Precosmic Chaos

In Paradise Lost by John Milton, Chaos and Hell are different places whereas Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson equates them.

In the myths and doctrines about divine creation of the universe, does God create something from nothing or impose order on chaos? Did nothing or chaos precede creation?

In Genesis, chaos came first: shapeless, empty, dark and deep. The deep was water. God, in the Genesis account, did not create the water but did impose order on it. He separated the water above from the water below and moved the water below to one side so that the dry land appeared. Thus, he created a world with a sky, sea and land which he could then populate. The Flood was the temporary undoing of creation. The Norse imagined a Void but then hypothesized dialectical opposites located at the poles interacting to generate life at the center.

When Milton's Satan looked through the Gate of Hell, he saw:

"The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
"Illimitable Ocean without bound,
"Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
"And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
"And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
"Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
"Of endless warrs, and by confusion stand,
"For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce
"Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring
"Their embryon Atoms; they around the flag
"Of each his faction, in thir several Clanns,
"Light-arm'd or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,
"Swarm populous, unnumber'd as the Sands
"Of Barca or Cyrene's torrid soil,
"Levied to side with warring Winds, and poise
"Thir lighter wings. To whom these most adhere,
"Hee rules a moment, Chaos Umpire sits,
"And by decision more imbroiles the fray
"By which he Reigns; next him high Arbiter
"Chance governs all. Into this wilde Abyss,
"The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
"Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
"But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
"Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
"Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain
"His dark materials to create more Worlds,
"Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
"Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
"Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
"He had to cross. Nor was his eare less peal'd
"With noises loud and ruinous (to compare
"Great things with small) then when Bellona storms,
"With all her battering Engines bent to rase
"Some Capital City, or less then if this frame
"Of Heav'n were falling, and these Elements
"In mutinie had from her Axle torn
"The stedfast Earth. At last his Sail-broad Vannes
"He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoak
"uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a League
"As in a cloudy Chair ascending rides
"Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets
"A vast vacuitie: all unawares
"Fluttring his pennons vain plumb down he drops
"Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour
"Down had been falling, had not by ill chance
"The strong rebuff of som tumultuous cloud
"Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him
"As many miles aloft: that furie stay'd,
"Quencht in a Boggie Syrtis, neither Sea,
"Nor good dry Land: nigh foundered on he fares,
"Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,
"Half flying; behoves him now both Oare and Saile.
"As when a Gryphon through the Wilderness
"With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale,
"Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stelth
"Had from his wakeful custody purloind
"The guarded Gold: So eagerly the fiend
"Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
"With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
"And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes:
"At length a universal hubbub wilde
"Of stunning sounds and voices all confus'd
"Born through the hollow dark assaults his eare
"With loudest vehemence: thither he plyes,
"Undaunted to meet there what ever power
"Or spirit of the nethermost Abyss
"Might in that noise reside, of whom to ask
"Which way the neeresr coast of darkness lyes
"Bordering on light; when strait behold the Throne
"Of Chaos, and his dark Pavilion spread
"Wide on the wasteful Deep; with him Enthron'd
"Sat Sable-vested Night, eldest of things,
"The Consort of his Reign; and by them stood
"Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name
"Of Demogorgon; Rumour next and Chance,
"And Tumult and Confusion all imbroild,
"And Discord with a thousand various mouths."
-John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 891-967.

Compare Milton's account of Chaos with Anderson's account of Hell:

"I'd lose contact with Ginny and wander off again; or a lurch would nearly make us collide; or the intense gravitational field where space was sharply warped hurled our sticks groundward and tried to yank out guts and eyeballs; or a quick drop in weight sent us spinning; or we shot through folds in space instead of going around and were immediately elsewhere; or we passed into volumes where hyperspace was so flat that our broomspells didn't work and we must go through on momentum and aerodynamics - I don't recall every incident. I was too busy to notice a lot of them.
"We traveled, though, and faster than we'd hoped, once Bolyai discovered what tricks we could play when the time dimension was buckled. The deafening racket and disgusting illusions plagued us less as we got the hang of passing smoothly from metric to metric." (Operation Chaos, pp. 257-258)

Alan Moore partly follows Milton:

the endless seething chaoplasm is beyond Hell;

the Original Darkness, when conjured, arises from Chaos, advances through Hell, fomenting demonic civil war, and approaches the Light...

