Argens' Autobiography

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966), originally serialized in Analog as The Ancient Gods:

Chapters I, VIII and XIV are narrated from a third person alien point of view;

Chapters II-VII, IX-XIII and XV-XVII are first person narrations by Guild Captain Felip Argens;

of Argen's chapters, all but XVII were part of his published autobiography;

XVII was found among his effects and added to a posthumous edition.

Chapter II begins:

"On another evening, very far away, I had heard another song. This was when I got back to City." (p. 7)

The chapter then describes the orbiting starport called City and Argens' meeting with the singer, Hugh Valland. Thus we never learn what evening or what song Argens had been describing before he turned his attention to City and Valland. These chapters can only be a short extract from the autobiography of a man who had lived for centuries.

"Hugh Valland" is a familar kind of name to us but not to Argens:

"I'm old enough to recognize that anyone bearing a name like his must be a great deal older." (pp. 10-11)

The novel is set at least two removes into the future: Argens has lived for centuries but Valland for millennia and the antithanatic will be developed in the latter's lifetime but in our future. Valland describes himself as "'...medieval...'" (p. 16)

"One thing we have all gained in our centuries is patience. Could be that Hugh Valland simply had a bit more than most." (p. 16)

Argens - or rather Anderson - skilfully tells us how immortality works while also hinting at details of the autobiography that we will never read. Referring to himself and his fellow immortals, Argens writes:

"Sometimes we're a bit crazy, even. We don't have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Take my own case - but no matter." (p. 16)

In one other work by Anderson, the first person narrator tells us his friend's story but merely hints darkly at his own:

"'I looked into the abyss once, and saw nothing, and haven't looked since. You keep looking. Which of us is the braver?'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), pp. 103-134 AT p. 134.

Two Unaging Men

Rereading Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, I wanted to write something briefly about Anderson's two longest living characters (but see the first comment below): Hanno from Boat and Hugh Valland from World Without Stars. Each is, like Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long and (maybe) James Blish's John Amalfi, the oldest man in his universe. (One difference of approach is that Blish shows us Amalfi dying with everyone else at the end of their universe whereas the others just keep going if not forever then for longer than we can see.)

Valland will live for at least three thousand years in our future whereas Hanno, already an adult in 310 BC (correction: I should have said "already about 670 years old in 310 BC"; see comments), will survive into an indefinite future and will then travel relativistically so is probably older than Valland. Both will experience the entire period of human interstellar travel although with the important difference of FTL for Valland and STL for Hanno. (I think it is legitimate to employ these acronyms for a fannish as opposed to a mundane audience?)

Near the end of Boat, Anderson makes us think that Hanno is about to die but he doesn't yet. Anderson pulled the same stunt with Dominic Flandry near the end of A Stone In Heaven as Heinlein did with Lazarus Long at the end of Time Enough For Love. However, I do not regard Time Enough For Love or any of its successors as valid continuations of the Future History so that for me the only Lazarus Long worthy of our attention is the one in Methusaleh's Children.

Wanting to write something about these two old men, Hanno and Valland, I checked back and found that I had already written all that I immediately wanted to say in "Immortality," reproduced below from my Science Fiction blog.

                                                                       Immortality

Fantasy

“Immortality” in science fiction (sf) can mean just that someone is immune to disease and old age but not also to accident or violence. He is not indestructible. By contrast, in Neil Gaiman’s fantasy series, The Sandman, the source of Hob Gadling’s immortality is supernatural, not chemical or genetic. The anthropomorphic personification of Death has agreed not to come for Hob. Consequently, he enjoys, or endures, more than just perpetual good health and middle age: he can be immersed, burnt and deprived of food but cannot be drowned, burnt or starved to death.

