Not The Same San Francisco Bay

The image shows San Francisco Bay, FirstSide. On the Other Side, Tom Christiansen stares open-mouthed at the Bay with:

no San Francisco;
a town along the waterfront;
a small airport in place of the Naval Air Station;
no landfills on the shore;
long piers with fishing trawlers and small wooden ships;
cranes taking cargo to sheds and warehouses;
trucks carrying it to the highway;
no bridges;
Alcatraz with only swarming pelicans and guano;
fewer and smaller ships - schooners, barges, tugs, sailboats and fishing boats;
in flight, gulls, pelicans, cormorants, golden eagles and several condors;
a spouting whale;
sea lions;
a sea otter.

Adrienne explains:

"'...it's exactly what it looks like, only it's not the same San Francisco Bay you grew up with. Different...time line. A different history, two different universes existing in the same space and joined only by the Gate.'" You know the concept?'" (p. 243)

In Narnia, they would say that you cannot go there by traveling through space, only by magic.

Tom replies:

"'Yeah, you know I read science fiction.'" (ibid.)

And we know that that science fiction includes "Anderson" (p. 103) so Tom has almost certainly read Valeria's explanation to Rupert:

"'You can picture the cosmoses as lying parallel to each other, like the leaves in a book. That isn't strictly true, either; they occupy the same space-time, being separated by a set of dimensions -'"
-Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), p. 101.

San Francisco And Falkayn Bays

"Clouds were massing in the west, but it was still a clear night for early November. From the window where he stood, Michael Stefanik looked down, across the glitter of San Francisco and the darkness of the Bay, to those hills which enclosed the farther shore. They were strewn with firefly light, their own cities, against a windy sky."
-Poul Anderson, Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959), 1, p. 1.

These are the opening sentences of the novel.

For previous blog references to San Francisco Bay, see here.

"Nob Hill was more than a good address; it was seeing the great two-footed stride of the Bay Bridge, or the lovely curve men had thrown across the Golden Gate, or ships standing in past blue islands, whenever you wished."
-ibid.

For previous blog references to the Golden Gate, see here.

For comparable descriptions of Falkayn Bay on the colonized planet, Avalon, see here. (Scroll down.)

There is no direct connection between a contemporary detective novel and a futuristic sf novel. However, a real Bay on Earth and a fictional Bay on a terrestroid planet are comparable. Further, fictionally speaking, Avalon will be colonized in our future just as, fictitiously again, the events of the detective novel occurred in the 1950s. Thus, these two narratives could fit into a single timeline. In any case, we appreciate the descriptive passages set in such diverse periods and worlds of Poul Anderson's imagination.

Integrates And Languages

The Stars Are Also Fire, 5.

Lilisaire to Aleka:

"'You remember me telling you about my kinswoman Mary Carfax in San Francisco Bay Integrate, don't you?'" (p. 83)

So they have Integrates in the Harvest Of Stars future history as well as in the Technic History but there is a difference. Jim Ching lives in San Francisco Integrate whereas Mary Carfax lives in San Francisco Bay Integrate. Are these identical or is the latter bigger?

Such words or phrases are sometime, though not always, used to indicate that diverse texts belong in a single series. Alternatively, a terminological difference can indicate different series: English becomes Anglic in the Technic History but Anglo in the Harvest Of Stars series. In the latter, intelligent seals speak an adapted Anglo although with non-human sounds whereas the Lunarians, genetically altered human beings, construct an artificial language to express their psychological and cultural differences from Terrans. By contrast, the Technic History features various extraterrestrial languages: Planha on Ythri and Avalon, Eriau on Merseia etc.

Review of Perish by the Sword by Poul Anderson

This review of Perish by the Sword by AM Romer will be at the top of the blog for the next week. Newer posts will appear below it.

The outstanding thing about Perish by the Sword is that Poul Anderson has captured a particular time and place perfectly. It’s like a tourist’s guide to Northern California, 1959. You can see it, hear it, and feel it in the air. Here are the Berkley scientists in their labs and offices, the post-war tech, and Russia forever in the background. Here are the San Francisco Bay houses, complete with sunken lounges and after-work martinis, and the women with their cropped hair, their own jobs and their own sports cars. And here’s the bar, Howl, full of beat poets (of course) and groovy cats, and young men who’ll do anything for ‘the experience’. The sense of place and time he’s given us is awesome; it’s a gift, and that’s the joy of this book. But unfortunately, what is joyless outweighs it.

