To The End And Beyond

Imaginative authors sometimes take us to the end of all things and beyond.

One very long body of work on time and indeed on time travel is Poul Anderson's two-volume Time Patrol series: Time Patrol and The Shield Of Time. However, the Patrol guards only a million years and we are shown mostly our past, not the future. The Danellian civilization and its successors, if any, remain a mystery.

Five much shorter works on different aspects of time are:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis;
"Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson;
The Quincunx Of Time by James Blish;
"Man In His Time" by Brian Aldiss.

Wells' Time Traveller sees the giant red sun eclipsed above a lifeless Earth in a remote future and flees back to the nineteenth century. Lewis addresses the relationship between time and eternity but derived his image of eternity from a story about travel to the past. However, what I want to quote from Lewis here is his account of the end and a new beginning:

"...the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 117.

The Great Divorce may be compared not only to these works of science fiction but also to Plato's Phaedo and John's Gospel.

The protagonist of "Flight to Forever" remains within time but travels around its circle because beyond the end is the beginning. The protagonists of The Quincunx Of Time receive messages from their future but cannot understand messages from too far ahead. Characters in a longer work by Blish, Cities In Flight, Vol IV, The Triumph Of Time, survive the end of our universe long enough to create new universes from their own bodies. "Man In His Time" addresses only a very brief temporal discrepancy and is included in this list because of its originality.

And here are two more remote futures from Poul Anderson:

"'Once we've discovered how to build a holontic time communicator - it'll mean more than the future talking to the past, you know. It'll mean calling across the universe.'
"'And in that way also making the universe one.' She sighed. 'A grand vision. You and I won't live to see it, though.' Mastering forces so mighty would take many human lifetimes. 'Unless we do live on afterward.... No, I can't say what the limits are for us.'"
-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), 52, p. 494.

Lewis believed in a hereafter. Anderson speculated about one. (See the "holontic" link.)

- and, for the post-Ragnarok future, see here.

"'Yes,' answered Njord, god of the sea, 'from this day to the last, we are brothers.'" (ibid.)

Lewis believed Christianity but also, like Anderson, valued Norse myths. Thus, we have rounded up several imagined cosmic endings.

Other Literary Associations

For more about Poul Anderson and Rudyard Kipling, see the combox here.

Other literary associations are more complicated. CS Lewis replied to the secularist sf of HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon whereas Poul Anderson and James Blish wrote Wellsian and Stapledonian sf while respecting Lewisian theological issues.

Lewis:

hinted at time travelling in the concluding sentence of his first Ransom novel, Out Of The Silent Planet;

discussed time travel in the opening passage of his unfinished Ransom novel, "The Dark Tower," and in the Preface to his The Great Divorce.

However, it was Anderson who most fully developed Wellsian time travel.

Alice In Wonderland pervades our culture and impinges on Poul Anderson's works at least in one Dominic Flandry story. While recuperating from a cold, I have reread in full Alice In Sunderland by Bryan Talbot and The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. Like a reward near the end of the Lewis work, comes:

"'And she couldn't make herself smaller? - like Alice, you know.'"

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1946), p. 113.

Yes, we all know.

This and other important works by Lewis are set in England during World War II. Manse Everard of the Time Patrol visits London during the Blitz. All fiction is one.

Future Historians And Hell

CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy is Lewis' reply to the British future historians, Wells and Stapledon, whereas his The Great Divorce is an imaginative account of Hell. The Trilogy and the ...Divorce are connected because Lewis as first person narrator knows Ransom and dreams the ...Divorce which refers, indirectly, to the Trilogy.

In Lewis' "The Dark Tower," Ransom, Lewis and others view the mysterious "Dark Tower" through a chronoscope. When they discuss whether the tower is in the past or the future, Ransom suggests that it might be in the future for any of them because he thinks that it is in hell. Thus, Lewis links the ideas of future history and of the hereafter as a "'...future life...'"
-CS Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), p. 166.

Here is a linear sequence of American future historians:

Robert Heinlein
James Blish
Poul Anderson
Larry Niven
Jerry Pournelle

- and here is a list of American sf writers who have presented imaginative accounts of Hell:

Heinlein
Blish
Anderson
Niven and Pournelle

I discuss Anderson's Hell here. I am informed that The Great Divorce influenced Niven and Pournelle so I will read their Escape From Hell with interest, having previously read their Inferno.

To The End And Beyond II

See To The End And Beyond.

The post refers to thirteen titles. However:

Cities In Flight is a tetralogy of which The Triumph Of Time is a volume;

the Phaedo and the Fourth Gospel are relevant to The Great Divorce but otherwise a bit off-topic.