Two Intersecting Literary Traditions

Classical and Post-Classical
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
Prometheus Unbound by Percy Shelley
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss

That sequence forms a neat tetralogy. Aldiss knew what he was doing with that title.

Biblical and Post-Biblical
Genesis
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Perelandra by CS Lewis
A Case Of Conscience and Black Easter/The Day After Judgment by James Blish
Genesis by Poul Anderson

In the second sequence, the theme is creation:

God creates Adam and Eve;
Frankenstein creates the monster;
Maleldil creates a new Adam and Eve on Venus;
Satan possibly creates the Lithians and becomes God;
an Artificial Intelligence re-creates extinct humanity on the future Earth.

Milton retells the theocentric Biblical narrative.
Mary Shelley, quoting Paradise Lost on her title page, initiates the anthropocentric sf tradition which is rejected by Lewis who reaffirms the Biblical-Miltonic tradition.
However, the sf tradition continues:

Blish responds to Lewis;
Anderson is arguably a culmination of this tradition.

The question is: was, or would it be, right to (re)create humanity?

A Midsummer Tempest XIII

The first year the Duke's Playhouse, Lancaster, presented promenade performances in Williamson Park, the Shakespeare play was A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the Promenade tenth anniversary, they again performed the Dream. I preferred the first performance but, on the second occasion, Puck gave a memorable rendition of:

"Up and down, up and down:
"I will lead them up and down:
"I am fear'd in field and town;
"Goblin, lead them up and down." (Act III, Scene II, lines 418-421)

Poul Anderson must have expected readers familiar with the play to hear an echo of Puck when he wrote of Prince Rupert in A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975):

"His fist beat the cannon beside which he stood, up and down, up and down." (p. 145)

In this alternative history, Rupert was not only defeated but also captured by Roundheads at Marston Moor. He escapes with help from Oberon, Titania and a Puritan's ward, Jennifer. The Puritans interrogate Jennifer by sleep deprivation but she later wins one of them over. Again, some prose can be rendered as verse:

" 'And here at last a chance has come for thee.'
" 'To do what thing, my lady?' 'Set me free.' " (p. 154)

Later, she reflects:

" 'Oh, hard it is to use him heartlessly,
" 'And from its grave call forth knight-errantry.' " (p. 156)

With some humour but also with harrowing scenes of Jennifer pinched awake, Anderson vividly displays dreadful Puritan intolerance. When reminded that Protestants are tolerated in a Catholic country, one of Jennifer's captors complains that Catholics are tolerated there as well!

Anderson does not mention this here but John Milton in Paradise Lost describes Catholic monks entering the hereafter and ascending as they believe towards Paradise only to be blown around, and their religious symbols scattered, by whirlwinds in the Paradise of Fools. How can anyone be so certain, first, that there is a hereafter and, secondly, that he and his co-religionists will be well received and their opponents confounded on arrival there? Such unwarranted certainty, serving only to make its believers feel better about themselves, is with us still.

It would be an instructive exercise to design a hereafter where everyone (everyone) learned more than they had on Earth. Milton might receive a short taste of the Paradise of Fools, then be shown that there is more to life, and death, than intolerance and complacency.

St Paul preached a new message of universal salvation that made sense at the time to some Jews and many Gentiles, both master and slave. Hence, its success. "Blood sacrifice" resonated then if not with most of us now. Christianity, ie, Gentile Messianism, provided ruling ideas for three stages of social development: slave-owning, feudal and capitalist. It was endlessly adaptable. Pagan elements absorbed earlier could be jettisoned when appropriate at the Reformation although the ideas remained distinctively Christian. Hence, the intolerance of the Puritans who attributed their business success or failure not to aristocratic privilege but to inscrutable Predestination. If only England 1649-1660 had been a genuinely inclusive and tolerant Republic... 

