Clifford Simak

Since this blog is about Poul Anderson, I here quote Poul Anderson's opinion about another science fiction writer:

"the late great Clifford D Simak was an inspiration to us all. He still is."
-Poul Anderson, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), p. 81.

I would have been interested to read Anderson's comments on some of Simak's works. I know from private conversation that James Blish did not care for them and that he particularly disliked talking dogs which, as I remember, occurred no less than three times in Simak's sf. Simak must be classified with Ray Bradbury and CS Lewis as not a hard, therefore a "soft," sf writer.

In my teens, I set out to read every word written by certain American sf writers. Simak was on this list. However, I caught up with him, read his then newly published novel, felt that he had become repetitive and self-parodying, and stopped reading although Simak continued to publish a novel a year (or thereabouts).

A lot of what he wrote about time and time travel did not make sense. His Time And Again did present a logically consistent circular causality paradox but I was disappointed when I reread it more recently - too many sf cliches - although one interesting feature was an appearance by Old Cliff himself at the age of ninety.

Anderson, Blish and Simak each wrote a story about exploring the Jovian environment. Anderson's and Simak's characters, though not Blish's, wound up living happily there.

Ghosts In The Future

Ghosts are fantasy, not sf - as a rule. Robert Heinlein's Martians have direct contact with their "Old Ones." CS Lewis surprised me when, reading his Ransom Trilogy out of order, I came across, early in Volume II, the startling statement that, on Mars, Ransom had encountered beings that were both extraterrestrial and supernatural - both alien and uncanny! Characters in hard sf can think that they see ghosts. See a relevant quotation from Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return here.

When Wells' Time Traveller first glimpses Morlocks as white figures at night, he remembers Grant Allen's notion that, if each generation dies and leaves ghosts, then the world should eventually become overcrowded with such ghosts. In The Goblin Reservation by Clifford Simak, because a future University has both a Time Travel Department and a Supernatural Department, William Shakespeare is able to meet his own ghost. See here.

This idea of ghosts in the future has enabled us to assemble references to:

Robert Heinlein
CS Lewis
Poul Anderson
HG Wells
Grant Allen
Clifford Simak

Names to conjure with. I had never heard of Grant Allen before but he is yet another period reference in The Time Machine. It is late, approaching the hour at which people see ghosts, and I am out of here.

Three On Jupiter

I refer to three fictitious accounts of the exploration of Jupiter:

James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981);
Clifford Simak, City (London, 1965);
Poul Anderson, "Call Me Joe," IN The Dark Between The Stars (New York, 1981).

In Blish, Robert Helmuth on Jupiter V dons a helmet and perceives the Jovian environment through instruments on a car that moves along the Bridge being built on the Jovian surface;

In Anderson, Edward Anglesey on Jupiter V dons a helmet and perceives the Jovian environment through the central nervous system of an artificially grown quadrupedal organism that has been sent to the Jovian surface;

In Simak, Kent Fowler in a dome on Jupiter is transformed into a quadrupedal organism and sent out onto the Jovian surface.

Thus, Anderson's account is intermediate between Blish's and Simak's. Anglesey and Fowler wind up happy in their Jovian bodies whereas Helmuth hates that environment and wants to get away from it. Blish told me that he could not have described Jupiter as a comfortable place. His "Bridge" came from an experience under a New York bridge that shook as a train passed overhead.

The Must Reads

When I was a teenager in the 1960's, I wanted to read everything by Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Robert Heinlein and Clifford Simak. (Heinlein had not yet completely degenerated.) I caught up with Simak, read his, at that time, most recent publication and then forgot about him although he continued churning out novels, probably as many again after that. I thought that he had become repetitive and self-parodying. James Blish, whom I continued to revere, disliked Simak's three instances of talking dogs.

Poul Anderson was not then among my Must Reads. I read some of his works but not others. Now, of the writers mentioned so far, only Blish and Anderson are Must Reads and Anderson, because of his volume and range, is the only one about whom I can blog indefinitely.

