Heroes, Villains And People II

In Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind, Daniel Holm of Avalon faces off against Admiral Cajal of the Terran Empire whereas, in Anderson's Ensign Flandry, Dominic Flandry of the Terran Empire faces off against the Merseian, Brechdan Ironrede, Protector of the Roidhun's Grand Council. However, we take the side of Holm against Cajal and of Flandry against Brechdan. Thus, we are first against, then for, the Empire.

Cajal is an honorable enemy attempting no more than the rectification of a border dispute whereas Brechdan is a fictional "villain" plotting the subjugation or extermination of mankind. Flandry's other indisputable "villain," the Chereionite Aycharaych, cynically manipulates populations and individuals for what would have been a worthy end, the preservation of his racial heritage, if his means had been less devious, destructive and demonic.

Thus, Anderson excels both at "heroes and villains" narratives and at rounded novels presenting both sides of a conflict. However, Ian Fleming, Stieg Larsson, SM Stirling and Dornford Yates routinely present vastly viler villains. In Yates' Gale Warning, at the end of Chapter X (of XV), two of our heroes finally behold for the first time, through binoculars, across a valley, their long sought quarry:

"Barabbas...robber-chief...a great, big bull of a man, all dressed in white."
-Dornford Yates, Gale Warning (London, 1939), CHAPTER X, p. 210.

The drive and force that make this "Barabbas" a lawless puppet-master are visible across the valley. Maybe we should be relieved that Anderson did not turn his considerable creative talents to describing individuals as evil as Fleming's Rosa Klebb, Larsson's Zala, Stirling's Ignatieff or Yates' several equivalents?

(For some information about Yates' two main "heroes," see Mansel And Chandos.)

Addendum, later the same evening, then the following morning: See also The Structure Of A Series: Dornford Yates and The Structure Of A Series: Dornford Yates II. (Yates matches Anderson for series complexity.)

Unauthorized Crime Fighters II

Operation Luna, 15.

While traveling to meet FBI Agent Bob Shining Knife, Steve Matuchek reflects:

"Once in the past, we'd defied him, his agency, the whole United States government, to go get our Valeria Victrix back. Only the spectacular outcome kept serious charges from being brought against us. But that had been an exceptional pickle. Neither Ginny nor I believed that, as a general rule, untrained, unorganized, unauthorized individuals could really fight crime, whether or not they wore silly comic-book costumes. That way lay lynch law." (p. 140)

See:

Untrained Crime Fighters
Poul Anderson On Comics

Dornford Yates, through his characters, expresses the opposite view. Boy Pleydell's wife has been kidnapped and Boy speaks with his cousin, Jonathan ("Jonah") Mansel:

"'What about the police?' [Boy] said suddenly. 'Why don't you want them called in?'
"'Because I want my hands free. If battle and murder will help, I'm out to do both: but I can't do either, if I've got to apply for a warrant before I can force a door. We're six men armed: we know how to work together; and we're not afraid of lying out in the rain. Call in the police and you put us out of court.'"
-Dornford Yates, Perishable Goods (London, 1938), CHAPTER II, p. 46.

Yates wrote the blurbs for paperback editions of some of his novels. On the back of Perishable Goods, he quoted Mansel's words above, then, with characteristic pomposity, added, "There's something in that, you know."

Something in it? It would make me feel neither happy nor safe to know that Dornford Yates, two of his friends and their three servants, all armed, were lying in the undergrowth somewhere nearby, especially since two of Mansel's friends had been sent down from Oxford for violent behavior.

Like A Dream

(i) Might there be realms so dissimilar that they scarcely impact on each other?

Yes. Mass-energy as against dark matter or dark energy.

(ii) Might we be able to pass between such realms?

Hardly. We are mass-energy and are already surrounded by the "dark" stuff but can barely detect it.

(iii) If we were able to pass between very dissimilar realms, might each seem unreal or dream-like when we were in the other?