Fictional Histories And Poul Anderson

We all know that Robert Heinlein wrote the Future History and that some other American sf writers have followed this model. Thus, there are "future histories," including "the Future History," which was collected as The Past Through Tomorrow.

Future histories are one kind of fictional history. Others include:

JRR Tolkien's History of Middle Earth;
CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia;
Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain.

Not unrelated to the works of Tolkien, a Catholic, and Lewis, an Anglican, is the Bible, a multi-generational narrative comprising every kind of literature including:

myths;
genealogies;
theologically interpreted histories;
historical fictions (Ruth, Job and Jonah).

Also relevant is John Milton's theological trilogy:

Paradise Lost;
Paradise Regained;
Samson Agonistes.

With the passage of time, a future history becomes an alternative history. Also, an alternative historical series can become a fictional history. Thus, SM Stirling presents:

three novels about the gradual conquest of Earth by the Draka;
one novel about interstellar and inter-cosmic conflicts involving the Draka -

and:

a trilogy about Nantucket translated to an alternative timeline;
a series about the Earth that Nantucket left behind.

Of the future history series that I have read, I think that Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is the most substantial and comprehensive. We should always remember the original model:

Heinlein's Future History
I A collection about technological advances, eventually including interplanetary travel.
II A collection about the colonization and exploitation of the Solar System.
III A novel about the revolutionary overthrow of an American theocracy and two stories about different aspects of the post-revolutionary society, including the resumption of space travel.
IV A novel about a crisis in the post-revolutionary society.
V Two stories about a lost interstellar ship mentioned in Vol IV.

Some other future histories can be summarized briefly:

Anderson's Psychotechnic History
UN
Solar Union
Stellar Union
Galactic civilization (query)

Anderson's Technic History
interplanetary and interstellar exploration
Solar Commonwealth and Polesotechnic League
Time of Troubles
Terran Empire
Long Night
civilizations in several spiral arms
a Galactic civilization

Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium Future History
the CoDominuim
the First and Second Empire of Man

James Blish's Cities In Flight
a novel about the discoveries necessary for interstellar travel
two volumes about Okie civilization
a novel about the post-Okie universe

Larry Niven's Known Space Future History
Too complicated to summarize briefly?

The Garden And The Tree

Operation Luna, 40.

We know the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis and the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasil, from the Eddas. Thus, a modern author incorporating such well-known locations into a new narrative must get them right.

CS Lewis discusses John Milton's description of Eden:

"Of course, the trees have golden fruit. We always knew they would. Every myth has told us so; to ask for 'originality' at this point is stark insensibility."
-CS Lewis, A Preface To Paradise Lost (London, 1967), VII, p. 50.

Again:

"...the unexpected here has no place. These references to the obvious and the immemorial are there not to give us new ideas about the lost garden but to make us know that the garden is found, that we have come home at last and reached the centre of the maze - our centre, humanity's centre, not some private centre of the poet's."
-ibid., p. 51.

So how well does Poul Anderson describe Yggdrasil? (Scroll down.)

For War Of The Gods, see Yggdrasil.

For Operation Luna, see:

Norse Myths In Modern Fiction II
Yggdrasil II
Under Yggdrasil
Mimir

Many Gods

(This post, copied from the Religion and Philosophy blog, starts with religion and philosophy but ends with fantasies by CS Lewis, Neil Gaiman and Poul Anderson.)

It is a premise of Paganism that all gods exist. A newly encountered tribe or nation worships either different gods or our gods under different names - Zeus and Thor are Jupiter - so that, either way, the gods exist. There is no difference in meaning between asking which gods are worshiped in Northern Europe and asking which gods are active there. Human interaction with divinity and divine interaction with humanity are a single process. Divine activity is (regarded as) experienced so the abstract question of divine existence does not arise.

