Speculution (Speculative Evolution)

The Man Who Counts, see here.

Rereading this novel, I have reached a point where I would want to summarize Poul Anderson's speculations about extraterrestrial evolution but find that I have already done so:

Diomedean Evolution
Diomedean Evolution II
Explanation
Alien Evolution

That fourth post also refers to evolution on Starkad, Ythri and Dido and to life cycles on Talwin. These five planets all appear in Anderson's main future history series, the History of Technic Civilization. Thus, Anderson presents not only future history but also fictional evolution.

For evolution on two other Technic History planets, t'Kela and Throra, see Making Sense Of T'Kela.

Fictional Evolution And History: The Betans

 

The Avatar, XI. 

III, pp. 16-18, summarized some future Terrestrial history.

XI, pp. 109-114, summarize the fictional evolution and history of the Betans. Because travel between human and Betan space is via T machines, we do not know whether the events summarized here are "past" or "future" in relation to human history.

The summary is complex and condensed and I do not propose to condense it even further here. Basically, the Betans' technological advances have generated a social crisis which they hope that human beings will be able to help them with.

There are echoes of other Anderson works. The Betans have met a winged migratory race. They have discovered that the placing of T machines does not allow for any temporal paradoxes. Thus, they cannot get into their own history to try to change it. Footnotes could refer readers to Anderson's The Man who Counts and Time Patrol. 

Evolution

First, natural selection did a very good job of displacing theistic Design arguments by Paley etc.

Secondly, reading about evolution increases our appreciation of Poul Anderson's fictional evolutions of Ythrians, Diomedeans, Starkadians and Didonians, all in his Technic History.

Thirdly:

"...the consensus of modern evolutionists is that the evolution of intelligent life on Earth was not only not foreordained, it is so improbable that it is most unlikely to occur elsewhere in our Galaxy...

"In section 3.2 we shall discuss briefly the reasons evolutionists have for believing intelligence to be an incredibly improbable accident. Additional arguments against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life will be found in section 8.7 and Chapter 9."

-The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 124.

When he discussed this book, Anderson commented that he did not accept these arguments. I will have to read further but, for the time being, I am sceptical of other intelligent species showing up any time soon.

Moles And Wine On Staurn

The Star Fox, Part Two, III.

"'...hydrogen gives less energy per mole than oxygen...'" (p. 95)

I never knew that meaning of "mole" and still do not understand it. 

"They flew over wine darkness, streaked with foam, until the mainland hove into sight." (ibid.)

A Homeric reference.

On Staurn, industrial civilization destroyed itself so the Staurni reverted to ancestral patriarchal households which however retained nuclear weapons that could never originally have been developed by such isolated social units.

The Staurni are flying carnivores like the Ythrians in the Technic History but hydrogen-breathers. Usually, carnivores fight rather than think but the Staurni possibly developed intelligence because they had to resist a larger, related species invading their continent. More fictional evolution.

Recent Posts And What Is To Come

Recent posts have summarized information about:

fictitious languages;
authors of fictional works about Mars or Martians;
some ideas about Mars from Blish, Bradbury, Burroughs and Stirling;
three alleged levels of anthropomorphism;
four stages of sf subject-matter, including the themes of several works by Wells;
fictional presentations of versions of chess;
historical heritages in the North West of England;
a discussion of the significance of human life as against the aesthetic value of chaotic terrain;
a reflection on evolution in different planetary environments.

My present point is that there is unlikely to be any more tonight!

I have so far collected only three of the NESFA Collections of Poul Anderson's Shorter Works so there are (how many?) of those still to come.

Sebastian Tombs And The Milky Way Etc

Checking back through "A Sun Invisible" for David Falkayn's use of the name "Sebastian Tombs," I came across this passage:

"He looked into the glory which was space, sun after sun until suns grew so thick that they melted into the great argent flood of the Milky Way."
-Poul Anderson, "A Sun Invisible" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 263-315 AT VI, p. 306.

