Further Future Furniture II

(Regular blog commentator, Sean M. Brooks, hopes to rejoin us this coming Saturday or soon after.)

See:

Future Furniture
Further Future Furniture

"I sank deeper into my chair. Variable contours sought in vain to comfort me."
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 2319, p. 376.

"[The chair] fitted itself to his contours, to his every motion."
-"The Year of the Ransom," 15 April 1610, p. 659.

In The Shield Of Time, PART THREE, 31,275,389 B. C., Wanda Tamberly is a dinner guest in Faculty Lodge at the Time Patrol Academy. We expect to be told that the furniture is self-adjusting but we are not. Wanda's host, Guion, conducts her to a seat where she tries to loosen her muscles as she is being taught in phy ed. Maybe the higher echelons of the Patrol are above such things as self-adjusting furniture?

Further Future Furniture

See search result for Future Furniture. (Scroll down).

"Leaning back in a lounger...softness changing beneath her at every slight motion to fit every contour..."
-Poul Anderson, The Byworlder (London, 1974), VI, p. 68.

"Avery lowered himself into a chair. Thornton sat stiffly on the edge of his, obviously disliking the idea of furniture which molded itself to his contours."
-Poul Anderson, Planet Of No Return (London, 1971), Chapter 2, p. 14.

One more comment on each of these novels:

the end of The Byworlder demonstrates how ideology can transform a scientist and family man into a murdering moron;

although Planet Of No Return has the futuristic sf cliche of "...an aircab..." (p. 13), this turns out to be not a flying car but a "copter" which -

hovers by Lorenzen's hotel balcony;
extrudes a gangway;
states the fare in a mechanical voice;
accepts payment in a slot and gives change;
flies above Quito;
sets its passenger off at another hotel where a door opens for Lorenzen when he states his name.

Future Furniture

How often, in Poul Anderson's futuristic sf, do we read about self-adjusting furniture automatically molding itself to the body shape of whoever sits on it - provided that they relax and cooperate, of course?

In the Technic History:

"Torres gave the chair no opportunity to mold itself to him. Perched on the edge, he proceeded harshly..."
-Poul Anderson, "Margin of Profit" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 135-173 AT p. 140.

"[Coya] sat down on the edge of the spare lounger, ignored its attempts to match her contours..."
-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 633-680 AT p. 649.

Both Torres and Coya are confronting Nicholas van Rijn, which explains why neither is relaxed.

And at the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene period:

"Dard Kelm demonstrated the gadgets in a typical room. They were the sort you would have expected by, say, A.D. 2000: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 1-53 AT p. 8.

Well, who invented such self-adjusting furniture? You are not going to believe it:

"The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us...Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon..."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), Chapter 1, p. 7 (the opening page of the text)

Visiting Laurinda Ashcroft

How will people greet each other in the future? See Angels And Service. In Laurinda's period of the Genesis future history, people bow briefly over bridged fingers - not an Anglo-Saxon gesture.

In Part One, V, Laurinda quotes what we recognize as Shakespeare and explains that she reads a lot. Fictional characters redeem her humanness which she might otherwise have lost while interfacing with Terra Central.

Characters are listed:

Hamlet;
Anne Elliot;
Wilkins Micawber;
Vidal Benzaguen.

I thought that Vidal would turn out to be a future fictional character. However, googling indicates that he is a Rudyard Kipling character. I found a link to a text although I know that such links do not work for all blog readers.

Finally (for tonight):

"Chairs shaped themselves to bodies with fluid, unnoticed sensuality." (p. 39)

More Future Furniture.

Arrival

We summarized Lockridge's and Auri's arrival in the fortieth century here but neglected to mention that Warden furniture:

"...fitted itself to every changeable contour of their bodies..."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 126.

Another example of Future Furniture.

Lockridge will have only one evening with the Wardens before he must embark on his mission to mislead Brann. Anderson is able to move his narrative through many ages, stages and places very quickly in a short novel. Unfortunately, this is the only text where we read about time corridors. I have just had another idea but must go out.

Routine Space Travel

We have said this before. A contemporary novel routinely referring to mobile phones, laptops, the Internet and communications satellites would have been sf if it had been published in the mid-twentieth-century but, back then, we expected that the early twenty-first century would be all about routine space travel. Patrick Moore, interviewed by a younger man on British TV, seriously asked the interviewer to send him a post card from the Moon when visiting it as a tourist about ten years from then. Think about all the wrong assumptions implied by that request. In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the stories in Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, showing Luna City, indentured servitude on Venus and the colonization of Mars as well as both Martians and Venerians, are set about 2000. 