If we focus on ten titles, then six contain the word "Time" and the remaining four imply it:

Lewis' "Great Divorce" is between Heaven and Hell which are eternal but approached through time;

"Flight to Forever" is explicitly temporal;

"starfaring" involves time dilation;

divine warfare has temporal consequences.

The single word, "Time," can have many significances. Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time is the sequel to his Time Patrol and both titles describe the same organization whereas James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time is not a sequel to his The Triumph Of Time although there are conceptual links like the Dirac transmitter and an intergalactic setting. The Triumph Of Time means not, as I had thought, that, given time, we will triumph but the opposite, that time will triumph over us. The Quincunx Of Time refers instead to the physics of time, its possible multidimensionality.

Lastly, the post refers to ultimate futures but misses Anderson's Two Ways to survive the end of the universe.

Coffee, World War II And Romances

 

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

"Holger consumed the meal with appetite and afterward thought wistfully of coffee and a smoke. But wartime shortages had somewhat weaned him from those pleasant vices." (CHAPTER THREE, pp. 23-24)

We have noticed the absence of coffee in other times and realms here but have not previously mentioned wartime shortages. Holger is not the only fictional character to depart for another world during World War II. See also CS Lewis':

The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe

Perelandra

The Great Divorce

The Lion... mentions the Blitz. Perelandra mentions blackout restrictions. The Great Divorce ends with an air raid siren. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters is also set during WWII.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrolman, Manse Everard, visits London during the Blitz.

Holger:

"...had never gone in for reading romances, scientific or otherwise..." (CHAPTER TWO, p. 20)

Scientific romances are what Lewis knew as "scientifiction" and what we call science fiction.

In an early edition of a novel by HG Wells, the list of other titles by the same author included not the heading "Science Fiction" but the sentence, "Mr. Wells has also written the following fantastic and imaginative romances."

John Buchan wrote not "The King liked my books" but "He did me the honour to be amused by my romances."

Three Hearts... is a romance, scientific or otherwise...

Points Of View

Regular readers of this blog might remember that one of my interests, indeed one of my preoccupations, in works of fiction is the narrative point of view, or "pov," which Poul Anderson always handles extremely well. I want to discuss povs in general before returning to Anderson's presentation of them in his Time Patrol story, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

I think that I have always been aware of povs and probably all readers are even if they think that they are not. Kevin, whom I meet once a month in the Gregson Centre, and I had both read a Hornblower novel. I drew attention to a pov shift and he said that he would not have noticed such a thing. But he would surely have been aware of povs at least while reading. A French guy was reading Dune in translation. I remarked that Frank Herbert's prose has no consistent point of view. The French guy replied, "I have read it!," meaning that he had noticed Herbert's pov inconsistency.

In Volume II of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, while Blomkvist and Bjork converse, we are told that:

"Blomkvist worried..."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 19, p. 318 -

- but also that Bjork thinks:

"How the hell could Blomkvist know anything about Zalachenko?"

-ibid., p. 319.

Indeed, the omniscient narrator informs his readers that, at this point, feelings and thoughts are tumbling through Bjork's head. Thus, in the course of a single conversation, the pov shifts from Blomkvist to Bjork - and back again because, almost immediately after Bjork's thought, we are informed that Blomkvist realizes that he is unscrupulous enough to double-cross Bjork and that he feels no guilt.

James Blish, writing as William Atheling, Jr., sets out why this is wrong while reviewing a short story entitled "Final Exam" by an author called Arthur Zirul:

"A conscientious editor, for instance, would have told Mr. Zirul that he had failed to make himself aware of so simple a technical problem in fiction-writing as that of how to handle the point of view. He would have pointed out that in "Final Exam" there is no consistent point of view; instead, the author is omniscient, and tells us what each and every character is thinking (including the horse). He would have explained that the author-omniscient method of handling this problem, while it is not necessarily always bad, is at the very least obsolescent, and that common practice in modern fiction is to assign a single point of view for a short story, or at the very most, a single point of view for each plot thread. This, the author would explain, is not an arbitrary rule, but instead is based upon a great deal of accumulated experience as to how a reader reads, and what techniques give the reader the greatest access to what is important in the story. Modern readers in particular, the editor would be able to point out, are not used to being forced to leapfrog from one character's mind to another's at the author's whim; instead, they have been trained to identify with some single central character, and to be admitted to his thoughts only. Certainly no modern reader is going to react favorably to a point of view which may shift from one paragraph to another, or even from one sentence to another."

-William Atheling, The Issue At Hand (Chicago, 1967), p. 85.

Some Points To Note

(i) Atheling/Blish refers explicitly to short stories whereas I also discuss novels. However, the same principle applies. A novel should not have a chaotic pov! The whole novel or at least each chapter or at least each section of a chapter, each discrete narrative passage, should have a single pov.