Polytheist pantheons can be incorporated not only into each other but also into monotheist and even "atheist" world views. In Paradise Lost, John Milton identified Pagan gods as demons, thus as fallen angels, thus as rebellious creatures of the One God. CS Lewis, a Miltonic Christian, incorporated Spiritualism into Christianity by acknowledging that dead souls might revisit Earth to haunt buildings or contact mediums although they really should go somewhere else. Hindus can incorporate Christianity by recognising Christ as one of many divine incarnations.

In Hinduism, the many gods can be seen as aspects of one God. However, Hindu philosophical systems include Samkhya which is "atheist" as accepting that one material substance and many reincarnating souls are beginningless and uncreated. This kind of atheism denies the one God of monotheism but not the many gods of polytheism. The latter are among the many reincarnating beings.

Patanjali based his Yoga Sutras on Samkhya philosophy but wanted to include the widespread popular devotion to a personal deity in his list of yogic practices so he described Isvara, the personal God, as a special kind of soul, permanently free from reincarnation, not a Creator but nevertheless a God incorporated into an essentially atheist philosophical system - really clever.

Some works of modern fantasy accept as a premise of fiction, not of belief, that all gods exist and that all mythological realms coexist somewhere somehow. In CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy and Narnia Chronicles, Pagan gods are necessarily subordinate but nevertheless enjoy a surprising degree of autonomy. Narnia is jointly liberated by a Greek god and by the Christian god in animal form. That alliance is unique in imaginative fiction.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman graphic novels, gods exist because they are imagined, then worshiped. They fade away as their worship declines. In Poul and Karen's The King Of Ys Tetralogy, Mithras, the Olympians and the Three of Ys withdraw before the advent of the new god whose messengers, like their successor Milton, regard those earlier deities not as non-existent but as demonic.

In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, a traveller between alternative timelines finds one where the Aztec gods exist. In Anderson's Operation Luna (New York, 2000), the universe containing the World Tree of Norse mythology:

" '...was once closely entwined with ours, and surely with others. Or, rather, the crossing was easy from Northern lands. The belief factors...Christianity changed things. In a way, Beings like you, Fjalar, were left stranded here, like their counterparts in other universes.' " (p. 319) (Fjalar is a dwarf.)

So belief is a factor there too.

"...the old Norse...gods...'d withdrawn before the One God..." (p. 319)

Again, withdrawal, not non-existence.

Nergal And Others

Nergal is a god worshiped in Babylon in SM Stirling's Against The Tide Of Time and a demon in DC horror comics. See image and here. John Milton's Paradise Lost explains polytheism by stating that, when demons came to Earth, they not only tempted mankind but also masqueraded as all the pagan gods so that they would be, inappropriately, worshiped. Thus, Nergal as a Babylonian god and as a contemporary demon could be two parts of a single story. (Greeks explained Egyptian zoomorphic deities by stating that, when Titans attacked Olympus, the gods fled to Egypt and hid in animal forms.)

Poul Anderson wrote fantasies about Norse gods but not much about demons. The Devil's Game has a literal Devil or a powerful Devil-like being or a mental condition of one of its human characters. Anderson wrote a humorous short story about a scientist tricking a literal demon but I remember neither the title nor the plot. In Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys, Corentinus/St Corentin, the Christian minister in Ys, regards the Gods of Ys not as delusions but as demons, thus agreeing with Milton. If these Gods did exist, then some of their actions could indeed be described as demonic. The Sea God, Lir, is feared and appeased, not loved or thanked, and winds up destroying the city. In the Biblical narrative, the sea is the primordial chaos driven back by God at the creation.

The Ysan Gods, Lir in particular, have a similar unsettling feel to the demons in James Blish's Black Easter, although there are three differences:

the Ysan deities threaten the city, not the world;

they remain off-stage;

they are a Triad whereas Blish's demons number seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand, nine hundred and twenty-six.

The Following Morning: This post was not meant to be exhaustive but to seek out odd details like Nergal's dual nature and Blish's precise number of demons. However, for completeness, we should mention the demonic hordes in Anderson's Operation Chaos.

