Milky Way And Mach Drive

The Star Fox, IX.

"Heim ignored the mob scene on the 3V, rested his eyes on the cold serenity of the Milky Way and thought that this, at least, would endure." (p. 69)

The Milky Way will endure for longer than human mobs. "Cold serenity" seems to be a description of the Milky Way that we have not noted on previous readings. 

The Fox II leaves the Solar System on Mach drive. For a longer summary, see here. For more on means of faster than light travel, see here. (Scroll down.)

We have reached the end of Part One.

FTL III

The previous post, FTL II, was written in haste. I allow almost zero time to walk from Blades St up to the Friends' Meeting House. Now that I am back home under less time pressure, I am able to search the blog and find that I have previously summarized the space jump technology as presented in World Without Stars. See:

Dark Matter, Dark Energy And Intrinsic Unity
World Without Stars

So far, four FTL rationales:

quantum jumps
the Mach Drive
the superlight drive
the space jump

These rationalizations are ingeniously different yet all serve the same purpose of moving a ship through space faster than light.

The Psychotechnic History has a more conventional sounding hyperdrive. I do not think that it is rationalized. For Love And Glory (FLAG) has hyperspace and even "hyperbeaming," instantaneous interstellar communication. Does anyone remember whether FLAG rationalizes its FTL space travel?

Poul Anderson's Premises

In several works, James Blish's Adolph Haertel is a successor of Einstein. In Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars, Sugimoto and Yuen are later interpreters of the Schrodinger equation.

Anderson deploys an extraordinarily broad range of premises from which to construct fictional narratives and social settings. I will now try to summarize several such premises as briefly as possible:

interstellar teleportation and a dead star;
a predictive science of society;
cyclical history and hyperspace as quantum jumps;
an "irrelevant" warp drive;
the Mach drive (and here);
gyrogravitics;
superlight, civilization clusters and global genocide;
an accelerating Bussard ramjet;
the antithanatic, the space jump and an intergalactic planetary system;
mutant immortals;
a legendary city veiled from history by its gods (with Karen Anderson);
magic as technology and parallel Earths;
instantaneous time travel in a variable reality;
time-consuming time travel in an invariable reality (time corridors or mutant time travelers);
human-AI interactions;
post-organic intelligences.

Scientists

Science fiction refers to scientists, both fictional, like James Blish's Haertel, and real, like Einstein (see image), Dirac, Mach, Milne and Dingle (see here). A "Mach drive" is one of Poul Anderson's several FTL drives. Rereading HG Wells' The Time Machine (London, 1973), we find and take for granted this topical reference:

"'...some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly - why not another direction at right angles to the other three? - and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago.'" (Chapter 1, p. 9)

We accept Newcomb as we accept every other period reference in The Time Machine. The text is rich in such references, placing this novel firmly in its own period before its protagonist launches himself "'...into futurity.'" (Chapter 4, p. 25) Now, however, it is an easy matter to google the pre-Einstein Newcomb, who even turns out to have written a science fiction novel!

Anderson and Blish cite Einstein etc when rationalizing their FTL drives. Now Newcomb, expounding four dimensional space, joins this august company. It is quite a thing to be named in The Time Machine.

And Dingle...

See Herbert Dingle (Wiki).

Poul Anderson and James Blish address technology and its effects on society. We have seen that their technological speculations encompass various alternative FTL drives and that both referred to Mach for this purpose. Blish had mentioned Mach, Einstein, Milne and his own fictional Haertel. In his second Jack Loftus novel, he adds Dingle!

In Milne's relativity, the light speed limitation is a mere mathematical convenience;

Dingle found two Einsteinian errors;

in 2011, Haertel showed that Einstein's relativity was a special case of Milne's relativity which was a special case of Haertel's own relativity;

in 2030, an FTL drive is one practical outcome of Haertel's theory;

in the 2050s, Jack Loftus and colleagues visit the Coal Sack nebula and the Heart Stars.

A project would be to write detailed accounts of every FTL drive in Blish's and Anderson's works.