(ii) Although Atheling refers to "...the author-omniscient...," I think that the author and the omniscient narrator are different. The author, usually, is simply not present in a fictional text. Of course he can write himself in as a character or as a first person narrator but it has to be clear to the reader if that is what he is doing. In a third person narrative, it is surely an omniscient narrator who tells readers what the viewpoint character sees, feels, thinks etc. It is not the character that does this. But nor is the author directly addressing his readers as in an Introduction or Afterword.

(iii) I think that there has to be a single pov because otherwise the text does not describe anything that happens. If Blomkvist and Bjork converse, then what happens is that Blomkvist experiences the entire conversation from his pov and Bjork experiences it from his pov but there is no third pov jumping back and forth between them.

Another writer, CS Lewis, fully understood povs but broke the rules creatively:

Lewis as a writer and a Professor of Literature knew that authors must understand and control narrative points of view. If an entire novel is not written from a single point of view, then each Chapter or at least each section of a Chapter, each passage of continuous prose narrative between changes of scene, should have a single point of view. That Hideous Strength breaks some rules of points of view but in interesting ways. It contains:

several viewpoint characters;
one first person viewpoint character;
an imaginary observer;
a first person narrator of other passages in the novel;
an omniscient narrator of yet other passages in the novel.

I identify the first person viewpoint character with Lewis because he tells us:

"...I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge..." (2)

The opening and closing viewpoint character of the novel is Jane Studdock. The main continuing viewpoint character throughout the novel is Mark Studdock. In fact, the novel principally follows Mark's moral and  spiritual development. Temporary view point characters during the novel are Lewis, Ransom, Dimble, Frost, Wither, the tramp, Mr Maggs, Miss Hardcastle, Feverstone, Filostrato and Mr Bultitude. When Lewis is the viewpoint character, he narrates in the first person. However, a first person narrator, presumably also Lewis, sometimes imparts information about other characters. For example, of the fleeing tramp we are told:

"I have not been able to trace him further." (3)

At one point, this first person narrator invites the reader to imagine an observer placed high enough to see both a car carrying Mark and, later, a train carrying Jane from the town where they live. "...our imaginary observer..." has what we call a bird's eye, or god's eye, view of some English countryside. (4) An imaginary observer who saw not just at one place and time but at all places and times would be an omniscient observer and would thus share one attribute of the God in whom Lewis believed. Such an observer would have been promoted from a god's eye view to the God's eye view. The omniscient narrator who is present in much fiction and in some parts of this novel is presumably an omniscient observer who narrates some of what s/he observes.

Before leaving the first person narrator, Lewis, we can note that he sometimes adopts the first person plural, as when he refers to "...our imaginary observer...," thus getting the readers on his side. (4) When he refers to the British press as "...our papers...," he again identifies himself as one of us, a citizen who reads the same newspapers that we do. (4) The omniscient narrator would refer merely to "...the papers."

However, the omniscient narrator is also present and tells us things that the first person narrator could not have known: something that Curry thinks but immediately and permanently forgets; what Frost, Filostrato and Wither were thinking as they died. This narrator could have told us where the tramp went.

Mark confronts Dimble. Conventionally, their conversation should be described either from Mark's or from Dimble's viewpoint but not from both. However, the narrator of this passage tells us how they both felt. Dimble's effort not to hate Mark gives his face a fixed severity which Mark misinterprets as loathing.

"The whole of the rest of this conversation went on under this misunderstanding." (5)

The omniscient narrator would know this, of course, but Lewis might have learned it later by conferring with both men so we are not sure which narrator speaks here. The author has indeed complicated the viewpoint issue - as Isaac Asimov did at one point in the Foundation Trilogy when an "I" appeared unexpectedly in what had until then been the omniscient narrator's account of different modes of consciousness in the far future. In that case, one critic objected to the ambiguity in Asimov's narrative whereas I welcomed the extra layer of mystery presented by a narrator who, on the one hand, knew something about future mental powers but, on the other hand, admitted to the same level of ignorance as the readers about what it would be like to experience such powers.

There cannot be many parallels between works by CS Lewis and Ian Fleming. James Bond is Fleming's viewpoint character. However, one Fleming short story presents a bird's eye view of two converging figures crawling through long grass - towards a third party whom both intend to assassinate. This odd perspective is explained by the fact that three stories, including this one, were based on screen treatments for a proposed TV series.

Lewis the first person narrator came on stage on p. 136 of Out Of The Silent Planet, after Ransom had returned to Earth.

