Samarkand

(The image shows the Road to Samarkand.)

SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), p. 10.

Count Ignatieff has "...boyar arrogance..."

Yasmini says, "'Veno vat...'" and "'...pajalsta...'" (The latter means "sorry" or "excuse me.")

Ignatieff is an initiate in the cult of Malik Nous or Tchernobog, the demiurge worshiped in Samarkand.

On just this one page, I have found these seven words or phrases that I wanted to google. I found no information for "Veno vat..." Of course I have heard of demiurges but what are they exactly? And Samarkand but what is its significance? Alan Moore refers to Malik Nous (or Taus) in Top 10. Czernobog shows up in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

If The Peshawar Lancers continues to be full of such interesting words, then I will have to start skipping past them to get on with the story.

Athelstane King's orderly is Narayan Singh - a Sikh surname. Poul Anderson's Ensign Flandry served briefly under a Commander Singh in an interstellar battle.

"The Russians" II

(This images shows Russian troops taking Samarkand in 1868, which is appropriate here because, in SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), the Russian Empire has relocated to Samarkand just as the British Empire has relocated to India, Africa and Australia, a decade later.)

The previous post stated two social consequences of the Fall but there was a third. I summarized what some of the post-Fall cannibals did but what of the others? Here again, there is a social distinction:

in societies where, for one or two generations, men hunted each other to eat, trust ceased and savagery resulted;

in Samarkand where the Russians ate their Asian subjects, the elite was horribly united by cannibalistic rituals which they subsequently continued in order to maintain their rule, thus generating not miserable savagery but sophisticated barbarism, helped in its war against civilization by an uncanny prescience that is intensified by an enforced inbreeding that could only be practiced by such a barbaric dictatorship - so maybe the two apparently disparate premises fit together quite well?

Changing Times

Poul Anderson's Rogue Sword (New York, 1960) shows the fourteenth century as a time of change. Is every century?

Lucas, the hero of Rogue Sword, is a transitional figure and a modern man:

the illegitimate son of a Venetian father and a Cretan mother;

 
learned the handling of boats from his stepfather;

learned Greek and Latin from mother's uncle, a monk;

at eleven, thanks to his natural father's family, was apprenticed to a Venetian counting house;

learned half a dozen languages in the cosmopolitan Republic but left urgently because of an affair with his employer's wife;

became a knight's attendant;

travelled with a Venetian merchant to the Crimea, Bokhara and Samarkand;

 
was captured and imprisoned by the Genoese but escaped;

travelled with a Tartar merchant and spent time in Cathay;

homesick, returned to the West but no longer felt at home there;

familiar from childhood with Catholic-Orthodox conflict, was influenced by the Cathayan belief in many (or no) roads to God;

 
found no reasonable answer to the question of what God wanted of men;

valued Oriental hygiene and Cathayan police procedures that prevented the planting of evidence after an accusation had been made;

gains an ambiguous social standing -

" 'If you were clearly of gentle rank...you're no simple commoner who must be punished for assaulting a cavalier. Confound it, Lucas, you aren't anything! Neither in birth nor nation nor way of thinking. Does anyone alive understand you? Do you understand yourself?' " (p. 146)

Maybe he is an American?

White On A Throne

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 27.

Anderson almost snuck this one past me. He quotes:

"White on a throne or guarded in a cave
"There lives a prophet who can understand
"Why men were born -" (p. 364)

When I thought to check here, I found that it was Flecker yet again and even the Golden Road to Samarkand. See the image. (There is nothing that should not be known. See James Blish's After Such Knowledge here.)

A Sense Of Adventure

There is a lot of action-adventure fiction out there but how much of it conveys a sense of adventure, like James Elroy Flecker's poem about the Golden Road to Samarkand?

Even if the premise is familiar - another planet or an alternative Earth - the treatment must be fresh as if we were encountering the idea for the first time.

Examples
(i) Poul Anderson quoting Shelley:

"The world's great age begins anew..."
"A loftier Argo cleaves the main..."

- before two Polesotechnic League stories.

(ii) Young Flandry when we first see him, shot down by Merseians but rescued and traveling on a native ship on Starkad.

(iii) Manse Everard arriving at the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene.

(iv), (v) and (vi) SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers, Conquistador and The Sky People. It is an adventure:

to live in the British Empire relocated to India;
to travel to a North America with no white men, including a San Francisco Bay with no Bridge;
to colonize a retro inhabitable Venus.

