Questions About Thule

 

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule.

See Future Thule.

In the kind of economy with which we are familiar:

(i) Individuals work to produce goods or services, thus earning a wage or salary with which to buy goods or services. However, the quantity of goods or services that they produce is more than the quantity that they can afford to buy. Thus, the controllers of the process make a profit.

(ii) When individuals access goods or services, money (cash or bank account) is a convenient, standardized form of exchange.

In the future society of "Thule," (i) no longer happens while all goods and all machinable services are as abundant as air so why does "basic share" come in the form of money?

"Basic share" at least means that every individual has an equal share or stake in society and in its technology. We need to be shown people acting collectively, not just as atomized individuals. When we try to imagine a qualitatively different society, how many assumptions do we still make based on our own social experience?

Frost-Road, River Of Frost

Nowadays, when rereading Poul Anderson and coming across a colourful description of the Milky Way, I usually pass it by on the assumption that I have noted it in an earlier post. We find:

"...a night crowded with unwinking brilliant stars, girded by the frost-road of the galaxy..."

-The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, 28, p. 550.

Searching the blog for "frost-road" brought up The Milky Way which does quote a phrase from this novel but not this phrase. Furthermore, for the reference to the phrase that is quoted, "...like a river of frost and light...," I had linked to a post entitled "Pytheas" which the computer informs me does not exist! And searching the blog for a post with that title reveals that there is none. A while back, a couple of posts were deleted for a reason that came up at the time.

This time round, I started to reread The Boat Of A Million Years not from the beginning but at its long concluding section, XIX, Thule, because I wanted to treat Thule in and of itself like an independent interstellar novel comparable to Tao Zero or Starfarers. Now I think that, when I have read to the end of Thule, I will again reread I-XVIII with a view to reperceiving the eight continuing characters as they had been in historical periods while now knowing where they are destined to wander in a remote future. While rereading, we can look out for any descriptions of the galaxy although these are less likely pre-space flight. 

Indeed, now checking XIX, 12, where Pytheas leaves the Solar System, we find:

"The Milky Way coursed heaven like a river of frost and light." (p. 499)

Thus, that earlier quotation has been found easily enough. I will now edit "The Milky Way" to link to here.

Future Thule

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

How could anyone not like Chapter XIX, "Thule"?

The eight original immortals are now called the Survivors;

Hanno explores the Solar System alone for two or more years as a "Trial run" (p. 456);

Tu Shan tries farming and handicrafts although neither of these activities fits in a high tech future;

Aliyat, surrounded by a simulacrum of medieval Constantinople for which she had been a principal consultant, converses with the apparently solid image of a friend whose sex change has been not surgery and hormones but regrown organs, glands, muscles and bones and who hopes for a non-human body next;

Wanderer visits a reservation of elective mortals whose numbers decline as their children when grown opt for immortality and reversible sterilization;

and there are four more Survivors to read about before we find out what happens to them and to the rest of civilization next!

"Thule"

Poul Anderson, The Book Of A Million Years (London, 1991), pp. 9-13.

The fictitious immortal Hanno meets the real geographer Pytheas who first wrote of Thule. Hanno sounds educated because he has traveled and studied. He mentions a trope, a penteconter and the Pretanic Isles. The Carthaginians are starting a war in Sicily but this cannot be one of the Punic Wars because it is much earlier.

What Hanno And Pytheas Say About Knowledge

Hanno: "'...I want to learn as much as I can about this earth and its peoples while I am still above it.'" (p. 10)

Pytheas: "'A consortium of merchants...want to know the chances and costs of a sea route to the far North, now that the Gauls are making the land dangerous.'" (ibid.)

Hanno: "'I have some acquaintance with [the Gauls]. That should help.'" (p. 11)

Hanno: "'...you are organizing this expedition.'"
Pytheas: "'To follow knowledge...two of the sponsors are more intelligent than most. They value understanding for its own sake.'"
Hanno: "'Knowledge has a trick of paying off in unexpected ways.'" (ibid.)

Hanno: "'...I've learned to pay attention.'" (p. 12)

Hanno: "You'll need sail. Let me counsel you on what ships to buy.'"
Pytheas: "'You claim a great many proficiencies...'"
Hanno: "'I have been through a great many schools...'" ((ibid.)

The dialogue refers to theoretical, experiential, practical and pragmatic knowledge. Hanno wants to learn while he lives. Merchants want to learn for practical reasons but some are intelligent enough to value understanding and its unexpected benefits. Some philosophers never learn to pay attention to politics.