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, Manse Everard, recruited by the Patrol in 1954, is told about the future but we the readers learn nothing about it until it happens and not much then either. Gorbachev shows up on schedule in The Shield Of Time, published in 1990. A typical room in the Patrol Academy in the Oligocene has the sort of gadgets:

"...you would have expected by, say, A.D. 2000: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet."

-"Time Patrol," 2, p. 8.

That adjustable furniture occurs in many Andersonian futures but first appeared in The Time Machine.

This post was occasioned by rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Volume III, and was not expected to encompass the Future History, The Shield Of Time, "Time Patrol" or The Time Machine.

Furniture And Phones

(Sometime we find an image for a different work with the same title.)

The Day Of Their Return.

Desai to Aycharaych:

"'Won't you be seated?' The chair in front of the desk didn't have to adjust itself much." (3, p. 89)

More self-adjusting furniture. (I think that I read another example recently but now cannot find it.)

By now, we have become used to such future amenities. However, when Desai enters Tatiana Thane's rooms at the University:

"This layout was incredibly archaic. No doubt the original colonists hadn't had the economic surplus to automate residences, and there'd been sufficient pinch ever afterward to keep alive a scorn of 'effete gadgetry.'" (7, pp. 121-122)

Does this imply no self-adjusting furniture? Sure enough:

"The chair [Desai] found was too high for his comfort." (p. 123)

Commendable consistency in the devilish details. 

Despite the (usual) high quality of the furniture, Desai lacks one very obvious useful gadget. See Mobile Phones.

Death And Aftermath II

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire.

"Kenmuir took a chair. His body resisted its form-fitting embrace..." (21, p. 287)

See Future Furniture.

"There the solar disc glowed soft between zodiacal wings and stars were like fire-drops flung off the tumbling Milky Way." (22, p. 290)

Temerir uses his Lunar observatory to find his dead father's hypothetical planetoid: a very remote 2000-kilometer-diameter sphere of dense iron, a future source of wealth for Lunarians who will conceal it from the Federation which has recently, thanks to lobbying by Dagny and her allies, allowed Moondwellers to build interplanetary spaceships. The plot of the flashback chapters moves towards the scenario of the previous novel with the added secret of the planetoid.

Life In The Early Twenty-First Century

(The Psychotechnic League cover by Vincent di Fate.)

"Un-Man," VI, pp. 47-48.

On these pages, Poul Anderson summarizes information about future society through the reflections of the Un-Man, Naysmith, e.g.:

"Murderers lurked in the slums around Manhattan Crater..." (p. 48)

Why should there be slums and crime around a crater? See Existence And Craters about a different Anderson future.

Naysmith refers to:

"...the World Wars and the Years of Hunger and the Years of Madness and the economic breakdowns..." (ibid.)

- thus again reviewing the background of the Psychotechnic History to date.

He contrasts:

Hindu peasants and their tiny fields with Chinese collectives and their new power plants;

murderers in the slums with technicians able to "...buy a house and furniture for six months' pay..." (ibid.);

floating ocean colonies and cities on the Moon, Mars and Venus with rain-cloud drummers in the Congo -

- and asks, "Reconciliation - how?" (ibid.)

A civilization that has built the massive apartment buildings (see The Daily Life Of The Future) and colonized the oceans and the planets can surely technologize peasant agriculture, clear the slums and improve conditions in the Congo? I suspect that Anderson projects present social divisions unnecessarily into a changed future.

Naysmith reflects that modern technology requires neither physical laborers nor routine intellectuals but highly trained technicians and therefore that:

"...education had to start early and, being free as long as you could pass exams, be ruthlessly selective." (p. 47)

He asks: how is it possible to escape the resultant snobbishness and friction? My answer: technology is made for man, not man for technology. Education, continuing to be free, should develop the diverse aptitudes and interests of the entire population, not just of that minority that can be selected for highly skilled technical roles.

Quito

Why is Quito, Ecuador, suitable for space travel in three timelines?

In Poul Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire, Dagny Ebbeson attends the Fireball school in Quito and see also:

Further Future Furniture
Van Rijn POV VI

We get used to certain background references but then we notice that they are cropping up in different timelines. I am now able to search the blog to find out where a setting like Quito has been mentioned before although there may be more.

"How To Be Ethnic..." III

See "How To Be Ethnic..." II here.

