Starfall

"Still below the horizon, Maia, sun of Hermes, made the tops of steeples and towers in Starfall shine as if gilded." (Poul Anderson, Mirkheim, London, 1978, p. 35)

And Starfall is also the name of a provincial community on the planet Dayan (Anderson, Flandry's Legacy, New York, 2012, p. 43).

When Anderson wrote A Stone In Heaven (collected in Flandry's Legacy), did he forget that he had already placed a "Starfall" on Hermes? (Addendum, 2 Sept 2017: No, because the Hermetian Starfall is also named in A Stone In Heaven.) In any case, it is a place name that is likely to be used more than once.

Both of these passages merit rereading, and quoting, at greater length - but a series of posts on Anderson's works cannot comprise endless quotations. I can only refer page viewers to the works themselves. Maia, rising from Daybreak Bay, shines westward over the Palomino River and down Olympic Avenue to Pilgrim Hill. From her balcony, the Duchess looks down to the bay and the Auroral Ocean while a colorful, singing nidiflex flies past.

And Miriam Abrams, remembering the Starfall of Dayan, views the towers of Archopolis, knowing that they are just one part of a single city stretching around Terra...

The Flight To Starfall

Mirkheim, X.

Despite having problems with a social structure, we can always appreciate its natural environment. Returning from a hunt to Starfall, Sandra flies above:

the shining Palomino River;

a lowland Runeberg agrarian property;

autumn touching green pastures;

majestic herds;

opulent grainfields;

orchards;

groves;

red-tiled Follower houses with their gardens;

the Runeberg mansion in the distance.

 

And Sandra's memories of that mansion:

 

gracious rooms;

ancestral portraits;

immense tradition;

children's laughter.

 

Adding this to the information about Starfall, Hermes becomes a real place.  

Mornings

This is ironic. Olgor hu Freylin, Warmaster in the Republic of Lafdigu in the southern hemisphere of Merseia (notice the non-Wilwidh type name) says:

"'...the most reasonable postulate is that none of the starfaring races have mental powers we do not. They simply have longer histories.'"
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 234.

Merseia will discover to its profit that at least one other race does have superior mental powers...

Meanwhile, Poul Anderson describes mornings on other planets, making us feel that we already know the places. On Merseia:

"Korych rose through winter mists that turned gold as they smoked past city towers and above the river. Kettledrums rolled their ritual from Eidh Hill. Shutters came down off windows and doors, market circles began to fill, noise lifted out of a hundred small workshops. Distantly, but deeper and more portentous, sounded the buzz of traffic and power from the new quarters, hoot of ships on the bay, whine of jets overhead, thunder of rockets as a craft left the spaceport for the moon Seith." (p. 242)

And later on Hermes:

"Still below the horizon, Maia, sun of Hermes, made the tops of steeples and towers in Starfall shine as if gilded. When it rose out of Daybreak Bay, its light struck westward over the Palomino River and straight along Olympic Avenue to Pilgrim Hill. There the brightness lost itself among trees, gardens, and buildings, the gray stone mass of the Old Keep, the fluid lines and many-paned walls of the New Keep, the austere erectness of Signal Station. A beam went past an upper balcony on the New Keep, through the French doors beyond, and across the bed of Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 47.

We have already been told that Korych is the sun of Merseia and that is evident in any case. There are gold mists in Ardaig and gilded steeples and towers in Starfall. Work begins in Ardaig. We have never heard of Eidh Hill but feel that we are familiar with its drum ritual. The use of place names generates a feeling of familiarity. In Starfall, Maia light shines across the River and along the Avenue, both named, and penetrates the New Keep where it focuses on a single person who is already known to us so that the feeling of familiarity is not entirely misplaced.

Ranger's Roost And Rovers Return

See Starfall On Hermes.

Sandra Tamarin drank in the Ranger's Roost, Starfall, Hermes. Residents of Coronation Street, Weatherfield, Lancashire, drink in the Rovers Return. (Weatherfield is an hour by Motorway from Lancaster but is also fictional.)

