Who Represents SF?

My copy of Clifford Simak's City (SF Masterworks, Gollancz, London, 2010) has arrived and I am honestly uncertain as to whether I will summon up the motivation to reread it from cover to cover whereas, decades ago, I had rated it highly. I ordered City via eBay because recently on this blog I compared four stories set on Jupiter:

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson

"Bridge" by James Blish

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Of these stories, "Call Me Joe" is alone in not being part of a series - although three different Andersonian series do include Jupiter-related stories. "Bridge" was incorporated into Blish's They Shall Have Stars which I have recently reread with interest. "Desertion," which I was able to reread online, was incorporated into City, hence this purchase. 

The cover quotes Robert Heinlein as saying, "To read science fiction is to read Simak." What? I can think of several more significant names and would substitute Anderson for Simak. Heinlein himself - early Heinlein - is surely more important? Inside, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov and James Gunn write highly of Simak. Asimov tried to imitate his style.

By contrast with this, James Blish, whom I rank with Anderson, did not respect Simak's works.

The Introduction by Gwyneth Jones quotes Heinlein:

"The reader who does not like Simak stories, does not like science fiction at all." (p. v)

Clearly untrue!

Jones informs us that Simak was:

"Never remotely interested in 'technology', or in factual 'science'..." (p. vii)

But science fiction is about the relationship of human beings not only to each other but also to the universe revealed by science including the potentialities of technology. Sf began with Frankenstein: can a scientist create life?

Simak himself is quoted as saying that, disillusioned by World War II and the Atomic Bomb, he wrote the City stories only to create a momentary refuge. When Jones expands on this, I find it difficult to paraphrase and therefore will have to quote at greater length than I would have preferred:

"For a moment, in these tales, a Man sits in his armchair, his loving Dog at his knee, a glass of whisky at his elbow; pondering the lives of small creatures in the quiet woods around his homestead. Asking nothing, demanding no reward or second chance for the failed experiment of human civilization; inventing nothing that isn't already held in this moment, he spins a dream of blameless wonderland." (ibid.)

Inventing nothing? That is not sf! Just before the passage quoted, Jones describes the City stories as having:

"...only the most perfunctory futuristic trappings." (ibid.)

That human civilization will fail, will even destroy itself, is one of the possibilities that has to be faced and is faced by sf writers, including Poul Anderson. Retreat to a homestead in the quiet woods in the present moment and not in any future endeavour is one possible response to this...

However, Jones goes further:

"Perhaps all of science fiction secretly lives in Simak's moment, and is made of the same stuff as City - a paradoxical hybrid of nihilism and wish-fulfilment; tempered by a stoic acceptance of the cold equations." (p. viii)

No, it does not. Acceptance yes but not either nihilism or wish-fulfilment. Poul Anderson takes us to the further reaches of space and time both in mythical worlds and in the physical universe insofar as it was understood at the time of writing.

Meanwhile here and now: for me, today has become very indulgent, staying in a dressing gown and adding to the blog instead of stirring out of the house. The next few days will have to involve a lot of physical exercise and much less computer time.

Clifford Simak's Jupiter, Part II

(Today, we have just seen a partial solar eclipse which seemed to me an anticlimax.)

We have reread to the end of Clifford Simak's "Desertion." Thus, of the four Jupiter narratives that were to be discussed, only those by Poul Anderson and James Blish remain to be reread to the end.

Like Anderson and Blish, Simak describes the Jovian environment as a perpetual maelstrom where the prevalent liquid is not water but ammonia. Like Anderson, Simak concludes his narrative with human minds in Jovian bodies happy to live on Jupiter. Unlike Anderson and Blish, Simak proposes not ice as a construction material but metal with increased electronic tension enclosed in tough quartz to protect it from the ammonia rain. 

Simak's characters possess  a technology that enables them to "convert" a human body into an organism able to live on another planet, then to re-convert that body back into human form! - so why are human explorers confined inside domes on the Jovian surface when they sound as if they are already Lords of Creation? Well, their conquest of Jupiter is delayed by the fact that those who are converted and released find their new existence so paradisal that they do not want to  return and do not even communicate this information to anyone else so that it seems to those back in the dome that the "converted" have been sent to their deaths. (In CS Lewis' "Forms of Things Unknown," several men in succession are sent to the Moon and do not return but, in that case, the reason is deadly.)

Anderson's character on Jupiter has to struggle to survive. He does not find himself in a paradise. But Anderson and Simak are a hard and a soft sf writer, respectively. (Lewis also "soft.")

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.

Clifford Simak's Jupiter

Four men, two by two, had gone into the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter and had not returned. They had walked into the keening gale—or rather, they had loped, bellies low against the ground, wet sides gleaming in the rain. 

