Newness And Glade

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire, Chapter 4.

Jesse Nicol reflects that:

"...the faith of Christ or Mahomet, the philosophy of Locke or Jefferson, the science of Newton or Darwin, or certain verses -" (p. 84)

- troubled the peace of the world and asks whether new ways from an obscure culture might do the same in his period? His period needs to be shaken up. However, I am confident that we can build a dynamic culture that welcomes newness instead of being troubled by it.

Anderson repeats his idiosyncratic use of the word "glade":

"The sun, become a red-gold shield, was on the horizon. Glade blazed from it across the waters." (ibid.)

A Scullery And A Glade

A Midsummer Tempest, viii.

This chapter has two scenes:

THE SCULLERY OF THE MANOR, pp. 57-62;
THE FOREST GLADE, pp. 62-65.

In the scullery, Sir Malachi Sheldrake instructs his ward, Jennifer, with yet another Biblical quotation:

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'"
-see Exodus 22:18.

In Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, horrific serial murders are based on such Biblical texts. See Different Uses Of The Bible In Fiction II.

In the glade:

"Everywhere among the trees, whose twigs bent over the Milky Way like claws, wavered dull-blue lights. 'Corposants, those lures of death.'" (p. 63)

The Roundheads pursuing Rupert and Will see:

"'Herne the Wild Hunter!'" (p. 64) (Scroll down.)

Sheldrake reminds his companions that "'...fat Jack Falstaff wore the aspect of...'" Herne. (p. 64)

- and we must remember that, to them, Falstaff is a historical figure.

Harvest Of Stars: Miscellaneous

Walking and tiredness have got in the way of blogging today.

"The Moon entered the sky. That low, it did not yet cast a glade." (23, p. 220)

Here is Poul Anderson's idiosyncratic use of "glade," again. (Scroll down.)

"The ship lifted." (24, p. 226)

In sf, we take it for granted that ships "lift" but think how much the meaning of the word, "ship," has been extended by this usage. Outside the viewport, the stars:

"...crowded vision, a frosty glory." (ibid.)

No Milky Way this time but we have read about stellar frost and glory before.

In American sf, taking off into space, preferably going interstellar, is the ultimate symbol of freedom. In this passage, Guthrie is indeed escaping not only from Terrestrial gravity but also from the Security Police. However, they wait on Luna - reprehensible activity extends beyond Earth - so the chase is not over yet.

Harvest Of Stars is divided into:

Epilogue, pp. 1-2;
PART ONE kyra 1-24, pp. 3-233;
PART TWO eiko 25-39, pp. 234-383;
PART THREE demeter 40-63, pp. 384-531.

Fortunately, we approach p. 234. I want to get away from the Sepo as much as Guthrie does.

Something will happen tomorrow. I am not sure what.

Glades And The Dead

Poul Anderson, World Without Stars, XV.

In Rain And Words, I did not understand the phrase:

"...wave-splintered glade..."

Sean suggested in the combox that there might be "...a rarely used meaning for 'glade.'" My Chambers Dictionary gives only:

"an open place in a wood."

Anderson uses the word again:

'"...the moon and Jupiter rose together and threw two perfect glades...'" (p. 111)

Valland and Mary are camped by a lake. Are the glades the light on the water?

Valland goes on to tell us something more important than we realize at the time:

"'We swore to each other we'd always remember our dead.'" (ibid.)

That is what Valland is doing: keeping his promise to Mary.

Glade And Death

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire.

Kenmuir and Aleka are on Vancouver Island where the sun:

"...threw a glade across the bay..." (37, p. 482) (scroll down)

Centuries earlier, Dagny Beynac is found dead on the Moon. (38, p. 486)

"Luna mourned. On Earth, every Fireball flag went to half-mast." (p. 487)

I had thought that we might read a conversation between living Dagny and download Dagny. Probably such a conversation does happen between chapters.

Like DD Harriman, "The Man Who Sold The Moon," Dagny Beynac, "The Mother of the Moon," dies of heart failure while appreciating the view on the Lunar surface. Her legacy continues. Next we read a letter that she had left for her eldest son.

Across The Sky

This is another post for the Milky Way thread although the galaxy is not named in the relevant passage. The Arvelans, visiting aliens, are on Taiwan at night. They see:

a mountain rising to the right and plunging to the left;

downward, yellow windows and a twinkling seashore village;

"...the ocean, like living obsidian, bridged by a moonglade." (p. 133) (In this linked Wiktionary article, notice the quotation from Mirkheim);

"Across the sky glimmered the galaxy." (ibid.);

there are many individual stars.