In an interview (find it here), Anderson explains how he begins to conceive of a book: he wants to say something about a particular topic – a philosophical concept or thought experiment, or an observation on the political and social movements around him, for example – and then develops a story around that. It sounds great for sci-fi. Arguably, the motivation at the core of all sci-fi is the question What if…? But this is where Perish by the Sword falls down.

It reads as though the author has made a decision to write a novel in the ‘detective’ genre, maybe as a kind of exercise, to see if he can do it. He has developed his plot points, the crime and the solution, and the elements of contemporary culture he wishes to include, and then – and only then – has he populated this plot with characters. It’s as though he has precisely mapped out all the moves in a game of chess for both players, and then carefully places the pieces on the board in their required positions, rather than letting the game unfold. The plot is enacted by the characters – it does not grow naturally from them. There is the strong sense that they exist mainly to fulfil plot points and genre requirements, whereas great characters seem to have a life of their own and are caught up in events which they or other characters have created. The result is that I can’t care about them. I don’t care if they live or die; they are items moved upon a game board because the author needs them to move. This results in a distinct lack of tension – because I don’t care enough to be invested, to worry about the wrongly accused or who might next be put to the sword.

Even their names felt carefully constructed, along with their background, psychological profile, linguistic habits, eccentricities of behaviour and interests. Yes, the name Trygve Yamamura indicates his ‘San Francisco melting pot’ heritage, but it will never get this detective into the canon. And Colquhoun (huge, fiery-tempered bloke with a suitably Scottish moniker) was slowing the pace – not because of his character, but because of having to read and then remember how to pronounce his name.

For someone who is a seasoned reader in the crime genre, the perpetrator stood out from the beginning. In fact, it seemed so obvious that I thought there must be a twist, and it was the thought of this that kept me reading… but there was no twist. By the end, when Yamamura gives a straightforward walkthrough of the murder and how it was done, I’d already been waiting some time for the characters to catch up to what I already knew. If this doesn’t happen quickly, it doesn’t matter how brilliant the writer is in terms of language or imagery – frustration sets in. Some elements of the denouement were a surprise, hinging as they did on the tiniest, seemingly throw-away lines and observations. But rather than coming across as ‘clever’, so that the reader has that rush of revelation, Oh, of course! Why didn’t I see it? that characterises the best Poirot stories, it felt almost mathematical: the clues so carefully scattered, gathered together at the end by the detective into a neat equation, but one I had no real interest in working out.

People love to solve problems. The detective story is a sophisticated series of problems and puzzles, and good ones test their readers’ knowledge of human psychology, as well as their familiarity with the conventions of the genre itself. Perish by the Sword was not so much a test for the reader as an illustration of Anderson’s ability to create a plot. The characters were figures made to fulfil the plot’s requirements: the detective, the victim, the suspect, the love interest, the murderer. And the overall reason for the book’s existence felt like it was an exercise for a very intelligent author in ‘writing a murder mystery’. Detective Yamamura occasionally showed glimpses of being his own person, rather than the author’s puppet, but in the end he too felt like a chess piece in an intellectual game. So despite my fantastic tour of Berkley and San Francisco in the late 1950s, I was left cold and, ultimately, bored by the novel – and by the characters who played out their pre-assigned roles and behaviours exactly as planned. 

AM Romer
August 2019

Fifties-Never-Ended Land

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

(From a window of his oval office, John Rolfe, Founder of the Commonwealth of New Virginia, can see Mount Saint Helena.)

Through the viewpoint character, Tom Christiansen, Stirling very effectively shows his readers how we might respond if we found ourselves in a place like New Virginia.

Tom stares open-mouthed at San Francisco Bay without San Francisco (here).

"Napa town ended with the abruptness Tom had become used to in this weird through-the-looking-glass place..." (p. 343)

Alice found that what could be seen in the looking glass, like the back of the clock on the mantelpiece, was the same as in her world but that everything else was wildly different - the clock in Looking Glass House has a smiling face.

