Another Future Historian

For earlier references to Ursula Le Guin, see here. (It is a search result. Scroll down.)

Le Guin resembles Poul Anderson in that she wrote both a future history (here) and a fantasy series (here).

Recently, I invited comparisons of Anderson with several other future historians and sf writers:

Mack Reynolds
H. Beam Piper
Cordwainer Smith
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Frank Herbert
Philip K. Dick
Clifford Simak
etc

Clearly, Le Guin should also be on this list. My memories of reading the Hainish History decades ago are that:

it was uneven;
there was disappointment because an Enemy was referred to in some of the books but turned out never to have appeared in any of the books;
it felt as though the whole was less than the sum of the parts;
The Dispossessed, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Word For World Is Forest and "The Day Before The Revolution" were individually good.

Hyperdrive Oscillations

Mirkheim, VII.

I am only just taking on board the limitations on communication by hyperdrive oscillations. These oscillations are instantaneously detectable at about a light year but, for most of that distance, they can be modulated only into an on-off code. Voice transmission is possible only within a few thousand kilometres and pictures require even closer proximity. Ship to ship, Grand Duchess Sandra and a Baburite representative communicate by sound alone. 

This seems plausible. Technology has its limits and these sound like the sorts of limits that faster than light communication might have if it were possible in the first place. Less plausible, I think, is the instantaneous interstellar communication in Poul Anderson's later For Love And Glory.

Ursula Le Guin's future history has an instantaneous communicator called the ansible but the master of faster than light (FTL) communication is James Blish:

the ultraphone, FTL but not instantaneous;

the CircumContinuum (CirCon) radio in A Case Of Conscience, instantaneous;

the Dirac transmitter in Cities In Flight, instantaneous;

the Dirac transmitter in "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time, receiving messages not only from the present but also from the past and future.

A Conscious Ecology

Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars, 51.

On Earth, psychotechnicists develop AI;

the information is transmitted to Demeter;

the colonists incorporate not robotic mechanisms but nanotech and an AI into their terraformed ecology;

thus, the self-maintaining and self-adjusting Demetrian ecology functions like a single conscious and intelligent organism or like a planetary goddess;

(later, Terrestrial AI, saving its ecology by other means, values abstract mathematics and aesthetics and regards Demeter Mother as tainted by organicism;)

download Kyra quotes "'Vaster than empires and more slow...'" (p. 445) (see here), a link to English metaphysical poetry and to Ursula K. Le Guin's future history.

Today: the long drive home.
This evening: meditation group.
Result: less time for blogging.

FTL Communication

Ursula K. Le Guin coined the term, "ansible," which has come to be widely used.

I regard James Blish as the master of fictional faster-than-light communication and I relate Blish's devices to Poul Anderson's Joel Weatherfield and holonts.

Blish's Devices

Ultrawave

Waves of contraction pass along a caterpillar's body faster than the caterpillar's own forward motion. Similarly, pulses along a laser beam between Earth and Centaurus III move 25% faster than light.

The Dirac Transmitter in Cities In Flight

A positron moving through a crystal lattice is accompanied by de Broglie waves corresponding to the waves of an electron elsewhere. Thus, controlling the frequency and path of the positron causes the electron to appear instantaneously in another communicator.

The Dirac Transnitter in "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time

In a four-dimensional continuum, "instantaneously" means in the past and future as well as the present.

The CirCon Radio in A Case Of Conscience

The CircumContinuum radio communicates around the continuum but only in the present.

For similar devices in Poul Anderson's works, see:

The Ultrawave Series

Change, Actions And Information

STL And FTL

Space travel, and therefore also sf about space travel, divides into:

STL = slower than light;
FTL = faster than light.

(I think that Ursula Le Guin has NAFAL = nearly as fast as light, which would be useful.)

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization has one STL story, added later, and 42 FTL installments whereas his earlier Psychotechnic History has eleven STL and nine FTL.

In the incomplete TOR collection of the Psychotechnic History, STL corresponds to Volumes I-II and FTL is Vol III.

The STL period is from the aftermath of World War III to the beginning of the slide into the Second Dark Ages whereas the FTL period is from the founding of the Nomads to the evacuation of Earth in the Galactic period.

Starward!

Earlier Empires

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, Ythrians and Merseians get the hyperdrive from Terrans who invented it independently. However, it is known that there was a previous star traveling race and we learn that they were the telepathic Chereonites. How many such earlier races are there in sf? No doubt many. I think that there was a previous civilization in Ursula K Le Guin's future history although that is one that I have neither read recently nor reread.