Checking whether Hank Davis had connected Dominic Flandry with Simon Templar, I found this passage:

"Poul Anderson originally conceived Flandry as a science fictional counterpart of Leslie Charteris' celebrated Simon Templar, better known as the Saint, but his hero soon began to look more like a science fictional counterpart of another iconic hero with an English accent, James Bond, though the resemblance is almost certainly a case of parallel evolution, since Flandry's early adventures appeared prior to the publication of Casino Royale (1953), with 007's debut."
Hank Davis, "Enter A Hero, Somewhat Flawed" IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. vii-xi AT pp. ix-x.

(Roger Moore played both Templar and Bond just as Buster Crabbe played Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Tarzan.)

Did Anderson conceive Flandry as an sf Saint? The Saint is a private operator outside the law which Flandry is not.

Also in "A Sun Invisible," on p. 314, is yet another poem referring to ivory, apes and peacocks.

An Embarrassment Of Riches

While still rereading Poul Anderson's Fire Time, I have started to reread Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire and have also received SM Stirling's The Sky People (New York, 2006) from Amazon. (It should have been Stirling's Dies The Fire.)

Stirling harks back to the kind of inhabited Venus that Stapledon, Burroughs, Heinlein, Anderson and others wrote of in previous decades. Stirling's way of doing this is to locate his inhabited Venus in an alternative timeline, thus combining interplanetary adventure in an inhabited Solar System with a different, usually unrelated, sf concept.

Stirling's "Acknowledgments" refer to:

John Carter (of course);
Northwest Smith (I recognize the name);
"Wrong Way" Carson of Venus.

Did ERB call Carson Napier "'Wrong Way' Carson"? In any case, he did go the wrong way, departing from Earth towards Mars, pulled off course by the Moon, falling towards the Sun, then landing on Venus - celestial acrobatics almost as implausible as Carter's astral projection. Since ERB's Martians knew of intelligent beings on Mercury, since Carter traveled from Mars to a Martian moon, then to Jupiter, and since later space travelers, also aiming at Mars, instead found a civilization inside Earth's Moon, ERB was well on his way towards presenting a fully inhabited Solar System - a concept that Stirling nostalgically revives, at least as regards Venus and Mars.

A metafiction is a fictional text that somehow acknowledges its fictional status. For example, a work of fiction set in an alternative timeline might obliquely refer to our version of the "real world." Stirling approaches such metafiction at the end of his Prologue when a scientist, looking at video images broadcast from Venus, exclaims:

"'A Neanderthal...What the fuck?'" (p. 6)

This could be more elegantly translated as:

"How has our timeline happened to diverge from any of the more probable timelines in which Venus either is uninhabitable or at least certainly is not inhabited by any species recognizable from Terrestrial evolution?"

However, as a first approximation, a four letter word suffices!

A Historical Novel

War Of The Wing-Men, XX.

"The evolution of intelligent life on Diomedes is still largely conjectural; there has been no time to hunt fossils. But on the basis of existing biology and general principles, it is possible to reason out the course of millennial events." (p. 143)

"Drak'ho's Fleet was one of several which have now been discovered by traders. They may all have originated as groups living near the equator and thus not burdened by the need to travel; but this is still guesswork." (pp. 146-147)

In these passages, a fictional narrator addresses his contemporaries in the Solar Commonwealth and Polesotechnic League period of Technic Civilization. This narrator is not omniscient. He cannot present the mere facts of Diomedean evolution. His remarks are "conjectural" and guesswork." And he knows nothing of Technic History after his own period.

So how did this non-omniscient narrator know what Wace and some Diomedeans were thinking in earlier chapters? He did not know. But he is writing historical fiction. Hloch, the Avalonian Ythrian compiler of The Earth Book Of Stormgate, informs us that this historical novel about Nicholas van Rijn was published either on Terra or on Hermes, that a different author and date are cited in each case and that he, as editor, did not consider this matter worth pursuing! Thus, the ultimate author, Poul Anderson, indirectly dismisses this edition that I am reading entitled not The Man Who Counts but War Of The Wing-Men. I am probably reading the Hermetian edition.

That ultimate author informs us in the AFTERWORD in The Technic Civilization Saga that the wellsprings of the novel, and presumably of Nicholas van Rijn, include Falstaff, Long John Silver and some real Renaissance figures. I read Treasure Island over sixty-six years ago and remember only a murder committed by Silver.