Sorry, folks. I am still mostly out of it with this cold and cannot sustain the usual rate of posting on the blog.

The Golden Road And The Bridge

SM Stirling, Shadows Of Annihilation, Advance Reading Copy.

In Chapter NINE, Flecker's "Golden Road to Samarkand" is referenced once again. (See here.)

In TEN, a familiar poem is quoted and I can answer its question:

"...how can man die better
"Than facing fearful odds..."?

He can die better of old age after a long, productive, peaceful life.

The Romans and Roosevelt wanted their citizens to believe that:

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

Wilfred Owen called this sentiment an "...old Lie..."

Rogue Sword III

I will be away from a computer for most of this coming week.

Rogue Sword has got into a long chase sequence as our hero and his mistress run away from the forces of the state mobilised against them by the hero's old enemy, a merchant of Venice. I commented before that I thought chase sequences consumed too many pages in other works.

A hundred years previously, Crusaders had sacked Constantinople, an event described in Anderson's time travel novel, There Will Be Time.

The political geography of Rogue Sword includes exotic place names familiar from poems by James Elroy Flecker: Famagusta; Cyprus; Samarkand.

Anderson's title Fleet Of Stars is a quotation from a Flecker poem. Quotation from Flecker is another similarity between Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman.

Sorry, folks. Just a few random observations before departure tomorrow morning.

More Flecker

We have found James Elroy Flecker quoted by Poul Anderson, SM Stirling and Neil Gaiman.

In Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars:

Sleep not, my country: though night is here, afar
Your children of the morning are clamorous for war:
Fire in the night, O dreams!
Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,
South to the desert, east to ocean, north to snow,
West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go
Where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.
-copied from here.

Anderson quotes these lines between DRAMATIS PERSONAE and Chapter 1, p. 1, but he has "my children" where Flecker has "my country."

"We travel not for trafficking alone;
"By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
"For lust of knowing what should not be known,
"We take the Golden Road to Samarkand."
-quoted in 13, p. 157.

This stanza was recently discussed in the combox.

Questions Answered

War Of The Wing-Men.

Nicholas van Rijn takes over the organization of a war so that both sides will realize the need for a truce so that he will be able to talk to both sides together:

"'Sit down, both you nations, and listen to Nicholas van Rijn!'" (XIX, p. 142)

How did the two nations become so opposed? And how did either develop in the first place?

See Diomedean Evolution.

Chapter XX answers a question that had arisen from reading Chapter IX and that was asked in Diomedean Social Developments. It is good to learn that the text is coherent.

Van Rijn survives adversities and takes the golden road to Samarkand. But there must be bones of dead merchants on other planets.

One Dominic Flandry novel shows us some of the later historical developments for Flock and Fleet on Diomedes. As the publicity for one Star Trek film said, "The adventure continues..."

A Solid World And A Waste Of Years

Rogue Sword, CHAPTER II.

I think that I am proving a point here, whether or not anyone else agrees with it, that the actions and adventures of Poul Anderson's historical novels occur in a solid world that remains invisible to the readers if they just read past all the place names and other local details as I used to do. All of the background information in these fictional narratives imparts a strong sense of place and time, including both physical and political geography.

To continue:

"'The quarrel took place beyond the Bailo's jurisdiction...'" (p. 45)

"'I suppose you know that Holy Church has forbidden Christians to sell their fellow...'" (p. 46)

- human beings? -

"'...believers. Therefore slavers are at pains to withhold the Word of God from their poor pagan victims.'" (ibid.)

That makes sense, doesn't it?

Lucas has traveled:

by sea "...to the Crimean port, Soldaia, which Venice maintained." (p. 47);
by caravan to Bokhara and Samarkand.

Soldaia has fought the Genoese colony, Kaffa.

Lucas has served a Tartar merchant and visited:

Sarai;
Karakorum;
Khan Baligh;
Cathay;
Sinope;
Anatolian emirates;
Trebizond. (Scroll down.)

He has been with many women including a Kazakh and Mei-Mei in "...the Heavenly City." (p. 48)

However, most of the women that he has known are:

"...nearly forgotten, lost in a waste of years and miles." (ibid.)

The phrase, "...a waste of years...," could be applied to Anderson's time travel saga, "Flight to Forever," but also fits as a description of a man's life.   