Beginnings

The Boat Of A Million Years, I, Thule, 1, pp. 9-13. 

The opening and closing chapters are entitled Thule. The opening line:

"'To sail beyond the world -'" (p. 9)

- is spoken by Hanno to Pytheas.

The concluding chapter opens with Hanno exploring Jupiter. 

Hanno speaks to Pytheas of his namesake, Hanno the Navigator. See here. Our Hanno is Phoenician. The Navigator was a Carthaginian. Carthage was a Phoenician colony. Are the two Hannos the same? Earlier chapters are of greater interest when read in the light of the concluding chapter. We are only just beginning...

Bode And Boat

I do have a copy of Heinlein's Time For The Stars (see here) which states that:

"...Bode's Law was a simple geometrical progression that described the distances of the Solar planets from the Sun."

-Robert Heinlein, Time For The Stars (London, 1978), CHAPTER XII, p. 119.

We have even posted about this before. See here.

Next, we have been considering interstellar travel in cosmic sf so let's reconsider:

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Tears (London, 1991), XIX, Thule -

- which covers pp. 455-600 and is divided into 34 sub-chapters.

Boat... is mainly historical sf. Sf can be historical if it deals with time travel, immortality, mutants, alien visitations or other recognizable sf ideas in historical periods. Boat... is about "immortal" mutants who will die by violence or accident but not by illness or old age. The book is long enough, 600 pages, that it could have been published as a trilogy:

historical;

twentieth century;

future -

- but it is all in one. Someone that I know disliked the future section, XIX, and thought that it detracted from the novel. I do not. Historical periods do have some future ahead of them (hopefully) so let us speculate about it.

Thus, we can reconsider familiar themes:

what might technological civilization be like in the future?;

a means of interstellar travel;

interactions between "immortal" characters, as in Anderson's World Without Stars;

alien contacts.

Anderson is a master of FTL (faster than light) interstellar travel but he also wrote a lot (maybe more?) about STL (slower than light), the latter including Thule.

"May he go forth in the sunrise boat,

"May he come to port in the sunset boat,

"May he go among the perishable stars,

"May he journey in a Boat of a Million Years."

"-The Book of Going Forth by Daylight

"(Theban recension, ca. 18th Dynasty)"

- quoted in Boat..., p. 7.

An inspiring introduction. (And I still have music from the Chinese New Year concert in my head.)

The Immortals

Nornagest: born in Norway maybe 2000 BC.
Hanno: born in Tyre when Hiram was king, about 980 BC.
Tu Shan: born in China about 100 BC.
Patulcius: born in Rome in 27 BC.
Rufus: born in Gaul maybe 259 AD.
Aliyat: born in Palmyra about 550 AD.
Starkadh: born in Norway maybe in the ninth century.
Asagoa: born in Japan in the early twelfth century.
Svoboda: born near Kiev maybe in the tenth century.
Wanderer: born in North America before Columbus.
Flora: born a slave in the Southern States maybe about 1730.

In Chapter I, Hanno navigates for geographer Pytheas' northern voyage.
II, Tu Shan declines an invitation to advise the Emperor.
III, Hanno finds Rufus.
IV, Aliyat flees from Palmyra.
V, Nornagest and Starkadh meet and later die.
VI, Hanno and Rufus meet Svoboda in Kiev.
VII, They meet Aliyat in Constantinople.
VIII, Asagoa becomes a Buddhist nun.
IX, Svoboda ceases to be a Christian nun.
X, Asagoa meets Tu Shan.
XI, Hanno meets Cardinal Richelieu.
XII, Wanderer leaves his tribe.
XIII, Flora escapes from slavery.
XIV, Hanno and Rufus find Wanderer; Rufus dies.
XV, Flora finds Aliyat.
XVI, Hanno finds Patulcius.
XVII, Svoboda fights in World War II.
XVIII, The Eight meet.
XIX, They leave Earth.

That might provide a framework for comprehending a long, episodic novel that could instead have been presented as a series of short stories. Although Anderson realises each period well, the climaxes of the episodes become predictable. Either one of the characters has lived longer than is usual or two of the characters are immortals meeting for the first time. Chapter XVII is an exception. The immortals act as a team only in the last chapter.

One reader enjoyed the historical chapters but disliked the concluding futuristic chapter. I disagree with him here but another way to present the narrative would have been to publish Chapter XIX as a separate 145-page volume, a sequel. Thus, Volume I would comprise historical and contemporary fiction whereas Volume II would be speculative fiction but with eight characters in common. That might have been a more interesting way to do it?