"Darkness Visible"

"The sky was absolute and endless black, though in some fashion we could see stars and ugly cindered planets, visibly moving in chaotic paths; they were pieces of still deeper darkness, not an absence but a negation of light."
-Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), Chapter XXXII, p. 252)

"The sky remained black, with its more-than-black crawling orbs." (p. 258)

"A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
"As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
"No light, but rather darkness visible..."
-John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines  61-63.

"For those rebellious, here their Prison ordain'd
"In utter darkness, and thir portion set
"As far removed from God and light of Heav'n
"As from the Center thrice to th'utmost Pole.
"O how unlike the place from whence they fell!" (p. 71-75)

Anderson and Milton address the same problem. Hell must be dark without any light yet those who go there must be able to see it. Hence, "...darkness visible..." etc.

Roma Mater II

Roman Pagans worshiped Jupiter whereas Roman Christians worshiped Christ. Simple? Well, no, a bit more complicated. In Poul and Karen Anderson's Roma Mater (London, 1989), Gratillonius, a British Roman Centurion, worships neither Jupiter nor Christ but Mithras. A Christian calls him " '...pagan...' " but he denies that he worships Jupiter... (p. 23).

It is interesting to read about a group who differentiated themselves from Pagans but who were not Christians either. The Andersons' Note says that little is known about Mithraic doctrines and that "...there is virtually no record..." of Mithraic rites. (p. 480).

We can now differentiate five perspectives on Jupiter. He was:

the chief god, according to Roman Pagans;
a lesser god, according to Mithraists;
a demon, according to Roman Christians and to John Milton in Paradise Lost;
a manifestation of the One God, according to some Hindus (one of "...My million faces...," according to Krishna in the Gita);
non-existent, according to modern Christians and secularists.

That is very comprehensive. It would be a tough assignment to imagine a sixth possibility. Where an answer is uncertain, people seem to have the capacity to formulate and live by every possible answer. The Christian merely tells Gratillonius that he will burn forever if he does not convert. This has to be the vilest doctrine ever imagined by human beings.

300-372

"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

The third narrative passage in "The Sorrow..." is headed 300. The numbers, ranging from 43 to 2319, refer to year dates. "A.D." is not added because none of the years in this Time Patrol instalment are B.C.

300 is historically earlier than either 372 or 1935 - quite obviously! - but it is also earlier in Carl's experience which was not necessarily going to be the case in a time travel story. Flashbacks are frequent in fiction. An author can open with the buildup to the climax, then backtrack to show how it all began, then conclude with the climax, as Anderson does here. See also John Milton's approach in Paradise Lost here.

Carl, based in the 1930's, visits Gothland through the period, 300-372. Thus, the opening passage, 372, is set very near the end - but not quite at the end. There is a long build-up to a devastating climax and the title is fully appropriate.

All We Need Of Hell

Hell is visited in:

Inferno by Dante Alighieri;
Paradise Lost by John Milton;
Heaven And Hell by Emanuel Swedenborg;
The Marriage of Heaven And Hell by William Blake;
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis; 
Magic, Inc by Robert Heinlein;
Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson;
Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish;
Inferno and Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;
Swamp Thing by Alan Moore and his successors;
John Constantine, Hellblazer by Jamie Delano and his successors;
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman;
Lucifer by Mike Carey.

Anderson's Hell is scientifically explained as a dark, chaotic, high entropy cosmos that his characters merely raid on a single occasion. A more sophisticated Hell, complete with feudalism and politics, is presented in Mike Carey's Lucifer: A Dalliance With The Damned, which I am currently rereading.

We contemplate Hell in poetry, prose and pictures.

The Culmination Of A Conceptual Sequence

The conceptual sequence that I propound here from Wells and Stapledon via Lewis to Blish and Anderson culminates in Anderson's Genesis, appropriately published in 2000, the year before Anderson died.

Genesis has:

a Stapledonian cosmic timescale;

the Miltonic/Frankensteinian question whether it is right to create human life.

Lewis had written:

A Preface to Paradise Lost;

Perelandra in which God/Maleldil creates a second Adam and Eve on Venus.