Endless Comparisons

Because I find it more convenient to read a book in the hand than an ebook on screen and because I prefer sf to detective fiction, I have easily been diverted from reading Poul Anderson's Murder In Black Letter to rereading James Blish's The Star Dwellers while comparing:

Blish's Haertel overdrive with Anderson's Mach drive;
Jack Loftus with Dominic Flandry;
Jack's mentor, Howard Langer, with Flandry's mentor, Max Abrams;
the Hegemony of Malis with the Roidhunate of Merseia;
Anderson's, Niven's and Blish's feline aliens (Blish's remain quadrupedal).

Other comparisons and contrasts are possible. Flandry's contemporary, John Ridenour, reflects that the universe produces sophonts as casually as snowflakes. Langer goes further, claiming that intelligences arises wherever it can. In Langer's period, the evidence has proved him right but he claims that this was expected. Is it?

For heuristic purposes, Blish's foreign service cadets are under an oath of celibacy whereas Flandry is anything but. In fact, Abrams plans to make Machiavellian use of his assistant's sexual activity: have the Ensign sent Home in disgrace - carrying military intelligence with him under the noses of the appeasers.

Blish's industrialist, McCrary, has got one of the energy beings called Angels to inhabit and control a fusion plant for him and wants to employ Angels to do this all over Earth whereas the Secretary for Space more prudently wants a treaty with the Angelic race or nation first. Would Anderson's capitalists be more cautious? CS Lewis (the character) knows that his friend, Elwin Ransom, receives visits and communications from extra-planetary angels and fears that Ransom is a beachhead for invasion. In the horror sf of Quatermass, any alien visitation could only be a threat.

Tomorrow, I will travel to Birmingham by train, carrying a book but not my laptop.

Another Means Of FTL

We have seen hyperspace as a series of quantum jumps in the History of Technic Civilization and have encountered the Mach hypothesis in The Star Fox/Fire Time. See here. Now, in After Doomsday (St Albans, Herts, 1975), we have a third means of faster than light travel (FTL).

The superlight drive is based on:

"The mathematical depiction of space as having a structure equivalent to a set of standing waves in an n-dimensional continuum." (p. 29)

(The "Standing Wave" is one of James Blish's means of FTL along with his Haertel overdrive, Arpe Drive and Imaginary Drive. Blish preferred to avoid the cliche of "hyperspace.")

In After Doomsday, where the waves interfere, a spaceship can move between them. In interstellar space, where gravitational distortion is minimal, interference fringes are sufficiently close that spaceships can skip most of the straight-line distance to their destination. Whereas galaxies recede as intergalactic space is generated, a superlight ship exploits zones where space is cancelled out - except that the field physicist winces at this summary by a mechanical engineer.

More interesting is the kind of interstellar society that Anderson imagines in this, and only this, novel. It is not known whether superlight ships were invented once or more than once. Explorers found primitives, civilizations not interested in space travel or those that were able to learn and apply superlight, which thus spread not like a cone of light but like dandelion seeds. Each space-traveling species deals regularly only with other species in its own civilization-cluster because there are too many for regular contact elsewhere. The galaxy is too big for any single Federation or Empire. No one can have an overview or know the full history. This makes sense and would have been a perfect premise for a series of novels.

Appeasement And FTL

(Here we begin to feature other The Star Fox covers.)

I should have mentioned in the previous post one other datum to be gleaned from the blurb of my copy of The Star Fox (London, 1968). The hero Gunnar Heim is described as one of those "...who know that appeasement will only lead to further Alerion encroachment...," therefore that the World Federation "...peace at any price..." policy is wrong and that a "...hit-and-run battle...," in the spacecraft, Fox II, is desirable. Regular readers will recognize this kind of political disagreement from Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation.

I will be interested on rereading the novel after several decades to check whether the aliens' motivations simply mirror those of human aggressors or whether they differ socio-psychologically to any degree.

In this novel and its sequel, faster than light (FTL) travel is by "Mach drive": if gravitrons can bend space through a closed curve, then a spaceship has no resistance to accelerative force and can go as fast as you want. (p. 71) This differs from Technic History hyperspace in which a ship makes many minute but instantaneous quantum jumps, thus generating an FTL "pseudo-velocity."