Poul Anderson And Neil Gaiman

In Poul Anderson's "The Only Game In Town," the Time Patrol must prevent the Mongol invasion of North America. Kublai Khan and Marco Polo are mentioned. Rereading that reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Sandman story about Marco Polo.

There are other parallels. In The Sandman, Shakespeare writes A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest for Morpheus. Anderson wrote A Midsummer Tempest about a parallel Earth where Shakespeare was the Great Historian, not a great dramatist, thus his characters really existed. That novel features Anderson's inn between the worlds where characters from different universes and fictions meet, as in Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End.

Anderson imagines a Roman in the reign of Augustus who speculates that the Empire might either conquer the whole world or, as then current policy suggested, stay approximately as it was. Gaiman shows us Augustus formulating the latter policy and tells us why he did it.

Both quote James Elroy Flecker, including "...the Golden Road to Samarkand." Anderson refers to and quotes Kipling. Gaiman described his Sandman story, "Hob's Leviathan" as "...me doing Kipling..." Kipling has an Indian Prime Minister who becomes a mendicant. "Hob's Leviathan" has an Indian king who becomes a mendicant.

High Treason

In 1965, the Impulse science fiction magazine published stories by five authors (see image) on the theme of sacrifice. Anderson's and Blish's contributions are almost companion pieces. Blish's story, "A Hero's Life," about the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth, was later expanded and re-entitled "A Style In Treason" whereas Anderson's story about a convicted traitor is called "High Treason."

In both stories, Earth faces a powerful alien enemy against a colorful interstellar background. However, Anderson describes a straightforward military conflict whereas Blish presents espionage and intrigue in a baffling, not fully explained, context of institutionalized treason.

I felt that "High Treason" presented a World War II-like scenario because:

an early passage describes the death in combat of a Japanese character;

a Morwa who conversed with the narrator before hostilities had commenced spoke with Asiatic politeness;

we see the American narrator in exotic locations far from home.

The entire story is reminiscent of the opening passage of Anderson's Rebel Worlds: a space navy officer in a cell in orbit, but this one is not rescued. The narration is his technologically recorded thoughts so it is not linear. We know that he has been convicted of treason long before we know what he did - disobeyed the order to bombard a planet.

Like a character in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, he quotes James Elroy Flecker's "Golden Road to Samarkand." I compared Anderson and Gaiman in a couple of earlier posts. See Between Worlds, Two Unaging Men and Poul Anderson And Neil Gaiman.

Against The Tide Of Years: Prologue

OK. We are starting to look at SM Stirling, Against The Tide Of Years: A Novel of the Change (ROC, New York, 1999), which I am reading for the first time. The text begins, as it should on p. 1 and concludes on p. 454 with a verse about "...the Golden Road to Samarkand," although I am puzzled as to whether this verse is from the poem by Flecker.

The novel comprises:

a two-page Prologue;
twenty six numbered but untitled chapters;
a five page Epilogue.

The type is small and there is very little blank space between the chapters. Nantucket is still in the prehistoric past. The Prologue is dated 2 After the Event and the Epilogue is 10 A.E. Chapter One begins with a date of 8 A.E., followed by 2 A.E. in brackets, but presumably this will be explained.

The Prologue begins by quoting a History of the Republic of Nantucket published in 57 A.E. This in turn begins by stating that the Event is an insoluble mystery "...like time itself..." (p. 1) Thus, we are persuaded to accept the unexplained premise of the trilogy. It is a fair comment on life, anyone's life, that time is a mystery.

In the Prologue, our villain, Walker, sells guns to Agamemnon. The time travelers are changing not just history but mythology.

Virtual Deities

The Stars Are Also Fire, 27.

A "Soul-quester" has, in virtual realities, heard Indra speak from the thunder, questioned Jesus Christ and felt Kwan-Yin's compassion. Is this blasphemous? People have dramatized Biblical narratives so why not an interactive drama? It would be idolatrous if anyone worshiped a simulation. Presumably the Soul-quester hopes to learn from virtual reality before returning to reality. He claims that he is:

"'...trying to understand and enter into God...'" (p. 361)

- not to make his own God.

Over the page, we find:

"White on a throne or guarded in a cave

"There lives a prophet who can understand

"Why men were born -" (p. 362)

- which is yet another quotation from "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" by James Elroy Flecker.