Finding Familiar Phrases

Poul Anderson, After Doomsday, CHAPTER THREE.

Tau Ceti II, like some other planets known to us, has "...hurtling moons..." (p. 28) (Scroll down.)

My blog search for "hurtling moons" found Rustum and Gorzun but not Barsoom. An Aenean moon also moves visibly. See here.

Interstellar explorers instruct newly contacted industrialized and outward-looking races:

"From these newly awakened worlds, then, a second generation of explorers went forth. They had to go further than the first; planets of interest to them lay far, far away, lost in a wilderness of suns whose worlds were barren, or savage, or too foreign for intercourse. But eventually someone, at an enormous distance from their home, learned space technology in turn from them." (p. 33)

Regular readers might recognize that it was the recurrent phrase, "wilderness of suns," that drew my attention to this passage. However, the passage was worth quoting at greater length and will generate another post.

Transonic

"The Star Plunderer."

By oratory, Manuel wins the freed slaves to an attack on Gorzun. He inspires them by naming the captured ship "'...- the Revenge.'" (p. 355)

Background technical details differ when a story was not originally written to fit into a future history. The Revenge comes off "...secondary drive..." (p. 357) and is hailed "...over the transonic communicator..." (ibid.) but Manuel speaks the language and has the codebook.

Gorzun, like Barsoom, has "...hurtling moons..." (p. 358) but three of them. Because of ERB, we associate hurtling moons with a barbaric planet.

The Revenge bombards Gorzun. There is now nothing to prevent Manuel from advancing and rising to the Imperial Throne. He and Kathryn will start a dynasty.

"'She will be the mother of kings,' said Manuel..." (p. 362)

Rustum

Twenty light years away, Rustum, a planet of e Eridani, hotter and more oceanic than Earth and with one and a quarter terrestrial gravities, has a semi-permanent cloud layer separating two life zones (eg, lower spearfowl are larger) and containing nebulo-plankton browsed on by occasionally glimpsed cigar-shaped, jet-propelled air porpoises.

Theory: the dense air carries fine particles scoured by wind from surface rocks into the clouds where water drops dissolve out minerals which are consumed by microscopic organisms preyed on by larger life forms like the porpoises which rise by filling a bladder with biologically generated hydrogen, eat by sucking in air and plankton and move by blowing air out.

Vegetation is blue-tinged green, brown or yellow. Sea level air pressure is too high for most human beings who therefore colonized an above-the-clouds plateau, High America, where the Swift and Smoky Rivers from the western Centaur Mountains join to form the Emperor River. Hercules Mountains are to the south.

Rustum has two moons:

the outer Raksh changes apparent size as seen from Rustum, sometimes appearing twice the size of Luna as seen from Earth, and raises tides in a lowland lake;

Sohrab moves fast enough for its motion to be seen, like the hurtling moons of Mars in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter series.

Three thousand colonists, transported from Earth in suspended animation, increase their numbers by both natural and exogenetic births. Little native life is edible so they grow terrestrial crops. Because the ecology supporting the crops is not yet firmly established, harvests are poor and most colonists must farm immense holdings with children transported to the Anchor village school in a publicly owned airbus. More scientifically oriented colonists become, e.g., iron miners or lowland explorers, competing with farmers for machinery and differing culturally, being more pragmatic and hedonistic.

The day-night cycle is longer than Earth's so Rustumites must be active at night although Dan Coffin wonders why they could not adapt to forty hours of activity and twenty of sleep. 

Public policy is settled by televisual discussion without formal government. Military defense is unnecessary and public services are voluntary but one elected official, the mayor, administers laws, presides in debates, judges disputes, oversees medicine and education and collects taxes.

Most sea level explorers must wear helmets but a minority who can live there comfortably settle and begin the colonization of the entire surface of Rustum.

How Space Piracy Works (And A Note On Moons)

Poul Anderson, "The Moonrakers," see here.

The Interplanetary Political Background
The Incorporated State governs Earth.
Malcontents colonized and terraformed Mars.
Mars mines the nearby asteroidal mineral wealth.
Martian misfits colonized the asteroids, where small private companies became the Chiefdoms.
Most of the asteroids became the independent Free Worlds.
Mars ceased trade with the Free Worlds, which resorted to piracy.
The Free Worlds sell pirated goods on Earth or on the Martian asteroids, then buy necessities from Earth.