"Nothing that happens in that nexus between the universes ever quite happens. When guests say goodbye and walk back out the door, it shall be like waking from a dream.
"Yet some dreams leave a measure of understanding."
-Poul Anderson, "Loser's Night" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), pp. 105-123 AT p. 107.

Thus, we think that the between-the-wars Winston Churchill leaves the Old Phoenix at the end of "Losers' Night" better equipped for what is to come.

Meanwhile, in terms of my rereading, not in terms of any other frame of reference, Dornford Yates' characters have escaped from his magical kingdom of Etchechuria:

"For a little they sat in silence. Then Pomfret started to his feet.
"'It's all been a dream,' he cried."
-Dornford Yates, The Stolen March (London, 1926), CHAPTER X, p. 293.

However, they have brought with them physical artifacts (which cannot be brought from the Old Phoenix), including a source of wealth that impacts on the mundane world:

"'Where is she now?'
"'Got out and married,' said Fluff. 'Lives in a hell of a place down Biarritz way.'"
-Dornford Yates, Adele And Co. (Stratus Books, Cornwall, 2001), 2, p. 31.

Readers of the thriller, Adele and Co., need not know how Eulalie became rich enough to buy "...a hell of a place..." Different realms...

Raging Tempest

Poul Anderson's frequent use of the pathetic fallacy has made me more appreciative of this literary device in works by other authors. For example, in Shoal Water by Dornford Yates, CHAPTER V ends when the narrator's friend realizes that he has been followed by one of their enemies:

"'But I've brought the enemy with me as far as Cruise, for a wallah I noticed at Rouen got out of the Paris train.'"

-Dornford Yates, Shoal Water (London, 1942), p. 111.

I was overwhelmed to turn the page and read the opening sentences of CHAPTER VII:

"A tempest raged that night. For hours the wind blew and the rain fell down: but while the wrath of the gale passed over the castle's head, the long roar of the forests, bearing the brunt of the onslaught, was unforgettable." (p. 112)

But then we are assured that all will be well:

"And then, when I woke the next morning, the heaven was blue again, and the sun was out, and a dripping world was gleaming with green and silver and smelling sweeter than any perfumer's shop.

"...this transformation was truly magical..." (ibid.)

Sheila is out enjoying Lancaster Music Festival in venues like the Priory Church and Ye Olde John O'Gaunt pub whereas I am still at home recovering from a cold while rereading not only Poul Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors" but also a graphic series by Neil Gaiman and the novels of Dornford Yates so I hope that readers will indulge these quotations from the latter who is perhaps a kindred spirit of Anderson although representing a very different era.

Literary Writing In The 1930s

(Image from a not very accurate TV dramatization of Dornford Yates' She Fell Among Thieves but the characters look good.)

As you know, I cannot subsist on nothing but a diet of Poul Anderson rereading and am currently rereading elsewhere. However, Anderson has taught me to look out both for pathetic fallacies and for descriptive passages appealing to at least three of the senses. Thus, in Dornford Yates' She Fell Among Thieves (London, 1935), a storm has been building. Then, Chandos and Virginia find that they have been locked in his room:

"'...Every one of these doors has a bolt - on the other side.'
"As though to attest the saying, a sullen grumble of thunder came rolling over the hills.
"The storm had begun." (p. 205)

Thus ends CHAPTER VII. Soon after that:

"The storm was fast approaching. I could see the flicker of the lightning, and the heavy roll of the thunder was louder with every flash. As I glanced at the open window, I heard the forests shiver at the touch of the running footman that goes before : and the air was definitely cooler - I could smell the rain that was falling some two miles off." (p. 208)

Reading this, I think of Poul Anderson who has helped me toward a finer appreciation of Dornford Yates' prose. In fact, I have stopped reading during a suspenseful action sequence in order to post.

Poul Anderson And Dornford Yates

What do Poul Anderson and Dornford Yates have in common? I hope to have shown some parallels. But, of course, the main connection, for the purposes of this blog, is simply that I read both authors and that passages written by one remind me of passages written by the other. All literature is one, if we can see it.

