Harleman

Satan's World.

There are two Harlemans (scroll down) in Poul Anderson's works, as I have just discovered by searching this blog for that name, but I want to focus on the one in Anderson's Technic History.

Van Rijn in "Hiding Place" refers to Juan Harleman of the Venusian Tea & Coffee Growers, Inc. (see here) and Thea Beldaniel in Satan's World refers to "'...Freeman Harleman of Venusian Tea & Coffee..." (II, p. 343) The same guy. A future history series is strengthened by every repeated background reference. Although Freeman Juan Harleman never appears and is mentioned only twice (I think), he is a brick in the wall of the Technic History along with all the other spear carriers and supporting cast. Not everyone is famous but everyone is part of the society that makes some of us famous.

Not Mentioning Any Names

"Hiding Place," see here.

A work colleague said, "A clique was developing. And I'm not mentioning any names. And Richard was in it!" He had completely forgotten the second sentence when he uttered the third. Nicholas van Rijn speaks in what sounds like a similar way but, in his case, every word and thought is under his control:

"'...is the human brain a turtle just because it is armored in bone? A parasite just because it lives off blood from other places? Well, maybe some people I could name but won't, like Juan Harleman of the Venusian Tea & Coffee Growers, Inc., has parasite turtles for brains. But not me.'" (p. 608)

(Tea and coffee growing on Venus. If only... SM Stirling gives us a retro terrestroid Venus in The Sky People.)

Is Harleman a distinguished competitor whom van Rijn must pretend to despise or an economic "parasite" whom he does in fact despise? If ever we met Harleman, then we would make our own assessment. But, meanwhile, we have reached the end of the last story in The Van Rijn Method and must decide what to read or reread next after a night's sleep and some other responsibilities.

Today: The herons at Muncaster Castle still remind me of Ythrians.

Humor III

OK. The humor in Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984) loses me when it talks about street battles between the People's Union for Righteous Excellence and the Friends Upholding Closer Kinship. But something else has been at the corner of my attention from the beginning of the first story, "Nothing Succeeds Like Failure," and has just come to the foreground.

Junius Harleman, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wants to prolong the life of NASA just long enough for him to have time to get the directorship of a more viable agency so he accepts the proposal for a low budget gyrogravitics project which, against all expectation, does open up the Solar System for colonization. In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the "Man who sold the Moon," DD Harriman, is an entrepreneur who invests his money, time and energy into getting mankind onto the Moon and into space.

So Harriman gets mankind out into the Solar System by his personal efforts whereas Harleman gets mankind out there by accident and the similarity between their names cannot be a coincidence. The joke continues as the gyrogravitics team is assembled:

skeptical specialists welcoming the opportunity to use expensive equipment for basic research;

"...graduate students desperate for thesis material..." (p. 30);

engineers unable to hold down better jobs.

And yet: "Harleman felt rather proud when he had finished rounding up that crew. It hadn't been easy..."! (p. 30)

Silver Spring

When I worked as a Careers Adviser, I helped clients to formulate an action plan by completing a form with headings like Where Am I?, Where Do I Want To Be? and How Can I Get There?

Where is humanity, where does it want to be and how can it get there? We have different answers. One answer to where do we want to be is ad astra, to the stars.

Poul Anderson gives us one set of answers in Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984). (Isn't it good to have "1984" as the year of publication instead of the title? No offense to Orwell but we are glad to have got past that year without suffering Big Brother en route.)

Anderson's answers:

Junius Harleman, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a neighborhood kept quiet by armored patrol cars, and worries that his budget will be cut even further;

a crank calls to his door...;

the rest is future history.