We will refer to one other work by Anderson, four by Blish and one by Niven. In Anderson's After Doomsday, the FTL drive spreads like dandelion seeds among many intelligent species. It is not known whether it was discovered once or many times or by whom.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, there have been four great civilizations in the Milky Way:

I ?;
II the Vegan Tyranny;
III the Earthman culture;
IV the Web of Hercules.

In Blish's Jack Loftus novels, the Heart Stars empire is much older than humanity and the energy beings called "Angels" knew several previous interstellar civilizations in other galaxies. (Blish, like Anderson, goes intergalactic a few times.) In Blish's "This Earth of Hours," the Terrestrial Matriarchy comes into conflict with an ancient telepathic Central Empire whereas, in his "A Style In Treason," High Earth's adversary, the Green Exarch, draws tithes from six fallen empires older than man.

In Larry Niven's Known Space History, the now extinct Thrintun ruled the galaxy three billion years ago and, like the Chereionites, left a telepathic legacy.

Interstellar Communication

The Inter-Being League uses subspace radio.

There are subtronics in "Sargasso of Lost Starships" but a transonic communicator in "The Star Plunderer" and the rest of the Technic History has modulated hyperpulses whereas there is a hyperbeam in For Love And Glory.

There is an "ansible" in Ursa Le Guin's Hainish future history.

Compare James Blish's Dirac transmitter and other interstellar communicators. Also, Communication. For more on his CirCon (circum-continuum) radio, see ASK Haertel.

Literary References

An Author's Note after Poul Anderson's "Rokuro" (All One Universe, New York, 1997) informs us:

"The traditional No play is full of allusions to classic literature and quotations from it." (p. 151)

- and adds:

"You may be interested to see what was intended in this case." (ibid.)

Yes, indeed, since I missed all the references as I read the play. I will mention only some of them here.

"Triumph and tragedy..." (p. 140) is from Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. V. Churchill drinks in the Old Phoenix in Anderson's "Losers' Night."

"They grind worlds forth..." (p. 141) is attributed both to Johannes V Jensen and to Vergil's Aeneid. Thus, Jensen is mentioned three times in All One Universe.

"With stars at its head..." (p. 142) is a reference to Dylan Thomas, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," which, as Anderson points out, is cited in James Blish, They Shall Have Stars, the opening volume of Blish's interesting but shorter future history.

"'In Him the Way...'" (p. 144) is from Rudyard Kipling, "Buddha at Kamakura." Anderson discusses Kipling in an article in All One Universe.

"Into what wilderness..." (p. 145) is a reference to Tom o' Bedlam, which is quoted in Anderson's "Goat Song" and in the title of his A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

The Author's Note also mentions Archibald MacLeish, Frederic Brown, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness, Buddhist figures of speech, Pascal, haikus by Kyoshi and Basho and Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land.

Thus, "Rokuro" is a short but rich work.

Limits On Interstellar Communication

"The 'instantaneous' pulses emitted by a ship in hyperdrive are detectable at an extreme range of about a light-year. They can be modulated to carry information. Unfortunately, within a few million kilometers quantum effects degrade the signal beyond recovery; even the simplest binary code becomes unintelligible."
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 132.

However, the interstellar civilization in Anderson's For Love And Glory has an instantaneous hyperbeam. I remember that there was some limitation on the use of hyperbeam but not what it was.

In the Man-Kzin Wars period of Larry Niven's Known Space History:

"'Someday they'll miniaturize hyperwave equipment to the point where it'll fit into a spaceship.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Inconstant Star" IN Niven, Ed. Man-Kzin Wars III (New York, 1990), p. 211.

And, later in that history, Beowulf Shaeffer, exploring the galactic center alone in a spaceship, speaks to his puppeteer employer instantaneously by hyperphone. (Too easy.)

Anderson's Starfarers features an instantaneous and transtemporal communicator and Ursula Le Guin's future history has the instantaneous ansible. However, the true master of interstellar communication is James Blish:

his ultraphone is FTL but not instantaneous;
his CirCon radio and Dirac transmitter are instantaneous;
in one application of the Dirac transmitter, it receives messages from the past and future as well as from the present;
his Heart Stars empire and Angels also have instantaneous interstellar communication.

This is the kind of systematic treatment of a theme that we often find in Anderson's works.