Addendum, 9/6/12: If Boat had not culminated in the futuristic "Thule," then it would have had to reach some other sort of conclusion in the present. Chapter XVIII as it stands is merely a preparation for Chapter XIX.

Chapter XIV implies that Hanno and Wanderer manage to prevent white-Native American relations from being even worse than they were. Thus, here, as in Chapter I, there is an unseen influence of immortals on history.

Anderson, Poul, The Boat Of A Million Years, Orbit, 1991.

Mountains And Boat

Now let's compare Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains with his The Boat Of A Million Years.

"'...Americans are descended from the failures of Europe, and asterites are descended from the failures of Earth.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Recruiting Nation" IN Anderson, Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984), pp. 255-283 AT p. 272.

The interstellar craft is crewed by:

third-raters;
failures;
loafers;
wastrels;
clunkbrains breeding in the easy conditions;
cranks;
the handicapped;
crooks;
the elderly.

In Boat, Hanno argues that, at each stage of evolution, it is the failures, atavisms and outcasts that make the next step:

fish that couldn't compete struggled onto land;
ancestors of the reptiles were forced out of the amphibians' swamps;
birds were forced into the air;
mammals were forced to find niches safe from dinosaurs;
some apes were forced out of the trees;
Phoenicians went to sea because they held only a thin strip of land;
only those uncomfortable in Europe went to America or Australia;
the immortals go into space.

Boat, like the Harvest of Stars Tetralogy and Anderson's Genesis, also addresses the relationship between biotic and post-biotic intelligences:

"'...at last we will meet the postbiotics as equals...'
"'I wonder if, at the end, we and our allies won't be more than the equals of the machines.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), XIX, Thule, pp. 455-600 AT p. 598.

"Thule" II

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

I missed one example of experiential knowledge:

"'...that long hull would never survive the North Atlantic. My friend, you haven't seen waves or storms till you've been yonder.'" (p. 12)

Of course Pytheas has seen waves and storms, or he would not understand the words, but we also understand what Hanno means, that Atlantic weather must be experienced to be appreciated.

One of Pytheas' ships has a "...cutwater." (p. 13) The meaning is clear enough although I had not encountered the word before - except in previous readings when I did not notice it. Hanno wears a "...chlamys..." (p. 13). Pytheas tries to locate the north celestial pole with a "...goniometer..." (ibid.) Hanno, without access to ancient records, knows that the heavens change over the centuries.

Pytheas' expedition is threatened by Keltoi (p. 16). His soldiers include hoplites and peltasts (ibid.). The Keltoi turn out to be Pictones (p. 19). In narratives set on Earth in the past, Anderson always remembers seasonal weather:

"Autumn was in the wind, chill and loud. Leaves were turning yellow, brown, russet and beginning to fly away...Cloud shadows and pale sunlight sickled across immensities of sallow grass." (p. 20)

Pytheas and Hanno are shown Stonehenge. Pytheas knows that it is ignorance to say that "'...giants built it in the morning of the world.'" (p. 21) By sighting from the center of the complex, he deduces that the Sun will rise above an outer stone on Midsummer's Day but they cannot wait to verify this. Pytheas concludes:

"'I've learned as much as I can...It isn't enough! It never will be. Our lives are a million years too short.'" (p. 22)

He echoes James Blish's philosopher at the end of the universe pronouncing the epitaph for man: "We did not have time to learn everything that we wanted to know." (See the concluding section, here.)

When Anderson writes about autumn, we need no Internet but when he writes about a goniometer or a peltast, we wonder how we managed without it.

The Book Of Many Cross-References

In recent posts, discussion of Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years has involved reference to his:

Time Patrol Series;
The King Of Ys (with Karen Anderson);
Tales Of The Flying Mountains;
"Flight to Forever";
Orion Shall Rise;
Brain Wave;
World Without Stars
Dominic Flandry series;
Starfarers;
other "STL future histories";
by implication, one short story about a stranded time traveler and another about a stranded extraterrestrial.

Since I have as yet reread only as far as Chapter IV, section 3 (of 16), other cross-references may become relevant. So far, each chapter has introduced an immortal:

I, Thule - Hanno in 310 BC;
II, The Peaches of Forever - Tu Shan in 19 AD;
III, The Comrade - Rufus, in conversation with Lugo/Hanno, in 359 AD;
IV, Death in Palmyra - Aliyat in 641 AD.