We have encountered this use of the word "glade" three times before:

Rain And Words
Glades And The Dead
Four Senses On St. Li In Oronesia

Across The Milky Way

We might start a sub-thread of objects seen in front of the Milky Way:

"Aycharaych nodded, his crest a scimitar across the Milky Way."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT IX, p. 461.

A scimitar is a weapon and Aycharaych works for the Merseians who aim to conquer the Milky Way.

"They had left the shining nebula far behind; an unlit mass of cosmic dust reared thunderhead tall across the Milky Way."
-op. cit., XII, p. 503.

The Hooligan flies from light towards darkness and a metaphorical thunder storm threatens the Empire.

"...the dreadnought...was Nova class; its hull curved over him, monstrous as a mountain, guns raking the Milky Way."
-Poul Anderson, "Hunters of the Sky Cave" IN Sir Dominic Flandry..., pp. 149-301 AT XV, p. 266.

"...guns raking..." is not metaphorical but quite explicit.

"His profile, vaguely seen against the Milky Way..."
-Poul Anderson, The Byworlder (London, 1974), VI, p. 62.

"Silhouetted athwart the Milky Way, as if hovering free among clustered stars, Ahasuerus' pine-cone bulk..."
-The Byworlder, XIV, p. 166.

"A gob of thick digestive fluid sailed past the Milky Way." (XV, p. 185)

See also:

Night On Ivanhoe
Starting The Jumps
Shadows And Milky Way
Blaze Of Stars, Milky Way And Meditation
The Milky Way And The Promised Land
The Voyage Begins
Zamok Sabyel'
Progress
A Reminiscence Of Ferune
Five Interesting Features In "Cold Victory"
Coffin's Coffin
Mercury, Milky Way And Moon
Past The Milky Way
A Mountain Against The Milky Way
Embarrassment And The Milky Way
Hirharouk's Head
Athwart The Milky Way
Mirkheim And The Milky Way
Fringe Of Battle
Leaving Hermes
Night On Avalon
Lissa's Sister And The Milky Way
Galactic Vastness And The Milky Way
Tjorr And The Milky Way
Irony, Highlanders And The Milky Way
The Trader Team On Merseia
Abrams II
Clans And Tribes
Diomedes, Starkad And Talwin
Djana Remembers And Imagines
Near The End Of The Rebel Worlds...
Battlements Against The Milky Way
Falkayn's Father's Castle Or Mansion And The Milky Way
A Flying Mountain Across The Milky Way
Gigantic Against The Milky Way

Jupiter And The Milky Way 

Dayspring And Milky Way

Against Sagittarius
A Turban Against The Milky Way
A Scullery And A Glade

A Silhouette And Birds Of Prey 

In Space

Across The Milky Way II

A Wisp Of The Milky Way 

Frozen Fire And Glowing Maelstrom

The Milky Way And The Gate Of Death 

A Weapon, Stars And A Funeral

On A Comet

End Of The Long Way Home

"The Bitter Bread": End

A Soothing, Then Unsettling, Helicopter Ride

Night In The Freehold Forest

"Inside Earth"

Wanderer And Night-Bridge

Sunset

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 4.

Jesse Nicol composes a poem that begins:

"The sunset throws a road across the sea..." (p. 82)

Poul Anderson writes:

"The sun, become a red-gold shield, was on the horizon. Glade blazed from it across the waters." (p. 84) 

Tawiri says:

"'We were going to swim down the sunset road...'" (ibid.)

Nicol, Tawiri and Ianeke are on an upper deck of the Okuma 'Olo, a floating town like Delfinburg where van Rijn has a mansion and an office in the Technic History.

Some Descriptive Details

"Fortune Hunter."

"...a splendidly antlered wapiti..." (p. 203)

An elk but I never heard it called a wapiti before.

"...an eagle hovered. He caught on his wings the sunlight..." (p. 204)

Another hovering bird of prey.

"I heard an owl hoot to his love. In royal blue, Venus kindled. The air sharpened..." (p. 207)

Three senses in quick succession.

"...the Milky Way would be a white cataract..." (ibid.)

"...when Jupiter rose there would be a perfect glade across the water." (ibid.)

Readers might be able to recognize Poul Anderson's style even without being told the author's name.

Elvenveil And Emperor

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four, 5.