Yates' Jonathan Mansel, although not widely known, has been compared to:

John Buchan's Richard Hannay;
Sapper's Bulldog Drummond;
Ian Fleming's James Bond -

- and, of course, Bond is comparable to Anderson's Dominic Flandry.

But there is more here than just a few similar characters as I hope that several recent posts have demonstrated. We are now living in the post-aristocratic future that Yates and his characters dreaded. Poul Anderson's sf addresses a spectrum of futures, utopian, dystopian and ambiguous. Both authors address humanity and society.

Watson And Goodwin (And Falcon)

Operation Luna, 20.

Steve Matuchek guesses that a discrete courier is:

"'...from a private detective firm. Watson and Goodwin, I'll bet. Their operatives are expert at self-effacement.'" (p. 179)

Perhaps "self-effacement" suggests that the reference is not to central characters but to their assistants - especially since everyone recognizes "Watson" in this context? I had to google Goodwin because I have not read any Rex Stout.

An unrealistic aspect of much fiction is that a narrator often recites verbatim an extended conversation that in real life would have had to be summarized. This is done not only by the first person narrator of a novel but also sometimes by one character informing another of a conversation with a third party. In the latter case, double quotation marks are used. Thus:

"'...the Mother Superior arrived and I told her Lord St. Amont was dead.'
"'Did she go in?'
"'Yes.'
"'Alone?'
"'No. I went in with her and stood by the door.'
"'Was anything touched?'
"'I don't think so.'
"'Were the tablets still in the spoon?'
"'No.'
"'And then?'
"'The Mother Superior asked what I had to say: and I told her that I had known nothing until I came into the room.'
"'And then?'
"'The House Surgeon arrived.'
"'And then?'
"'He - he made an examination...'"
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), pp. 35-36.

In this dialogue, Yates' fictional detective, Superintendent Falcon, even reproduces a hesitation and the repetition of the word, "He..." To quote this passage correctly, I should have added yet another set of quotation marks to show that I was quoting from Yates' text in which Falcon, addressing Richard and Jenny Chandos and Jonathan Mansel, recounts his conversation with a witness.

Very occasionally, an author recognizes and rationalizes the absurdity of his characters reciting previous conversations as if they were human tape recorders. Thus, in the Wikipedia article about Archie Goodwin, linked above, we read:

Archie is a skilled observer and has trained his memory so that he can make verbatim reports, oral or typewritten, of extended conversations.
-copied from here.

Similarly, after we have accepted Falcon's recitals as a convention of fiction, Jenny Chandos asks him how he is able to remember and to repeat conversations word for word and he replies that he has trained himself to do this because he cannot establish a rapport with a witness when he is continually writing notes.

These observations have taken us away from Poul Anderson but into the interesting company of Rex Stout and Dornford Yates.

Fiction And Time II

In Fiction And Time, I contrasted Dornford Yates with Poul Anderson in the belief that Yates mourned the passing of a society divided into aristocrats, their faithful servants and deferential peasants whereas Anderson anticipated different possible futures.

However, in a novel published in 1954, Yates, through the mouth of his character, Mansel, presents this anticipation:

"'In twenty or thirty years, the process of levelling down will be complete. That is, if no catastrophe occurs. Nothing worth having will be left. There'll be no one and nothing to look up to, no examples to follow, nothing whatever to strive for except existence itself. Life will be painfully dull. And those in power will treat all the others like dirt. And then, after much tribulation and many years, the great days will come again.'"
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Cornwall, 2001), p. 11.

That last sentence sounds like the "The world's great age begins anew..." (see here) of the Polesotechnic League and the great wealth and ostentation of its merchant princes.

But what of the rest of Mansel's prediction? Is there nothing worth having, no one and nothing to look up to, no example to follow, nothing to strive for except existence? Is life painfully dull? Are we treated like dirt? (Sometimes.) Might a catastrophe occur? (Unfortunately, yes.)