In both cases, the punctuation was not as expected. Thus, "Ranger's Roost," not "Rangers' Roost"; "Rovers Return," not "Rover's Return." Literally, "Rovers" is plural, not possessive, and "Rovers Return" is a sentence.

The two names have different implications. "Ranger's Roost" implies that Starfall residents range elsewhere but return home to roost. I have read the suggestion that "Rovers Return" was originally a warning: those who aspire to better themselves by roving away from their humble Northern origins will learn otherwise and will be obliged to return, sadder but wiser. This was a British social attitude that was becoming redundant when Coronation Street started in 1960. And I never expected to contrast that interminable TV series with Poul Anderson's ever fresh sf.

For an earlier blog reference to "Weatherfield," see here.

Autumn In Starfall

Mirkheim, XIII.

Autumn is gentle. Hermes tilts less than Earth. Walking across Pilgrim Hill to the Old Keep, Sandra sees:

green trees and hedges

crimson daleflower

whitefoot

blue skyberries

yellowing birch leaves

purpling fallaron leaves

Maia shines through haze. Mild air is slightly tanged. Wings trek.

Sandra sees:

gleaming river

Starfall stretching east to the bay

westward, farms and Cloudhelm

Stillness. She remembers an autumn twenty-two Hermetian years previously at Whistle Creek with Pete. A lot has changed. As in any effective novel, Poul Anderson captures human life and the passage of decades.

Hermes

The planet Hermes:

is in the system of the star Maia in Sector Antares;
has two moons, Caduceus and Sandalion;
has one large continent, Greatland, with an arid interior;
was colonized early mainly by northern Europeans;
was developed by private corporations which became the basis of the Hermetian state;
began as a Grand Duchy with a stratified society;
gained stewardship of the industrially valuable planet Mirkheim after the Babur War;
at that time also became an ordinary crowned republic while remaining nominally a Grand Duchy;
during the Troubles, developed a military-oriented society with authority concentrated in the executive and rule by whoever commanded the greatest armed force;
lost Mirkheim when Hans Molitor became Emperor;
rioted against forced demilitarization under Molitor and was pacified by the Marines;
prospered under Grand Duke Edwin Cairncross who reclaimed the interior with canals, landscaping, imported species, urbanization, commerce and a castle on an extinct volcano.

Greatland divides the Auroral Ocean to the east from the Corybantic Ocean to the west. The city of Starfall is on the east coast where the Palomino River flows into Daybreak Bay. Tilirras sing from millionleafs and there are colorfully winged, trilling nidifexes.

When Hermes declared independence from Terra, its new constitution recognized the Kindred as the Thousand Families controlling the "domains": either landed estates or corporations. The presidents of the domains elect the Duke or Duchess of Hermes from the Tamarin family which must not own a domain. Ancestors of Kindred and Tamarins were the first to arrive from Earth but, instead of founding a corporation, the Tamarins free lanced as scientists etc. "Followers," holding entailed shares, are junior partners in domains, each holding a single vote in domain affairs whereas Kindred have ten. "Travers," hirelings or unaffiliated business people, descended from latecomers, are not taxed and have no vote. The Liberation Front demands full rights for Travers who, as a result of "Libby" campaigns, gain a vote in choosing municipal officers. Travers bow to the Duchess, Followers salute, Kindred shake hands.

The Asmundsens, Followers of the Runebergs and tenants on the Brightwater estate, manage the Runeberg's copper industry. A younger Asmundsen, who explores and develops other planets in the Maian system, is obliged by custom to give preferential promotions to fellow Followers but acknowledges that his strike-threatening Traver employees have legitimate grievances which he tries to address by negotiating in person with their leaders and offering compensations like extra vacations. Hornbeck, the estate of the Falkayn domain, is on a plateau jutting from Mount Nevis in the Thunderhead Mountains. Sam Romney, independent ship-owner, fisherman and loyal Traver, does most of his business with the Falkayns. 