"Meeting the father of someone you'd been dating was always a bit fraught, and probably more so here in fifties-never-ended land." (p. 365)

That phrase,"fifties-never-ended," is a good expression for the time warp feeling that Tom has experienced more than once.

We feel that we become very familiar both with this New Virginia and with the Angrezi Raj of another parallel Earth. And which would we prefer to live in?

Verbals And Visuals

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series deserves to be adapted into a visual medium although Anderson does his best with words alone. At the peak of the series, Everard and Wanda converse with a Danellian on a beach in 1990, then they are in a hotel suite overlooking San Francisco Bay, then Everard is in Harfleur (see image) and Paris in 1307.

Harfleur, the chief port in northwestern France, is also the location of Time Patrol operational headquarters. As ever, Everard makes the port real through several senses:

wavy light through the glass in the cames;
"...Asian-like clamor off the street below..." ("Death And The Knight" IN Time Patrol, p. 753);
cathedral bells;
smells (do we want another list of those?);
"...a sense of crackling energy." (p. 754)

"Asian-like" is well observed and evokes another continent. The sense of energy comes from "...a rookery of merchant adventurers..." (ibid.) who "...a few life-times hence...would set sail for the New World." (ibid.) - two more continents. And Everard has just come directly from San Francisco, 1990! What does that do for his sense of historical perspective?

Cities At Night

"Magnificence spread below the mountain, city like a galaxy of million-hued stars, bridges a-soar over shimmering waters toward heights where homes gleamed beyond counting. Wind boomed, full of sea. It was too cold to stand in for long. While they did, her hand sought his. When they took shelter in the car, soon she leaned against him and he put an arm about her shoulder; and at last, gently, once, they kissed."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART TWO, 1988 A. D., p. 99.

Lights seen, wind heard, sea smelled, cold felt, bodily sensations.

They parked in the hills, with the Eastbay cities like a galaxy of stars below them, San Francisco an island universe across darkness. She sighed and leaned against him. He wondered, dimly alarmed, why he had come here. 
-copied from 2,  here.

A less sensorial experience.

Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly are above San Francisco in 1988. Wanda is about to start Time Patrol training.

Robert Kintyre and Margery Towne are above Berkeley in about 1960. A common friend has just been murdered.

The two couples are across the Bay decades apart in different genres but possibly in the same timeline.

It is night here in Lancaster near Morecambe Bay.

On The San Francisco Bay Bridge

Perish By The Sword, 7.

Mike Stefanik:

"...nosed his MG onto the freeway, over the Bay Bridge and south. Air streamed about him. He could look up at the Detroit cars as if from a boat, shudder at a rear end like two Al Jolsons, scoot around and leave an equally horrible grille dwindling in his wake. Traffic grew thicker and noisier as he went, but that spiced the exhilaration." (p. 67)

Observations
(i) Stefanik looks up from one level of the Bridge to the other. See image.
(ii) I do not know what two Al Jolsons look like.
(iii) Thick, noisy traffic freaks me out big time.
(iv) I am learning the difference between the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge.
(v) I have caught up with my notes and can now progress rereading the remaining six chapters and fifty pages of the novel.

The Golden Gate Bridge

For the Golden Gate Bridge on the blog, see here.

For San Francisco Bay on the blog, see here.

Manse Everard and Trygve Yamamura see the Bridge;

SM Stirling's Other Siders see the Bay without the Bridge;Stirling's Emberversers see the beautiful structure of the Bridge rising from the mist while knowing that it will collapse in a few generations but meanwhile discuss maybe building an anti-pirate outpost garrison on the bridge deck or up one of the towers.

The Bridge, or alternatively its absence, is a focal point in more than one universe.

The Contemporary In The Cosmic IV

This time, "contemporary" = 1990.

"Light streamed through the Golden Gate. From their suite [Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly] saw cable cars go clanging down toward the waterfront, islands and the farther shore rising steep from a silver-blue bay, sails like wings of some wandering flock."
-Poul Anderson, "Death And The Knight" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 737-765 AT SAN FRANCISCO, THURSDAY, 8 MARCH 1990, p. 746.