Stages of The Piracy
(i) Asterite boats ambushed drone ships, cut their way in with lasers, disconnected the autopilots and appropriated the captured ships.

(ii) Drones were replaced with ships capable of accelerating all the way. Asterites, unable to intercept such ships, used spies to learn the homing signals that would make the autopilots follow the pirates' ships.

(iii) The signals were made top secret but then asterite agents in the Martian companies inserted course tapes that took the ships elsewhere.

(iv) All relevant personnel were replaced. Then some loading personnel planted time bombs in engine rooms.

(v) The guilty loaders were fired. Then the pirates began to scatter cosmic gravel in the paths of Martian ships. Some of the gravel destroys ships' engines, enabling the pirates to match speeds and also to claim that they are salvagers, not pirates.

The Problem
If armed men travel on the ships, then the pirates will come armed. Going out of the ecliptic plane would be too expensive. There is a continuing problem of what to do, as in Anderson's "Margin of Profit."

Moons
The Martian moons, far from hurtling through the sky, are "hardly visible" (p. 153) from the surface.

Phrases And Visuals

"Gorzun rolled black and white against a wilderness of stars."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 357.

I have been tracking the phrase "...a wilderness of stars..." through Poul Anderson's works and here it is again.

Like most people, I enjoy good films. Like some people, I also enjoy good graphic fiction (comic strips). Films and comics are visual, unlike novels. Works like "The Star Plunderer" lend themselves to visual adaptation. Manuel's mutineers have switched off the lights and the twice Terran artificial gravity in the Gorzuni spaceship. Some have naval zero G training. While Manuel melts the lock of the cage holding the male slaves, Reeves:

"...could dimly see the tangle of free-floating naked bodies churning and screaming in the vast gloom. A scene from an ancient hell. The fall of the rebel angels. Man, child of God, had stormed the stars and been condemned to Hell for it.
"And now he was going to burst out!" (p. 351)

As the captured ship, now named the Revenge, attacks Gorzun, the men of Sol see:

"...mountains...snow and glaciers and a churning sea lit by three hurtling moons. Blackness and cold and desolation." (pp. 357-358)

Anderson's descriptions are vivid enough to convey how well these scenes would look if drawn or filmed.

"World Of The Mad"

OK. We are now starting to read "World of the Mad" online. How far will this go?

Four senses:

curling purple mists and a floating face (sight);

rolling, quivering ground (touch);

rumbling, shifting strata and voices singing in the fog (sounds);

the viewpoint character, Langdon's, sense of direction (kinesthesia).

There are "three hurtling moons." ERB's Mars/Barsoom has two. Langdon is on a planet called Tanith where he sees what is described as a "temporal mirage" of a long dead city with winged inhabitants.

Tanith is an extrasolar colony where men do not age so that Langdon is another "immortal" character. In well-established sf jargon, Earth is referred to as "Terra." We encounter familiar echoes of other genre sf stories.

No doubt all will be made clear but, for me, that will have to be after a lunch break.

Visibly Moving Moons

On ERB's Barsoom and on some extra-solar planets in Poul Anderson's Technic History, moons visibly hurtle across the sky so we are unsurprised to read about yet another moving moon until we remember that this one is seen from the Bahamas:

"It was a beautiful night under a full moon that raced over their heads through the thin high clouds."

-Ian Fleming, "Quantum of Solace" IN Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (London, 1964), pp. 84-108 AT p. 106.

But, of course, this moon merely appears to race as the clouds move beneath it. I reread this passage almost simultaneously with Anderson's description of the winter solstice on Scotha when:

there are religious ceremonies and feasts;

town and castle blaze with light;

there is music and drunken laughter;

warriors and nobles swirl their finest robes;

drunken quarrels end in bloodshed;

mountains are "...white beneath a hurtling moon..." ("Tiger By The Tail," p. 266);

Flandry seduces Queen Gunli.

Another Moving Moon And The Milky Way

The Peregrine, CHAPTER III.

On Rendezvous, three moons are up and one is:

"...almost full and hurtling between the stars so that [Peregrine Thorkild Sean] could see it moving." (p. 18)

Thus, Sean has three shadows and one of them moves. Also above him:

"Overhead were the stars, constellations unknown to the home of humanity. The Milky Way was still there, a bridge of light, and he could see the cold brilliance of Spica and Canopus, but most of heaven was strange." (ibid.)

We have already found the Milky Way described as a "...ghostly bridge of stars..." later in The Peregrine. See here.