 "At this point, if I were guided by purely literary considerations, my story would end..." (6)

and:

"This is where I come into the story." (6)

We learn that Lewis has fictionalized the names of "Ransom" and "Weston" in order to publish as fiction an account that a very few readers will recognize as the truth. The postscript is "...extracts from a letter written by the original of 'Dr Ransom' to the author..." (7) In one extract, 'Ransom' addresses Lewis by name.

At the beginning of Perelandra, the first person narrator visits Ransom and is again addressed by name. 

"The Dark Tower" features Ransom, MacPhee and, as a first person narrator, an "Oxford man" who dislikes the nick-name "Lu-Lu" and who "...had been mixed up with..." Ransom's strange adventure described "...in another book..." and is indeed referred to as "Mr Lewis." (8)

"The Shoddy Lands" has a first person narrator visited in his college rooms at Oxford by a former student. 

The Great Divorce has a first person narrator who admired George MacDonald and is clearly Lewis. Here the story overlaps with that told in Lewis' spiritual biography Surprised By Joy.

Thus, whereas first person narrators are not usually identical with their author, in this case they are.

(1) CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet IN The Cosmic Trilogy, London, 1990, pp. 1-144 AT p. 138.
(2) CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN The Cosmic Trilogy, London, 1990, pp. 349-753 AT p. 359.
(3) ibid., p. 719.
(4) ibid., p. 395.
(5) ibid., p. 578.
(6) Out Of The Silent Planet, p. 136.
(7) ibid., p. 139.
(8) CS Lewis, "The Dark Tower" IN The Dark Tower and other stories, London, 1983. pp. 17-91 AT pp. 17, 22, 29, 39.           

-copied from here.

  

Poul Anderson And CS Lewis

(i) Poul Anderson wrote several future histories. Future histories are one kind of fictional history. Other fictional histories include Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis' Narnia. The Narnia Chronicles cover the entire history of a universe with a flat earth and living stars from its creation by Aslan to its Last Battle and what happens after that. Thus, Narnia is comparable to Anderson's fantasies.

(ii) In Poul Anderson's "Journeys End," telepaths experience the problem of reading each other's distasteful thoughts. In Lewis' "The Shoddy Lands," Lewis himself enters the mental landscape of a self-absorbed woman. Being Lewis, he hears a knocking and a voice:

"'Child, child, child, let me in before the night comes.'"
-CS Lewis, "The Shoddy Lands" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1983), pp. 104-111 AT p. 110.

(iii) Anderson is the most comprehensive writer about fictional time travel. Lewis' Ransom, Lewis, MacPhee, Orfieu and Scudamour begin "The Dark Tower" by discussing time travel just like Wells' Time Traveler and his dinner guests.

(iv) Anderson's sf is (very) "hard" whereas Lewis' is the opposite. Lacking scientific knowledge, Lewis deployed immense psychological and moral insights and knowledge of both literature and mythology.

(v) Both authors favored Norse mythology.

(vi) Anderson treated religious beliefs sympathetically whereas Lewis propagated a particular belief which he imaginatively restated three times, in the Narnia Chronicles, the Ransom Trilogy and The Great Divorce.

(vii) Anderson speculates about hereafters as about everything else whereas Lewis merely assumes survival. In The Great Divorce, ghosts are free to haunt buildings, communicate through mediums, settle in the grey town that is really Hell or catch a bus to the foothills of Heaven and stay there as long as they like. But does every individual consciousness really persist indefinitely and, if so, how?

(viii) Both authors exercised seemingly endless creative imagination.

"God!"

(I wanted to tell the story of a cartoon about God but find that I have done so three times. See here.)

Sometimes a noun ceases to be semantics and becomes more like punctuation, particularly "God." Let us compare four examples, two from CS Lewis' The Great Divorce and two from different works by Poul Anderson. (Unsurprisingly, the two works by Anderson feature the Time Patrol and the Old Phoenix. These texts are inexhaustible.)

"'Oh, Keith, welcome home,' said the high small voice.
"Home! he thought. God!"
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 10, p.112.

That is the dramatic conclusion to the second Time Patrol story and Keith Denison's closing thought has nothing to do with God.

A famous artist, glancing around the landscape in the foothills of Heaven, says, "'God!'" He is asked, "'God what?,'" then told that "'In our grammar God is a noun...,'" to which he responds:

"'Oh - I see. I only meant "By Gum" or something of the sort.'"
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 73.

Thus, God means little more than an exclamation mark although the artist, unsuspectingly, is potentially on the threshold of an encounter with God the noun.

Sometimes people invoke God unreflectingly but then receive an unexpectedly serious response. When George MacDonald warns Lewis not to pass off his dream as a real experience of the hereafter:

"'God forbid, Sir,' said I, trying to look very wise.
"'He has forbidden it. That's what I'm telling ye.'"
-Lewis, op. cit., p. 117.