Hob’s immortality differs from that of Bernie Capax who is older – he remembers the smell of mammoths – but who meets Death when a wall collapses. Bernie then learns that his soul has a different kind of immortality. The fantasy Sandman presents the full panorama of Heaven, Hell and states between. Although Hob, like a few other deathless men, welcomes his physical immortality, The Sandman presents two other characters who, having become physically indestructible, long for extinction, the mythical Orpheus and the super-heroine Element Girl. (All mythologies and many comic book characters co-exist in this series of “graphic novels.”)

Fictional vampires have the same problem of living indefinitely and needing to conceal their longevity but we know how they can be killed.

SF

Although there are many other examples, I will mention briefly just twelve instances of sf immortality. Of the three Campbell future historians, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and James Blish, two addressed the idea. In Heinlein’s Future History, the Howard Families breed for longevity. After a few generations, they live well into their second century. The oldest member present chairs meetings. Like Hob and similar characters, they practise what they call the Masquerade: to conceal the fact of longevity, they periodically move elsewhere and change their identities. Later, public disclosure of the Howards’ longevity inspires a research project that finds a means of indefinitely extending anyone’s life span. Such artificial means of longevity exist in other works to be mentioned below but, first, there is another idea in the Future History.

An early Howard, Lazarus Long, lives indefinitely, for millennia, and becomes “the Senior”, the oldest member of the human race. Thus, he is a mutation who need not have been born to Howard Family parents. “Lazarus Long” is a Masquerade name. His birth name, Woodrow Wilson Smith, is a clue to his real age. In The Boat Of A Million Years by Poul Anderson, a small group of such mutations survives through recorded history and into an indefinite future. Crossing interstellar space, they split up but plan to meet again in another million years. 

Of course, Anderson could not possibly have written what these characters would be like after a million years. By that time, either they would all have died in accidents or those who yet survived would have become different characters. How much would they even remember? Each of them had already preserved his or her sanity by somehow marshaling inner resources in order to resist being overwhelmed by accumulating memories. By living that long, they perform functions that are usually performed by successive organisms without a memory accumulation problem. Death is the natural mechanism for memory deletion.

In Asimov’s future history, extra-solar colonists, inhabiting a germ-free environment, extend their life spans well into a second century and usually record their age in decades, not in years. A year becomes more like a month on that time scale. The only immortal being in this future history is a humaniform robot, not a human being. Thus, Robot Daneel Olivaw, having been introduced in the Robot novels, appears again millennia later in the Foundation novels which had originally been an unrelated series.

In James Blish’s Cities In Flight future history, antigravity and antiagathics make interstellar travel possible. Star-traveling characters live for centuries although we only realize later in the main volume that so much time has elapsed since the beginning of the book. Logically, some of the characters happen to live until the end of the universe although, for story purposes, that ending is brought much closer to the present than we would have expected. In fact, the date given, 4004 AD, contradicts suggestions in the previous volume that several millennia have elapsed during the interstellar period. Despite antiagathics, everyone dies but new universes begin.

In Larry Niven’s Known Space future history, “boosterspice” performs the same function as antiagathics and protector-stage humanoids are immortal, although at the expense of no longer being “breeders”. However, in his alternative future history, A World Out Of Time, Niven imagines an elegant alternative source of immortality. If teleportation is possible, then the chemicals associated with aging can be teleported out of the body. Thus, the instant elsewhere is a young forever. It is perhaps a more acceptable form of immortality than another in the same book which arrests physical development before puberty, producing immortal children who must preserve mortal adults for breeding.

In Anderson’s Psychotechnic History, modeled directly on Heinlein’s Future History, it is suggested that an organism can be made immortal only by shielding it from all radiation, thus by incarcerating it underground, consequently producing a human being with an extremely limited experience and mental range. Scientists care for an immortal hospital patient: a dead end. Appropriately, this story is called “What Shall It Profit?” In Anderson's Technic History, “antisenescence” explains why Dominic Flandry remains active and might yet have more children although he is nearly seventy. However, antisenescence delays aging but does not prevent death.

