The Day Of Their Return, 1

Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 1, pp. 75-76.

In Captain Flandry...:

"Outpost of Empire" concludes at the bottom of p. 72;

p. 73 is blank;

p. 74 is a dedication "To Marion Zimmer Bradley, my lady of Darkover";

p.75 presents -

the title of a novel, THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN;
a quotation, JOB, iv, 12-16;
over half way down the page, the beginning of the first chapter of the novel, called simply 1.

Half way down p. 76, 1 ends, to be followed immediately by 2. Thus, 1 is less than a page in length. It presents a scenic description and an inner dialogue. Dawn gleams on a sea. A waterfall on a blue cliff beyond the sea is audible to the male viewpoint character, Jaan. The sky is white in the sunrise, purple above and violet to the west. Jaan feels grit beneath his feet. Thus, three senses are engaged.

Jaan converses with an inner presence called Caruith who:

claims to have returned after six million years;
refers to "Oneness" (p. 76) in terms reminiscent of the Last Supper discourse of John's Gospel;
but says that "...sentience will create God..." (ibid.), thus contradicting John's opening verse.

Jaan/Caruith ascends to the Arena to proclaim Oneness. A new message and movement are beginning...

Darkover

I have read none of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover future history. Comments would be welcome. There are superficial similarities to Poul Anderson's Technic History:

Terrestrials colonize extra-solar planets;
one colony is isolated and develops independently;
eventually, it is recontacted by an interstellar Terran Empire.

Some future histories focus on a single colonized planet:

Darkover;
Dune;
Anderson's Rustum, although see also Roland;
Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Barnes, although Niven's Destiny's Road is set on another planet in the same history.

This and the previous post focus on works that are not known by the current blogger - who will return to Lancaster tomorrow, hopefully avoiding high winds forecast for the western coast of the UK.

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.

Why Empires?

Why are there so many interstellar "Empires" in American sf? Notable examples are the works of Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Frank Herbert, H Beam Piper and Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Although James Blish's Cities In Flight features an interstellar "Hruntan Empire," the main emphasis of this series is on trade by the flying cities.

Empires resonate with much past Terrestrial history. The word "empire" evokes a realm both vast and powerful - although also oppressive and militaristic. It seems both implausible and unimaginative as a future form of social organization.

Poul Anderson wrote well about interstellar empires, then moved on to other kinds of fictional futures. "The Star Plunderer" makes the founding of the Terran Empire by Manuel Argos seem plausible and the Dominic Flandry novels make interstellar Imperial administration seem credible.

Greg Bear wrote:

"...Rome has been much abused. Lay off Rome for a while. And give me no spaceships in feudal settings...unless, of course, you are Poul Anderson, but you are most likely not."
-Greg Bear, "Tomorrow Through The Past" IN SFWA Bulletin, Fall 1979, pp. 38-41 AT pp. 40-41.

I agree that Poul Anderson made even feudalism with spaceships work. I can accept Niven and Pournelle's Empire of Man as part of a literary tradition and as the setting for their First Contact novel but sf must move on, as Anderson did.

Literary Comparisons

Appreciating Poul Anderson has involved comparing his works to those of:

William Shakespeare
Mary Shelley
Lewis Carroll
Rudyard Kipling
HG Wells
Olaf Stapledon
Jules Verne
CS Lewis
JRR Tolkien
Michael Moorcock
Brian Aldiss
Mark Twain
Edgar Rice Burroughs 
L Sprague de Camp
Robert Heinlein
Isaac Asimov
James Blish
Ray Bradbury 
Ward Moore
Jack Finney
Larry Niven
Jerry Pournelle
Greg Bear
SM Stirling
Peter Cakebread
Alan Moore
Neil Gaiman 
Mike Carey
Jamie Delano
Audrey Niffeneger
Richard Matheson
Tim Powers
Harry Harrison
Kim Stanley Robinson 
Frank Herbert 
Julian Holt
Dante
John Milton
Jex Collyer
Stieg Larsson
John C Wright 
Carl Sagan
James Elroy Flecker
Karel Capek
Percy Shelley
Bob Shaw
Kurt Vonnegut
Fritz Leiber
Andrea Camilleri
PG Wodehouse
Ian Fleming
Edgar Allan Poe
David Drake
Len Deighton
Philip K. Dick
Peter Frankopan
Agatha Christie
GK Chesterton
Clifford Simak
David Brin
Samuel Butler
Hal Clement
Harry Turtledove
Jane Austen (and Pride And Prejudice here)
Cordwainer Smith
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Mack Reynolds
Theodore Sturgeon
Elliot S! Maggin
Damon Knight
Jonathan Swift
Dan Brown
Barbara Vine
Arthur Conan Doyle
Edmund Cooper
Alfred Bester
Kingsley Amis
Arthur C Clarke
Hesiod
Homer
Virgil
Stanislaw Lem
Yuval Noah Harar
John Buchan

I had forgotten many of these comparisons until I searched for them.

Addendum, 5 Mar: In fact, the list has more than doubled since it was first posted. I had to be reminded of Kipling, then other names kept recurring to memory.

An Unexpected Sequel

If Poul Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, is read in chronological order of fictitious events, for example in Baen Books' seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga, then the third Young Flandry novel, The Rebel Worlds, is succeeded by two non-Flandry installments, "Outpost of Empire" and The Day Of Their Return. However, and completely unexpectedly, the second of these installments imperceptibly metamorphoses into a direct sequel to The Rebel Worlds despite not sharing any characters with it. Snelund is dead, the McCormacs have fled and Flandry has returned to Terra so what new characters have become active in Sector Alpha Crucis and how do their actions continue the conflicts initiated by their predecessors?

In the large format edition of The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume IV, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire:

p. 73, which could have been an internal title page for The Day Of Their Return, is blank;

p. 74 bears a dedication To Marion Zimmer Bradley, my lady of Darkover (that is another future history series by a woman writer that I have not read);

p. 75 bears a quotation from Job;

pp. 75-76 bear Chapter 1 which does not tell us where it is set and is packed with Biblical language (see On The Third Day... and Jesus And Caruith);

Chapter 2, beginning on p. 76, kicks off the action... 

Future Histories Overview

Some future histories I am unfamiliar with and would welcome input:

Cordwainer Smith;
H Beam Piper;
Marion Zimmer Bradley.

The ones that I do know divide into four groups:

British
Wells
Stapledon
Aldiss
RC Churchill (not well known)

Campbell-edited
Heinlein
Asimov
Blish
Anderson

An American sequence (overlapping with "Campbell")
Heinlein
Anderson (2)
Niven
Pournelle

Anderson's later future histories
six or seven

The magnitude of Poul Anderson's contributions is evident from these lists.