When Taverner says:

"'You wouldn't want us to lose our license, would you?'
"'God, no,' I said.
"'Not God. Absolutely no idea of that.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Losers' Night" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), pp. 105-123 AT p. 122.

Little Masterpieces By Wells, Lewis, Blish And Anderson

"'THE TIME MACHINE...THAT LITTLE MASTERPIECE' J. B. Priestly

-quoted on the back cover of HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973).

 

I agree and apply the same description to CS Lewis' The Great Divorce. These two works address Time and Eternity respectively and raise the same philosophical problem because they treat consciousness as detachable from bodies.

 

To qualify as a little masterpiece, a novel must first be short. Poul Anderson's The Avatar, The Boat Of A Million Years and The Shield Of Time are masterpieces but not short. Secondly, the novel must present a sense of completeness. When I first read James Blish's "Beep," I thought that it should be novelized and it was as The Quincunx Of Time. It also addresses Time and presents consciousness as detachable.

Candidate "Little Masterpieces" By Poul Anderson

There Will Be Time

Tau Zero

Genesis

World Without Stars

After Doomsday

 

Pete Pinto, the former Lancaster sf bookseller, said that there was something about After Doomsday that made it a complete novel. James Blish said that Lewis' That Hideous Strength contained every kind of character and was a complete novel but it is not short. Lewis' The Great Divorce, Anderson's Operation Chaos and SM Stirling's Emberverse series present some feeling of what a Heavenly realm might be like.

Unicorns Etc III

I keep trying to exorcise the unicorns but not succeeding. I forgot to mention that Karen Anderson's sphinxes hunt unicorns. So maybe the unicorns were wiped out by the sphinxes who were wiped out by early men who then displaced the centaurs?

Science fiction writers, including those who also write some fantasy, present alternative answers to shared questions like, in this case: where did the mythical beasts go? One story reminds us of others although, as CS Lewis comments in The Great Divorce, we do not always remember either titles or authors. On this occasion, I remember an author but not the title either of the story or of the collection. In a story by Brian Aldiss, a member of Noah's crew sees a larger Ark with dinosaurs on one deck and mythical beasts on another, then wonders whether the right Ark survived the Flood.

Karen Anderson's "The Piebald Hippogriff" might conceivably find its way into some future "first man on the moon" anthology because it ends as its viewpoint character flies his newly tamed hippogriff towards the moon to homestead there. First man on the moon stories are dated but have their place:

Vernes' characters went round the moon;
Wells' characters went in the moon;
Heinlein wrote a Future History version, a Scribner Juvenile version and a film version of the first trip to the moon;
Lewis' and Blish's successors of Cavor, Weston and Haertel, went to Mars, not to the moon (and Haertel used anti-gravity);
Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters tried for Mars but were sabotaged and crashed on the moon;
a Niven character was on the moon before Armstrong because he traveled to the moon later, then time traveled;
Poul Anderson's Valeria Matuchek was the first human being on the moon in her parallel universe where magic works;
a TV adaptation of The First Men In The Moon showed Armstrong and Aldrin approaching a lifeless moon, then flashed back to Cavor and Bedford - a fixed Cavorite sheet was used to eject the lunar atmosphere into space, thus killing the Selenites.

And that returns us to our starting point: accepting a mythical account, then explaining why the account is no longer applicable.

Mystery And Anachronism

William Cowper coined the phrase, "God moves in a mysterious way...," which is quoted elsewhere in literature and in common speech. Poul Anderson has a priest's slave say:

"'The gods do move in mysterious ways.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 106 -

- two thousand years before Cowper.

Two further points:

CS Lewis refers to Cowper in The Great Divorce;

searching the blog for The Great Divorce shows in how many contexts I have referred to this Lewisian work.

It is Lewis' third great imaginative restatement of Christianity, after Ransom and Narnia. Each of these three narratives is connected to World War II and the Blitz, which links them to Anderson's very different work, "Time Patrol." Sherlock Holmes is a real person both in "Time Patrol" and in the chronologically first Narnia book, The Magician's Nephew.

Survival

Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), Chapter XXIX, pp. 223-224.

The characters discuss the nature and survival of the soul, a big subject of which we will scratch the surface. I will return to Operation Chaos after surveying some comparable fictional treatments of the subject. Here is an incomplete list:

The Land Of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle;
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley;
The Palace Of Eternity by Bob Shaw;
Inferno and Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson;
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis;
"The Man Who Traveled In Elephants" by Robert Heinlein;
Why Call Them Back From Heaven? by Clifford Simak;
The Triumph of Time by James Blish;
The Day After Judgment by James Blish;
Midsummer Century by James Blish;
Starfarers by Poul Anderson.