Anderson's Technic civilization emerges form the Chaos but he also wrote dystopias.

Addendum: Mansel, some of us want to level up, not down, and are very far from succeeding as yet. I would love to argue this in the Old Phoenix but not in the Wet Flag!

A Visit To The Bookshop

Today I visited the Old Pier Bookshop where I bought ten books by Dornford Yates. (Scroll down.) The heroes of Yates' thrillers, Jonathan Mansel and Richard Chandos, can be compared to Flandry and Bond although, since they were early twentieth century creations, they subscribed to old-fashioned social attitudes and morality. To my surprise, in Blind Corner, Mansel pulls a van Rijn act, becoming incoherent with indignation, but it is all an act.

Familiar to readers of Poul Anderson are the combination of action-adventure fiction with colorful descriptive passages and conservative politics. Chandos:

"...had lately been sent down from Oxford for using some avowed communists as many thought they deserved..."
-Dornford Yates, Blind Corner (1927), CHAPTER I, p. 9.

When I read that in the early 1960s, I was amused. Now it turns me off big time. (Anderson treats characters with whom he disagrees with more respect.)

Andrea, who lives above his brother's shop, gave me a different perspective on the time travel paradoxes of a recent film. I encouraged him to comment on the relevant posts.

(At University, I was annoyed when I was listening with interest to a political speaker but his speech was interrupted by an English public school type throwing an egg at him. Instead of receiving applause or support, the egg-thrower found it advisable to beat a hasty retreat. Meanwhile, I was growing out of the Chandos mentality.)

Fools And Knaves

See:

"Commentary"
Commentary

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

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

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

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

Years ago, an acquaintance told me that:

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

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

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

Valour And Discretion

Dornford Yates' Jonathan Mansel, who had been in the Secret Service during World War I, says:

"'Do please remember that battles have gone wrong, wars have been lost and the history of the world has been changed, because valour has outrun discretion and men have lost touch.'"
-Dornford Yates, Perishable Goods (London, 1928), CHAPTER IV, p. 105.

History changed recalls Poul Anderson's historical fiction, Time Patrol Series and main future history series. His character, Dominic Flandry, marked by both valor and discretion, two qualities necessary for an intelligence agent, was out of touch while on Scotha, Unan Besar and Talwin but nevertheless transformed defeat into victory.

Yates suddenly presents a historical perspective during the action of a contemporary thriller. Anderson's sf thrillers regularly remind us of their historical context. Both authors address social change.

Fictional Nostalgia

Toward the end of a fictional biography, the central character remembers his younger days and we remember reading the earlier chapters or installments. Thus, there is a shared nostalgia. For our part, the nostalgia is vicarious insofar as we identify with the character but might also be real if we read the earlier installments years or even decades previously. A prime example is the concluding chapter of Poul Anderson's Mirkheim, which I have quoted more than once, e.g., here, here and here.

In the last full Dominic Flandry novel, Flandry does not reminisce about his career because he is still working past retirement age. Instead, he reflects on his current situation, addressing himself in the second person:

"You've got health, money, power, friends, women, interesting work that you can even claim is of some importance if you want to."
-Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 1-188 AT III, p. 31.

That last claim reminded me of Dornford Yates' characters appraising their private crime-fighting careers:

"'We've had our day,' I said.
"'Yes,' said Mansel, and smiled. 'But what a day, William!'
"'It suited me,' I said.
"'And me. The open air, and doing something worthwhile. "And gentlemen in England, now abed..."'"
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), p.5.

That novel was Yates' second last, originally published in 1954. His very last is dated 1956, the same year as Anderson's first Nicholas van Rijn story. Mansel and Chandos remembered the Edwardian age. Living in a different social milieu, they differed from Flandry in that they did not "have women." Chandos married, was widowed and married a second time whereas Mansel remained unmarried.

Mansel again:

"'Times have changed, and the world that we knew has gone.'"
-op. cit., p. 6.