By contrast, in Anderson’s World Without Stars, every human being uses “the antithanatic.” A few immortals lead changeless lives on planetary surfaces or in orbiting space stations but many trade and explore endlessly between galaxies which are made accessible by a series of instantaneous jumps in a spaceship. Many memories are artificially deleted to prevent cerebral overloading but it is necessary to preserve the overall pattern of the past and the important details. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, remembers Mary O’Meara who died young in 2037 just before she would have had access to antithanatic. He revisits her grave on Earth as if revisiting a living woman and recounts experiences on many planets but must also have deleted many intermediate memories. He has somehow made sense of his indefinite longevity by focusing on one set of memories.

At any given time, what exactly does Hugh Valland remember? First, he has normal memories of whatever he has experienced since his most recent memory deletion. Secondly, he preserves vivid memories of Mary O’Meara. Thirdly, he remembers the pattern of his life since leaving Mary. Fourthly, within this pattern, he has perhaps a natural life span’s worth of memories of experiences in space, on other planets and back on Earth. However, he must have had to delete far more details than he has been able to retain. He maintains his purpose and remains celibate by focusing on ever fresh memories of one person. Only at the end when we realize that that one person is long dead do we doubt Valland’s sanity.

It seems appropriate to begin a brief consideration of fictitious immortality with the fantasy character Hob Gadling and to end with the sf character Hugh Valland.

Addendum, 5/6/12:  

Hob is thought to be the Wandering Jew;
Hanno is asked if he is the Wandering Jew;
in one of four speculative Secret Origin stories, the DC Comics character, the Phantom Stranger, is the Wandering Jew;
so is Lazarus in A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr ("What the lord...raise up, it stay up.")

Posted by Paul Shackley at 21:21

Lazarus Long And Hugh Valland

If a lot of people lived indefinitely extended lifespans, then younger immortals would have to find ways to recognize and respect older immortals, at least some of whom would have become maturer and wiser over their centuries or millennia.

When Robert Heinlein's Howard Families - not immortal but long-lived - meet, Mary Sperling declares her age, one hundred and eight-three, and, when no one present claims to be older, chairs the meeting because she is the Senior. When Lazarus Long, challenged about his identity, discloses that his birth name was Woodrow Wilson Smith, he is asked in astonishment how old he is and, when he owns up to being two hundred and thirteen, he must replace Sperling in the chair. His style is far less formal than hers but is accepted because he is the Senior. He will turn out be a mutant immortal that need not have been born among the Howards who have been merely selected for longevity.

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, when Felipe Argens meets Hugh Valland, the latter:

"...thrust out a muscular hand. Archaic for certain!" (II, p. 10)

When Valland declares his name, Argens is startled because:

"...I'm old enough to recognize that anyone bearing a name like that must be a great deal older.'" (p. 11)

Indeed, Valland is the Lazarus Long of his timeline. Heinlein made a mess of writing further volumes about Long but Anderson would have done a good job if he had continued the biography of Valland. 

To ship under Captain Argens, Valland must be a gunner who can double as a second deck officer and ideally must also have some xenological skill. Valland is old enough to have learned from experience before anyone had started to teach such skills:

"'I think I can claim the whole lot,' he answered. 'No formal trainin'. By the time they got around to foundin' academies in such subjects, I'd already been in space for quite a spell.'" (p. 12)

What an asset Valland would be as an academy student. He would know how to learn whatever there was to be learned from an academy course and would also know how to pass on his accumulated knowledge without patronising or denigrating anyone else. A true Senior. He would be asked to stay and teach but probably would not want to.

Would immortals just keep working in the same line of work indefinitely? I think that people would find different ways to use all that time like long periods of what would call "retirement" followed maybe by complete changes of career direction. In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, as I recall, one character had spent a normal working lifetime on Earth. Thanks to suspended animation, he was able to emigrate to an extra-solar colony. Thanks to boosterspice, the Known Space equivalent of anti-agathics or the antithanatic, he would then live through a second working lifetime in a different profession. What a life experience.