I cannot treat all of these works equally:

I have not read The Land Of Mist;

decades ago, I saw a TV dramatization of Immortality Inc. and remember that survival was not automatic but could be attained either yogically or technologically;

The Palace Of Eternity has electromagnetic "egons" in interstellar space disrupted by the wakes of Bussard ramjets;

Niven and Pournelle follow Dante's account;

Matheson follows spiritualist accounts;

Lewis presents an allegory;

the surprise ending of Heinlein's story is that the viewpoint character is dead;

Simak's novel states that there is a hereafter but does not describe it;

in The Triumph Of Time, one theoretical possibility is the continued existence of isolated consciousnesses with memories but without bodies, environments or sensory impressions but no one wants this;

characters in The Day After Judgment speculate that eternal life is stable negative entropy;

in Midsummer Century, a personality is a semistable electromagnetic field which remains integrated as long as it has the supplementary computing apparatus of a brain and the energy source of a body but then fades away unless it is picked up by a suitable receiver;

in Starfarers -

A sympathetic human character, Jean Kilbirnie, dies in the black hole. Or does she? In fiction, and particularly in fantastic fiction, when no body has been found, the author might reverse the death. Two of Jean's colleagues later suspect that holontic configurations are not transitory but permanent, imposing a trace on the vacuum, a direction on randomness, a change in the metric, thus lasting and surviving death, implying that organic patterns and processes might last also.

So could the Holont rescue Jean's consciousness from the death of her body? This is my speculation, no one else's, but it is implied by passages that otherwise are left undeveloped. Anderson's intention is to show us that there is always more to be learned so there will at any stage be still unanswered questions.
-copied from here.

Far Horizons

The Earth Book Of Stormgate also collects The Man Who Counts in which the titular character, Nicholas van Rijn, is on the planet Diomedes where the horizon is twice as far away as on Earth, enough to disturb and alarm any human being. This reminds me of a passage in CS Lewis' The Great Divorce which, however, I find that I have already quoted no less than three times. See here.

Lewis was describing not an extra-solar planet but an extra-cosmic hereafter which turns out, in any case, to have been a dream. Thus, Lewis' concerns are far from those of hard sf writers and his own sf is "soft" although he acknowledges that two ideas in The Great Divorce were derived from pulp magazine "scientifiction."

How many characters in sf spend their time in metal shells of spaceships without any description of the universe as seen from space or on the surfaces of terrestroid extra-solar planets without any scientific analysis of planetary environments?

The Light Of Day

(Today, we were at Ryelands again - in the sun.)

How is this Heracitean quotation relevant to Poul Anderson? It reminds me of three things:

(i) a passage in CS Lewis' The Great Divorce (London, 1982), where a man who leaves the grey town and approaches the mountains thinks that he must turn back because the lizard on his shoulder, whispering in his ear, gives him dreams that "'...up here...'" are "'...so damned embarrassing.'" (p. 90);

(ii) aspects of my own experience that I will not discuss here;

(iii) Poul Anderson's "Journeys End, " where telepaths are repelled by each other's private thoughts.

"'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.'"
-The Great Divorce, p. 117.

Visions Of Heaven

"...very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains. Sometimes I could make out in it steep forests, far-withdrawing valleys, and even mountain cities perched on inaccessible summits. At other times it became indistinct. The height was so enormous that my waking sight could not have taken in such an object at all. Light brooded on the top of it: slanting down thence it made long shadows behind every tree on the plain. There was no change and no progression as the hours passed. The promise - or the threat - of sunrise rested immovably up there."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 29.

"Far distant mountains climbed steep and blue, their peaks floating like ghosts of white. [Ignatius] thought the silver towers of a city rose in their foothills, tall and slender and crowned with banners."
-SM Stirling, The Sword Of The Lady (New York, 2010), Chapter Twenty-One, p. 641.

"The abbot rested a hand on [Ignatius'] shoulder; it was a light touch, but the younger monk felt a sudden shock at the depth of the contact. As if he was a ghost, a figment, and the contact had revealed him as unreal, a dream within a dream that strove to wake itself from illusion."
-Stirling, op. cit., p. 643.

"Screaming, I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!' I cried, 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.'"
-Lewis, op. cit., p. 117.

Comparing CS Lewis and SM Stirling with Poul Anderson leads to comparing them with each other.

Doubts

"Star of the Sea."

Quite often, I have heard people arguing that their beliefs are as certain as geometrical theorems and have realized that they are primarily trying to convince themselves. In CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, a man wanted proof after proof of survival after death, then he died and survived and had no purpose left because his only purpose had been to prove survival!

