Back To Senlac

Rereading Poul Anderson's works and reading some for the first time is an endless voyage of discovery. Many months ago, I posted about his time travel novel, There Will Be Time. One detail that I appreciated in that novel was the hero's birthplace, the carefully realized Midwestern town of Senlac with its river and the nearby Holberg College. In fact, I posted about Senlac specifically.

At present, I am reading, I am fairly sure for the first time, "The Kitten" by Poul and Karen Anderson and blow me down if this short story is not set in Senlac where the viewpoint character's wife commutes forty miles to Holberg College in order to complete her master's degree. I think that the novel also mentions the distance of the College but will check.

Still reading the story, I am not sure whether it is going to fit into the category of mystery fiction or of fantasy. There is an early cryptic reference to "...the other place..." that will have to be elucidated (The Unicorn Trade, New York, 1964, p. 122).

Since There Will Be Time is set in the timeline of Anderson's Maurai future history, the Senlac setting suggests a slight extension of this series, which can be collected in three volumes:

Vol I, the three Maurai stories;
Vol II, Orion Shall Rise;
Vol III, There Will Be Time and "The Kitten."

This sequence starts in a post-nuclear future and ends in a quiet Midwestern town in the present.

Anderson Versus Verne

Jules Verne is tedious! I might not finish Hector Servadac/Off On A Comet although I do want to check what he writes about Jupiter and Saturn. Even when his characters traverse the Solar System, Verne is mainly interested in their national peculiarities, writes very insensitively about a Jewish character and spends far too long, in the pages of a novel, telling us what is already known about comets.

I found one very minor and accidental connection with Poul Anderson. One of Verne's comical British characters refers to the Battle of Hastings as the unfortunate affair at Senlac. Since the fictional American town of Senlac is the birthplace of Anderson's character, Jack Havig, I googled Hastings and Senlac and learned, which I probably have heard before, that a hill called Senlac was a site in the Battle.

In literary terms, Anderson is a successor of Wells far more than of Verne. For one thing, both wrote English. Also, both wrote fiction from their characters' viewpoints, not semi-documentary.

(Note to Ace Books: this is not Verne's only interplanetary novel.)

Senlac III

What can I say about Senlac that I haven't said before? See the blog search result here.

In Chapter I of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Robert Anderson replaces "Poul Anderson" as the first person narrator and describes Jack Havig's birth in 1933. Thus, it will be some while before Havig becomes our adult protagonist. This is a biographical novel although it will not take us anywhere near its hero's death. However, by the end of the novel he will no longer be alive in the twentieth century.

The opening pages make Senlac a very real place and could have been the beginning of a contemporary novel. In fact, I would like to read a novel about other residents of Senlac who knew the Havigs but who never found out that Jack was a time traveler. I have mentioned before that I am fascinated by the idea of works of different genres fitting into the same time frame. Thus, Anderson's Time Patrol is - or at least could be - operating somewhere in the background behind the machinations of the highly secretive Swedish intelligence services encountered by the protagonists of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.

Characters whom we know to be time travelers if we have read other works could interact with characters in contemporary novels, the point being that the universe is bigger than we usually suspect.

Senlac

From the top floor of the county hospital in February, 1933, when Jack Havig is born, Dr Robert Anderson sees to his right the small upper-midwestern town of Senlac (a fictional name invented by Poul Anderson for his novel based on the deceased Robert's notes, clippings and photographs and on remembered conversations). The town was:

"...clustered along a frozen river, red brick at the middle, frame houses on tree-lined streets, grain elevator and water tank rearing ghostly in the dawnlight near the railway station." (There Will Be Time, New York, 1973, p. 9)

Ahead and to the left are hills, woodlets, fences, farms and Morgan Woods. Like Clark Kent and an earlier "superman," Philip Wylie's Hugo Danner, the time traveler Jack Havig grows up in a small American town, a "small ville." In fact, there is an explicit reference to Clark Kent. On a page that I will find when rereading, Havig remarks that a cubicle in a public toilet is a more discrete place than Clark Kent's telephone booth for a time traveler to disappear in.