Frankenstein's monster quotes Milton' Adam. This is quite a literary sequence since it traces back to the original Genesis. "Go with God," in the words of Blish's Jorn the Apostle.

From GENESIS To GENESIS

It may be thought that the works listed in the preceding post are too dissimilar in content and quality to be anything more than a nominal sequence. However, that is kind of the point. A long odyssey goes to many places. Geoffrey of Monmouth's History Of The Kings Of Britain, a major source on Arthur and Merlin, begins by tracing the Britons back to Troy just as Virgil's Aeneid had traced the Romans back to Troy.

There are other long sequences.

A Torah scroll in a synagogue

A Bible on an eagle lectern in a church

A Koran in a mosque

A Granth in a gurdwara

Milton's Paradise Lost, retelling the Biblical narrative

fiction quoting scripture

The Bible incorporates the entire text of the Torah.

The Koran incorporates Biblical stories and the prophetic line.

Some Granth hymns were written by Muslims.

Poul Anderson frequently quotes the Bible.

James Blish quotes the Bible and, in The Triumph Of Time, the Koran.

 

Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

Prometheus Unbound by Percy Shelley

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss

Genesis by Poul Anderson

 

Anderson's Genesis asks whether it would be right to re-create human beings and thus, by implication, whether it would have been right to create us in the first place. Milton's Adam, quoted on the title page of Frankenstein, asks:

 

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me...?

-copied from here.

Lucifer: Evensong

The purpose of this blog is to appreciate Poul Anderson. This involves urging others to read or reread his works. A lesser purpose is to say, "If you like Anderson, then you might like -." Having drawn parallels betwen Anderson and Neil Gaiman, I should also mention Mike Carey, another British fantasy writer both of prose novels and of American comic books.

Lucifer Morningstar resigns as Lord of Hell in Gaiman's The Sandman and pursues an independent career in Carey's Lucifer. I have tried to convey the richness of Carey's imagination in the following summary, copied from Comics Appreciation (see here).

Some readers might share my own original reservations about reading fiction in which the central character is the Devil. Remember that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. Also, this is not Satan. The Vertigo imprint had to differentiate Lucifer from Satan because both these versions of the Adversary were simultaneously involved in parallel storylines. Lucifer is Nietzschean, not malicious.

A rebel angel hiding among the decaying alternative hereafters resists the new God, Elaine Belloc;

Elaine moves on the face of the deeps, ploughs Hell under, leaving only a small corner intact for the demoness, Lys, makes a place for her formerly dead brother in the new creation and has a farewell drink with friends before sinking into everything;

Lucifer leaves;

beautifully drawn art by Peter Gross and Ryan Kelly illustrates Lucifer's reminiscences about the War in Heaven and about his retirement from Hell on the occasion of Morpheus' second incursion and also his last meeting with the previous God in the Void;

art by Jon J Muth shows Lucifer in a Japanese Buddhist milieu.

Hail and farewell, Lucifer Morningstar, Prince of the East!

An Ancient Hell

"The Star Plunderer."

"They herded us aboard a tender after dark. It was like a scene from some ancient hell -..." (p. 330)

This hell is night, scores of houses burning like torches and guards kicking stumbling prisoners.

Later, on the ship, the three rebel leaders, having killed several Gorzuni, stolen their guns and switched off the anti-gravity and the lights, are about to free the male slaves:

"...I 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)

I was interested in the repetition of "scene from an ancient hell." Epic poetry, originally oral, relied on repetition of phrases like Homer's "wine-dark sea." (I think that some sword and sorcery authors also repeat phrases, e.g., about "ichor"?) Anderson practices repetition to epic effect. His phrase, "The fall of the rebel angels...," echoes another epic, John Milton's Paradise Lost.

What People Read

Question and Answer.