The prophetess, Veleda, expresses doubt:

"'You know I am foe to Rome, and why... But this talk of bringing it down in wreck - more and more, as the war wears on, I come to see that as mere rant. It is not truly what the goddess bade me say, it is what I have told myself she wants me to say. I must needs utter it again tonight, or the gathering would have been bewildered and shaken.'" (3, p. 500)

How do those who pray know what their deity bids them to say or do? Sometimes there are experiences as of seeing and hearing a deity but not for most people most of the time. (At this point in the text, we do not yet know that Veleda has seen and conversed with a time traveller whom she mistook for her goddess.) Veleda is honest enough to recognize what she has told herself that the goddess wanted her to say. A true fanatic would never have been able to realize that.

Heidhin does not want to forsake the gods but would that just mean forsaking power and fame? - Veleda asks. Are the "gods" just a way of talking about what is going on anyway? I saw a newsletter in an Evangelical church in which the vicar had written, "Remember how in our prayer time the Lord seemed to be telling us that -?" Did He or was that just group imagination? 

Burhmund, the rebel leader, says:

"'...[Veleda's] fierceness is lessening. Perhaps the goddess herself wants an end to the war.'" (4, p. 505)

Is "The goddess might want an end to the war" just another way of saying that the sibyl now has doubts about the war? Burhmund clearly senses the effects of Veleda's doubts.

As an Andersonian touch, when Burhmund acknowledges that he also has had his fill of strife:

"His sigh gusted in to the wind." (ibid.)

We can always rely on the wind.

James Blish On Poul Anderson

Comparing Poul Anderson's works with those of his contemporary and fellow Campbell future historian, James Blish, has refocused my attention on Blish and I will shortly add to the James Blish Appreciation blog.

Blish commended Anderson's Tau Zero and After Doomsday. In particular, he appreciated the passage of the relativistic spaceship through the period of inter-destruction in Tau Zero and also the recounting of the Battle of Brandobar not in the narrative present but in a later-sung ballad in After Doomsday.

Although Blish understood that Anderson particularly liked his flamboyant merchant prince character, Nicholas van Rijn, he also thought that that character was about played out. However, I think that the van Rijn sub-series of Anderson's Technic History had just about come to an end by the time that Blish expressed that opinion. Because I had been a Blish fan long before I became an Anderson fan, I asked Blish's advice on reading Anderson and, as part of this, asked whether I should disregard Dominic Flandry. Blish agreed with this suggestion at the time! I now realize that it was entirely mistaken, of course. The Flandry series became much more than its earliest-written segment, the "Captain Flandry" series, which continues to be worth anyone's attention in any case.

Blish appreciated and made multiple references to CS Lewis. He valued the moral and psychological insights in That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce and the chilling account of Weston's possession and damnation in Perelandra and, for these reasons, wished that Lewis had written more fiction. 

He also preferred ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia Trilogy to Tolkien's Middle Earth History. It seems that some readers like Eddison or Tolkien but not both. I could not get into Eddison and have read little Tolkien - The Lord Of The Rings only twice.

All of this is relevant to Poul Anderson. I regard CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy as a Christian response to twentieth century science fiction falling, both chronologically and conceptually, between Wells and Stapledon earlier in the century and Blish and Anderson in later decades. And Anderson was transforming Norse mythology into modern fantasy at the same time as Lewis' friend and colleague, Tolkien - although more people know about The Lord Of The Rings than about The Broken Sword.

Johannes V Jensen

Having read CS Lewis, we can go on to read George MacDonald, knowing that Lewis read and enjoyed MacDonald before writing Narnia or The Great Divorce. (The latter features MacDonald as a character in conversation with Lewis.)

Thanks to Poul Anderson's article, "Johannes V Jensen" (All One Universe, New York, 1997), we can try to track down English translations of Jensen's Danish novels, knowing that they influenced Anderson.

Anderson summarizes the thousand year history of Scandinavian literature:

the Eddic poems;
the writing down of the Icelandic sagas;
the Danish folk ballads;
a revival during the Reformation;
eighteenth century playwright Holberg and poet Bellman;
the Romantic movement;
Hans Christian Anderson;
Ibsen and Strindberg;
literary realism in the nineteenth century;
many well known writers from the beginning of the twentieth century until the Second World War;
Jensen, 1873-1950.