But all is not as it seems. Everard must travel to France in October 1307 just before the suppression of the Knights Templar, a historically pivotal event. Anderson is restrained in his treatment of the Templars. They revere Abraham's jawbone and are not a front for the Patrol or for any esoteric magical or mystical tradition. Nevertheless, Anderson describes contemporary San Francisco, the setting of his three detective novels, before plunging Everard into yet another dangerous temporal mission, unfortunately his last to be written by Anderson. In Paris in 1307:

"'Let's go,' Everard said, and led them away." (p. 765)

He returns to his holiday with Wanda in 1990 but when after that?

Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Timeline

1989alpha A. D.

We learn that the Time Patrol second hand bookshop in San Francisco is in the Cow Hollow district.

The instruments on Wanda Tamberly's timecycle tell her that she is there although she is surrounded by wilderness. She recognizes Nob Hill and Russian Hill but they are covered by brush, not by buildings. Twin Peaks lacks the television tower. She has materialized on the surface instead of underground.

There is no:

San Francisco

Golden Gate Bridge

Bay Bridge

Eastbay cities

ships

aircraft

Oakland

Berkeley

Albany

Richmond

Golden Gate Park

What there is is:

"...the wind and the world." (p. 307)

The world without the works of man and, of course, the wind.

Wanda continues to think that she has arrived at the wrong time, not in the wrong timeline. But she will begin to suspect otherwise when she has flown east before the end of this chapter.

On Avalon: Falkayn Bay And The Hesperian Sea

San Francisco And Falkayn Bays

On Falkayn Bay

Another View Of Falkayn Bay

Five Senses Above Falkayn Bay

Livewell On The Wind 

Realism On A Clear Winter's Day 

Signing Off On The People Of The Wind... 

 

Technology And Democracy  

A View On Avalon 

First Island

 

See also: Who Knows Of Avalon? 

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.

Crucible Of Gold

Poul Anderson, Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959), 4.

Posting about Poul Anderson is almost too easy. Eating breakfast while planning to go out, I read a single page of Perish By The Sword:

"The Bay was full of white fog, growing molten yellow as the sun declined." (p. 30)

Two colors and a reminder of the time of day. We have had many sunsets on the blog. Is this single sentence worth blogging about? Maybe not, but it is soon to be followed by:

"The Bay became a crucible of gold. The Marin hills beyond were purple, joined to dim San Francisco towers by six Chinese brush strokes of bridge. Overhead, the western sky was a clear pale green." (ibid.)

Three more sentences: eminent blogging material. The two characters looking out at the Bay are going through a human crisis but that is standard novelistic fare. The crucible of gold and the western sky transcend human concerns - or can do if we see them that way.

Differences IV

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

See here.

This is not like visiting another planet. It is the same planet in another history. Tom and Roy have to keep adjusting to what is not there:

most of the San Francisco Bay area has virgin woodland instead of towns or buildings;

there are ranches, fields and hamlets in place of Silicon Valley.

On the other hand, scores or even hundreds of humpback whales move along the coast, surfacing, spouting and breaching. Gulls swarm around a beached fifty-foot carcass while half a dozen condors and at least three widely spaced grizzlies also eat. Does this paragraph belong on our food thread?

I can see that Stirling develops alternative histories in far greater detail than Poul Anderson did but I am not well read in this sub-genre. Does any other alternative historian convey the differences and similarities between parallel Earths in such concrete detail?

Meteoric Moods

Murder Bound, xvii.

Conrad Lauring likes the Californian climate but:

"He doubted if the climate had caused his moods to become this meteoric." (p. 150)

He catalogues what has happened:

Saturday, horror;
Sunday, the time of his life;
Monday, near death;
Tuesday, the happiest he can remember.

That is going to send a man up and down:

"Meteoric was the wrong word for his new temperament, though. Meteors fell. He kept bobbing upward." (ibid.)

When I was under stress, my feelings rushed up and down so fast that I learned to disregard them. Buddhist practice is nonattachment to momentary mental states. Either there is no permanent reality or they are not it.

"His sense of happiness was absurd in view of what he had undergone..." (ibid.)

On the contrary. Let us consider three examples:

(i) anecdotal;
(ii) scriptural;
(iii) fictional.