Baburite invaders appoint Benoni Strang, an embittered Traver, as High Commissioner for Hermes. Strang, as Bayard Story of the Galactic Developments company and the Seven in Space cartel, had secretly armed Babur. As Commissioner, he intends to impose a social revolution, democratizing the domains and obliging them to conduct all operations through a central trade authority. Through Duchess Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen, he announces that a Grand Assembly to draft a new constitution, as provided for in the existing constitution, will be held when procedures for the election of delegates are in place. Christa Broderick, the Liberation Front leader welcomes Strang's proposed social reforms but Strang bypasses the Front, many of whom oppose the invasion, and his Traver supporters form a new party.

Broderick's city and farming followers snipe and sabotage while guerillas operate in the Arcadian Hills and the Thunderheads. Both groups attack Starfall while the returned Ducal Space Navy engages orbiting Baburite craft. After the liberation, the Duchess receives a petition. Revolutionary terror has weakened the domains and the Liberation Front has gained confidence. It is agreed that a constitutional convention must await a firm peace but then Hermes, while remaining nominally a duchy, will become in practice a republic. Later, Cairncross is not a Tamarin though he is remotely descended from the Founder of the Empire, Manuel Argos.

Hermes, like Avalon, Aeneas and Vixen, is an entire inhabited planet imagined in detail by Poul Anderson.

Sources: Mirkheim and A Stone In Heaven.

Maia And Sandra

Mirkheim, II.

Sandra Tamarin will be the viewpoint character in this chapter and the first thing that she will do will be to wake up. However, the chapter does not start with that. Instead, the omniscient narrator takes us on an interesting journey at the speed of light.

From below the eastern horizon, the Hermetian sun, Maia, gilds steeples and towers in Starfall. When the sun rises above Daybreak Bay, its light travels over the Palomino River, along Olympic Avenue to Pilgrim Hill, among trees, gardens and buildings and past Old Keep, New Keep and Signal Station. One beam, passing above an upper balcony of New Keep, goes through the French windows and onto Sandra's bed, waking her in the first sentence of the second paragraph.

Now we are in her point of view and the first thing that we learn is that her husband, Peter Asmundsen, who had proposed to her on p. 7, died more than four years ago. Events move fast towards a future historical climax but, although it is dawn in Starfall, it is midnight in Lancaster.

Starfall On Hermes

If human beings do ever cross interstellar distances and colonize extrasolar planets, then inhabit them for centuries, then they will build cities that become the homes of many generations of individuals. Poul Anderson shows this happening many times in his History of Technic Civilization.

Sandra Tamarin, returning by air to Starfall, first sees the city dark against the brightness of Daybreak Bay, then discerns details:

the red brick Mayory;

St Carl's Church spire;

the Hotel Zeus on Phoenix Boulevard;

flowers like banners around Elvander's statue in Riverside Common;

dense traffic and busy terrace cafes on Constitution Square;

Jackboot Lane where she in her youth had drunk, talked and sung like generations before her in the Ranger's Roost tavern;

Pilgrim Hill with its trees, gardens, Signal Station, Old Keep and New Keep where Sandra now resides as Grand Duchess of Hermes.

All of this is centuries old and as solid and substantial as any Terrestrial city, yet could be destroyed by nuclear bombardment. Anderson makes us see what Sandra and her generation would lose if that were to happen. 

Being There

Mirkheim, XX.

In Starfall on Hermes:

"Spring was full-blooming in Starfall when the patriot army stormed it." (p. 271)

"On the right flowed the Palomino, brown and murmurous, its opposite shore rising in green slopes where villas lay scattered and fallaron trees bloomed golden. On the left, older houses stood close-ranked, deserted, their windows blind. Ahead swelled the hill, steeps and terraces, gardens and bough-roofed walks, to the gray bulk of the Old Keep. Beyond it lifted the lattice of Signal Station and a pastel glimpse of the New Keep." (p. 273)

As with the descriptions of Ysan buildings, squares and streets in The King Of Ys (with Karen Anderson), it is as if Poul Anderson had stood in the place that he describes. Maybe the Palomino and its surroundings are a real place with their names changed? - although any river through a city is going to have buildings and maybe some trees on its banks and probably other larger buildings visible nearby.

Although we had known that David Falkayn came from a planet called Hermes, we had not seen the planet before Mirkheim and now receive a lot of information about it, which is welcome. It will be visited once more a long time later in A Stone In Heaven.