After the 1960's, he wrote a lot more and my respect for what he had written increased. Once, when I browsed a novel of his, the blurb described an interstellar spaceship crew returning to Earth to discover that a Social Welfare Party had gained office in their absence. To me at the time, this did not sound sufficiently new so I returned it to the bookshop shelf. Let me end with a question: can any reader of this blog identify that novel from the description given here? Or maybe I am mistaken and it was not an Anderson novel? 

More

We have been comparing Poul Anderson with other future historians so here are some more:

Olaf Stapledon's Last Men future history has Martians invading Earth;

ERB's Moon Maid future history has Martians communicating with Earth and Moon Men invading Earth;

Wells and Anderson each have Martians invading Earth in a separate novel;

Clifford Simak's City future history has a Jovian exploration story comparable to Anderson's "Call Me Joe" and James Blish's "Bridge";

ERB's Jupiter story is "Skeleton Men of Jupiter";

ERB's future history is a small part of his fictional universe that also includes Tarzan, John Carter, Pellucidar, Venus, the Land that Time Forgot and an extra-solar planet.

The main comparative points here are:

interplanetary invasions (Wells, Stapledon, Burroughs and Anderson);
Jovian expeditions (Burroughs, Simak, Blish and Anderson).

Lines Of Development

Copied from the Science Fiction blog.

In the 1960's and early '70's, I read as much science fiction (sf) as I could find. Thus, I became very familiar with the works of certain authors. I caught up with Clifford Simak and read his then newly published The Goblin Reservation but did not continue to buy new works by Simak partly because I thought that he had become repetitive and self-parodying and partly because I was by then less interested in reading new sf.

I know of only a single work by Ward Moore, Bring The Jubilee, and have read only a single work by Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates. In both these cases, the common topic of interest is time travel.

The following lists are not intended to be exhaustive but they do represent what I regard as certain major lines of development among the sf writers that I have read:

British
Wells
Stapledon
Lewis
Aldiss

American
Burroughs
Heinlein
Asimov
Blish
Bradbury
Anderson
Niven
Pournelle

Wells and Heinlein are two starting points. Sf readers will notice that many prominent names are absent, often because they started to write long after I had ceased to read. I have appreciated rereading the works of several of the listed authors. Because Poul Anderson uniquely combines quality with quantity, he has become the subject of a blog. Because of Greg Bear's connections with Anderson, I have this month started to read, and post about, Bear's Way Trilogy.

Stars And Cities

This is a recurrent theme that I am focusing on again. Stars and cities are important in sf, travel between stars and futuristic, technological cities, and they can be connected:

James Blish has cities flying between stars;

Arthur C. Clarke has a novel called The City And The Stars;

Brrian Aldiss' future history ends with the phrase, "...the old city and the stars";

Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn story, "The Master Key," ends with a reference to the city beneath the stars;

Michael Moorcock has a novel called The City In The Autumn Stars;

both Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson have an interstellar empire ruled from a fully urbanized planet;

in Anderson's Psychotechnic History, interstellar spaceships arrive at and depart from one city on one planet in each planetary system, Stellamont on Nerthus and Port Nevada on Earth.

Lastly, for now, without any direct reference to stars:

there are large enclosed cities on the future Earth in A Torrent Of Faces by James Blish and Norman L. Knight and in The Caves Of Steel by Isaac Asimov, in the latter work capitalized as "Cities";

Clifford Simak has a future history called City because it is about the dissolution of cities.

In Anderson's Psychotechnic History and in Simak's City, rapid transportation and communication make cities unnecessary but, in the Psychotechnic HIstory, interstellar travel revives them although only one per planet.

Teleportation/Transportation/Transference

While we are paralleling future histories, we should include Star Trek. Merseians, kzinti and Klingons are obvious parallels. However, Star Trek has transporters and Known Space has transfer booths whereas the Technic History does not have teleportation.

An alien interstellar empire does have teleportation in Poul Anderson's "Interloper." However, the human societies in his Technic History do not develop such a mode of travel. But this makes the Technic History more plausible. How could a physical object or a human being be transported from one place to another without traversing the intervening space? Is it destroyed at the first place and reconstructed at the second? In that case, it is not transported - and could surely be duplicated at several places?

