Niyorek II

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

Having condemned the Wardens, let us look back even-handedly at the Rangers whose technology, which could be used to educate and engage, is instead used to control and subordinate. Wells wrote utopias and dystopias. Anderson's account of Niyorek is in the Wellsian tradition of urban-industrial dystopias - or even the Orwellian tradition:

"...the outlines were brutal, bespeaking a spirit whose highest wish was the unrestrained exercise of unlimited power, forever." (p. 142)

That recalls 1984.

"The city went deep below ground, but only machines housed there, with a few armored engineers and a million convict attendants who did not live long amidst the fumes and radiation." (p. 143)

Technology can be made clean and its dangerous parts automated but here the fumes and radiation are maintained to dispose of the convicts.

"...a file of grey-clad men passed by, with one soldier for guard. Their heads were shaven and their faces dead. He knew them for convicted unreliables. Genetic control did not yet extend to the whole personality, nor was indoctrination always successful. That these men might be trusted among the machines down below, their brains had been seared by an energy field. More efficient would have been to automate everything, rather than use such labor; but object lessons were needed. Still more important was to keep the population busy." (pp. 144-145)

No, automate everything, end drudgery, use education, not indoctrination, to engage the population in remaking society. Do it gradually, if necessary, but do it.

"He reminded himself, somewhat wildly, that no state could long endure which had not at least the passive support of a large majority. But that was the final abomination. Nearly everyone here, on every level of society, took the Ranger's government for granted, could not imagine living in any other way, often enjoyed their existence." (p. 145)

Nearly everyone in every society takes current social arrangements for granted and cannot imagine living in any other way. Nowadays, this is, contradictorally, despite the great changes that they know have happened and will continue to happen. (I used to argue that the Berlin Wall could be pulled down and that Apartheid could be overthrown.) Society changes not, I think, when the majority starts to entertain alternative ideas but when their experience contradicts their expectations. Then, they question, act and become open to alternative ideas.

In Niyorek, or anywhere, those whose labor maintains the regime have the power to change it. The individual Director is, of course, individually powerless. His men have the physical ability to arrest or shoot him out of hand at any time but that does little good if they simply acknowledge a new Director.

A machine records every person in the western hemisphere. By thinking a code word at the mind scanner, Lockridge gets the machine to confirm a faked identity planted in the machine by Warden agents. Think what good such a machine could do if used not for political control but for public information and education.

Down The Shaft

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

In some futuristic sf scenarios, like Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry series, lifts or elevators are replaced by anti-gravity shafts where an invisible field gently wafts people up or down within very high buildings. The continental megalopolis of Niyorek has shafts without fields for those privileged or authorized to wear anti-gravity belts bestowing superhero-like flight.

Lockridge enters Niyorek "...at the bottom of human habitation." (p. 143) After walking among the unemployable who press themselves away from his guardsmaster's uniform, he ascends an upward shaft by gravity belt and enters the wide, clean hallways of the technician class. From there, he flies above roofs towards Director Brann's steel stronghold, surmounted by its ball of blue flame, guns on every flange, circled by warcraft, surrounded by swarming Patrolmen, with clean cold air and city sounds subdued but still only other towers visible further inland.

Before seeing the Director, who already knows that he must be an impostor, Lockridge is strip-searched and deprived of weapons and gravity belt. His task is to feed Brann information, then escape through the time corridor in the foundations of this tower before being psychoprobed. But how is he to reach the corridor quickly without a gravity belt? Easily - for an Anderson hero with Marine and karate training, in a milieu where prisoners never give any trouble. As two guards with energy guns drawn but not pointed at him escort him past a shaft, he chops one guard in the throat, grabs the other and falls down the shaft with him. The tower is so high that Lockridge, clinging to the guard, has just enough time to pound him unconscious, then reach down and switch on his gravity belt.

OK, I lost my lunch on the way down but that might just work...

Dirzh In 538 A.C.C.

See "Time Lag."