I also intend to scour the book for data on Senlac, yet another of Anderson's imaginatively detailed fictitious locations. The Foreword has already told us that Robert's father, a journalist, became editor of the local newspaper in 1910. These Andersons were Episcopalian and Democratic. Looking ahead, I am reminded that there is a Senlac Arms which, by 1969, will have been razed and another hotel built on the site. Most details are forgotten when reading a novel whereas studying the text means retaining many of these details and also enhances appreciation of the author's creativity.

Fictional Places In Contemporary Settings

Authors

Poul Anderson

John Grisham

Susan Howatch

Dornford Yates

Stieg Larsson

Alan Moore

 

Places

Senlac

Ford County and the City

Starbridge

Reichtenburg

Hedestad

Hampton (really Northampton)

These are six that I am familiar with. I particularly appreciate Senlac and Morgan's Wood. Grisham's Rogue Lawyer is set in an American city that is so corrupt that it is probably wise not to specify its location and to refer to it simply as "the City." Such civic anonymity detaches the City from the hero and now and makes it more akin to a future city in an sf novel.

The End Of There Will Be Time

In the beginning is the end. On the first page of Chapter I of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), the narrator, Dr Robert Anderson, describing the mid-western town of Senlac, where the novel begins and ends, as he saw it in February 1933, remarks:

"The beginning shapes the end..." (p. 9)

and mentions:

"...a darkness which was Morgan Woods." (p. 9)

At the mid-point in Chapter VIII, the central character, Jack Havig, who had been delivered by Dr Anderson in Senlac on that February morning in 1933, enters:

"...a timberlot big enough to gladden Havig with memories of Morgan Woods." (p. 79)

Finally, in October 1971 and in the concluding Chapter XVI, Robert Anderson walks through "...a delirium of color..." to the Morgan Woods creek where he stands on the bridge watching the water, a squirrel and an oak, then returns home to be visited by Havig for the last time. (pp. 170-171)

Thus, Morgan Woods becomes a real place in the course of the novel and the lives of its characters.

Sean M Brooks wrote on this blog (see here) about Anderson's ability to write attention-catching opening paragraphs for novels. Here, I must commend the conclusion of There Will Be Time. A good concluding sentence or paragraph can leave the reader reflecting on the events of the novel or even wanting immediately to reread it. A now out-of-date British novelist, Dornford Yates, often had his first person narrator recapitulate several dramatic scenes in the concluding paragraph. In early secondary school, I read a juvenile adventure novel set in the Middle East. I have forgotten title, author and plot but I do remember that the novel ended with the viewpoint character leaving, looking back, seeing a light and knowing that, in her heart, that light would always shine.

In Chapter XVI, the narrator learns that the time traveling Havig and his wife will, in a distant future, travel between stars and probably not return to Earth. On the very last page, he speculates that, from an even more remote future, newly created time travelers traveled back to spread the time-travel-gene-bearing virus that empowered Havig to travel through time and initiate that future civilization. He concludes:

"I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder." (p. 176)

The Beginning

There Will Be Time, I.

The opening page of Chapter I:

recounts the birth of the central character, Jack Havig, in 1933;

begins to accustom readers to the narrative voice of Robert Anderson who had been described and introduced as a speaking character in the Foreword;

begins to establish the American town of Senlac as a believable place.

The opening sentence reads:

"The beginning shapes the end, but I can say almost nothing of Jack Havig's origins, despite the fact that I brought him into the world." (p. 9)

This reference to a beginning and an end resonates with the reference to spring and autumn near the end of the opening passage on p. 10.

We must remember that the Foreword had informed us that Poul Anderson chose to call the small upper-midwestern town Senlac and that he, not his informant, Robert Anderson, had called the people of a future Federation the Maurai. There should be a uniform published trilogy:

Maurai (the three short stories)

Orion Shall Rise (a long novel)

There Will Be Time

 

- although, for reasons explained by the author, none of these three works is fully consistent with the other two. Maurai and Orion... are two slightly inconsistent works of fiction in the timeline of There Will Be Time.

A Sense Of Place And Time

There Will Be Time, I.