Fictional nostalgia in other media:

Life And Art II

"...when a police siren wakes me, and, for a moment, I forget that it's all over...
"But Batman was a young man."
-Frank Miller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (London, 1986), BOOK ONE, p. 5, panels 3, 4.

Intertextualities

(i) Poul Anderson's A Stone In Heaven refers to the events of Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows but not to any work of that title because these novels do not exist in the fictional history that they describe.

(ii) Anderson's Steve Matuchek telepathically broadcasts the text of Operation Chaos to hypothetical other universes and later writes the text of Operation Luna although not for publication. Thus, there is no intertextuality in this case.

(iii) In Dornford Yates' She Fell Among Thieves, two continuing characters, Mansel and Chandos, meet the new heroine, Jenny, and Chandos marries her. Several volumes later, Chandos, narrating, reminisces in conversation with Mansel:

"So we came back to Jenny, by way of She Fell Among Thieves."
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), p. 2.

Fictitiously, Chandos not only narrates these novels but also writes them and gets them published, like Dr. Watson, as factual accounts of his adventures, although this generates massive contradictions, e.g., Chandos not only confesses to murder but also describes Mansel's highly confidential affair with his cousin's wife while simultaneously assuring us that no one else knows about it! However, despite these absurdities, I feel that Yates has earned the right to refer to his own works by their titles. I read She Fell Among Thieves several times in the 1960s and again recently and it is curiously meaningful when Chandos himself refers to that work by its title. (Nostalgia is part of it.)

(iv) Tad Williams' contribution to Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds refers to Anderson's The High Crusade, "The Man Who Came Early" and Three Hearts And Three Lions and also to the contents of Tau Zero and the Dominic Flandry series. In Williams' story, these works are simultaneously fictions written by Poul Anderson and created realities in which it is possible to intervene. However, this is all one big joke and the only question for the reader is: How absurd can this text get?

Sequels

A sequel written twenty years later can:

acknowledge the passage of time in the real world by recounting events understood to be occurring exactly twenty years after those of the previous work;

continue the action from immediately after the closing scene of the previous work;

be set any other length of time after the previous work.

In other words, an author has complete freedom to intervene or re-intervene at any moment along his fictional timeline as I used to believe that the creator of this universe would be able to do, e.g., responding to a prayer for good weather on a particular day, He would direct environmental conditions on previous days in order to ensure good weather on the day in question. By revising a text, an author can even change the course of events as we sometimes imagine that time travelers might do. The characters in a revised text have no memory of their experiences as recounted in the original text - unless, of course, the author were to write in some kind of cross-textual connections but to do that would be to tell a different kind of story.

Let us consider sequels written by:

(i) Dornford Yates;
(ii) Poul Anderson;
(iii) a Doctor Who script writer.

(i) Yates wrote nine novels narrated by Richard Chandos. Volume VI begins:

"This tale is one which could have been told before now: in other words, the events which I shall relate took place before some others which I have already set down."
-Dornford Yates, An Eye For A Tooth (Beeching Park, Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), 1, p. 1.

Near the end of Volume I, Mansel and his man, Carson, drove fast from Villach to Salzburg with Chandos and Hanbury asleep in the back of the Rolls. We did not know then that Mansel and Carson had found a corpse on the road and concealed it in the road-side ditch. Now, only ten days after that event, Mansel informs Chandos and Handbury and requests their help in the investigation of a murder. Thus, Volume VI becomes a retroactive sequel to Volume I which is fortunate for Hanbury because, as we later learned, he had died between Volumes IV and V.

(ii) Anderson's omnibus Time Patrol collection, Time Patrol, should end with "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" first because this story does come after the others in terms of Everard's experience and secondly because PART ONE of the Time Patrol novel, The Shield Of Time, is a direct sequel to this story. Everard has returned:

"...to New York on the day after he left it..."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART ONE, 1987 A. D., p. 3 -

- from the events of "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" in Hiram's Tyre even though other stories were written in between.

