondwanaland" IN Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014), pp. 215-244.

Because of my interest in time travel, I turned first to the three Time Patrol stories in Multiverse. I was reluctant to continue reading "Christmas...," after its opening pages, because it seemed that its events could not happen. If it is impossible for a time traveler to proceed directly from the Gondwanaland of a "timeline 2" to the Prague, 1910, of a "timeline 1," then why continue to read about such impossible events?

I read the other short stories before returning to "Christmas...," then found that the explanation given ("We exist and we don't exist" (p. 218) etc) did not make sense. However, I continued to read because it is always interesting to try to unravel time travel stories. After appreciating Silverberg's description of Prague, I was surprised to find a different explanation. I do not yet know whether this second explanation is fully coherent but it is at least not immediately and obviously self-contradictory.

Although, in Patrol terminology, "deleted" timelines are said to be simply nonexistent, they nevertheless have a temporal relationship to each other and to whatever is regarded as the current timeline. Thus, there was an original timeline in which there was time travel and there were Danellians although there was not yet a Time Patrol. The Danellians knew that a temporal change, whether deliberate, accidental or random, could prevent their existence. To preserve that existence, they made one change, the establishment of a Patrol to prevent any further temporal changes, thus to guard a timeline leading to the Danellians.

The original timeline is said not to exist but can also be described as having existed before the Patrol timeline. In other words, it is in the past of a second temporal dimension. It cannot be accessed by time travelers going back and forth along the current timeline but nor did it at any stage cease to exist from the point of view of anyone living within it. Its denizens or inhabitants all lived from their births until their deaths and did not cease to exist at any intermediate moment.

Ben-Eytan tells Everard that the Danellians who were to attend the Founding Convocation, somehow knowing that the attack was coming, either exited before the attack or arranged not to be there in the first place. Either way, there are Danellians still at large. In any case, Ben-Eytan claims that human evolution and history will lead to Danellians whatever happens. It follows that the Danellians had some other reason to organize the Patrol! The Danellians want Ben-Eytan, Everard and three other agents to rectify events in Gondwanaland.

But, and this is the alternative explanation that I have been working my way back to, the Danellians have organized a Time Patrol II, with a Founding Convocation in an (unknown) other time and place, to ensure that, despite the catastrophe in Gondwanaland, the timeline remains indistinguishable from the one that had been guarded by the first Time Patrol! By trying to prevent the massacre in Gondwanaland, Everard etc will be working against Time Patrol II but they accept that their sworn duty is to restore their version of the timeline, including their version of the Patrol. But why do the Danellians want them to do this? Continuing to read will make everything either clearer or unclearer.

Christmas Food

Since we have been finding some parallels between Poul Anderson's Technic History and Juliam May's Galactic Milieu -

interstellar civilization
extra-solar colonies
a planet called Avalon
telepathy
rebellion
canonization

- and since it is nearly Christmas, maybe we should let May contribute to our Food Thread (which originated when comparing Anderson's works with SM Stirling's).

At an annual family gathering after midnight mass, Uncle Rogi consumes:

Buffalo wings
gorgonzola dip
Poltroyan (alien) pickled tariji eggs
dim sum
curly fries
kidney bean salad
walnut-maple-fudge torte
a large hot buttered rum -

- seated in "...a chair half-concealed by the Christmas tree." (Magnificat, Chapter Sixteen, pp. 263-264)

The Christmas Party

"The Season of Forgiveness."

Master Trader Overbeck, the viewpoint character for the beginning of the story, is surprised that Ram Gupta, Nikolai Sarychev, Mamoru Noguchi and Philip Feinberg, lacking any common faith, nevertheless enthusiastically join in with Juan Hernandez's preparations for a Christmas party. They:

fill rooms and passages in the dome with ornaments of foil or sheet metal, color-coded wire and painted paper;

bake cookies;

laugh and whistle, boosting efficiency with their cheerfulness;

also decorate outdoors when, after some argument, Overbeck agrees to that.

When I was yet again back at College, in 1988-89, the course itself was, of course, entirely secular although some students held their own prayer meetings or investigated an Evangelical C of E parish church across the road. At Christmas, there was enough support for a student-run carol service with Gospel readings, for which there was even a rehearsal. I said that I would meditate in my room at the same time as the service and afterwards drank non-alcoholic beer while the others had something stronger. Now all that we need to do is to extend good will and fellowship throughout the rest of the year...

Pathetic Fallacies, The Milky Way And A Future Christmas

Being without a computer for a few days was an opportunity to catch up with some other reading and rereading. I have become sensitized to literary devices that I had first noticed in Poul Anderson's works. For example, in graphic works by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman:

Meteorological Pathetic Fallacy

"Thunderheads , iron-black in the blue distance. The air is suddenly dry and heavy. The sky holds its breath...

"It's coming this way. And it's a monster."

-Alan Moore, Miracleman: A Dream of Flying (Forestville, California, 1988), CHAPTER 3, p. 2, panel 7, captions 1-2.

This "monster" is an approaching storm.

"Uneasy, Mike Moran can hear it, prowling around the perimeter of their conversation. A tiger, circling, closing in...

"It's coming this way. And its a monster."

-ibid., p. 4, panel 7, caption 2; p. 8, panel 1.

This "monster" is the man with whom the viewpoint character, Moran, is conversing. Moran articulates what he feels:

"'I can tell by your voice, by the way you stand... You're not human, John. I can feel it.'"

-ibid., p. 8, panel 7, caption 1.

Scary. Maybe even more evocative than some of Poul Anderson's storm-dialogue parallels?  And I have appreciated Moore's text more by quoting it here.

A Colourful Description of the Milky Way Seen from Space

"I met with Avril in deep space, her costume bright against the Milky Way's pearly blur..."