James Ching tells us:

"I eased my muscles, let the lounger mold itself around me..." (p. 179)

See Future Furniture.

"Not many regular spaceman's berths become available annually, and a hundred young Earthlings clamor for each of them." (p. 174)

The unsuccessful try to get work that will send them outsystem or save and go as tourists. The Technic History recounts the adventures of the successful but also tells us that there there is a lot of dissatisfaction. There will be problems later.

Undated SF

Science fiction can become dated but remain worth reading, e.g., The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds. It is good when a science fiction writer sometimes gets part of the future right. Heinlein had mobile phones, water beds and waldos. The last are named from Heinlein's novel.

Skillful sf writers can also avoid writing texts that date too quickly. Although Poul Anderson wrote his Time Patrol series from 1955 to 1995, he carefully avoided describing the near future. Gorbachev is mentioned in a novel dated 1991 but no political leader of the 1990's had been named before then. In the opening story, an instructor at the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene demonstrates:

"...the gadgets in a typical room. They were the sort you would have expected by, say, A.D. 2000: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet."
-Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 8.

Indeed. This group of cadets has been recruited from 1850-2000. Some of them will already be familiar with these domestic gadgets. The others can be introduced to them. Whitcomb from 1947 and Everard from 1954 will have less difficulty than their colleagues from the 1850's. One girl with "...iridescent, close-fitting culottes...green lipstick...fantastically waved yellow hair..." (p. 6) sounds familiar from later in the century. Is she "...the girl from 1972...a rising young physicist in her own period..." (p. 9) who speaks up later?

In Anderson's "Delenda Est" (1955), Piet Van Sarawak is from Venus whereas, in SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time" (2014), he is from a terraformed Venus, not contradicting but completing Anderson. In a timeline without the terraforming, the acidic Venerian environment would boil lead.

More Detail Than Anderson

Because Audrey Niffenegger focuses on the time travel aspect of Henry's and Clare's relationship, she goes into more detail than Poul Anderson or any other time travel author thinks of. Thus, young Clare notices that, when Henry comes from 1988, 1989 or 2000, he is upset or freaked but he is ok in 2001. He tells her not to date one of her drawings of him because it is not dated in the future but she dates it. When he returns to his "present," that drawing is not where it should be on the wall. It has fallen down behind some furniture. When retrieved, it is not dated and Henry notices that the bottom of the sheet has been trimmed off. Clare had got worried and trimmed it off.

"...why does it feel as if something impossible almost happened? Why do I feel so relieved?" 

-The Time Traveller's Wife, p. 106.

Some sequences of events are consistent and can happen whereas others are not and cannot. There is a psychological explanation for what happens with the drawing. If Clare were the sort of person who, having been told not to date the drawing, would date it and would not trim off the date, then Henry would have seen the drawing dated in the future and would not have told Clare not to date it so she would have dated it and Henry would have seen it dated. Clare not trimming the date off and Henry seeing the drawing undated is an impossible sequence of events which cannot and therefore does not happen. Jack Havig might notice such minutiae but mostly his attention is focussed on the bigger picture.

Wanda And Kinna

In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time, Wanda Tamberly enrolls in the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene period and is invited to dinner by Guion, an Unattached agent who works within the Patrol. A machine brings them drinks. In Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, 7, Kinna Ronay enrolls in the University of Cromelin on Mars and is invited to dinner by Chuan, the synnoiont (human-AI liaison) of Mars. At a signal from Chuan, a servitor brings wine and Mozart plays. I thought that these two scenes were similar. Future domestic technology will make it unnecessary to move.

Yet again we encounter futuristic furniture:

"Kinna took a chair but did not at once relax into its form-fitting embrace." (p. 91)

Often, Anderson's characters are too tense to relax and enjoy their comfortable furniture.

A Comprehensive Series

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, we appreciate:

many passages set in fully realized historical or prehistorical periods;

past Patrol bases that become familiar locations;

comfortable twentieth century settings where Patrol agents can safely discuss the problems of the past;

a single passage set on the Moon in 2319;

hints at many other future periods;

glimpses of potential histories that remain unrealized but  nevertheless influence the Time Patrol timeline - in particular, Veleda does not change the Germanic religion but might have done.

Like one facet in a jewel, this series reflects the comprehensiveness of Anderson's fictional canon.

