Ranger's Roost And Rovers Return

See Starfall On Hermes.

Sandra Tamarin drank in the Ranger's Roost, Starfall, Hermes. Residents of Coronation Street, Weatherfield, Lancashire, drink in the Rovers Return. (Weatherfield is an hour by Motorway from Lancaster but is also fictional.)

In both cases, the punctuation was not as expected. Thus, "Ranger's Roost," not "Rangers' Roost"; "Rovers Return," not "Rover's Return." Literally, "Rovers" is plural, not possessive, and "Rovers Return" is a sentence.

The two names have different implications. "Ranger's Roost" implies that Starfall residents range elsewhere but return home to roost. I have read the suggestion that "Rovers Return" was originally a warning: those who aspire to better themselves by roving away from their humble Northern origins will learn otherwise and will be obliged to return, sadder but wiser. This was a British social attitude that was becoming redundant when Coronation Street started in 1960. And I never expected to contrast that interminable TV series with Poul Anderson's ever fresh sf.

For an earlier blog reference to "Weatherfield," see here.

An Ending

I have posted a few times about endings, e.g., see:

South Pacific Sunset.

Sometimes we do something for the last time knowing that it is the last time. On this occasion:

Poul Anderson knew that he was writing the last Polesotechnic League narrative;
we know that we are reading the last PL narrative;
Adzel knows that the team is about to embark on its last adventure.

That is a lot of knowledge of endings. We have known Adzel since the trader team's first expedition and, before that, since his student days on Earth.

I recently referred to Coronation Street. When two women who had run the corner shop for a long time were about to retire and go their separate ways, one asked, "How many years has it been?" The question was ironic or metafictional since that TV series is a real time drama. Thus, it had been exactly as many years for the actors as for the characters. We do not share the same time frame as Adzel. Anderson had had to skip over decades of missions in order to give us a beginning, a middle and an end for the story of van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew. This sub-series of the Technic History ends here with a sense of completion and closure.

Naming Planets, Stars And Constellations

"A Sun Invisible."

The human discoverer of the planet Cynthia named it after his wife. Thurman discovered Thurman's Star and named one of its planets, "Vanessa."

Falkayn thinks:

"Judas, what a radium-plated opportunity an explorer had! What girl could possibly resist an offer to name a whole world for her?" (I, p. 272)

On Coronation Street, a guy got a star named after his girlfriend and googling reveals that this is a real world practice. See Star Registration. I suppose that that is one way to interact with the universe. Inhabitants of a planet in orbit around a star have no way of knowing that their sun is named after someone on Earth or that Earthmen might arrive and name their planet "Cynthia" or "Vanessa." I wonder what they call us?

In a James Blish story, Sol seen from far enough away is in a constellation called the Parrot and, in Anderson's Technic History, it is in the Maukh. See The Plowman And The Parrot.

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.

Off-Stage Characters And A Writing Career

Yamamura's wife is mentioned again in Murder Bound but is she one of those fictional characters who remain permanently off-stage and how many of those are there? Sometimes in a play, the characters expect another character but we know from the cast list that he will not arrive.

Is Richard Telford a character in the novel? He remains off-stage but is mentioned twice and described once.
-copied from here.
 
(And the author, CS Lewis, puts Telford to good use.)

Coronation Street had a handful of permanently off-stage characters and then, I was told, one of them appeared.

The blurb for Poul Anderson's first detective novel, Perish By The Sword, describes the author as:

"Already well established as a science fiction writer..."

- whereas the blurb for his third detective novel, Murder Bound, describes him as:

"A familiar figure in the mystery field..."

- but then he found that he could earn more as an sf writer!  

But he could also write richer and more varied narratives in sf. This blog would not exist if Anderson had written mostly mystery novels.

Laure And Jaccavrie

Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 709-794.

We are told, on p. 714, that:

the cybernetic brain of Daven Laure's spaceship, Jaccavrie, is aware, thinks and has "conation," which turns out to mean not cognition but volitions;

this "brain" is also described as a "computer";

(presumably, a single artifact could be both a computer and an artificial, inorganic brain, although a mere computer is not also a brain because the former functions without consciousness whereas the latter generates consciousness);

Laure does not anthropomorphize this computer but then he does not anthropomorphize nonhuman intelligent beings either;

instead, he thinks that cybernetic and alien brains have analogies to his human awareness, thoughts and volitions;

he regards his ship as a friend although some of his colleagues regard theirs as elaborate tools.

If the ships are aware, then they are not mere tools but maybe they do not object to their Rangers regarding them as such?

The recorded voice of  a Kirkasanter woman is a "...husky contralto..." (p. 713) whereas Jaccavrie's voice is "...mezzo-soprano..." (ibid.) Like everyone else, I have heard such terms but, like some others, I do not know their precise meanings. (Jack on Coronation Street summed up all operas as "The tenor wants to give the soprano a good 'seeing to' but the baritone won't let him.")

The computer knows which kind of female voice and idiomatic language are best for Laure - and these are not the same as those that he would prefer. He finds himself inwardly engaged with the Kikasanter contralto, an early signal to the reader that he will be attracted to the woman when he meets her.