The "Epilogue" Ecology

When we are immersed in the details of the "Epilogue" timeline, it can seem as substantial a fictional future as some future history series. "Epilogue" presents not a history but an evolution and an ecology. The plant equivalents evolved from animal equivalents which began as hunters.

There are no microbes. Immobile units powered by molecular solar batteries break down ores, manufacture alloys and concentrate dielectric energy, using reagents like acids in glass. Mobile units extract processable metal and reuseable parts from each other. More complex machines divide into large, tall four-armed bipedal hunters and low, wide, bulky, two-armed octopodal reproducers. (The Arvelan sexes also differ in size.) Reproductive crystallization begins when the two body patterns heterodyne in electric currents and magnetic fields. When complete, the new unit is activated. 

Because the new unit that One is creating is almost complete, Zero, who has lost one of his four hands, is able to thrust his arm stump into her repair orifice and, after a while, withdraw it with a new hand. While inside, the stump was enfolded and scanned by interior tendrils. Meanwhile, the new unit's synaptic pathways gradually crystalize from solution. When one of its motor impulse pathways has been completed, the unit stirs within One. That word, "synaptic," addresses my question: how can these self-reproducing artefacts feel anything?

Vampires

I have searched the blog for references to vampires. (Scroll down.) Poul Anderson's "Interloper" gives us a fictional origin of vampire legends.

I strongly dislike the whole idea of vampires and cannot understand how one author has written a whole series about them. (There are also some Young Adult series.) Alan Moore developed the idea that, although vampires cannot cross running water, they might be able to survive and thrive by living under the surface of still water - until someone causes the water to flow.

SM Stirling's Shadowspawn turn out to be vampires among other things which does not endear them to me. However, I remain interested in their evolution, history, mental powers, means of social control, civil war and dilution by interbreeding.

The Shadowspawn are homo sapiens nocturnus and the Alfar in "Interloper" are nocturnal life. See Alfheim. Anderson also has "half-world" organisms that dissolve in sunlight when dead in his Operation Luna. See Magic And Goetics.

There is a very old tradition that a different kind of life coexists with familiar life forms on Earth and imaginative authors can tap into this idea. It is as if they were confirming something that we already knew.

Different Kinds Of Beings

Poul Anderson's fiction presents:

immortals;
time travelers;
immortal time time travelers, i.e., the Time Patrol members;
Danellians, who founded the Time Patrol;
gods.

In fantasy, it is unnecessary and probably wrong to explain the powers of the gods because any explanation or rationale transforms fantasy into sf. Danellians are the next stage of evolution after humanity. Immortals are ordinary human beings who merely live longer. Time travelers are ordinary human beings with access to time machines - usually, although, in There Will Be Time, they are mutants and I have tried to show that the Time Patrollers surely transcend any ordinary perception of time. Also, on several occasions, they are perceived as gods or angels by people in the past and, to the Patrollers themselves, Danellians are god-like. However, real "gods" are those whose powers are a mythical or fictional premise not requiring any explanation.

Human Martians

Most fictional Martians are not human beings. Indeed, how could they be? In fact, there are three exceptions. Poul Anderson's six or more Martian races are of course all aliens but Anderson's sf was preceded by, among others, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first Martians encountered by ERB's John Carter - green, twelve foot, hairless, tusked, six limbed and egg-laying - sound more like giant insects. However, in any ERBian universe, the hero has to marry a Martian princess. Therefore, without any explanation or rationale, Carter soon encounters humanoid Martians. He not only marries the Princess of Helium but even gets her pregnant even though her metabolism is so different that, instead of giving live birth, she lays a large egg that will hatch their son. ERB's Mars, with its canals and thin but breathable atmosphere, was based on contemporary astronomical observations but his ideas about Martian life were off the wall.

Michael Moorcock pastiched ERB and rationalized human beings on Mars. His hero, Michael Kane, accessed Mars not by ERBian astral projection but by time travel into the far past. Thus, his Mars still had oceans, an atmosphere and a human race that had not yet migrated to Earth.