The main past bases are the Academy in the Oligocene and the Lodge in the Pleistocene. The many future periods include the Martian war of 3890, the Second Asteroid War and the Era of Oneness preceding the Danellians. Twentieth century locations include:

Everard's apartment with its polar bear rug and Achaean Bronze Age spears;
the Farness' flat overlooking Central Park in the 1930s;
a Caribbean restaurant in Amsterdam;
Nick's antiquarian bookshop;
Wanda's student apartment in Palo Alto with its shabby furniture and a National Wildlife Federation poster.

Manse and Wanda are in her apartment when the unsuspecting younger Wanda is away. I used to leave a one-room apartment empty at weekends in Merseyside. With a timecycle, I would now be able to make use of that room on all those weekends.

The Food Thread

A Bar With Food
Bradshaw
An Indian Meal
Good Food
Morning
Food For Thought
Harvesters' Lunch
Harvest Supper
Evening Picnic

Descriptive Passages
Curry And Naan
Lunch At Sea
Dinner At The Winged Cross And in An Airship
Van Rijn
Open Sandwiches
Bhang Lassi
The Peshawar Club

Dinner At His Desk
Another Meal And Another Adventure
Barfi And Samosas
Dinner At The French Embassy
Festival Food
This Month
Food In Khartoum
China
Draka Food

A Buffet Lunch
Burritos
A Chinese With Weak Coffee
Beautiful Scenery And Good Food 
"The Best Hamburger He'd Ever Tasted" 
Some Vivid Descriptive Passages 
Not only Times But Also Places

Spartan Food
Faith, Food And Freedom
More Food 
Yrsa's Upbringing 
Yule Eve In Leidhra
The Twilight Of The Elves
A Bird Made Of Fog
"Tea Or Coffee, Sir?"

A Bronze Age Feast
Welcome Home Feast
Another Meal 
Venison
Harvesters' Lunch II 
Clambake
Christmas Dinner 1250 B.C.
Initiation Feast 
Another World
A Civic Harvest Festival Meal 

Hospitality To Odysseus
Ivanhoe: Miscellania
Delfinburg
In The Saturn Room Of The Hotel Universe, Lunograd
In The Phoenix House
Fanciful Comparisons: Ythrians And Japanese
Palatial Privacy, Lack Of
Four Senses And Good Food
A Nasty Shock
An SF Villain

Can't Resist It! 
Bread And Venison
A Camp Meal
Yule Feast
Dinner In A Barn 
Dinner In The Aylward Household
Hash Browns And Conversations
Harvest Supper
An Understated British Resurrection? (And Another Meal) 

Engineering And Tea
Preserving Civilization
Eating And Killing (Or Vice Versa)
A Welcoming Feast
Breakfast
Dinner At The Sheaf And Sickle
Dinner In A Hunting Lodge
Caviar And Toast
The Fife And Drum Tavern
A Paxton

Meal Before Battle
Vegetarian Food In A Buddhist Monastery
Grill And Bar Food
Camp Breakfast
An Iowan Dinner
A Banquet
Feast
Winter Meal

Feast Before Seidh
Ironrede 
Two Meals
Another Camp Meal
The State Banquet
A Sheriff's Hospitality
A Cold Collation
A Conference Dinner
A Dunedain Feast 
A Meal In A Tent In A Desert
Paces II

Another Sea Battle And Another Meal
The Fifth Sense
A Meal On The Ceram Sea
Outsystem Food
From The Lavishly Stocked Terran Embassy Larder
An Altaian Banquet
Rich Texts, Drink And Food
Modjo Fruit
Two Rijstaffels

Breakfast At Biocontrol Central
Captain's Dinner
An Evening And A Morning On Vixen...
In The Hooligan 
High Living In The Future
Luxury
Dinner In A League Outpost
Warped Reality
Another Meal
Life In 209 B.C.
Fiction Set In The 21st Century
L'Etoile de Diana
Pleasures

Some Parallels
A Meal In Hiding
The Meal Before The Metapsychic Rebellion
A Meal On The Moon
Christmas Food
Satan And Food
The British Raj
Cross-Temporal Cheese Cake

Restaurants
Furniture And Food
Future Facts Of Food
Follow-Up On Food
One Breakfast And Three Alternative Histories
Milky Way, Steak And Revolutionaries
Hail And Good Night
Sacrifice And Feast
Warmth And Light In Two Timelines

Full Marks To Eric Wace
New Lemurian Food
Some Notes To Recent Posts
A Meal In The Command Tent 
Like Chicken
Avocati
Many Descriptive Details And One Old Friend
Time And Place: Eating In San Francisco
Time And Place: Steam Beer
Bowls Of New Potatoes
Time And Place: Chinatown And Pub Crawling