Here is another project(s) for Andersonian scholarship:

list and summarize all of Anderson's different means of FTL;

also list the different works in which it is accepted that interstellar travel must be STL and the various ways in which this is done.

FTL II

See FTL.

FTL? summarizes the quantum jump hyperspace of the Technic History and the FTL drive in The Star Fox. Fire Time, the sequel to Star Fox, informs us that this drive is based on the Mach hypothesis.

Another Means Of FTL summarizes the superlight drive in After Doomsday.

In World Without Stars, space has an intrinsic unity and all points are equivalent, distinguished only by the n-dimensional coordinates of the mass at a point. Artificially altering the configuration of the matter-energy field described by these coordinates instantaneously moves the mass to another corresponding point.

More later.

The Milky Way Thread

OK. I am gathering together the posts quoting Poul Anderson's descriptions of the Milky Way. So far, they are:

The Milky Way
Mirkheim Miscellany
The Milky Way From The Dronning Margrete
Finishing Ensign Flandry Again
Mimir And The Milky Way
Descriptions, Including The Milky Way
Three Senses On Aeneas And The Milky Way
 
Any relevant new links will be added below:

Windhome And The Milky Way
Night Sky On Aeneas
The Milky Way As An Icefall
The End Of A Novel II 
Curdled Silver
Supernova Ships And The Milky Way
Across The Milky Way
Bellatrix And The Milky Way
Cairncross And The Milky Way
Icy Sweep And Blue Jewel 
The Milky Way In A Stone In Heaven
Radiant Road
Battle Sun And The Milky Way
The Frosty Glitter Of The Milky Way
Argent Flood Of The Milky Way
Sebastian Tombs And The Milky Way Etc
The Milky Way From Van Rijn's Yacht
Gandarian Street And The Milky Way
Life On Nerthus
The Milky Way And Ginnungagap
Starting The Jumps
Shadow And Milky Way
Constellations And Conscience
The Winter Of The World: Some Details
Concluding Details, Josserek And Van Rijn
The Sigman's Spaceship
Anderson And Blish
Columbus' Egg And The Milky Way
The Sea
Across The Sky
Furniture And Stars
On An Asteroid
Death And Aftermath II
Nebulae And Night
Latin, Poetry And The Milky Way
Olympus Mons And The Milky Way
Guthrie On Demeter And The Milky Way
Home Brew And The Milky Way
Moon And Milky Way
Milky Way And Magellanic Clouds
The Winter Road 
Catastrophe At Hades
A Freakishly Huge Moon
The Farthest Star
Arrival
Mars And The Milky Way
On Mars 
Fenn And Guthrie
The Fleet Of Stars: Concluding Observations From The Current Rereading
The Milky Way And A Moment
Ghostliness And The Milky Way
"Gorgeous Flow" (Julian May)
Some Anderson-May Parallels
An Infinitely Cold Cataract
Orbit Unlimited: A Few Details
Rustum Orbit
The Milky Way On Rustum
Ghost Road
Milky Way, Steak And Revolutionaries  (SM Stirling)
"Home"
The Unexpected And The Cosmic Setting
The Unexpected II
Three Senses In Space
Frosty Cataract
One Frozen Waterfall
Cold, Curdled Milky Way
The Permanent Frontier
The Milky Way Spilled
Mirkheim, Chapter XIX
Mirkheim, The Last Chapter, Continued
Curdled Silver II
Rochefort And The Milky Way
Frostiness And Warmth
Galactic Vastness And The Milky Way
Cosmic Summary
Orichalc And The Ocean Of Stars
A River Of Silver
The Heaven
The Milky Way Cascaded
Several Details In The Devil's Game
The Milky Way; Falkayn's Family
A Beautiful Paragraph
Crowd And Torrent
The Milky Way In An Ebon Mirror
Lost To Sight