Thirdly, in SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, 2008), mysterious beings with a higher technology have terraformed Mars and seeded (?) it with humanity originating on Earth. Thus, these tall, thin, dry humanoids are not products of extraterrestrial evolution but are related to us. I have started Chapter Two. So far, I am finding the text less accessible than that of the previous volume, The Sky People, because several passages are presented from the point of view of an unsympathetic Martian character whose historical and political context have not yet been fully explained.

A book on imagining extraterrestrials made the point that we have to imagine an organism that has originated and evolved elsewhere. Thus, a tall, thin, large-chested humanoid is not a Martian but a Terrestrial adapted to Mars. However, that is precisely what Stirling describes:

"...Highlanders even more eerily elongated than the standard Martians and barrel-chested..." (p. 53).

Clement Planetology

For convenience, we have been rereading Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts in a paperback edition with the alternative title, War Of The Wing-Men. Before that, we had been rereading this novel in the omnibus collection, The Earth Book Of Stormgate. However, if we are to reread an introduction that Poul Anderson, as opposed to Hloch of the Stormgate Choth, had written for the novel, then we must turn back to The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, The Van Rijn Method, where the Compiler, Hank Davis, re-presents Anderson's earlier introduction as an afterword. 

Anderson informs us that:

"...Hal Clement's marvelously detailed and believable fictional worlds..."

-Poul Anderson, AFTERWORD IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 513-515 AT p. 513 -

- were one "wellspring" of this early novel. 

This explains why Adzel studies at the Clement Institute of Planetology earlier in the Earth Book and on p. 187 of The Van Rijn Method. 

Anderson's account of Clementian creation:

a star's age, chemistry, mass, luminosity etc

a planet in a given orbit

the length of its year

its irradiation level

its surface features

its kind of life

the evolution of that life

the odour of a flower

that odour's meaning to an individual

A Clementian paragraph in Anderson's text:

"This atmosphere carried the dust particles which are the nuclei of water condensation to a higher, hence colder altitude. Thus Diomedes had more clouds and precipitation of all kinds than Earth. On a clear night you saw fewer stars; on a foggy night you did not see at all."

-War Of The Wing-Men, XV, p. 103.

Galactic Center

Fictional Versions Of The Galactic Center

densely inhabited

uninhabitable

exploding

a massive black hole

 

The second, third and fourth versions might be successive stages rather than alternative states.

 

"'To begin with, obviously as one goes inward toward a center of population - stellar or otherwise - one's chances of locating a habitable planet begin to rise. They go up pretty sharply toward the tail of the curve, because the stars at the heart of the galaxy seem to average about a light year apart, or only a little more.'"

-James Blish, And All The Stars A Stage (New York, 1971), 12, pp. 173-174.

 

"The nightmare of finding the whole of the center of the Galaxy organized into one vast federation, much older than Earth's, had been troubling the State Department for a long time, at first from purely theoretical considerations - all those heart-stars were much older than those in the spiral arms, and besides, where star density in space is so much higher, interstellar travel does not look quite so insuperable an obstacle as it long had to Earthmen..."

-James Blish, "This Earth of Hours" IN Blish, The Best Of James Blish (New York, 1979), pp. 257-280 AT p. 263.

 

"'You have boarded galactic observation station five, sun two thousand and thirty-six, arm two. The station is an automatic outpost of the Hegemony of Malis, a confederation of solar systems occupying most of the center of this galaxy."

-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER THREE, p. 38.

 

Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire is ruled from the galactic center although a later contributor to Asimov's future history commented that there is a black hole at the exact center.

 

The center explodes as a quasar in Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle and as a supernova chain reaction in "At The Core" by Larry Niven:

 

"Already the radiation must have killed all life in the Core if there ever had been life there. My instruments on the hull showed radiation like a solar flare."

-Larry Niven, "At The Core" IN Niven, Neutron Star (New York, 1968), pp. 51-72 AT V, p. 67.

 

And, during another mission to the heart stars in another Niven future:

 

"'State astronomers expected a close-packed sphere of millions of suns averaging a quarter to half a light-year apart, with red giant suns predominating. Instead, we find this: the matter in the core forced into a disk that flattens drastically toward the center, with a tremendously powerful source of infrared and radio energy at the axis.'

"'Like your diagram?'