Hanno was already over five hundred years old, an experienced immortal, in 310 BC - born during the reign of Hiram of Tyre. Various works of fiction have accustomed us to the idea that immortals move and change their identity to conceal their longevity every few decades but Anderson shows us Rufus and Aliyat before they have realized the need for this. They can only arouse wonder and suspicion among their contemporaries.

The Golden Slave, Chapter XV: Numerous Details

The Golden Slave, XV.

Phryne, a Greek, says that the Pontines are more alien to her than the Romans, Sarmatians or Cimbri. (p. 204)

After mentioning no less than five current cultures or tribes:

"She looked out the window, down to gardens where paths twisted so a man could lose his way." (ibid.)

The garden of twisting paths - a maze? - symbolizes the ancient world where a traveler could easily lose his way among the disparate cultures and spheres of influence.

Musical instruments include a sistrum. (ibid.) (See image.)

Mithradates asks Eodan:

"'Is it true that sky and sea run into one another up there, as Pytheas has written?'" (p. 206)

For Pytheas as a character in a novel by Poul Anderson, see "Thule." For all blog references either to the geographer, Pytheas, or to the spaceship, Pytheas, see here.

Mithradates astonishes us by drinking hemlock in memory of Socrates. (p. 205) However, it turns out that he drinks several poisons in small quantities in order to immunize himself because poisoning is a frequent means of assassination.

Mithradates leads an expedition against the Tectosages because:

"'Their tetrarch has been a thorn in my side since I took Galatian territory. We have had border skirmishes and the Gallic cantons lean toward Rome and intrigue against me.'" (p. 207)

"Cantons" is familiar although unexpected in this context.

That brings us to the end of Chapter XV. However, XVI and XVII are even more detailed.

Aliyat

 

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule, 3.

The eight Survivors, mutant immortals who have survived through history into an indefinite future, are Hanno, Wanderer, Tu Shan, Patulcius, Corrine, Asagoa, Svoboda and Aliyat. Sub-chapters 1-8 of Chapter XIX show how each of the Survivors copes with the future. After Hanno and Shan comes Aliyat.

The man, Raphael, with whom Aliyat has had a relationship has become a woman, Fiera. The change is total in organs, glands, bones etc, not just in surgery and hormones. (Anderson's Time Patrol universe also has indefinitely prolonged lifespans and genetic sex change.)

Brains as well as bodies are pliable so that psyches can be altered and non-humanoid bodies, e.g., half animal, will be the next development.

All goods and most services are as abundant as air. Basic share merely coordinates activities and allocates inherently limited resources like land. The walls of Aliyat's single room form any facility and show any scene on demand. She can have the sights, sounds and odours of the medieval Constantinople that she remembers. She was consulted in the development of the simulacrum.

Liberating for many but overwhelming for Aliyat.

Future Thule II

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

Wonders continue:

everyone can converse with a planetary artificial intelligence which claims that it has a complete understanding of physics, has delineated every possible biochemistry and has determined the bounds of technological possibilities;

whales became extinct but were recreated and reintroduced;

lighted Lunar cities are visible from Earth, although weather control, atmosphere maintenance and energy transfers cause fluorescence that obscures most of the night sky;

gigabillions of artificial micro-organisms cleanse the environment;

the sea has aquaculture and bargetowns;

despite population pressure, the Survivor Yukiko is allowed to live alone on an atoll;

exploratory robots disclose that life is rare, that three species so far detected have palaeolithic technology and that another three have behavior that is either elaborately instinctive or expressive of very different kinds of mentality;

the orbiting Web detects many "'...anomalous radiation sources...'" (p. 473) hundreds of parsecs away and indecipherable informational signals from twenty three astrophysically unusual sources;

robotic explorers, traveling at near light speed, will reach the nearest such sources in a millennium and will transmit information that might reach the Solar System fifteen centuries later.

Knowledge

Dante called Aristotle the master of those who know. Life and action have to be based on knowledge, not on ignorance or superstition. From an early age, explorers, philosophers and scientists have tried to know. I will shortly reread the opening chapter of Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, "Thule," about an early search for knowledge.

For James Blish on knowledge, see here, particularly the concluding section. The Buddhist Eightfold Path begins with "Right Knowledge." There are different levels of knowledge. Persis d'Io realized that the teenage Dominic Flandry knew exactly what he was doing when he seduced her. For me, the quintessential Anderson character who knows what is happening to society and tries to do what is best for his society is Gratillonius, the last King of Ys.