In the spaceship lounge, the Martian Dissenter is reading, this time not the Bible but Milton. I read somewhere that, in English Puritan homes, the Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost were considered the only appropriate Sunday reading. PL can be regarded as a prequel and intervel to the Bible. On the street in Birmingham, a Muslim propagandist gave me a free copy of the Koran. While I was sitting looking at this, a guy walking past told me that I should be reading the Bible because that is the proper book. When I went to practise Zen meditation in a Youth Hostel quiet room, I was joined by a Japanese man who seemed to be reading his Bible. There is a Buddhist story that the true scriptures are written on blank pages but people do not realize this so they are given something to read. In the beginning was the Word or the Deed?

Responsibilities And Rewards Of Kingship

The Merman's Children, V.

For duties, see King Vanimen. 

And another responsibility is added in the following paragraph. He is:

"...expected to be hospitable and openhanded..." (p. 28)

His rewards, before the destruction of their city, were:

to live in a hall instead of a simple home;

to have his needs provided when he did not want to hunt;

to receive splendid gifts;

to be highly respected by an otherwise irreverent tribe.

Only the fourth reward remains.

He does not seem to have had any counsellors.

In the Bible, the people of Israel want a king to be like other nations even though they are warned that he will exploit them. In CS Lewis' A Preface To Paradise Lost and Perelandra, kingship is inherent in the first unFallen man whereas, in Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, Aslan institutes human kingship of Narnia only because a human being has introduced evil into that newly created world. In this case, kingship is a stopgap measure.

Those of us who are republicans have to regard kingship as an earlier way of doing things. The Romans were the first to depose a king and establish a republic. We have a long tradition with ancient precedents.

Mars And Stars

Comparing Poul Anderson with SM Stirling led to discussing Stirling's Mars novel, In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. This led to discussing other science fictional treatments of Mars which in turn led to discussing other planets, the Solar System, the galaxy, the universe and the end of the universe. The universe and its end led back to earlier comparisons of Anderson with James Blish who in fact described Anderson's Tau Zero as the ultimate hard sf novel.

Tau Zero is:

sf because it is about an interstellar spaceship;
hard sf because its plot is fully consistent with the relativity theory and cosmology that were accepted when it was written;
a novel because it is a long prose narrative;
ultimate because it shows human beings surviving and human society continuing against the background of the universe.

This recalls CS Lewis' characterization of John Milton's Paradise Lost as the ultimate epic (a long narrative heroic poem):

Homer's epics were Primary because they showed incidents during the heroic age;
Virgil's epic was Secondary because it recounted a historical turning point, the founding of Rome;
Milton's epic is ultimate because it recounts Biblical history from before the Creation until after Armageddon.

Finally, I am glad of the increase in scientific knowledge and prefer to live in Anderson's universe.

Conclusion

The Dog And The Wolf, XXV.

The King of Ys covers twenty five years, beginning and ending on the Birthday of Mithras.

While exorcising Dahut, Corentinus, echoing the opening lines of Paradise Lost, says that Satan:

"',,,brought death into the world...'" (p. 501)

He did not. Does anyone still believe that the first human beings and all their descendants would have been physically immortal if not for an original act of disobedience to a divine command? Death was part of life before us and we are part of life.

There might be further reflections on rereading to the end of The King of Ys but that is all for now. Tomorrow I again visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

The Devil Speaks

The Devil speaks in:

parts of the Bible;
Paradise Lost by John Milton;
Magic Inc by Robert Heinlein;
Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson;
The Day After Judgment by James Blish;
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman;
Lucifer by Mike Carey (see image).

A demon speaks in Perelandra by CS Lewis but Ransom does not ask which one.

Milton follows Genesis;
Anderson follows Heinlein;
Blish follows Dante and Milton;
Niven and Pournelle follow Dante;
Carey follows Gaiman;
Lewis follows Genesis and Milton.

Anderson's Adversary is actively malicious:

"...the end of every hope and every faith..."
-Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), Chapter XI, p. 75 -

- whereas Gaiman's Lucifer, as developed by Carey, aims only to enact his own will unimpeded by God or anyone else. After ten billion years spent ruling Hell merely because it is far from Heaven, he rejects the Adversary role and goes elsewhere.