"'Yes, very like this diagram which I find in my data banks, a representation of the structure of the accretion disk around the black hole in Cygnus X-1.'"

-Larry Niven, A World Out Of Time (New York, 1977), CHAPTER TWO, III, pp. 52-53.

 

"Most [stars] were crowded close to the galactic nucleus, with a radiation background that made organic evolution unlikely almost to the point of unthinkability."

-Starfarers, 19, p. 154. 

Emotion And Intelligence In Four Universes

So many connections keep presenting themselves that I feel as though I will soon become one with the Poul Anderson multiverse and will express it all in one Last Post before disappearing into Valhalla - unless I am already there but do not realize it yet?

What do I have to say about "Emotion and Intelligence in Four Universes"?

(i) In The Time Patrol Universe
"The first part of instruction was physical and psychological. Everard had never realized how his own life had crippled him, in body and mind; he was only half the man he could be. It came hard, but in the end it was a joy to feel the utterly controlled power of muscles, the emotions which had grown deeper for being disciplined, the swiftness and precision of conscious thought."
-Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 12.

(ii) In The Immortals' Universe
"'I have the art of controlling sorrow.'"
-The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), p. 63.

(iii) In The Brain Wave Universe
See here and, more generally, here.

(iv) In The "Flight to Forever" Universe
"'...what I saw in both your minds was good - brave and honest, under the little neuroses which all beings at your level of evolution cannot help accumulating. I will be pleased to remove those from you, if you wish.'
"'No thanks,' said Belgotai. 'I like my little neuroses.'"
-Past Times (New York, 1984), p. 261.

Comments
What an amazing collection of fictional universes!

We all need Time Patrol training.

One immortal has learned emotional self-control over twelve hundred years.

The enhanced humanity of Brain Wave takes psycho-physical self-control further than any of the other groups of characters.

I do not like my neuroses.

I would have preferred if one of the time travelers had accepted the telepath's help.

We would then have learned what difference it made.

The Superman

Poul Anderson, "Chain of Logic." For reference, see here.

Roderick Wayne propounds four ideas of a superman:

"'...a bulletproof organism of a thousand horse-power...'" (1, p. 45);

"'...a macrocephalic dwarf talking in symbolic logic formulas...'" (ibid.);

"'...a godlike being, a greatly refined and improved human.'" (ibid.)

"'...Homo sapiens is a long way from realizing the full capacities he's already got. He needs training right now, not evolution.'" (ibid.)

Wayne contrasts this fourth idea with supermen but in fact it is one of the proposals for how humanity might become superior and again it ties in with Anderson's Psychotechnic Institute. (Another fictional Wayne, highly motivated, consulted experts and trained himself for two decades in combat skills, acrobatics and sciences related to detective work.)

Meanwhile, Wayne's taciturn son, Alaric, sprawls on the floor turning the pages of diverse scientific text books apparently at random:

"He must be only a - moron?" (p. 46)

The plot thickens.

Future Historical Parallels

Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars History and Olaf Stapledon's Last Men History both establish exotic settings for later volumes. See Sequels By Stapledon And Anderson.

Anderson's Harvest Of Stars History and Starfarers present slower than light space drives. See Two Space Drives.

Anderson's Harvest Of Stars History and Genesis present different evolutions of artificial intelligence. See Quantum Consciousness.

The Harvest Of Stars History and World Without Stars present different orbiting habitats. See City And Zamok Sabely'.

Cities on extra-solar colony planets in Anderson's Technic History are compared with a small town on an extra-solar colony planet in a Harvest Of Stars novel in Port Kestrel.

Also:

Martian invasion of earth in a novel by Wells, a novel by Anderson and a fictional historical text by Stapledon.

Human devolution into Morlocks and Eloi in The Time Machine contrasts with evolution into Danellians in Time Patrol.

Technic History Languages

Poul Anderson's Technic History presents six stages of human linguistic development.

(i) The twenty-first century: English and other national languages. (No change yet.)

(ii) The Solar Commonwealth period: League Latin, Anglic etc.

(iii) The Terran Empire period: Anglic, Fransai, Ispanyo etc.

On Dennitza: Serbic, Anglic and archaic Merseian Eriau.