(iii) When the Doctor returns his first two traveling companions to the twentieth century, they find that they have returned to that century perhaps three years after they had left it. I do not remember the exact number of years but the point is that it exactly corresponded to the years during which those characters had appeared in the program, something like 1960-'63. Was the script writer consciously acknowledging the period of time that had elapsed for the TV viewers or did it just not occur to him that, with a time machine, the Doctor should have been able to return these twentieth-centurions to the moment from which he had taken them, thus saving them the trouble of explaining an absence of three years?

SF, Thrillers, Philosophy And Comics

When you're a Poul Anderson Appreciation blogger, a week without a computer is an opportunity to:

draft posts to be published when back on-line;

catch up with other reading which often turns out to be relevant, e.g.:in the past week -

Hegelian philosophy;

Dornford Yates novels;

a visual chronicle of the first 75 years of DC Comics, where sf authors' names sometimes appear among comics writers'.

I trust that sf, pre-War thrillers, philosophy and comics are a sufficiently diverse reading list.

Sometimes it is as if all fiction and even all non-fiction is a single series. When a Dornford Yates character speaks of paying his debt to Morpheus, i.e., of catching up with missed sleep, he unknowingly refers to the title character of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman graphic novels. Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller are the three comics writers whose works I have found worthy of comparison with Poul Anderson's prose fiction. And now I might get back to rereading some Yates.

An Accidental Association

OK. I am rereading Blind Corner by Dornford Yates after fifty plus years (a strange experience) and, at one point, Mansel's name is misprinted as "Manse," a curious association for readers of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series.

Observations
I have remarked that both Ian Fleming's and SM Stirling's villains are more evil than Anderson's. Yates' "Rose" Nobel is also dreadful - and I have referred to him before. See Currencies.

Contemporary fiction excludes any reference either to magic, ghosts etc (fantasy) or to speculative futures (sf). However, authors can hint. One Yates novel, The Stolen March, is a fantasy and one of its characters appears in the realistic setting of another Yates novel.

Notionally, the heroes of early twentieth century fiction existed in the past of any fantasy or sf set later. See SM Stirling's reference to John Buchan's Richard Hannay in A World War I Reference.

Theoretically, unless the world is about to end, any contemporary fiction is going to be followed by a future timeline of some sort. If Yates were to write a futuristic novel, then it would project Edwardian social distinctions into future centuries and would present unlikely technological innovations like the Pragmatometer, which I have somewhere described as labor-intensive information technology, in CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength.

Poul Anderson's futuristic sf is sometimes action-adventure space opera and sometimes serious scientifically based speculation. His Technic History incorporates both.

Lewis’ only technological anticipations are Weston’s spherical spaceships and the NICE’s labor-intensive information technology: the findings of forty interlocking daily NICE committees print themselves off in their own compartments of an Analytical Notice Board (worked by at least twenty experts) every half hour, then each report slides itself into a position where it is connected by arrows to the relevant parts of other reports, thus showing NICE policy taking shape, displaying different kinds of business in different colours.²⁸ This “Pragmatometer” contrasts quaintly with computers and with Blish’s instantaneous Dirac transmitter.
-copied from here.

Generations And Nostalgia

(A stirring blurb.)

I am still rereading Poul Anderson's "The Master Key" but will not extract any more posts from its text this evening. Dornford Yates beckons. Some of his villains are in the same league as Ian Fleming's or SM Stirling's:

"The last was addressed by his companions as 'Rose' - Mansel told us later that he was undoubtedly 'Rose' Noble - a man of some position among thieves -..."
-Dornford Yates, Blind Corner (London, 1947, originally published 1927), CHAP III, p. 92.

(British understatement.)

In his Author's Note at the end of The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), Poul Anderson summarizes Robert Heinlein's Future History, then refers to his own:

"...new future history quite unlike the first." (p. 284)

Here in one Note is what I call the Future History Triad:

(i) the Future History;
(ii) the Psychotechnic History, modelled on (i);
(iii) the Technic History, unplanned, growing organically, but taking a similar form to (i) although on a vaster spatio-temporal scale.