For they did not go in the shape of men. 

Now the fifth man stood before the desk of Kent Fowler, head of Dome No. 3. Jovian Survey Commission. 

Under Fowler’s desk, old Towser scratched a flea, then settled down to sleep again.

-copied from clifford_d._simak_desertion.pdf

Although we await a copy of Clifford Simak's City ordered via eBay, we find the text online. You may read its opening paragraphs above.

Poul Anderson: "...wind...whooping...driving...ammonia dust..."

James Blish: "A screeching tornado..." (for both, see here)

Simak contributes: "...the howling maelstrom...," "...keening gale...," a ground and rain (above)

We notice:

similar descriptions in different words;

Simak's characters are not on Jupiter V but in a dome on the Jovian surface;

Simak's characters, like Anderson's Anglesey, venture onto the planetary surface "...not...in the shape of men";

Simak's characters include a dog - who will be important.

Is that enough for this evening? I need to do something different. 

Music is audible from somewhere out our back. Good night.

Anderson And Simak

individual flying vehicles replacing road vehicles

robots

Martians

enhanced animals

mutants

telepathy

exploration of Jupiter

an interstellar space drive

parallel worlds

suspended animation

I am trying to list ideas which:

have become standard in sf;

are in Poul Anderson's works;

are also in Clifford Simak's City which I am still rereading.

Anderson: enhanced seals;

Simak: enhanced dogs and ants;

Anderson: mutant time travelers and immortals;

Simak: a hyperintelligent mutant. 

There might be more. But some of Simak's ideas are impossible, even cartoonish, like an anthill with chimneys as the ants, with no increase in brain size, smelt ore.

(Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is another sf work that takes some standard ideas, like telepathy, robots and time travel, and then does something more with them.)

Simak's descriptions of wind and sunsets recall Anderson's:

"The wind talked harshly in the crouching trees and ripped the long grass in sudden gusts. The last rays of the sun struck fire from the distant peaks."

-City, II, p. 46.

"The sun sank in a lake of crimson, hushed finally to the glow of a fire burned low."

-ibid., p. 48.

"They sat for long minutes in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, by the ghostly whisper of an autumn wind in the trees outside."

-ibid., III, p. 71.

(As in Anderson's works, natural sounds do not interrupt but underline conversational silence.)

"...in the west the green-tinged glow that marked the passing of the sun was fading into night."

-ibid., p. 81.

Somewhere in there, a couple of sounds become one with the wind. I will quote those passages if I can re-find them but right now other activities call.

Not Time II

See Not Time. 

This line of thought has been occasioned by reading an sf work not by Poul Anderson but by Clifford Simak. However, there is an underlying issue here that Anderson gets right but that most people most of the time get wrong and the people who get it wrong include not only Simak but also HG Wells and James Blish! - so let's stay with the line of thought for a while. (N.B.: Neither Wells nor Blish confuses the nature of time as much as Simak.)

The Issue

Matter moves through space and motion takes time but we then think of time itself as a dimension that we move along. Clearer thinking is needed. If you sit under a clock in a waiting room from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM, then you are fully and equally present at 9:00 AM and at 10:00 AM and at every intermediate moment. You do not in any sense move from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. There is a 9:00 AM with you in it but there is no subsequent 9:00 AM with you not in it because you have moved away from it. Nor can you accelerate and arrive at 10:00 AM before me. We both arrive (if that is the right word) at 10:00 AM at 10:00 AM. 

Wells

The Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that our bodies extend along the Fourth Dimension whereas our immaterial mental existences move along it.

Blish

"'...the consciousness of Robin Weinbaum is moving along that entity in that invisible direction.'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), p. 116.

("...that entity..." is Weinbaum's body extending in four dimensions.)

Simak

In City, VII, on pp. 196-197, there is a passage that I will try to summarize rather than to quote in full. It is claimed that we had thought that we were passing through time whereas really we were moving along with it. Seconds did not pass. Instead, a single second moved along and we moved with it! What does that mean? He stays with the idea of motion through time but then tries to differentiate between two kinds of temporal motion. If something moves along through time, then the time that is moved through is measurable in units including seconds. Therefore, the moving entity is not itself one of those seconds.

Anderson

There is none of this in Anderson. In his Time Patrol series and in his There Will Be Time, our bodies extend along the fourth dimension - as in Wells and Blish although not in Simak - but there is no suggestion that any immaterial entities move along those bodies from their births to their deaths. Every moment is the present moment for any organism that is conscious in that moment. There is no moving present.

The Masterworks

At the back of my copy of Clifford Simak's City, there is a two-page list of eighty nine (or thereabouts) titles in this SF Masterworks series. Only one, Tau Zero, is by Poul Anderson.