(iv) The Long Night: Anglic semantic divergences.

(v) The Allied Planets period: planetary languages derived from Anglic etc.

(vi) The Commonalty period: Anglic is now described as ancient.

In (i), other national languages include Romance languages descended from Latin and English includes many Latin-derived words. Do any Latin roots survive into the galactic languages of the Commonalty period?

Think how much fictional history this implies. How many generations speak a language before it becomes a different language?

"'We're a long way from home in space, and even longer in time. It's been twelve hundred years since the breakup of the Commonwealth isolated [the Gwydiona]. The whole Empire rose and fell while they were alone on that one planet. Genetic and cultural evolution have done strange work in shorter periods.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Night Face" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 541-660 AT I, p. 549.

"'Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night...every such thing - behind us. In space and time alike. The people of the Commonalty don't get into wars.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 711-794 AT p. 722.

These quotations span nearly the whole Technic History.

Aeneans And Kirkasanters

We notice similarities between the Aeneans in The Day Of Their Return and the Kirkasanters in "Starfog." Then we remember that the latter are remotely descended from the former.

Inhospitable Environments

Aeneas

"'To maintain humans, let alone research establishment, on planet as skimpy as this, you need huge land areas efficiently managed. Hence rise of Landfolk: squires, yeomen, tenants. When League broke down and Troubles came, Aeneas was cut off. It had to fight hard, sometimes right on its own soil, to survive. Landfolk bore brunt. They became quasi-feudal class.'"

-The Day Of Their Return, 3, p. 96.

In addition, the University that had grown from the original research base incorporated military training into its curriculum.

Kirkasant

The high radiation background counteracted the small genetic pool by causing a high mutation rate. Many died but the fittest survived:

"And the planet did have an unfilled ecological niche: the one reserved for intelligence. Evolution galloped. Population exploded."

-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 730.

Respect For Learning

Aeneas

The University has retained a mystique:

"'The most ignorant and stupid Aenean stands in some awe of those who are learned.'" (ibid.)

Kirkasant

"The next generation might be too busy to keep public schools, but had enough hard practical respect for learning that it supported a literate class.'" (ibid.)

Respect For Privacy

Aeneas

"'One basic obstacle to understanding you is your pride, your ideal of discipline and self-reliance, your sense of privacy which makes you reluctant to bare the souls of even fictional characters.'" (7, p. 124)

Tatiana Thane asks whether human beings are "'...masks of God?'" (p. 129)

Kirkasant

Kirkasanters initially refuse to allow chromosome analysis because:

"'It...violates integrity. Human beings are not to be probed into.'" (p. 740)

The body is a citadel for the ego which should be inviolable. Personalities are reserved, cold, dignified and self-reliant. Medicine has been handicapped. However, there are no professional gossips, psychoanalysts or confessional writers.

"What was the symbolism behind the silver mask on the door?" (p. 762)

Back to Aeneas: can there be prose fiction without point of view characters or even with such characters whose inner states are not fully revealed to the readers?

Snowflakes And Miracles

Is consciousness cosmically common or rare, even unique to Earth? Poul Anderson's sf addresses two possibilities:

"...a universe that produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes."

-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 7.

"...a universe where life of any kind was so rare as to seem well-nigh a miracle."

-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, February 2001), PART ONE, VII, p. 85.

Despite their diametrically opposed premises, these two future histories share the scientific view that consciousness is not ontologically primary - that it neither pre-existed nor created the universe but instead arises within, and is a property of, evolving organisms. Anderson traces the evolution of fictional species on Ythri, Diomedes and Dido.

Anderson wrote fantasies in which powerful consciousnesses control natural forces. This was the pre-scientific world-view - although, despite that generally presumed primacy of consciousness, in Anderson's favoured Norse mythology, life and consciousness were not primary but instead arose from the interaction between the two dialectically opposed material forces of heat and cold.

While appreciating both Anderson's sf and his fantasy, we recognize that the author's own world-view was scientific. Consciousness as a property of an organism no more persists after the death of that organism than does any other materially based property. CS Lewis, defending prescientific metaphysics, wrote sf in which some of his characters are described as entering a hereafter. This idea requires far more back-up than Lewis ever gives it.