I want to share an appreciation of Poul Anderson's descriptive passages but also to avoid lengthy quotations. Blog readers are encouraged to read Anderson's texts. However, sometimes, a longer quotation is unavoidable. The following passage is notable both for its exotic colors and for its evocative place names. Svoboda and Coffin climb down the side of the colonized plateau called High America:

"At the bottom of vision were the clouds.
"He had ignored them when he first gazed over the Cleft. They were nothing but a whiteness far below his feet. But now they lay ahead. The first semicircle of e Eridani was visible, blinding in the east above a billowing snow-like plain. Blue shadows crawled toward him, kilometers in length. Mist began to pour up the canyon, filling it from side to side, a gray wall whose top faded to gold smoke. Svoboda caught his breath. He hadn't watched sunrise over the Cleft for years. It brought back to him how much else was beautiful here, the summer forests, Elvenveil Falls, Lake Royal turquoise in the morning and amethyst in the evening, a double moonglade shivering on the Emperor River...in spite of everything, he was glad he had come to Rustum." (p. 121)

This gives us two lists:

snow-like clouds
blue shadows
gray wall
gold smoke
morning turquoise
evening amethyst
shivering moonlight

Elvenveil Falls
Lake Royal
Emperor River

Although the colonists belong neither to a kingdom nor to an empire, they use the words, "Royal" and "Emperor." "Elvenveil" recalls Elven Gardens in Ys. 

Falkayn Remembers... III

See:

Falkayn Remembers...
Falkayn Remembers...II

The full list of what he remembers includes:

"...a double moonglade on the Auroral ocean...";
"...the splendor of an Ythrian on the wing..."
-Mirkheim, VI, p. 109.

Here is another use of "glade" to mean moonlight.

On at least three occasions, Anderson refers to the "splendor" of a flying Ythrian. This passage in Mirkheim must be the source of the title of my post, "An Ythrian On The Wing," see here.

Thus, we find one reference to an Ythrian in Volume IV of what I call the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy. In the original reading order of the early part of the Technic History, the Ythrians do not come on stage until the two Avalonian volumes after the League Tetralogy.

Like Methuselah's Children in Robert Heinlein's Future History, Mirkheim draws together many disparate strands of its future history series.

The Milky Way Cascaded

The Devil's Game, INTERVAL TWO.

The following passage contains at at least three points of interest to persistent blog readers:

"The moon had not yet appeared to brighten that sharp, high westward blackness named the Crag. But stars blossomed beyond counting, crowding the sky till its own crystal dark seemed to come alive and, in some way that never touched the great peace, ring beneath their lightfall. They flaunted their colors, blue-white Rigel, golden Capella, ember Betelgeuse. The Milky Way cascaded among them, in knife-edge clarity, quietly and argently ablaze. A planet newly risen glowed so lamplike that it cast a glade over the sea, which reached in polished ebony and flickering pale straks down past the foot of the steeply descending land." (p. 59)

Four Senses On St. Li In Oronesia

Light
"A full Morgana lifted from eastward waters. Its almost unblemished shield dazzled the vision with whiteness, so that what stars could be seen shone small and tender. That light ran in a quaking glade from horizon to outermost breakers, whose heads it turned into wan fire; the dunes glowed beneath it, the tops of the trees which made a shadow-wall to left became hoar."
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT Chapter XIII, pp. 587-588.

Lots of light words. The passage continues -

Three Other Senses
"There was no wind and the surf boomed steadily and inwardly, like a heartbeat. Odors of leaf and soil overlay a breath of sea. The sands gave back the day's warmth and gritted a little as they molded themselves sensuously to the bare foot."
-ibid.

Multi-sensory, sensuous and appropriate since Tabitha and Philippe walk along the beach to make love in a sheltered headland with soft Terran grass.

From The Pacific To The Moon

Harvest The Fire, CHAPTER 4.

Jesse Nicol had spent time on a shiptown of the Lahui Kuikawa. It was there that he decried unoriginal art.

There was a sunset:

"The sun, become a red-gold shield, was on the horizon. Glade blazed from it across the waters." (p. 84)

Some Lahui:

"'...swim down the sunset road with the Keiki.'" (ibid.)

During a silence after a fight:

"The sun dropped from sight, the sea-road faded into darkness." (p. 88)

Nicol saw the Moon above the deckhouse and wondered whether he should seek employment by the Lunarians there, which is where we have already seen him. CHAPTER 5 will return us to Nicol with Falaire on the Moon but not tonight, folks. The sun has long set here as well.