Russian Eggs And More About Films
A Meal And Four Senses
An Ad Libitum Breakfast
The Devil's Game: Interval Three
Breakfast
Five Senses And A Meal
Forests In Minds And A Fight At A Meal?
Shadows Of Annihilation, Chapter Four

Shadows Of Annihilation, Chapter Five, And Food
Pancakes And Cars
A Few Details
Some Observations Near The End Of A Novel
In The Nest
A Few Words
A Few More Words
Sensations And Anticipations
To Ear Or Not To Eat
Warmth And Light
Breakfast In The Hooligan

Some Details In A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows

A Meeting With Snacks

Operation Luna: Miscellaneous V  

Gerard, Demons And Coffee

Breakfasts

Breakfast In The Air

An Omelet And Fresh-Baked Bread 

Cosmic Interference III

"Cosmic interference seethed across his radio voice..." (p. 746) (For full reference, see here.)

"The star noise in his receivers was like surf and fire." (ibid.)

Both surf and fire!

Compare:

Cosmic Interference
Cosmic Interference II
Dry Cosmic Hiss

This cosmic background is common to works of hard sf, whichever fictional future they are set in.

Space explorers move through this inhospitable and uninhabitable vacuum full of lethal radiation yet remain comfortable, e.g., in the saloon of Daven Laure's ship with draperies, music, perfumes, animations and form-fitting furniture. (p. 738) Having evolved in a particular planetary environment, human beings must take that environment with them when they travel through space. Almost anywhere else, we would die instantly. Although - many extrasolar planets are being discovered so maybe some are terrestroid and as yet uninhabited.

A Personal Connection

Look how much future history we have covered already in considering just the first installment of Poul Anderson's Technic History. It is the single story that connects this fictional timeline back to the twentieth century. And there is a personal connection. Scobie in the Chronos has a disintegrating but signed copy of The Machinery Of Freedom. Its author is still alive. The book was published in 1973 with further editions in 1989 and 2014. Since "The Saturn Game" was published in 1981, we infer that Anderson had the first edition in mind. Scobie must have met David D. Friedman to get his signature. This is the closest that we can come to matching up the two timelines which, if they have not diverged already, soon will.

Scobie's apartment in the Chronos also contains:

furniture that he has made on board

Childe's border ballads

an 18th century family Bible

a model of a sailboat in which he had cruised

a handball trophy won on board

fencing sabers

pictures of family, places he had been on Earth, his selenological team, Thomas Jefferson and Robert the Bruce

a television

 

We get a solid picture of this one guy who is involved in events on Iapetus.

Out Of The Past

It seems appropriate that the Time Patrol, which guards the past, houses itself in dated surroundings. Patrol members have met in anachronistic hotels and one front for the Patrol is a used bookshop. Of the London office, 1890-1910, Anderson writes:

"There was a unexpectedly heavy effect to the oak furniture, the thick carpet, the flaring gas mantles. Electric lights were available, but Dalhousie & Roberts was a solid, conservative import house." ("Time Patrol" IN Time Patrol, p. 21)

Quite right! When initially contacting the London office, Everard, opening the message shuttle, found:

"...a sheet of foolscap covered with neat typing - yes, the typewriter had been invented by then, of course." (p. 19)

Would messages from earlier milieus have been handwritten? Patrol personnel would use future communication technology only when safely concealed from contemporary observation so maybe yes, handwritten notes even from earlier in the nineteenth century when:

"Herbert Ganz...liked being Herr Professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin..." in 1858 (pp. 399-400).

In Guthrie House

The Stars Are Also Fire, 9.

Again Poul Anderson conveys a sense of ancientness even in the future. Guthrie House is centuries old and seems older. Its stone seems to have been shaped by wind and rain, not hands. Within, there are oak panels, a dark room, antique furniture, hangings, traditions etc.

All five senses are engaged:

"Clouds lifted like snowbanks into radiant blue; a breeze blew cool, with savors of wood and salt, above summer-warm soil; waves gleamed and murmured, forest soughed; a few gulls went soaring aloft..." (p. 119)

Within:

"'Good liftoff,' Matthias toasted. The men brought vessels to lips. The tingle in his mouth gave Kenmuir impetus." (p. 123)

The Rydberg Matthias confirms that Dagny Beynac's son, Lars Rydberg, told his eldest son a secret to be preserved for a time of great need and that the titular Rydbergs have indeed preserved that secret ever since - but it remains secret.