Previous Posts On Mirkheim

I am rereading "Lodestar" and might shortly reread (parts of) Mirkheim. However, I find a wealth of material on this novel already on the blog. See:

search result for "Y minus 500,000" here;
Issues In Mirkheim
Something Is Rotten In Technic Culture?
Disagreeing A Little With Van Rijn
Not A Lot Going On
Perspectives
Disagreeing A Little With Van Rijn II
The Divided League
Old And New In Mirkheim
Satan And Mirkheim
The Surface Of Mirkheim
Quotes From Mirkheim
"Martin Schuster"
The Falkayn Domain
Meanwhile, Elsewhere
Between Volumes
Hydrogen And Helium
A Mystery Solved?
After Mirkheim
Clues
Planets In Mirkheim
Livewell On Delfinburg
Colourful Ambiguous Symbolism
The Richest Volume
Ages
More On "Lodestar" And Mirkheim
"Bargaining On This Basement"
The War Against The Seven In Space
Hopewell
Military Intelligence
Time Past And The Threshold Of The Future
Supermetals
Mirkheim, Chapter XXI
The Council Of Hiawatha
Falkayn Remembers...
Some Important Organizations
Nicholas van Rijn, Star of Solar Spice
Mirkheim, Chapter I
How To Film Mirkheim?
In The Saturn Room Of The Hotel Universe, Lunograd
"A Godland"
The Council Of Hiawatha: Earlier Posts
Heavier Elements
Conditions On Earth
A Little Goes A long Way
A Few More Details About Hermes
Turning Points
Benoni Strang's Grievances
On The Sunda Strait
God's Gifts
Nicholas Van Rijn, Philosopher?
From History To Legend
War And Peace
Starfall
Starfall On Hermes
Dinner At The Winged Cross And In An Airship
Wardroom
Windy Rim 

I followed a link and lost the thread that I was following. As ever, this list is longer than I had expected. I will not repeat all of this information but there is usually more to post, nevertheless.

(Everything after "How To Film Mirkheim?" is an Addendum.)

In A Wood On Hermes

Mirkheim, XV.

Ornithoids and buzzbugs, the latter dancing like dustmotes in Maian sunbeams, fly between trees that are mainly stonebark and rainroof, my point being that, if this scene were to be filmed in a Terrestrial forest, then CGI would be necessary to simulate the Hermetian environment. Evading pursuit, Falkayn uses old skills to part resistant shrubs and withes with economical arm and shin movements, Adzel moves with longer strides but cautiously to avoid leaving a trail and Chee Lan leaps between branches. Her home planet, Cynthia, is organized into treetop trade routes, not nation-states. On Hermes, all three beings, including the Hermetian Falkayn, need supplemental rations because native life lacks some vitamins and trace minerals. The forest is on the lower slopes of the Thunderheads. Across the mountain on its eastern side are the Apollo Valley, the Arcadian Hills, the coastal plain, Starfall and the Auroral Ocean. In Chapter II, we read an account of Maia rising out of Daybreak Bay and shining up the Palomino River into Starfall so we have come to feel very familiar with Hermes.

Munchen On Wunderland

See Starfall On Hermes.

"The Children's Hour," Chapter III, pp. 226-227.

Pournelle and Stirling do with Old Munchen what Anderson did with Starfall:

tile roofs;
tree-lined streets curling through the hills;
frangipani, palms and gumblossom in parks by the broad blue River Donau;
flowers by pedestrian ways;
cafes;
honeygold University quadrangles;
houses with courtyards, green spaces and fountains;
the Gothic Ritterhuuse where the Landholders Council met;
bronze statues of the Nineteen Founders in the great square.

Elsewhere:

sprawling shanty-suburbs;
shoddy factories.

Three friends climbed to sit on the shoulders of the tallest statues in front of a crowd. I have seen this done to Queen Victoria in Dalton Square, Lancaster. (Scroll down.) The Lancaster statue is here and here.

In Starfall, Hermes

A Stone In Heaven, II.