Poul Anderson's "Time Lag" is divided into five sections:

522 Anno Coloniae Conditae: is set on the planet Vaynamo and in space;

538 A.C.C.: is set in the city of Dirzh on the planet Chektoi;

553 A.C.C.: is set on Vaynamo;

569 A.C.C.: is set in Dirzh;

583 A.C.C.: is set in space near Vaynamo.

In 538
Bors Golyev and Elva have an apartment with three cramped rooms and a balcony, considered luxurious;

their single domestic servant can at any time be returned to, and replaced from, street level;

when Bors has company, Elva is confined to the sleeping cubicle;

Dirzh stretches toward the horizon in every direction;

it is mostly "...immense gray blocks..." (p. 121) although with a few shining steel and glass spires;

to the east, there are mines, chimneys and desert;

elevated roads carry robo-freight or client pedestrians wearing gray;

aircars carry patrons;

dust, smoke, fumes and vapors hide the streets;

an odor of acid and rotten eggs rises through thick air to the balcony;

in underground caves and tunnels, workers tend machines and criminal packs carry weapons;

Chertkoians who can afford to chain-smoke do;

their entertainment includes multi-sensory films and live combat;

the single large moon is visible but neon and thick air hide most of the stars.

Dirzh reminds us of Niyorek. (See also Niyorek II and Down The Shaft.)

Next post: Dirzh in 569 A.C.C. (Expect deterioration and decay.)

Journeys

Jules Verne wrote fifty four Extraordinary Voyages. Reflecting on recent posts, I have noticed how many very different kinds of journeys Poul Anderson recounts:

the intergalactic and inter-cosmic space journey in Tau Zero;

 
Jack Havig's long return from the Pleistocene near the end of There Will Be Time;

Manson Everard's walk through medieval Sicily in The Shield Of Time;

an alternative first journey to the Moon, also a supernatural journey to Yggdrasil, in Operation Luna;

and, in The Corridors Of Time:

a car trip from Copenhagen to west Jutland in 1964 AD;

a walk through a Jutish forest in 1827 BC;

a time journey involving transfers between corridors;

another that is just in and out of opposite ends of a single gate;

 
by Warden spaceship between hemispheres, by gravity belt through an Atlantic storm, on foot and by belt through Niyorek to Brann's tower.

 And now someone will tell me what I have missed?

Different Places

It has just hit me how many different places are vividly realized in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

Prehistorical
Avildaro, with the holy fire in its Long House, at the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Historical
The craggy, gloomy wilderness of seventh century Bavaria.
Viborg, 1535 AD.
The Lincolnshire Fens in "Harry's England," also 1535.

Contemporary
Copenhagen.
Denmark.

Future
A tunnel (only) in the twenty third century.
A palace and parkland in the Wardens' realm.
The megalopolis of Niyorek.
The tasteful buildings and green country of the time wardens' era.

- in just over two hundred pages.

A circle is completed as Lockridge and Auri return to prehistory:

"And the years flew past..." (p. 211)

- until they are accompanied by their sixteen year old son at the beginning of the new age.

Future Cities

Roger Elwood also edited an anthology called Future City although that was not one to which Poul Anderson contributed. However, Anderson described many future metropolises. We notice two features of the built-up area where Svoboda's departmental tower is located.

First, even from here, nature is visible. Although the tower extends as far as he can see:

"...through airborne filth...past the floating docks, on the world's eastern edge, he could see the mercury gleam that was the open Atlantic.

"Dusk was creeping over the planet. Spires etched themselves black against the surly red remnants of sundown." (1, pp. 8-9)

Secondly, the social division between Lowlevel and upper-level exactly corresponds to the physical levels of the city's architecture:

"Highlevel walls and streets began to glow. Lowlevel was a darkness beneath, and a muted unending growl of belt-ways, generators, autofactories, sparks to show a window waking to life or a pedicar headlamp or the flashbeams of men going in cudgel-armed parties for fear of the Brotherhood." (p. 9)

 

This same social-physical hierarchy exists in the megalopolis of Niyorek in Anderson's The Corridors Of Time.

Niyorek

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (New York, 1968).

"America..." (p. 141) must mean the whole continent? The Rangers do control the entire Western hemisphere. In any case, America is entirely covered by a ramparted, gated megalopolis interrupted only by deserts: concrete, steel, energy, ten billion slaves, windowless mile-plus-high towers linked by cables, tubes and elways, Brann's steel tower topped by blue flame, the sometimes painful noise of machines, spouts from a hundred furnaces.