Rain And Words

Poul Anderson, World Without Stars, IX-X.

Not only wind but also rain can punctuate the dialogues in Poul Anderson's texts:

"We faced each other, he and I, while the rain came down louder." (IX, p. 61)

"'They may mean well in spite of their manners,' Bren said.
"'Sure,' I said. 'They may.' The rain gurgled as it fell onto soaked earth." (p. 62)

Unfamiliar (to me) words continue:

"...lyophilized food..." (ibid.)

The "knurls" of Argens' gun comfort him. (X, p. 65)

I find the following phrase somewhat obscure:

"Even with goggles, we saw only the galaxy and its wave-splintered glade..." (ibid.) (My emphasis.)

Morning Star On Demeter

Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars, 56.

"Hugh Davis woke shortly before sunrise. Dew gemmed the glade between blue-black battlemented walls of forest. A few drowsy chirps tinkled through the hush. Orange-red clouds limned branches and crowns to the east. Above them shone white Aphrodite, inward planet, morning star." (p. 475)

We have encountered morning stars in myths, on Earth and elsewhere.

Ranger Hugh Davis, son of Kyra, is a successor to Anderson's juvenile heroes, especially Jack Birnam who treks across country on Avalon. Hugh, checking whether the forest is ready for the introduction of deer and wolves, is surprised to find high tech settlers and low tech woodsrunners. The presence of human beings means that the bigger game must be introduced differently but not that the human beings must be cleared out. "'Guthrie-Chief...'" (p. 480) has become a real libertarian god.

Download Kyra guides parts of the Demetrian ecology although not yet the forest in central Achaea. Meanwhile, Pilot Kyra is out in space, visiting Perun, exploring Phaethon or doing something else.

The Shadow Of God

"As a dewdrop may reflect the glade wherein it lies, even so does the story which follows give a glimpse into some of the troubles which Technic civilization was bringing upon itself, among many others."

-Poul Anderson, INTRODUCTION IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 559-600 AT p. 559.

 

This opening sentence of the Earth Book introduction to "A Little Knowledge" helps to integrate what might otherwise seem a peripheral story into the Technic History. The "troubles" become the Troubles.

The introduction continues:

"Ythrians, be not overly proud; only look back, from the heights of time, across Ythrian history, and then forward to the shadow of God across the future." (ibid.)

The two narrative threads of the first part of the Technic History are the Polesotechnic League and human-Ythrian interactions. Here, an Ythrian, Hloch, compares Technic and Ythrian histories. Since Ythrians of the New Faith neither address God the Hunter in prayer nor expect to meet him in a hereafter, his status as a personal deity rather than just a metaphor might be queried. 

As a metaphor, I am inclined to accept God the Hunter. I see His shadow over individual lives and also over Western civilization.

The First Grand Survey

"Our part in the Grand Survey had taken us out beyond the great suns Alpha and Beta Crucis."

-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 75-102 AT p. 79.

Participants in the first Grand Survey do not know that it is the first such interstellar survey just as participants in the Great War did not know that it was the First World War. The Terran Empire will have a Sector Alpha Crucis. The rogue planet, Satan, will swing round Beta Crucis. Rereading the earlier Technic History instalments, we appreciate their later significance.

After three years, the Olga under Captain Gray, discovers Ythri. Poul Anderson's Technic History series might have included a Grand Survey collection that would have constituted a "higher and greater Star Trek." This is a description that the British publisher, Charles Monteith, applied to James Blish's Cities in Flight but the Grand Survey comes even closer to the Enterprise's five-year mission.

"A ship of the first Grand Survey noted [Valenderay's] existence."

-Poul Anderson, "Day of Burning" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, March 2010), pp. 209-272 AT p. 211.

Valenderay is the supernova that threatens Merseia.

"When the Survey team arrived [on Merseia], the Wilwidh culture stood on the brink of a machine age."

-ibid., p. 232.

Merseia, dominated by old Wilwidh, will be the main opponent of the Terran Empire.

"They found [Paradox] during the first Grand Survey."

Poul Anderson, "A Little Knowledge" IN David Falkayn: Star Trader, pp. 599-630 AT p. 601.

Paradox is not major player but is a fascinating detail of the Technic History. Hloch, compiler of The Earth Book of Stormgate, compares "A Little Knowledge" to a dewdrop reflecting the glade wherein it lies.

Have I missed any Grand Survey references?