A civilization with sufficient knowledge and energy to practice teleportation would surely be capable of feats for beyond those that are otherwise displayed in either Star Trek or the Known Space History? In Clifford Simak's City, men in a dome on Jupiter can transform one of their number into an organism that can survive on the Jovian surface, then return him to human form. With that much knowledge and power, why do they huddle (Simak's own word) in a dome?

I think that Anderson's limited use of teleportation as an sf prop is a sign of his carefulness as an sf writer.

Survival

Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), Chapter XXIX, pp. 223-224.

The characters discuss the nature and survival of the soul, a big subject of which we will scratch the surface. I will return to Operation Chaos after surveying some comparable fictional treatments of the subject. Here is an incomplete list:

The Land Of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle;
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley;
The Palace Of Eternity by Bob Shaw;
Inferno and Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson;
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis;
"The Man Who Traveled In Elephants" by Robert Heinlein;
Why Call Them Back From Heaven? by Clifford Simak;
The Triumph of Time by James Blish;
The Day After Judgment by James Blish;
Midsummer Century by James Blish;
Starfarers by Poul Anderson.

I cannot treat all of these works equally:

I have not read The Land Of Mist;

decades ago, I saw a TV dramatization of Immortality Inc. and remember that survival was not automatic but could be attained either yogically or technologically;

The Palace Of Eternity has electromagnetic "egons" in interstellar space disrupted by the wakes of Bussard ramjets;

Niven and Pournelle follow Dante's account;

Matheson follows spiritualist accounts;

Lewis presents an allegory;

the surprise ending of Heinlein's story is that the viewpoint character is dead;

Simak's novel states that there is a hereafter but does not describe it;

in The Triumph Of Time, one theoretical possibility is the continued existence of isolated consciousnesses with memories but without bodies, environments or sensory impressions but no one wants this;

characters in The Day After Judgment speculate that eternal life is stable negative entropy;

in Midsummer Century, a personality is a semistable electromagnetic field which remains integrated as long as it has the supplementary computing apparatus of a brain and the energy source of a body but then fades away unless it is picked up by a suitable receiver;

in Starfarers -

A sympathetic human character, Jean Kilbirnie, dies in the black hole. Or does she? In fiction, and particularly in fantastic fiction, when no body has been found, the author might reverse the death. Two of Jean's colleagues later suspect that holontic configurations are not transitory but permanent, imposing a trace on the vacuum, a direction on randomness, a change in the metric, thus lasting and surviving death, implying that organic patterns and processes might last also.

So could the Holont rescue Jean's consciousness from the death of her body? This is my speculation, no one else's, but it is implied by passages that otherwise are left undeveloped. Anderson's intention is to show us that there is always more to be learned so there will at any stage be still unanswered questions.
-copied from here.

Didonian Designations

See:

Didonians, 12 June 2013;
Didonians, 22 May 2014.

A Didonian entity is known not by a name but by a designation indicating either a personal quality or a past event. Three entities, Cave Discoverer, Harvest Fetcher and Smith, accompany Flandry's party and can switch around to form Iron Miner, Guardian of North Gate or Lightning Struck The House. "Smith" amuses Flandry's crew but, in fact, the English/Anglic name, "Smith," began as a designation.

In a Clifford Simak novel, some aliens were introduced to a small town American mayor. The mayor was told (something like), "This being does not speak. He is a telepath." The mayor was all sympathy. "That's too bad," he said. Then:

"You can call him 'Smith.'"
"What do you know? They have names just like us!"

I used to be a Simak fan but stopped being but Poul Anderson regarded him highly. See here. (Scroll down.)

A Slow Boat To Alpha Centauri

In Is There Life On Other Worlds? (New York, 1963), Poul Anderson imagines a ship or fleet "...bound for Alpha Centauri at one-tenth light speed..." (p. 170):

the journey will take more than forty three years;
families will embark but only the children and grandchildren will arrive;
the self-supporting ships will recycle all organic matter and grow tanked plants or algae;
scientists exploring hostile Solar planets will have perfected these techniques;
after acceleration, the ships will be rotated to simulate gravity;
compatible, self-disciplined crews will have interesting work, libraries, theaters, gyms, gardens and emotion-regulating drugs.