-Alan Moore, Miracleman No. 14 (Forestville, Calif., April 1988), p. 4, panel 2, caption 1.

A Future Take on Christmas

"...Christmas, when we remember all the dead gods and lost mythologies, and exchange presents."

-Neil Gaiman, Miracleman No. 20 (Forestville, Calif, March 1991), p. 3, panel 1.

Each of these passages reminded me of Poul Anderson to whom we must soon return.

Trees

"The Season of Forgiveness."

Ivanhoans gather to look at Christmas decorations and a Nativity scene erected outside the trading base:

"A tree had been erected on the flagstones." (p. 333)

A couple of weeks ago, I explained to a Muslim neighbour that we were walking across town to a church with an annual display of decorated Christmas trees, where we would also meet our daughter and granddaughter: celebration, family and sharing of traditions. The church also had a screen displaying information about current conditions in Bethlehem.

"'[The Earthlings] should have special wisdom, now in the season of their Prince of Peace.'" (p. 334)

Any paganism can accept Christ as another god.

"'Raielli, Erratan!'

"Halt, Earthling!" (pp. 327-328)

On another planet, Ikranaka, Earthlings are "Ershoka." The land-dwellers on Starkad call them "the vaz-Terran." There will be many adaptations of terms like "Earthling" and "Terran" throughout the volume of space covered by Technic civilization.

The apprentices who decorate the base:

"...had no common faith." (p. 322)

- although maybe their organizer, Hernandez, is a Christian. When I was at College, 1988-'89, several of the students were keen enough to organise a carol service complete with Gospel readings which they rehearsed. There was a core of Christian commitment among the organizers. I said that I would meditate in my room at the time of the service. I am not up for singing anything let alone carols! - although people draw this line in different places. I know that I should not accept communion in a church but should accept food in a Gurdwara or a Krishna Temple. 

Seven Installments In Common

The Earth Book Of Stormgate collects twelve installments of Poul Anderson's main future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, also known as the Technic History.

The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, The Van Rijn Method, collects the first eleven installments of the Technic History.

These two volumes have seven installments in common:

"Wings of Victory" (Ythri)
"The Problem of Pain" (Avalon)
"Margin of Profit" (van Rijn)
"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" (Adzel)
"The Season of Forgiveness" (Christmas on Ivanhoe)
The Man Who Counts (van Rijn)
"Esau" (van Rijn)

Ythri, Avalon and Ivanhoe are planets that appear elsewhere in the Technic History. Van Rijn and Adzel are characters that appear elsewhere in the History. Christmas is common to other fictional series and to reality. Will it still be celebrated in the real twenty-fifth century?

My answer: Yes, if humanity survives.

Seasonal Reading

Poul Anderson, "The Season of Forgiveness" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), pp. 126-139.

In the combox for The Solutions And A Culmination, I explained why I place so much emphasis on Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate. This omnibus collection includes the first appearances of Sandra Tamarin, Coya Conyon, Merseians and Baburites. These two women and two extrasolar species are important elements in the culminating Polesotechnic League novel, Mirkheim. The Earth Book really is a concentrated essence of the Technic History. 

The Earth Book also collects "The Season of Forgiveness," which reuses the planet Ivanhoe, first introduced in the first David Falkayn story in The Trouble Twisters. Since "The Season..." is Anderson's Christmas story, it will be appropriate to reread it next but there is no hurry.

The opening paragraphs present a good overview of how the Polesotechnic League operates over long interstellar distances. Ivanhoe is:

"...the chill planet of a red dwarf star, away off in the Pleiades region, where half a dozen humans laired in the ruins of a city which had been great five thousand years ago, and everywhere else reached wilderness." (p. 127)

The planet:

"...had had no more than a supply depot for possible distressed spacecraft." (p. 128)

We read about that in the Falkayn story. Since then, an investigator has found the valuable herb adir in deserts on another continent. Master Trader Thomas Overbeck's team must persuade Ivanhoans to harvest adir in exchange for trade goods, like the deal on Suleiman in the previous story where the Baburites had intervened. Human traders will not come to a permanent base without their families and will not stay long if the families become unhappy so Apprentice Juan Hernandez's plan to welcome children with a Christmas party will make a good start. We read about the by now familiar League but not about any familiar characters. Known space is big.

Earth And Space

Robert Heinlein's Future History and Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History begin on Earth before moving into space whereas Anderson's Technic History, like Larry Niven's Known Space History, begins in space, then, eventually and occasionally, brings us back to Earth. When Anderson introduces James Ching and his friends on Earth in the twenty fifth century, it is an Earth that is fully informed of extrasolar races like Cynthians, Gorzunians, Wodenites, Ythrians and Alfzarians.

A few years after James Ching has learned that he will be able to go into space apprenticed to a Master Merchant, we are back on the extrasolar planet Ivanhoe where we first met David Falkayn as an apprentice. However, this time, our viewpoint character is neither Falkayn nor Ching but yet another never-to-reappear character, the apprentice Juan Hernandez. Whereas Falkayn had had to cope with an obscurantist religion and Ching had had to contend with a Festival of Man, Hernandez's problem is how to celebrate Christmas in this"...strange and lonely place..." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 319)

This is a Christmas story and a good one and the Technic History is nothing if not intricate and multi-faceted.

Another Christmas Activity

See:

Aquamen (scroll down)
Comics And Science Fiction
"Great Books"

Another possible Christmas activity is going to see a superhero film. Aquaman recalls Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children. Superheroes began in sf and still overlap with it. Poul Anderson could have novelized and rationalized superhero characters. The heroic deeds of medieval knights in his The High Crusade are an earlier form of superheroism, especially when translated to an interstellar stage. Comic book superheroes have included Thor (and see here) and a time traveling Arthurian knight.