Jensen "...invented a whole new literary form for himself, the 'myth' - a sketch which in a few pages, whether of straightforward description, fiction, or fantasy conveys an intensely personal impression of something, someplace, or somebody." (pp. 193-194)

Although these "myths" were brief, "...a few pages...," Jensen also wrote The Long Journey, a six volume series of mythological-historical novels stretching from before the Ice Age until the voyage of the Beagle. The series incorporates fantasy. Some of the characters live for centuries and one chapter of Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years is a homage to Jensen. Since Jensen also has characters who may be the originals of Odin and Thor and shows the Cimbrian invasion of northern Italy, it is easy for a reader of Anderson's historical novels to recognize Jensen's influence.

Lewis, Heinlein And Anderson On The Hereafter

Introduction

This blog appreciates Poul Anderson and also recommends some other high quality sf writers including:

the early Wells

CS Lewis

the early Heinlein

James Blish

SM Stirling

Lewis

I have read Lewis' spiritual autobiography, popular theology and theologically informed fiction, both adult and juvenile. Some critics might regard Lewis' fantasy and sf as propaganda and I personally have problems in particular with his Perelandra for its anti-Darwinism. However, he did write imaginative and insightful novels and short stories which were admired by the agnostic James Blish and still are by many, including myself.

Lewis presents philosophical arguments (which I do not accept) for theism but merely assumes indefinite continuation of human consciousness after physical death. I regard such an assumption as a major weakness. Of course, we must heed any alleged arguments or evidence for survival. Lewis implies acceptance of the evidence of Spiritualism:

"'They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what's called a Haunting.'" 

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 61.

Here, a resident in the hereafter plausibly describes some aspects of our experience.

Heinlein

Apparently, Heinlein believed in survival because he wanted to: the worst possible reason.

"'When you die, you don't die all over, no matter how intensely you may claim to expect to. It is an emotional impossibility for any man to believe in his own death.'"

-Robert Heinlein, "Elsewhen," quoted in Heinlein In Dimension.

(If I have "Elsewhen" upstairs, then I can check it for myself but blog readers might remember my reluctance to climb stairs late in the evening.)

It is perfectly possible to believe in our own deaths. I did not experience anything before I was born. Why should I experience anything after I am dead? I did experience my consciousness being irresistibly driven down into darkness by a general anaesthetic. I remember nothing between that extinguishment and my later reawakening. If I had died under the anaesthetic, then there would have been no further experiences or memories of this individual. Life and consciousness would have continued but mine would have ceased as they surely will. How can anything, especially something as complicated as memory and identity, continue forever?

Panshin doubted that it was emotionally impossible for any man to believe in his own death but suspected that this was true of Heinlein. Indeed.

Heinlein, through one of his characters, attempts an argument for immortality:

"I am immortal. I transcend this little time-axis; a seventy-year span on it is but a casual phase in my experience. Second only to the prime datum of my own existence is the emotionally convincing certainty of my own continuity. I may be a closed curve, but, closed or open, I neither have a beginning nor an end. Self-awareness is not relational; it is absolute, and cannot be reached to be destroyed, or created. Memory, however, being a relational aspect of consciousness, may be tampered with and possibly destroyed."

-Robert Heinlein, "They," IN Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (London, 1980), pp. 138-153 AT p. 146.

Slow down, man. Emotionally convincing? A closed curve would be immortal? Why can you not end? Go to sleep and do not wake up. Self-awareness not relational? Self is recognized as such only in relationship to other, like left-right, up-down, on-off etc. Awareness or consciousness is precisely the relationship between a subject and its objects. That relationship can certainly be created and destroyed. Memory possibly destroyed? It can certainly be destroyed and that is the end of the continuity of the self. 

Heinlein's "Goldfish Bowl" should be upstairs but is summarized on Wikipedia. See the link. One of the scientists who finds himself in a featureless environment considers the hypothesis that he has died and is in a hereafter. That is how pervasive this idea is in Heinlein's works.

Anderson...

...considered a scientific rationale for survival - a similar rationale is present in Starfarers although in less detail - but, in Anderson's works, this is only a speculative story idea. Anderson had neither the religious faith of Lewis nor the emotional conviction of Heinlein.

Distances And Vastnesses

In Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts, II:

Diomedes is about a hundred light-years from Sol;

a secondary-drive spaceship's pseudo-speed is measured in parsecs per week;

Wace and his companions are stranded in the Diomedean ocean ten thousand kilometers from the human trading post;

the horizon is twice as far away as on Earth.

Not the light-years, the parsecs or the kilometers but the visible horizon terrifies Wace.

Nike has a close horizon whereas Daedalus has no horizon, just the planetary surface receding to invisibility and, at night, the sun as a luminous ring not enclosing the landscape but illuminating infinity.

CS Lewis had a similar experience in a different context as a character and the first person narrator in one of his own works:

"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.

I think it is time for a comparison between Anderson and Lewis.