Hugh Valland

Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland is like:

Robert Heinlein's Jetman Rhysling because he is a singer of the spaceways;

Heinlein's Lazarus Long, Anderson's Hanno and James Blish's John Amalfi because he was been alive for a long time and longer than anyone else.

However, Valland has more going for him even than that. When he is communicating with an alien, Valland's musical instrument, the omnisonor, enables him to form sounds that are impossible for a human throat. Thus, his musical ability can be adapted to another purpose.

Of these and some other fictional "immortals," Valland is the only one who needs to use technology to edit memories in order to prevent memory overload leading to insanity. Thus, after living for nearly three thousand years, he retains only the memories of a normal lifetime.

Valland's fiancee, born in 2018, dies in 2037, just too soon to benefit from the antithanatic. In Amalfi's timeline, the antiagathics begin to be developed in 2018.

I have just watched a Smallville TV episode where Clark Kent, time traveling forward to 2017, is horrified to see that his future self is a straight-looking guy in a business suit wearing large glasses! 

We in the early twenty first century live at a Crossroad of Time.

Age And Wisdom

World Without Stars.

Age is not wisdom but can be used to become wise. Imagine someone who has been doing that for nearly three millennia. Hugh Valland lives up to our hopes and expectations. When idolized by a mere thirty year old:

"Valland took the situation well, refrained from exploiting or patronizing, and managed to slip him bits of sound advice." (IV, p. 24)

When the Meteor, emerging from a space jump, plunges toward a planet that should not be there but that fills the viewscreen, Captain Argens is paralyzed but Gunner Valland issues the necessary order:

"Then Hugh Valland's tone cut through, sword-like with what I should have cried. 'Pilots! For God's sake, reverse us and blast!'" (V, p. 29)

Argens, jarred from his stupor, scans the meters and takes command. Valland does not mutiny but leads when necessary.

James Blish said in one of his collections of sf criticism - and I am not going to find it at this time of night - that most people, given an indefinitely extended lifespan, would use all that time to become worse specimens than they already were. But some would not. Individuals like Valland would become leaders of mankind, whether formally recognized as such or not.

Thor And Hugh Valland

This is the seventh post this week to have been inspired by Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, Chapter II.

Gods live in us. Hugh Valland, born about 2018 (a very significant year: see also here), is old enough to remember still earlier stories about Thor, who has been mentioned on this blog more often than I had realized.

Valland is also creative enough to compose new stories about Thor. The god will come to help Wenli if asked because he owes Valland a favor:

"'I helped him out once when he got into an argument with an electrostatic generator. Now let me tell you more about him.'" (p. 15)

Valland, a successor of the skalds, then recounts the tale of Thor and the world serpent. All of Poul Anderson's works are set in a single - multiverse.

Valland And Smeth

World Without Stars.

Hugh Valland is the dying Enver Smeth's closest approximation to both a doctor and a chaplain, asking his permission to remove his suit to see if he can be helped. When Smeth complains about the unfairness of his thirty years as against Valland's three thousand, Valland softly tells him to shut up and reminds him that he is a man.

At Smeth's request, Valland sings the song about Mary O'Meara. Again, we should notice that Mary is not active in the song. This stanza ends:

"And whisper your name where you lie." (V, p. 34)

Where she lies... She is dead and buried. And Smeth dies as this line is sung. Valland has helped Smeth to die as well as he can.

Later, Valland will show the inhabitants of this planet that their God is present even when not seen. Valland's survival skills overcome every obstacle, all to get him back home to Mary O'Meara.

Hugh Valland

Rereading a novel involves noticing details that were meaningful to the author and to some of the characters though not to the reader on a first reading. This instance is particularly poignant. In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966), three thousand year old Hugh Valland, who travels between stars and galaxies, explains why he is content to visit his Mary O'Meara only occasionally on Earth.