Starfall on Hermes seems like a real place, especially since this brief passage reinforces what we have already read about David Falkayn's home planet in Mirkheim:

Williams Field

Daybreak Bay

the Runeberg mansion

Pilgrim Hill

the Palomino River

fragrant daleflower and roses

a flying, trilling tilirra

blinking glowflies

Riverside Common

millionleaf trees

rainroof trees

spires

domes

towers

Antares above the Auroral Ocean

As with two other colonized terrestroid planets, Aeneas and Avalon, we learn the names of local flora and fauna and accept that a population lives there. (The Avalonian ecology combines local organisms with those imported from Ythri and Terra.)

A Phone, A Cyanops And A Baburite

Mirkheim, X.

Sandra's portable phone hangs from her belt. Thus, it is a walkie-talkie, too bulky to fit in a purse or pocket. It saves an animal's life. Sandra's hounds have trapped a scaled, clawed, reptilian cyanops (scroll down) on a cliff top. As she prepares to shoot this native Hermetian animal through one of its eyes with a rifle, her phone buzzes and she must return immediately to Starfall. Although we are not told how many eyes the cyanops has, we assume two but film-makers could make some other assumption.

In the Insignia Room back in Starfall, Sandra sits at bay before the three-dimensional image of a conquering Baburite. I did not think of comparing Sandra to the cyanops but she does.

(The Van Rijn Method is another volume but Sandra Tamarin is one of the characters on its cover.)

The Beauty Of Hermes

Maia, rising from Daybreak Bay, shines westward over the Palomino River and down Olympic Avenue to Pilgrim Hill. From her balcony, the Duchess looks down to the bay and the Auroral Ocean while a colorful, singing nidiflex flies past.
-copied from here.

See also:

War And Peace
The Falkayn Domain
A Few More Details About Hermes
Mornings
Starfall On Hermes
Wardroom

Duchess Sandra wanders across Pilgrim Hill to the massive stone Old Keep, now housing records and a museum, surrounded by formal gardens and graveled paths. (As I remember, Old Keep with its records will be destroyed when the Hermetians successfully resist the Baburite occupation force.) There is an intricate design of flowerbeds, low hedges and occasional trees:

flowers are crimson daleflower and small whitefoot;
shrubs have ripe, vivid blue, skyberries;
trees are yellow-leaved birch and purple-leaved fallaron.

Starfall autumns are mild because the Hermetian axial tilt is less than Earth's. Sandra sees:

the gleaming river;
city roofs and towers stretching east to the bay;
farms and the peak of Cloudhelm to the west.

Earlier, in the Arcadian Hills, she had hunted a herpetoid cyanops with hounds and men from her estate. On a cliff-top meadow, she saw tiny white wildflowers studding the low lobate yerb, further hills and Cloudhelm.

Poul Anderson makes Hermes a very real place.

Wardroom

Sandra, Eric, van Rijn and Falkayn meet in the wardroom of the Hermetian space fleet flagship which has stonebark wainscoting, cyanops leather and pictures of:

Cloudhelm seen from an Arcadian hill;
the Rainbow Desert;
nighttime phosphorescence in the Corybantic Ocean.

None of these names has had to be specially invented for this scene. We have seen Falkayn in a forest of stonebark and rainroof and Sandra hunting a cyanops in the Arcadian Hills. Falkayn has flown over the Arcadian Hills beyond which lie Starfall and the Auroral Ocean. The single Hermetian continent, Greatland, separates the two Oceans.

Anderson has made Hermes seem to be such a real place that he is able to evoke its quiddity again by a few brief phrases describing the room in which the Grand Duchess, her son, her son's father and the father's protege hold their fateful meeting about the future of Hermes.

JRR Tolkien is rightly commended for his detailed creation of Middle Earth. How many fictitious planets are realized in the History of Technic Civilization as well as in Anderson's many other works of hard sf?

An Ax

Mirkheim.

Nicholas van Rijn, Sandra Tamarin and Eric Wace struggled, suffered and survived together on the planet, Diomedes. Shortly after that, Sandra bore van Rijn's son, Eric Tamarin. Wace drops out of the picture but is remembered in a name.