A Death-Horse And The Milky Way  

Bo Jonsson, The Milky Way And The Great Bear  

Another Moving Moon And The Milky Way  

Navigating  

Dayspring And Milky Way  

Pale Bridge  

Great Curdled Rush  

A Bit Of The Milky Way  

Steve Matuchek And The Milky Way  

A Tremendous, Upholding Arch And An Ice-Clear Galaxy  

Prayers And The Milky Way  

Valeria Matuchek And The Milky Way  

Escape Velocity At Night  

The Milky Way From The Mesa   

The Galactic Belt And The Moon   

Look At The Milky Way  

Cold Rush  

Undeclared War: Phase 2  

The Ice River And A Cannibal Star  

The Milky Way In The First Century

Kipple, Spirit Trail And Wind 

Lohannaso And The Milky Way

The Galactic Bridge 

Via Lactea

Wild Terai, Then The Milky Way 

Return From Space

"The Milky Way Soared Overhead."

Night On Aerie 

The Galactic Belt And Yet Another Mirkheim! 

Starfarers, Prologue

Nansen's Philosophy

NGC 5460

The Milky Way And A Tree

Pulsar, Bible And Milky Way

Frozen Fire And Glowing Maelstrom

Epiphany And Dread 

Galactic River

The Sea Of Space 

On A Comet 

Angels And Aurigeans

A Silver Band And More Weather

Pale River And Talking Wind

Ghosts, Gods, Time And The Milky Way

The Milky Way From Mercury

Milky Way, Andromeda And Sirius

Some Descriptive Details

Milky Way And Mach Drive

Armies Of Stars

River And Circle

Eagle And Silvery Cataract

North American Union And Diamond Dust

The Temple Of Earth And The Ghostly Glory Of The Milky Way

"Inside Earth"

Wanderer And Night-Bridge

Starting "Strangers"

Double Climax

(This cover: words fail me.)

Poul Anderson's "Marque and Reprisal" climaxes with two different kinds of drama: a Parliamentary debate and an escape from the Solar System. It also links the two dramas. The debate must be delayed because the French representative in the World Parliament will announce that his country has issued letters of marque and reprisal and meanwhile the privateer ship is hastening to leave the System before the Federation realizes what is happening and tries to stop it.

Mach faster than light travel is not hyperspatial but nevertheless has the usual hyperspace requirement that the ship be far enough out of a gravity well before the drive is activated. As in some other such works, our heroes have an exceptionally well tuned drive, enabling them to escape while the pursuing Federation vessel dare not follow. The ship begins its voyage while the legalities are still being argued back in Parliament.

En route to the orbiting ship, Heim flies up through storm clouds into a blue sky. I once had a meditation session that felt exactly like that: from unhappiness to instant, unforced and genuine elation. I knew then that there was a place above the clouds, that I was in it, that I would soon be back down beneath the clouds and that that did not matter.

STL Or FTL?

Poul Anderson made a point of imagining different means of faster than light interstellar travel (FTL) and this blog has recently mentioned three of them. However, with his characteristic comprehensiveness, Anderson also based an entire novel, Tau Zero, around the idea of slower than light (STL) Bussard ramjets.

In Larry Niven's Leshy Circuit stories, Bussard ramjets, flown at relativistic speeds, are used for trade between Earth and a few extrasolar colonies. In Niven's Known Space future history, Pak protectors use ramjets. Mutated Pak breeders, i.e., human beings, travel in suspended animation in slow ships and send equipment in Bussard ramjets which, at this early stage of Terrestrial technology, would destroy any organisms that they carried. Later ramjet models are safe but then extrasolar colonists buy the hyperdrive from a space-dwelling alien race.

In one (or two?) of his novels, Bob Shaw ingeniously synthesized the idea of ramjets with the idea of FTL. When ramjets pass a certain high percentage of light speed, they pass from the realm of FTL-prohibiting Einsteinian physics into the realm of FTL-allowing Arthurian physics. The curiously named Arthur Arthur formulates a theory that supersedes yet incorporates relativistic physics just as relativity had superseded yet incorporated Newtonian physics. Thus, Arthur is Shaw's equivalent of Blish's Haertel or Anderson's Mach.

However, the term "Arthurian" suggests that we are reading a fantasy, thus could be an auctorial comment as when Blish named one of his FTL drives the "Imaginary Drive."