" 'Earth's no place for a live man to live any more. Fine for Mary, not for me. It's not unfair to either of us. We get together often enough, considerin' that we'll never grow old. Between whiles, I can remember...' " (p. 16)

Earth is no place for the living but fine for Mary because Mary is dead. They'll never grow old because he has the antithanatic and she has died. Valland visits a grave. He remembers all the time.

The narrator of the novel did not know this when he conversed with Valland but does know it when he narrates. Like the author, he keeps the surprise till the end. And we forget this early conversation unless and until we reread the novel.

Anderson readers, reread! You have nothing to lose but insufficient appreciation of well-crafted stories and novels.

The Life Of Hugh Valland

Hugh Valland was born on Earth in the early twenty first century.
The antithanatic was developed in his lifetime.
He shipped on the first starship.
He composes and sings songs.
He has soldiered now and then.
He joins exploratory spaceship crews as a gunner.
He never accepts a captaincy because he wants to be free to return to Earth every few years or decades.
He is nearly three thousand years old.
For four decades, he wages war on an intergalactic planet until he and his companions are able to build a spaceboat, contact a technological civilization on another planet in the same system and return home.

We want to know:

how long Valland lives;
what other galaxies he visits;
more about this amazing intergalactic civilization;
how many human beings live in "...timeless oneness..." (p. 8) with a planetary surface and how many rove like Valland.

Liking Hugh Valland

We have almost finished rereading World Without Stars. Most of what remains is just how the good guys beat the bad guys although the concluding chapter is very different: the quiet Earth followed by the big reveal right at the end of the last page.

I had remembered this novel as presenting a distinctive fictional future of the antithanatic and the instantaneous intergalactic space jumps but what I have discovered on the current rereading is the likeableness of the character, Hugh Valland. No one in real life has three thousand years in which to become tougher and smarter than they already were but it is possible to meet potential Hugh Vallands and it is also possible, having espoused a cause, to learn by experience that some of your fellow campaigners are thoroughly good, intelligent and even wise. Faith in a cause can be partly faith, or trust, in some of its proponents. Of course, causes differ, to say the least. However, Valland's cause is simply to return to Earth and that at least is uncontroversial.

Food

Refugees from a generation ship (multi-generation interstellar spaceship) land on a terrestroid planet where one of them kills a native animal and says:

"'...always Good Eating.'"

-Robert Heinlein, Orphans Of The Sky (London, 1965), p. 111.

How can he know that it will be good to eat? The character does not even know that this should be an issue. Heinlein lets us think that they will survive.

By contrast, Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland says:

"'...there's life. Presumably our kind of life, proteins in water solution, though of course I don't expect we could eat it.'"

-World Without Stars, V, p. 32.

Right on. However, the ship's food unit has survived the crash so:

"'We'll live,' Hugh Valland said." (p. 35)

Orphans Of The Sky is Volume V of Heinlein's Future History. World Without Stars is not a future history but implies one because there have been nearly three thousand years of interstellar travel. Valland has lived for all that time and for how much longer?

See also Good Eating?

The High Sierra

There is an extremely evocative passage just over a page in length on pp. 110-111 of Poul Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966). It is very difficult to quote any of it without wanting to quote all of it. It is impossible to find any sentence or two that are the core of the passage. They are all core.

First, Hugh Valland, nearly three thousand years old, remembers being young.

" 'Oh Lord, but we were young!' " (p. 111)

He refers to himself and Mary O'Meara.