(i) Alan Watts, who:

gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area...
-copied from here -

- told this story from World War II. A man hears planes above and a bomb falling and knows that he is about to die. The bomb hits the roof but does not explode. The man has let go of his identity and remains free from it.

(ii) Gautama practiced extreme austerity, then, realizing that this was not the Way, accepted food, restored his physical health, sat in quiet meditation and realized his enlightenment.

(iii) Alan Moore's anarchist terrorist, "code name V," makes his assistant, Evey Hammond, think that she is being interrogated by several Fascist policemen when it is he alone that holds her head under water, locks her in a cell with a rat etc. When she refuses to sign a confession, she is told that she will be shot but then finds that she is free to walk past cardboard policemen and a caged rat back into V's Shadow Gallery. When he leads her to the roof in the rain, she is cleansed and liberated.

The View From Colletta Hall

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004), pp. 84-85.

Behind Giovanni Colletta's desk is a portrait of his father flanked by tall glass doors through which Giovanni sees:

a broad, balustraded terrace where malachite and crimson hummingbirds hover around gold, white and purple blossoms tumbling from man-high stone vases. From the balustrade, he can see:

gardens with trees, lawns, pools, fountains and terraced flowers;
the red-roofed town;
Settler farms;
plum, almond and apricot trees, green now, in June, but pink and white in spring;
vineyards;
breeze-blown golden grain with green windbreaks;
tall corn, soon to be harvested;
cattle and sheep in pastures with oak trees;
dark soil behind tractors followed by gulls;
the Santa Clara valley stretching to San Francisco Bay;
behind the Hall, redwood groves on low mountains.

Sounds:

vehicle engines;
wind in trees;
an ax chopping wood;
speech;
song;
hummingbird wings.

Scents:

the flowers on the terrace;
in spring, the fruit trees.

A proud sight but the ambitious Colletta is not content.

Another World

Poul Anderson, Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977), Chapter Three.

Having entered a magical realm, Holger Carlsen thinks wistfully of the world that he has left:

graceful spires in Copenhagen;

moors, beaches and wide horizons in Jutland;

ancient towns in green dales on the islands;

skyward arrogance of New York;

mist goldened by a San Francisco Bay sunset.

When you put it like that, why does anyone want to go to another world? (Holger didn't want to.)

Poul Anderson makes us aware of three groups who must do without coffee for breakfast:

Time Patrol members in the past (see here);
Holger in the Carolingian universe;
people living under "...wartime shortages..." (p. 24)

Holger's breakfast, served by Mother Gerd, maybe belongs on our food thread:

a bowl of porridge;
bread;
cheese;
ale;
"...a hunk of half-cooked bacon." (p. 23)

Despite the "half-cooked":

"Holger consumed the meal with appetite..." (p. 24)

What Havig Learned

(San Francisco Bay.)

See Within And Without.

Havig already knows that the mysterious Star Masters who come in fabulous engines to trade in ideas and knowledge have a subtle and pervasive influence that will lead to a new civilization or post-civilization beyond his comprehension but he does not yet know:

whether the Star Masters are the Eyrie, Stage Three;
whether their influence turns mankind inward on itself.

When he sees that the Star Masters are both human beings and extraterrestrials, he realizes:

"'Where else can newness, adventure, rebirth of spirit, where else can they come from except difference? The age beyond the Maurai is not turned inward on itself. No, it's begun to turn further outward than ever men did before!'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), XIII, p. 147.

A mechanic looks inside a car engine to fix a problem so that the car's owner can drive somewhere. We look within to fix problems so that we can better respond to the world without.

This World

Finding themselves in another world, some characters remember and appreciate this world.

Manse Everard recalls his friends, including characters from previous stories, and:

"...the austere cantos of Dante and the ringing thunder of Shakespeare; the glory which was York Minster and the Golden Gate Bridge..."
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 173-228 AT 2, p. 184.

In Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER THREE, Holger Carlsen recalls (I will rewrite them as a list):

the graceful spires of Copenhagen;
moors, beaches and wide horizons in Jutland;
ancient towns in green dales on the islands;
the skyward arrogance of New York;
the mist on San Francisco Bay made gold by the sunset.

While he is riding into Faerie, Holger remembers what reads like an even more fabulous realm.