"Some writers have suggested that voyages will be undertaken that last many generations. This is possible, I suppose, but does not look very probable." (p. 172).

But it is how we imagine science fiction "generation ships," i. e., slower than light multi-generation interstellar spaceships:

in Robert Heinlein's generation ship story, part of his Future History, the crew mutinies, destroying organized society within the ship;
in Poul Anderson's generation ship story, part of his Psychotechnic History, psychotechnicians manage ship society, containing conflicts and preventing an ultimately destructive mutiny;
in Clifford Simak's generation ship story, social engineering keeps the crew in line by inculcating religious fervor, e.g., for holy pictures of a House, a Tree and the Wind That You Cannot See But Know Is There.

These three stories form a conceptual sequence in which Heinlein adumbrates a problem to which both Anderson and Simak then respond.

Screeds And Blights II

See Screeds And Blights.

I will shortly reread Seed Of Light by Edmund Cooper and find out for myself. According to Damon Knight:

the plot is fatuous;

all British politicians are presented as heroic idealists whereas all the Americans are presented as clownish demagogues;

after WWIII, glass-roofed cities build spaceships inside their domes so that takeoff will kill those left behind;

the voyage of one starship is a rewrite of Heinlein's "Universe";

about p. 130, a beautiful Stapledonian sweep emerges.

The Politicians
Poul Anderson showed politicians as rounded characters and presented sympathetic treatments of those that he disagreed with.

The Cities
Anderson's characters would not have built spaceships that would kill those left behind. Why did Cooper's? And why did I not see that this was "asinine" (Knight's word)? Young and not technically inclined, I assumed that there was some off-stage technical reason why it had to be done that way. Also, I probably thought that there was a mythical Mors ianua vitae, "Death is the door to life," significance to the arrangement.

Rewriting "Universe"?
"Universe" presents not only the generation ship (multi-generation, slower-than-light, interstellar spaceship) idea but also a later generation, unable to see outside the ship, who think that it is the universe. Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Edmund Cooper reworked the generation ship idea. Aldiss' and Simak's crews cannot see outside their ship but Anderson's and Cooper's can.

Jupiter

Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison edited Farewell, Fantastic Venus, containing "The Big Rain," from the Psychotechnic future history, and "Sister Planet," a non-series story, by Poul Anderson. Logically, this anthology should also have contained "Logic of Empire" by Robert Heinlein but Aldiss, in a bar conversation at an sf con forty three years ago, quoted Heinlein as saying, "You can't have 'Logic of Empire.' It's part of my Future History!'"

There could be a similar, though perhaps shorter, anthology for Jupiter, containing at least:

"Bridge" by James Blish, part of the Cities In Flight future history;
"Desertion" by Clifford Simak, part of the City future history;
"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, part of the John Carter series;
"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson, non-series.

Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about a cyborg exploring a gas giant but I cannot remember what it was called, where it was published or which gas giant it was.

Anderson also touched on Jupiter in:

"Hunters of the Sky Cave," part of the Technic Civilization future history;
"Que Donn'rez Vous?," part of the Flying Mountains future history;
Three Worlds To Conquer, non-series -

- so an Anderson Jupiter collection could be compiled from these works.

It is on my agenda to reread "Call Me Joe." "Desertion" is similar but lacks Anderson's grasp of science. Simak's characters can transform a human body into a Jovian body and back again, which can only mean destroying a human body, creating a Jovian body with the human body's memories, then reversing the process. If they command that much knowledge and energy, then surely they do not need to send transformed beings to explore the Jovian environment?

Original Ideas

How often do you read an sf story and think, "That is an original idea."? I can think of six examples, three involving time travel, two of them by Poul Anderson.

Counterfeit World by Daniel Galouye

AIs inhabit a virtual reality, thinking that it is material reality. People from material reality visit the virtual. I think that there was one virtual inside another . (This was original when I read it.)

Beta Sol, James Blish

Sol is part of a binary. Its companion is a white dwarf, six light months away. Beta Sol has an inhabited planet and is reachable by 1970s technology.