Secondly, they were young at a very special time. Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, "Bliss was it to be alive that day, and to be young was very heaven." Valland and Mary were young when it was known that the antithanatic would "'...soon be in production.'" (p. 110) Thus, they were at the dawn of a biological revolution that would affect everyone. " 'Nobody who was alive would have to grow old.' " (p. 110) There would be no more fear of old age. Valland spells this out by contrasting a child like Argens' young daughter with a pre-antithanatic grandmother. The former would eventually become the latter " '...in less'n a century...'" (p. 110)

Thirdly, he tells us how the whole world population was responding to this imminent change. " 'The world had grown so quiet.' " (p. 110) Partly, people became cautious now having so much to lose and, partly, they just " '...needed a while to get used to the idea.' " (p. 110)

" 'It was an air...while the human race waited, it felt kind of like wakin' after a fever had broken.' " (p. 110)

Having described people who have become used to their immortality, Anderson now asks us to imagine those who were waiting for it.

Fourthly, though, Valland and Mary, being young, " '...couldn't sit still...' " (pp. 110-111) They had to do something to prove to themselves that they " '...were alive enough to rate immortality...' " so they backpacked in the High Sierras (p. 111). Valland explains to Argens that this was a mountainous region partly "'...kept as wilderness.'" (p. 110)

Fifthly, moreover, they did it to remember those who had loved the Sierras but had died and would never come back.

" 'We swore to each other we'd always remember our dead.' " (p. 111)

As we learn later, that is what he is doing for her. She died aged nineteen.

Sixthly, he recalls that most people eventually agreed with him and Mary that immortality would be useless if it just meant centuries of " '...bein' careful...' " so they " '...went to the stars.'" (p. 111)

And that ties in with Earth being quiet and depopulated in the concluding chapter.

I have tried not to quote too much but every short quotation has been apt and my attempted summary is about as long as the passage that I set out to summarise.

Krypton, Chereion And Time

I could present this as a Christmas Quiz question but it is highly obscure. What do Poul Anderson's characters, Joel Weatherfield, Jack Havig, Hugh Valland and Aycharaych, have in common? This blog has, in different ways, compared each of these characters to Superman.

See:

Earthman, Beware!

Superheroes In SF 

Hugh Valland And Superman

Not A Telephone Booth 

Kryptonians And Chereionites

 

Aycharaych's universal telepathy is a major super-power and he could empower himself further technologically, e.g, flight with a gravbelt and invulnerability with a force field. Several superheroes are empowered only by superior tech.

Immortality And Star Travel

World Without Stars.

Hugh Valland:

"'Between them, immortality and star travel changed everything.'" (IV, p. 26)

They would. But is either possible? If not, then this kind of sf is not futuristic speculation but an academic exercise and more like fantasy. Immortal interstellar travellers are as fantastic as immortal gods or elves. In "A Style in Treason," James Blish called the faster than light drive the "Imaginary Drive" as an auctorial comment. (Then one of his characters commented that this was an inappropriate name in The Quincunx of Time.)

Poul Anderson and James Blish were masters of this kind of improbable sf. The PRELUDE of BOOK ONE of Blish's Cities in Flight, Volume I, ends:

"He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to star faster than light."

-James Blish, Year 2018! (London, 1964), p. 17.

He was anticipating John Amalfi, first seen in the concluding chapter of Volume II. Moving sideways in time, he was also thinking about Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long and Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland. Moving away from faster-than-light universes, he was also partly thinking about Anderson's mutant immortal, Hanno, in The Boat Of A Million Years, who traverses interstellar distances but at sub-light speeds. Will anything like this ever happen? In Anderson's Genesis, it is only post-organic intelligences that star travel, again at sub-light speeds.

An Accurate Cover

This is an accurate cover illustration:

the galaxy is overhead;
the blurb is factually accurate;
the spaceship has crashed in a lake;
the number of men escaping from the ship is correct;
Hugh Valland holds his omnisonor;
his spacesuit reflects the light of a red dwarf sun.

I have a copy of the "First Book Publication," which has this cover. The only anomaly here is a strange object on the left which is not on my copy.

Hugh Valland's fiancee lived from 2018 to 2037 and he is nearly three thousand so the novel is set around 5000, long after what would have been the period of the Terran Empire if we want to compare chronologies.