I have posted a lot about Jack Havig's birthplace, Senlac, before.

"Senlac is a commercial center for an agricultural area; it maintains some light industry, and that's about the list." (p. 10)

A real-sounding place. These two opening pages of Chapter I could have been the beginning of a mainstream novel set in 1933. The science fiction starts on p. 11 although the reader does not necessarily recognize it as such yet. Eleanor Havig is distraught:

"'Johnny. Two of him. Then one again.' She choked. 'The other one!'" (p. 11)

Those in the know might recognize bilocation as a side-effect of time travel. When young Johnny/Jack travels a moment into the past, he temporarily coexists with his younger self. This is a very small beginning. The historical past and the future lie ahead of Jack and of his readers.

Places In Time

Places That Are Realized In Two Time Travel Works

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol Series

Everard's apartment

The Time Patrol Academy

The Pleistocene lodge

In Anderson's There Will Be Time

Senlac

The Havig group's main base

Manse Everard is often shown in his apartment. He is trained in the Academy in "Time Patrol" and attends an emergency meeting there in "Delenda Est." Wanda Tamberly is trained there in The Shield Of Time. Everard vacations at the lodge with Piet Van Sarawak in "Delenda Est" and with Wanda in The Shield...

Senlac, Jack Havig's home town, is realized in detail whereas his time travel base, although I have listed it here, is really only described telegrammically despite its being the main equivalent of the Academy in a different timeline. There Will Be Time is a thin and terse novel whereas the same narrative could have been presented and elaborated in a much longer volume.

Senlac II

By page 10 of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), the text has not yet informed the reader that this will be a time travel novel. We have probably read the blurb but, apart from this, we have not yet been told that in this narrative historical events will have a double significance. Not only do they affect human lives both immediately and later but also a time traveller can decide whether to revisit or shun them.

However, Anderson which here can mean either the author Poul or the narrator Robert, prepares us for what is to come by carefully delineating the historical period of the early 1930's when the time traveller Jack Havig is born:

a worldwide depression;
the Japanese conquest of Manchuria;
a bonus march on Washington;
the Lindbergh kidnapping;
Hitler Chancellor of Germany;
a new US President due to take office;
Prohibition about to be ended;
for local colour, "...springtime in these parts is as lovely as our autumn." (p. 10)

A different era, although Havig can revisit it - but will he want to? If this novel were written by Jack Finney, then there would be no doubt. The protagonist would be strongly motivated by nostalgia for this or an earlier period. Anderson's characters differ from Finney's and from each other. In a very different time travel scenario, one Time Patrolman says, of Victorian London:

"I'd like to have lived here..." (1)

- and, when his colleague asks:

"Yeah? With their medicine and dentistry?" (1)

defiantly replies:

"And no bombs falling." (1)

(This character's fiancee had died in an air raid in 1944.)

Much later, both in history and in the characters' lives, the colleague thinks, of his own birth period:

 "The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return." (2)

But why not return sometimes? I would.

Back to Havig's birthplace:

"Senlac is a commercial center for an agricultural area..." (p. 10)

with "...some light industry..." and a big Rotary Club. Robert and Kate Anderson's friends are her father (a local banker), the public librarian, professors and their wives from Holberg College forty miles away and New Englanders Tom and Eleanor Havig who attend the local church as the only way to keep Tom's high school science teaching job which pays so little that he must supplement his income with a summer job in creamery quality control. A teacher needing a summer job? Again, a different era (I hope).

Robert drives his Marmon down Union St to Elm to visit Eleanor who has panicked because Jack disappeared when she dropped him in surprise at hearing, then seeing, another baby crying in his crib. The baby in the crib is indeed Jack so she must have hallucinated...

The reader who has skipped the blurb might begin to suspect time travel and circular causality. When dropped into the crib, the baby time travelled a few minutes into the past and screamed, thus causing his mother to carry him into the bedroom and drop him in surprise. The novel will present several intricate elaborations of this paradox.

(1) Anderson, Poul, Time Patrol, New York, 2006, p. 28.
(2) Anderson, Poul, The Shield Of Time, New York, 1990, p. 178.   