Perelandra by CS Lewis

Lewis, visiting Ransom, is about to be introduced to a being in whom the distinction between extraterrestrial and supernatural breaks down. He finds it hard to articulate his disquiet.

The Goblin Reservation by Clifford Simak

A cartoon-style ghost like a white sheet has been called from the hereafter but died so long ago that it has forgotten who it was. William Shakespeare time travels to the future and meets the ghost which then remembers that it was William Shakespeare.

(This linking of ghosts and time travel ties in with Wells' The Time Machine. When the Time Traveller first glimpses a Morlock at night, he wonders whether it is a ghost, then reflects that, by 802,701 AD, there should be more ghosts because more people will have died. Ghosts appearing in old houses might also be linked with time travellers flitting through the old houses.)

There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson

Time travellers can travel into the future within slower than light interstellar spaceships and can report on the outcome of a voyage before it starts.

(I had thought of this idea. I envisaged "The Haunted Spaceship" with crew members glimpsing apparitions that are time travellers from later in the history of the ship.)

The Shield Of Time by Poul Anderson

A historical alteration is caused not by extratemporal intervention but by a quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy. Right at the end of the series, Anderson invents something new.

Imaginary Science?

Reading Poul Anderson's articles on "imaginary science" and on hard sf, I realize that I have been making a more simplistic distinction between hard sf, epitomized by, e.g., Blish, Anderson and Niven, and another, unnamed, kind of sf, epitomized by Bradbury and Lewis - although I can only think of those two authors to go into that second category. (Addendum, 29 October, 2017: Also, Clifford Simak.)

Thus, I have been classifying faster than light travel, time travel and parallel universes as hard sf although they are consequences of imaginary science, not of known science. However, I cannot feel this as a real distinction. I think that Anderson wrote "hard," scientifically and technologically based, sf just as much when he explained that hyperspace was a series of quantum jumps as when he delineated the environment of the planet Starkad.

The real distinction is between authors who know and care about science and those who do not. In one story, Bradbury accounted for the faster than light velocity of a group of interstellar explorers merely by stating that their speed was the speed of a god, thus evoking not quantum mechanics but a fantasy concept.

Lewis grudgingly acknowledged that the sciences were good in themselves - damning with faint praise - but concentrated his fire on their capacity to be perverted for diabolical ends without displaying any knowledge of scientific principles. To Lewis' character, Ransom, scientific knowledge of the universe is:

"'...the enemy's talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe with no centre at all, but millions of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds for ever, and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness."
-CS Lewis, Voyage To Venus (London, 1978), pp. 197-198.

Not bow down! But bigness can at least be acknowledged. Why are infinite worlds worse? The enemy referred to is literally the Devil. It is Lewis' anti-science that contrasts so sharply with the pro-science fiction of the hard sf writers.

Unseen Presence II

Since Poul Anderson quotes Percy Shelley twice in Trader To The Stars (see Percy Shelley), it seems appropriate to quote here another poetic "unseen presence":

"O wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being

"Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

"Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing..."

-see here.

 

Literary allusions abound. I would have gone on to say that Shelley's wife, Mary, wrote the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, asking whether it was right to create human beings, and that Poul Anderson wrote perhaps a culminating novel on this issue, Genesis. The first link above shows that I have already said this - but it bears repetition.

The Spirit is like a wind (Acts 2:2) and Clifford Simak connects wind with religious images. See A Winter Wind.

Good Eating?

Escapers from Heinlein's generation ship land on a terrestroid moon of a Jovoid planet. One knifes a native animal and says:

"'Good eating!'"

-Orphans of the Sky, p. 111.

The narrative ends with the affirmation:

"'From now on...always Good Eating.'" (ibid.)

Not necessarily. In fact, probably not. We have read Poul Anderson. Local food might be poisonous or might not be nourishing or might need dietary supplements. That last consideration, at least. Heinlein wrote an implausible conclusion to his generation ship story. Brian Aldiss thought that he "could do it better" (his own words) and wrote Non-Stop. Anderson imagined an Asimovian science of society used to prevent generation ship mutinies from getting out of hand. Clifford Simak imagined revivalist religion used to keep a spaceship crew performing necessary tasks. There have been a lot of other generation ship stories, apparently. See here.