Do I seem to go off at tangents? Yes, I seem to go off at tangents. But anything that has been interrupted will be returned to. I enjoy the total freedom of blogging not by committee but by individual whim. Posting about SF Premises led to rereading passages of Poul Anderson's World Without Stars.  

Immortal Employees

World Without Stars.

"Immortal" spacemen live for centuries or even millennia and spend all that time in paid employment in the same kind of work. Can't they save, invest and retire either to leisure activities or to retraining for other kinds of work? It seems an odd kind of existence. Even odder, they preserve their sanity by periodically editing their memories so that they only ever consciously remember a much shorter period, maybe only a few decades, like the equivalent of what used to be a normal working life. Their previous lives and work are recorded somewhere but not in their own conscious memories. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, recalls his youth, his most recent few years of work and only a few other selected details. He speaks of revisiting old places and visiting new places but even most of the old places will be experienced anew. And, in any case, there is an infinity of new places because the space jump gives access to every galaxy. This has to be the strangest fictional future ever.

In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the small group of mutant immortals have had to solve the memory accumulation problem for themselves and are able to traverse interstellar space at only sub-light speeds so their situation is very different. They propose to part and to reconvene in another million years which I should think is impossible. Will Hugh Valland survive for a million years? Statistically unlikely. But we would have liked to have read some sequels.

In James Blish's Okie cities, unaging policemen, and men in other professions, simply stay in those roles for centuries.

Hugh Valland And Superman

Sometimes one work of fiction makes us think of another even if we then have to think about what the connection might be. So why did rereading Poul Anderson's World Without Stars make me think of Elliot S! Maggin's Superman 400? The latter is introduced by sf writer, Ray Bradbury, but that is not the connection.

In Maggin's story, Superman:

ages but does not die;

outlives everyone he knew and loved on Earth;

survives into a period of interplanetary, then interstellar, travel;

befriends and travels through space with the reformed Lex Luthor until Lex also dies;

eventually disappears from human ken;

becomes a legend, then a myth;

is commemorated at the Miracle Monday festival when each family sets an extra place at their table for Superman in case he returns -

- and one Miracle Monday meal is attended by Superman time traveling from the twentieth century.

Readers of World Without Stars will recognize some parallels. Hugh Valland:

outlives his fiancee, who dies on Earth;
lives for thousands of years;
travels through space and even between galaxies;
writes songs that are remembered;
will probably become a myth -

- and we do not know his ultimate fate.

In Space

This is an old question: can human beings leave Earth, cross space and colonise other planetary surfaces, whether solar or extra-solar? A lot of science fiction (sf) just assumes the answer "yes" although Poul Anderson at least questions whether it will be a straightforward matter to breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food etc on any terrestroid planet.

Here are some variations on the question. Might people instead colonise the Asteroid Belt, as they do in sf series by Poul Anderson and Larry Niven? Or might they just construct self-sustaining habitats in space itself as in another series by Anderson? Certainly, any group that crosses an interstellar distance at sub-light speeds must take its environment with it and therefore need not depend on the extreme improbability of finding a habitable environment awaiting them on arrival.

In Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966), humanity has undergone three transformations.

(i) A spaceship can make a series of instantaneous interstellar or intergalactic jumps. Humanity is expanding, exploring, trading and regularly contacting other races.

(ii) Anithanatic prevents aging. People die only by accident or violence. Living indefinitely, they remain sane by allowing a machine to edit their memories. Thus, a man who has lived for thousands of years consciously remembers only several decades' worth of experience and must consult records about the rest of his past life.

(iii) They mostly live in space.