Anderson ends his Note by saying that these stories might "... now evoke pleasant memories of youth..." (p. 285) in readers of his age or be new to readers of his daughter's age and:

"These stories were not seminal like Heinlein's, but they were a noticeable part of the field a generation ago. We've all come a long way since then, but sometimes we do well to look back and see where we have been." (ibid.)

Looking back at early future histories in 1981! Two more generations have passed since then and we have come an even longer way. I am able to express my appreciation with this science fictional device, a laptop computer.

First Meetings

That previous post has got me rereading Dornford Yates although I did so only last year. My intention had been only to quote Richard Chandos in parallel with David Falkayn.

The theme of the current post is first meetings between fictional characters.

"Nicholas van Rijn left his desk and waddled across to the transparency that made one entire wall of his office...
"'You bring home the bacon and eggs scrambled with turmeric, I see you get rich.'
"'Yes, sir,' Falkayn mumbled."
-"The Trouble Twisters," II, p. 97.

That was the first meeting between van Rijn and Falkayn. The latter will defy the former only five installments of the Technic History later.

"...a tall, nice-looking man limped into the room...
"'My name is Mansel,' he said gravely. 'I beg that you'll drink with me.'"
-Blind Corner, CHAPTER 1, pp. 21-22.

Of no concern to anyone except those who remember Dornford Yates, this was the first meeting between Richard Chandos and Jonathan Mansel.

There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, 4 and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
“Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.
-copied from here.

Malice In Wonderland

Some Christians wish each other ill in the hereafter. See the reference to Milton in Through The Western Gate.

On Avalon, when Draun of the Old Faith kills a Terran, he says:

"'Hell-winds blow you before my chothmates! Tell Illarian they are coming!'" (p. 549)
-copied from here.

At least two fictional characters expect that they themselves will have the power to wreak harm in the hereafter:

SM Stirling's Count Ignatieff expects to be not a victim but one of the torturers in Hell!;

Dornford Yates' Barabbas, knowing that he is about to be executed by his enemies, inquires how his subordinate had slipped up so that he will be able to deal appropriately with him in the hereafter.

In Barabbas' case, the narrator comments:

"So far as I was concerned, that was the grimmest moment of all that terrible night, for here was a malefactor, standing upon the drop, yet so far from considering how he should meet his God, preparing to deal with his late accomplice in crime and actually seeking information to serve his filthy turn in the world to come."
-Dornford Yates, Gale Warning (London, 1939), CHAPTER XIV, p. 280.

I agree. And, again, Poul Anderson never created villains as evil as that!

All Male Fiction

It is possible to create a fictional narrative about a man of action fighting male villains without featuring a single woman character. Am I right in saying that the only woman in John Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps is a fellow rail passenger who speaks once as Hannay leaves London? In Dornford Yates' Blind Corner, Mansel's gang of six and "Rose" Noble's gang of seven are all men. The few "spear carrier" characters include one "innkeeper's wife."

What is Poul Anderson's record? A short story set in a spaceship might feature an all male crew or even a lone astronaut, like Garrard in James Blish's "Common Time." In both "Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon," a young male human being rescues a male Ythrian without the presence of a female of either species. These are juvenile adventure short stories, one originally published in Boy's Life. I am remembering other stories but will not draw up a list right now. A usual ingredient of a pulp action-adventure story is at least a heroine. In the first Dominic Flandry story, this had to be an alien princess.

In a bygone age, women who were major characters were also stereotypes. The sequel to Blind Corner introduces a flawless heroine:

"...a tall, slim girl, very graceful and wonderfully made. Her face was lovely..."
-Dornford Yates, Perishable Goods (London, 1928), CHAPTER I, p. 14.

Etc.

The two women whom Flandry most wants to be with, Kathryn McCormac and Kossara Vymezal, comes across as superior women but also as credible characters.