Cobblies

Poul Anderson, Virgin Planet (London, 1966), Chapter VI.

"The lower castes had charms against being psyched by the Critters and the Cobblies and other unseen mountain dwellers." (p. 38)

What are Cobblies? I cannot find this word in a dictionary and have encountered it in only one other work of fiction, City by Clifford Simak. Googling reveals that "cobblies" are also referenced in Existence by David Brin. In City, cobblies are undescribed but frightening intruders from other dimensions, like unsettling sounds heard in an old house. I found a link here to the on-line text of City although past experience indicates that such links do not work for all blog readers.

I now google or otherwise investigate every unfamiliar word or phrase in Poul Anderson's texts. The effort is usually worthwhile.

Some Short Future Histories

Future histories differ in length. A long future history series is multi-themed, dealing only with whatever happens in the future, whereas a shorter series can have a single theme with a definite conclusion. Although Poul Anderson's Twilight World is not listed as one of his future histories, it is a collected series covering more than one generation and concluding in a further future. Its single theme is that World War III causes so many mutations that some are beneficial and even enable subsequent generations to colonize other planets so that the outer Solar System is inhabited after Earth has become uninhabitable. Without that War, would the race have survived?

James Blish's The Seedling Stars is a single volume in four parts, originally five stories, about the single theme of pantropy, the science of adapting human beings to other planetary environments. It conclusion is that, when Adapted Men have filled the galaxy, Earth has changed so much that it is colonized by Adapted Men.

Twilight World and The Seedling Stars both address changes to the human form and extraterrestrial colonization.

Anderson's Maurai And Kith is a collection of only three Maurai stories and two Kith stories although later a third story was added to the Kith series and a long novel to both series. The theme of the Maurai Federation series is that, after a nuclear war, seafaring people of the Southern Hemisphere become the world power. We get a sense of Poul Anderson exploring every possibility.

James Blish's Okie series was complete as four stories in one volume. However, Blish added a prequel, a juvenile novel and a sequel. Okie culture ends in Volume III and the universe ends in Volume IV.

Larry Niven's Known Space is a long future history series with a definite ending. Because human beings are artificially selected for the inheritable psychic power of luck, Known Space and the Thousand Worlds become utopian societies of lucky people about whom Niven becomes unable to write any more stories! As Fran Cobden remarked, "...an amazing idea!"

Other short future histories:

The Moon Maid by ERB (a sequel to John Carter);

City by Clifford Simak;

Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand by Brian Aldiss.

Outside

Genesis, PART ONE, V.

There are green hills, wildflowers, trees and a breeze:

"Looking out, Laurinda Ashcroft could almost feel warmth and wind, hear birdsong, breathe odors of growth.

"But the view was electronic, for her house and its few neighbors lay underground." (p. 36)

Poul Anderson appeals to his readers' senses of touch, hearing and smell even though Laurinda merely sees.

Later, when she walks outside, low evening light goldens grass and leaves, rooks call while flying home and a breeze cools the air. More of Laurinda's senses are engaged. She glimpses machines tending the church and imagines devout ghosts inside it. Someone I knew believed that the whole Church, living and dead, was present when Mass was celebrated. HG Wells' Time Traveller, glimpsing a Morlock at night, imagined that he was seeing a ghost and wondered how many ghosts might have accumulated by 802,701 AD. In Clifford Simak's The Goblin Reservation, a University Time Travel Department hosted a talk by Shakespeare while the Supernatural Department conjured Shakespeare's ghost. I have digressed but that is because sf stories, like jokes, recall each other. ("Wasn't there a Star Trek like this?") For now, I am content to remain with Laurinda Ashcroft in the church, then back in her underground home: a quiet before the storm moment. Laurinda has anticipated the next two "storms": an imminent Ice Age and a radiation storm nine millennia hence. We miss the Ice Age because, between Chapters V and VI, the narrative jumps forward to a different civilization seventeen hundred years later.