Lockridge's identity, faked by the Wardens, is authentic enough to get him past the guards but clearly false to Brann, which is why he agrees to receive "Guardsmaster Darvast":

bred thirty years ago;
educated in Creche 935 and the Academy of War;
special service appointee in the household troops of Director Brann;
politically reliable;
decorated for hazardous assignments;
now returning by gravity belt through an ocean storm from a special mission. 

Darvast sounds like an interesting guy but, unfortunately, he is a fiction within the fiction.

Great Cities

York
London
Londinium
Paris
Berlin
New York
Seattle
San Francisco
Tyre
Pasargadae
Amsterdam
Bactra
Ys
Archopolis
Ardaig
Delhi
Lancaster
Preston 
Birmingham
Lichfield
Liverpool 
Baghdad
Uppsala
Nordyke
The Nine Cities
Gray and Centauri
Centauri (and here)
Nova Roma
Starfall (and here)
Pelogard 
Catawrayannis
Portolondon
Tridaig
Stockholm
Inga 
Rome
Trantor
Babylon (and here)
Roumek
Alternative Cities
"A Godland" - Chicago Integrate
Constantinople
Venice
Stellamont 
Northampton
Niyorek
Dirzh
Syrtis  

And two societies that do not have cities:

Ythrians
Freehold Outbackers

Future Cities

In the Technic History, on Earth:

"Everywhere around towers soared heavenward in fluid grace; this quarter of the city went back two centuries, to when an inspired school of architecture had flourished. White clouds wandered through blue clarity; aircars sparkled in sunlight. A breeze brought coolness and a muted pulse of machines in the service of man."

-A Stone In Heaven, III, p. 32.

Flandry in his roof garden sees white clouds and blue sky and feels a cool breeze so he is not completely enclosed or cut off from nature. His urban environment comprises high, graceful towers, aircars and machine sounds. Although it is all a thousand years in the future to us, it is two hundred years old to Flandry, living in his present.

In the Technic History, on Ramnu:

"Across a bridge, Dukeston reared and roared and glared."

-ibid., XI, p. 151.

This sentence conveys the dynamism of a city without, for once, delineating any details.

In The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge sees Niyorek:

"Monstrous it gloomed on the shore, and inland further than his vision went. Maps and diaglossa had told of an America webbed from end to end with megalopolis. Little broke that mass of concrete, steel, energy, ten billion slaves jammed together, save here and there a desert which had once been green countryside...

"North, south, and ahead, the city raised ramparts where nothing but a few wan lamps, and the spout from a hundred furnaces, relieved the lower murk. A sound came over the sea, humming, throbbing, sometimes shrilling so high it was pain to hear: the voice of the machines. On the upper levels, individual towers lifted a mile or more, the first dawn-glow pallid on their windowless sides. Cables, tubes, elevated ways meshed them together. The spectacle had a certain grandeur. They were not small-minded, the men who dreamed those vertical caverns into the sky. But the outlines were brutal, bespeaking a spirit whose highest wish was the unrestrained exercise of unlimited power, forever."

-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (Panther Books, St Albans, Herts, 1975), CHAPTER FIFTEEN, pp. 130-131.

Compared with Archopolis: higher and louder; not inspired but brutal.

After four million years of time travel, Martin Saunders stops in a city:

"...he couldn't follow the wild geometry of the titanic structures that loomed about him and they were never the same. The place throbbed and pulsed with incredible forces, it wavered and blurred in a strangely unreal light. Great devastating energies flashed and roared around him - lightning come to Earth. The air hissed and stung with their booming passage."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER SIX, p. 280.

Why does he think that this is a city? Not a voice but a thought warns him away.

"A billion years in the future there was a city standing on a plain where grass grew that was blue and glassy and tinkled with a high crystalline chiming as the wind blew through it. But the city had never been built by humans, and it warned him away with a voice he could not disobey."

-"Flight to Forever," p. 283.

After a billion years, it does not matter whether the non-human builders are our descendants or have evolved separately. This city is not described.