There are:

1 title by Robert Heinlein

1 by Larry Niven

1 by Frank Herbert

1 by Clifford Simak

2 by James Blish

2 by Greg Bear

2 by Michael Moorcock

2 by Kurt Vonnegut

2 by Ursula le Guin

2 by Richard Matheson

3 by Robert Silverberg

3 by Samuel R. Delaney

3 by Brian Aldiss

3 by Olaf Stapledon

3 by Frederik Pohl + 1 by Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth

5 by HG Wells

5 by Arthur C. Clarke

14 by Philip K. Dick

- and thirty other authors are represented by only a single title. (This includes two titles with two authors.) If anyone else has a copy of this edition, please check my numbers. I don't always get the same total when I re-count.

(Blish's two titles are his Tetralogy in a single volume and Volume III of his Trilogy, Volumes I and II being historical fiction and fantasy, respectively.)

Needless to say, I disagree with any scale of values that gives Anderson one volume and Dick fourteen.

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? 

The Jupiter Project

We have been at Windermere for most of today and I will be with Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for most of tomorrow.

This evening, I have revised and improved Comparing ERB. My new project is to reread and discuss the Jupiter stories by Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, James Blish and ERB listed in that post. 

"Call Me Joe" by Anderson is the title story of Volume 1 of the NESFA The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson series. I have a copy.

"Desertion" by Simak is in his future history volume, City. I shed my copy when downsizing but have ordered a replacement on eBay.

"Bridge" by Blish was incorporated into his Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, as the five evenly numbered chapters and the concluding eleventh chapter. I have this novel as a separate volume and in the Cities In Flight omnibus edition.

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by ERB is in John Carter Of Mars and I have a copy.

Anderson's and Blish's characters experience Jupiter remotely from Jupiter V. Anderson's and Simak's characters decide to live on Jupiter. Sometimes story ideas in sf overlap.

See also:

On Jupiter And Jupiter V

Three On Jupiter

How Must-Read Writers Change

In my teens, I read everything that I could find that had been written by:

Isaac Asimov

James Blish

Robert Heinlein

Clifford Simak

CS Lewis (not just sf)

I think that that was the complete list.

Observations 

(i) I knew of Poul Anderson but he was not yet on the list. 

(ii) I knew of Ray Bradbury but he was not hard sf and was not on the list.

(iii) Larry Niven and SM Stirling were not around yet.

(iv) Heinlein had not gone down the tubes yet.

(v) I caught up with Simak with The Goblin Reservation (1968) and then stopped reading his novels as they were published, also feeling that he had become repetitive and self-parodying.

(vi) Now Poul Anderson is to be not only read but also endlessly reread.

There has been delay in me acquiring a copy of Simak's City. A friend who read contemporary fiction and no sf read at least some parts of City and wondered why I thought that it was any good. Rereading it now, I might agree with him.

The best sf is very good but. (I know that it is grammatically wrong to end a sentence with "...but." instead of with "but..." but occasionally it feels appropriate.)

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).

Blish And Anderson On Jupiter V

Poul Anderson, Call Me Joe; James Blish, They Shall Have Stars. (Both here.)

Blish: Helmuth controls machines on Jupiter by waldos.

Anderson: Anglesey controls an organic body by psionics.

Blish: Helmuth works for the US which is still in the Cold War with the USSR.

Anderson: Anglesey works for the Psionics Corporation which is contracted by the Federation Science Authority.

Anderson's team on Jupiter V is all male.

Blish's Helmuth has an uneasy interaction with a woman colleague and is also in ham radio contact with men on other Jovian moons.

No doubt there is more but, here in Lancaster on Earth, the sun and other responsibilities beckon.

We will catch up with Clifford Simak's Jupiter later. (Too many texts to juggle at once.) (Simak's characters work for the Jovian Survey Commission.)

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.

Jupiter And Longevity

For the reason why James Blish's characters, unlike Poul Anderson's and Clifford Simak's, do not adapt human beings to live on Jupiter, see On Jupiter. And to reiterate:

"'We've sense enough - or humility enough, if you like that better - to know that we can't adapt men to a planet like Jupiter...'"

-James Blish, "Surface Tension" IN Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), pp. 107-180 AT p. 109.

However, in the stories in question, Anderson and Simak had still been thinking of Jupiter merely as a bigger planet with a solid surface whereas Blish was working with the updated idea of a "gas giant," a large planet with a turbulent atmosphere merely densening but never solidifying all the way down to the eventual planetary core.

Sf writers discuss the same questions but give different answers:

Heinlein's Howard Families breed for longevity; 

Blish's characters say that this is impossible but develop antiagathic drugs;

Anderson has antisenescence in the Technic History, anti-aging treatment in the Time Patrol and three different kinds of immortality in other works.

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.)