"...I suppose that a gene complex still crops up occasionally which makes the owner want to belong to a specific patch of earth." (p. 7)

Colonizers of planets:

"...wanted nature and elbow room. There is no other good reason for planting yourself at the bottom of a gravity well. The reason is not quite logical - after all, most of us can satisfy our ape instincts with an occasional groundside visit somewhere, or just with a multisense tape..." (p. 7)

So where do most of them live? The narrator, Captain Felipe Argens, describes the satellite starport called "City", which has grown over several centuries. Approaching it in a space boat, he sees:

"...towers rocketing from parapets, domes and ports glowing brighter than stars, the Ramakan memorial rakish across the galactic clouds; I could see ships in dock and boats aswarm; and as nearly as any spaceman (except Hugh Valland) ever does, I felt I was at home." (p. 9)

Argens is at home in City but has wives in several ports and each of them has several space travelling husbands who rarely meet each other.

He also describes the view from his wife Lute's porch:

"Space dropped dizzily from the viewport, thin starred black here on the rim. Huge and shapeless - we still being more or less within it - the galaxy streamed past and was lost to sight; we looked towards remoteness." (p. 12)

Here are true space dwellers. And Argens' guest, Hugh Valland, nearly three thousand years old, had "'...shipped on the first star craft.'" (p. 16)

After all these changes, can they still be human beings? Anderson describes them as such but he acknowledged elsewhere that a fiction set in the far future has to be regarded as a translation from a different language and worldview. And how long can they remain what we would recognise as human beings? A sequel set later might have shown greater physical and mental adaptations in these immortal space-dwelling organisms.

Another Evening

IN Poul Anderson's World Without Stars:

Chapters I, VIII and XIV are narrated from an alien pov;

everything else, culminating in Chapter XVII, is extracts from Guild Captain Felipe Argens' autobiography.

Chapter II begins:

"On another evening, very far away, I had heard another song. This was when I got back to City." (p. 7)

We are distracted by Argens' account of the colonized planet, Landomar, and do not return to the song in City until the bottom of p. 9. By then, we have forgotten the haunting quality of that two-sentence opening paragraph. Is Argens writing in an evening and remembering that other evening in City? Or has he just discussed one evening, then remembered that "other evening"?

An evening is an ending. An evening remembered is a past ending. And the evening referred to was "very far away." It is distant in space as well as in time. So Argens is not writing in City, where (we soon learn) he had a portwife called Lute and a young daughter called Wenli, so where is he and what has happened in between?

An autobiography is about the auto, the self, but these extracts have been selected to tell us about Valland, not about Argens. The latter tells us that immortality makes people patient but also eccentric and even crazy:

"We don't have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Like my own case - but no matter." (II, p. 16)

No matter, indeed. We never learn what bugs Argens but this remark about not editing certain memories is a clue to Valland's psyche.

The narrator of Anderson's "The Problem of Pain" looked into the abyss once, saw nothing and stopped looking. However, he tells us not his own story but that of Peter Berg who continues to seek answers. Similarly, Argens, at least in these extracts, tells us not about himself but about the millennia-old Hugh Valland.

Argens, Valland and their contemporaries:

live indefinitely extended lifespans;
but never retain more than an ordinary life-time's worth of memories;
therefore (maybe), keep journals and write autobiographies, like Argens;
can make instantaneous jumps between galaxies;
therefore, theoretically, could continue to travel outward through the universe throughout historical ages.

Anderson's Time Patrolers:

live indefinitely extended lifespans;
can spend years in the past or the future yet return to their "present" the moment after they left;
remember some events that "did not happen," at least not in the current timeline;
know the general course of future history and of human evolution;
can learn languages electronically, then erase the linguistic memories when they are no longer needed.

How would both groups perceive time? Would they remain human?

Thor And Hugh Valland

Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966).

See Dream Country plus combox.

OK. I got it wrong about Thor so here's the deal. Valland tells young Wenli that:

Thor has a red beard;

goats pull his wagon;

the wheels make thunder;

Thor throws a hammer at trolls;

he will come if they ask him;

Valland helped Thor in an argument with an electrostatic generator;

Thor caught the snake that encircles the world.

Born in the twenty-first century, Valland remembers - and adds to - the myths.