Sandra's conference chamber on Hermes displays a "...Diomedean battle-ax." (XVII, p. 233)

"When at last [David Falkayn] stopped and regarded her, it was strangely right that he stood beneath the ax." (p. 238)

Very right. The unity of action between the first van Rijn novel, The Man Who Counts, and this concluding van Rijn-Falkayn novel, Mirkheim, is being affirmed. If we approach the Technic History in chronological order, then we have read The Man Who Counts long before reaching Mirkheim whereas, in the original order, we read Mirkheim as the culmination of the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy, then, two volumes later, encounter The Man Who Counts as part of the Avalonian history, The Earth Book Of Stormgate.

In this chapter, we appreciate some weather. The storm makes the conference chamber a gloomy cave but:

"Freshness blew in, though, loud and raw. Rain struck the garden like spears and hid sight of the world beyond its wall. Lightning flared, making every bare twig on the shrubs leap forth under a sheet-metal sky; thunder rolled across unending reaches while murk returned." (p. 233)

"Wind whooped, rain rushed, thunder went like enormous wheels. Winter was on its way to Starfall." (p. 239)

See also Alliterative Prose.

Civil War

Mirkheim, XX.

The Polesotechnic League civil war is a catalogue of colonized planets:

the Free Hermetian Navy destroys the Abdallah Enterprises centrum on Hopewell;

Hermetians hijack supermetals carried from Mirkheim by Interstar Transport for the Stellar Metals Corporation, thus causing staggering losses to Timebinders Insurance;

Hermetians destroy equipment and data stores of XT Systems in Maharajah on Ramanujan;

bribed union leaders call a strike of technicians working for Sanchez Engineering on the metal-rich St. Jacques, sister planet of Esperance;

independent League companies, Sinbad Prospecting and the Society of Venturers, attack and loot the Galactic Developments entrepot on a Germanian moon;

on Hermes, the patriot army storms Starfall.

"Government by terror does not work on people used to liberty, if they have hope of deliverance." (p. 273)

Hope makes a difference. A population endlessly ground down does not necessarily Rise in its Wrath.

A Few More Details About Hermes

(This may be the last post for December although I am not sure yet. We have just returned from a solstice ritual.)

Hermetian trees include stonebark and rainroof.
Ornithoids and buzzbugs fly between them.
One flying predator is called a steelwing.
Athena Falkayn wears "...a necklace of fallaron amber." (Rise Of The Terran Empire, p. 216)
The Falkayn manor house derives its name from the nearby Hornbeck brook.
Wyvernflies fly above the brook.
Terrestrial food and drink taste odd to Hermetians so no doubt the reverse would be true.

Sandra Tamarin flies near the Palomino River as it crosses an agrarian property of the Runeberg domain. She sees red-tiled houses of Follower families and the Runeberg mansion which, she knows, contains ancestral portraits and long tradition.

The Insignia Room, its walls decorated only by the colorful devices of the thousand Kindred, is on a high floor with a view of sky and distant ocean. Grand Duchess Sandra sits at her desk before a three dimensional communication screen occupying half a wall and displaying the image of a hydrogen-breathing Baburite conqueror in his ship in synchronous orbit above Starfall.

The theme of Mirkheim is that times change. They can hardly change more than this.

Hermetian Forest

Mirkheim, XV, p. 210.

The trader team are in a forest on Falkayn's home planet, Hermes, where:

the trees include "stonebark" - so named because its wood resembles stone?;

another tree is "rainroof," providing cover with its seasonally yellowed canopies;

flying insects include "buzzbugs";

larger fliers are not birds but "ornithoids" -

- my point being that this scene could not be filmed in a Terrestrial forest without CGI to reproduce these Hermetian details. A cinema or TV audience needs to be constantly aware of visual alienness.

At the same time, it must also be conveyed that this territory is familiar to Falkayn. The Thunderhead Mountains rear in crags and eternal snows but their eastern heights curve down to the Apollo Valley beyond which are the Arcadian Hills, the coastal plain, Starfall and the Auroral Ocean.

The human discoverers of this planet followed the practice of naming a celestial body after a deity, in this case the Greek messenger god who was identified with the Roman god, Mercury. As with "Woden," we soon forget the original meaning of the word and simply apply it to the planet.