The Chronology Of the End Of There Will Be Time

There Will Be Time.

April 12, 1970. Jack Havig visits Robert Anderson in Senlac, bringing Leonce for the first time. Anderson advises them how to organize against the Eyrie. (Chapter XIV.)

April 19, 1970 (approximately). Havig phones Anderson. (XIV.)

March, 1971. Havig and Leonce briefly visit Anderson and report progress. (XIV.)

Sunday October 31, 1971. Havig and Leonce visit Anderson for the last time and report victory. Leonce tells Anderson that he is "'...good for a fair while yet!'" (p. 173) (XVI.)

October, 1972. Anderson narrates the concluding chapter, XVI, of There Will Be Time. (XVI.)

Late 1972. Robert Anderson dies. (Foreword)

1973. Poul Anderson publishes There Will Be Time.

Chapter XV describes victory over the Eyrie and ends with dialogue about the victory between Anderson, Havig and Leonce which therefore properly belongs in XVI when Anderson learns of the victory for the first time.

Three Novels And Three Short Stories

Three Detective Novels By Poul Anderson
Perish By The Sword
Murder In Black Letter
Murder Bound

Three Short Stories By Poul And Karen Anderson Collected In The Unicorn Trade
"Dead Phone"
"The Kitten"
"Single Jeopardy"

The three novels and the first short story star the San Francisco detective, Trygve Yamamura. The novels hint at supernaturalism whereas the short story ends by affirming it.

The first novel features a Metallurgic Laboratories company. "Single Jeopardy," published in Hitchcock's, is a murder story set in San Francisco about the two founders of a Metallurgical Research Laboratory, one of whom shares a surname with a character in the third novel.

"The Kitten," which ends by affirming the supernatural, is set in the fictitious town of Senlac, which also features in Poul Anderson's science fiction novel, There Will Be Time.

1951

I was two years old. George VI was still King of England. Our family had not yet moved from Whitehaven, where my father grew up, to Penrith, my equivalent of Smallville or Senlac.

Robert Anderson, the first person narrator of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, summarizes 1951 for us and I will post more on this when I have finished running around Lancaster on other business.

Truman was President. Also in the news were:

Alger Hiss;
Owen Lattimore;
Judith Coplon;
Morton Sobell;
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg;
Joseph McCarthy.

The Korean War was happening. The Russians had got the atomic bomb. Television was an innovation. A millionaire might finance space flight in the next century. Computers were few, large and expensive with blinking lights. There was smog in LA and sometimes in London.

Happier days?

Time Travellers In New York Or: Some Advantages Of Time Travel

There Will be Time, VI.

Jack Havig:

"...no longer dwelt in Senlac, but made his headquarters in New York - a post-office box in the present, a sumptuous apartment in the 1890's, financed by the sale of gold he bought after this was again made legal and carried downtime. He did come back for visits, though." (p.56)

When Manse Everard and Carl Farness confer in Everard's New York apartment, Everard says:

"'...let's go eat. We'll need a change of clothes but it'll be worth the trouble. I know a local saloon, back in the eighteen-nineties, that sets out a magnificent free lunch.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 362.

Living in one place in two or more times. Far out.

Many eating places have closed in Lancaster since 1973. Our King's Arms Hotel has suddenly been seized by bailiffs after a four hundred year history. With time travel, we would still be able to eat in all of those places. We would also be able to meet someone who has died as he sits in the Park without our telling him that we were from his future. The possibilities, even if travel is confined to within a single lifetime, are staggering. But I do not imagine that anyone is really doing this.

Three Senses And The Widowmaker

There Will Be Time, I.

"...we stood on the Stockton's screened porch. Lighted windows and buzzing conversation at our backs didn't blot out a full moon above the chapel of Holberg College, or the sound of crickets through a warm and green-odorous dark." (p. 16)

A detailed description appealing to three of the senses.

Robert Anderson thinks that Tom Havig, a thirty-plus year old science teacher, could have served his country better by staying at home during World War II:

"But the crusade had been preached, the wild geese were flying, the widowmaker whistled beyond the safe dull thresholds of Senlac." (ibid.)

Evocative language, recalling Kipling:

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

-copied from here.

Two evocative passages from a single page.

1970

There Will Be Time, XIV.

See:

1970

1970-1973

1970: In the same year when young Jack Havig is in Berkeley, the older Jack Havig and his partner, Leonce, visit Robert Anderson in Senlac. In 1951, young Jack had told this Anderson (not ours) about his experiences in Berkeley. Now the older Havig will try to get some discrete confidential help from what Anderson calls:

"'...good, responsible scholars at Berkeley!'" (p. 153)

No doubt that word, "responsible," carries political overtones! But never mind. What matters here is that Havig is starting to get academic and organizational help in setting up his anti-Eyrie time travel group.

Anderson meets Leonce, his first and only time traveller from the future or indeed from any other time. That freaks him. Poul Anderson, who will fictionalize Robert Anderson's notes, cannot have such an encounter.

I am rereading a comic book by Elliot S. Maggin in which Clark Kent meets a woman whom he knows to be from the twenty-ninth century because he has already met her in a prose novel also by Maggin. The republic of letters (and sometimes also of sequential art) is one.

Not A Telephone Booth

In an earlier post, Senlac, I wrote:

"On a page that I will find when rereading, Havig remarks that a cubicle in a public toilet is a more discrete place than Clark Kent's telephone booth for a time traveler to disappear in."

I made the same remark in different words in Poul Anderson On Comics.

What Poul Anderson in fact wrote was:

"'Know where the best place usually is for unnoticed chronokinesis in a modern city? Not Superman's telephone booth. A public lavatory stall. Real romantic, huh?'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), X, p. 105.

In the first Superman film starring Christopher Reeve, Clark found that a public telephone booth was too small and instead used a revolving door at superspeed.

See also Superman In Public Consciousness And Popular Culture.

Three Clues To Time Travel

(It is snowing here so why not blog?)

There Will Be Time, I.

Jack Havig's distraught mother:

"'Johnny. Two of him. Then one again...The other one!'" (p. 11)

An sf reader should be able to understand that.

Eleanor Havig again:

"'You don't realize how often he disappears.'" (p. 12)

After a day-long disappearance, a man with face hidden by a hat and topcoat returns Jack to his parents, then apparently vanishes while Tom Havig embraces his son.

Title and blurb have already told us that the novel is about time travel but we should forget that and appreciate how the text introduces the concept.

Jack growing up in Senlac is like Clark Kent growing up in Smallville and Philip Wylie's Hugo Danner growing up in a small Colorado town. Both Jack and Clark have a close friend called Pete. Pete Ross accidentally learns Clark's secret whereas Pete Dunbar merely hears disguised bragging from Jack.

Spooks And Serial Killers

In There Will Be Time, Poul Anderson spends an entire page beautifully describing one 31 October day in Senlac. Robert Anderson expects "...little spooks..." (XVI, p. 170) at his door.

In SM Stirling's Shadows Of Falling Night, Harvey Ledbetter reflects that Turkey swarms with metaphorical spooks which will be joined by literal spooks when the Council of Shadows meets there. (CHAPTER THREE, p. 31)

Ellen Breze describes a Shadowspawn gathering as "'...the serial killer's convention...'" (CHAPTER FIVE, p. 67)

Is this a reference to Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Doll's House? (see image and here.)

(There may be a proofreading point in that last quotation.)

Three Short Novels About Time

The Time Machine by HG Wells, There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson and The Quincunx Of Time by James Blish are three short novels about time. There Will Be Time is linked to Anderson's Maurai future history and The Quincunx Of Time is part of Blish's Haertel Scholium (see here) whereas The Time Machine is sui generis.

That There Will Be Time is brief but concentrated is demonstrated by the fact that I write innumerable posts each summarizing an entirely different aspect of the text. We discuss:

FDR;
the 1960s;
the fictional town of Senlac;
Elizabethan London;
other historical periods visited by Havig;
the fictional future;
the growth of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century;
different imaginary means of time travel;
Anderson's descriptions of nature -

- and probably more. Rereading, I have reached p. 92 of 176.