Despite accumulated and shared knowledge, philosophical disagreements remain. Some think that the earliest mental event in a new organism must have been caused by an earlier mental event, either in an earlier organism or in the creator (see here). I suggest instead that qualitative changes can and do occur and that these have included naturally selected organismic sensitivity quantitatively increasing until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation, thus that mental events began in the course of natural selection. I think that Poul Anderson is on my side of this argument.

Debate

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule, pp. 489-496.

Whether to launch a crewed interstellar spaceship is debated by the senior Survivor, Hanno, and the ruling intellects:

the Engineer

the Psychologist

the Economist

the Astronomer 

the Artist

the Sociologist

the Administrator 

- who are human, electronic or both.

Hanno thinks:

"If only life and awareness weren't so seldom, so incidental or accidental." (p. 492)

That is one premise of this novel. In Poul Anderson's Technic History universe, intelligent species are as easily generated as snowflakes. That is one reason why alternative fictional futures are necessary - as is their occasional incorporation into multiverses.

STL Or FTL

Poul Anderson's Major Fictional Futures With Slower Than Light (STL) Interstellar Travel

Tales Of The Flying Mountains

The Rustum History

Kith: short stories

Kith: Starfarers

The Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy

Genesis

Tao Zero

The Byworlder

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule

FTL

The Psychotechnic History

The Technic History

The High Crusade

World Without Stars

After Doomsday

For Love And Glory

The Hoka series (with Gordon Dickson)

Extra-Galactic

Tao Zero (STL)

World Without Stars (FTL)

Future Histories

We know which ones they are by now!

Future Thule IV

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

Mars and Venus could be terraformed (enormous technological change) but no one is interested (massive psychological change).

In extraterrestrial settings, Anderson's characters encounter unforeseen hazards, which are then explained. Here is another. As mountaineers traverse a Lunar ledge, the rock gives way under the first in file. Why? From pockmarks near the break, Svoboda deduces:

"... - once in the past a shotgun meteoroid shower had struck here. Probably radiation spalling then weakened the stone further..." (p. 477)

How did Anderson think of so many plausible unforeseeables?

The immortal bureaucrat kept himself so obscure throughout history that he appeared in only one earlier chapter of Boat. Gnaeus Cornelius Patulcius served the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Turkish Republic and the Dynasts, went public with the other Survivors, helped the high technology civilization to incorporate less developed societies, then returned to obscurity but is now unemployable as a mediator or operations manager because community has dissolved into individuals without any common interests or identity.

Chapter XIX, section 8, is about human minds interacting and merging with AI and will require further rereading. We have read eight sections and there are eight Survivors but has each had a section to him/herself?

I. Hanno.
2. Tu Shan.
3. Aliyat.
4. Wanderer.
5. Yukiko.
6. Svoboda.
7. Patulcius.
8. Flora.

Yes.

Hidden Bible

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule, 14, pp. 501-504.

Tu Shan says that it is natural to die yet people have become immortal. He asks:

"'Should that be? Will it in the end cost the race its soul?'" (p. 504) 

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?

Biblical influence again?

I am now rushing to get out the door, across town and up a hill so maybe back here tomoz?

Have a good night. Happy Tuesday.

An Appropriate Christmas Present

(Another one this year. For earlier posts today, see Revision And Expansion and Christmas Under A Red Dwarf Star. For previous Christmases, see links from A Pivotal Story.)

Edward Brook-Hitching, The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps (London, 2016).

Interesting information about places mentioned by Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman:

The Phantom Atlas summarizes the story of Atlantis and Anderson, of course, wrote The Dancer From Atlantis;

Hy Brasil (scroll down) was purged from maps only as recently as 1865;

the opening and concluding chapters of Anderson's long novel, The Boat Of A Million Years, are entitled "Thule" and, in the former, the central character, Hanno, joins the northern expedition of Pytheas whose lost account is cited in The Phantom Atlas.

There are Brendan's Islands on Anderson's fictional planet Avalon and there was a fictional St Brendan's Isle on maps of the Atlantic well into the seventeenth century.

Also relevant here is an earlier post, Anti-Magic.

Patulcius

The Boat Of A Million Years, XIX, Thule,, pp. 480-483.

The curator of Oxford tells the immortal bureaucrat Patulcius that she has no work for him because community has dissolved and people have become "'...purely individuals...'" (p. 483), loyal only to variable interpersonal configurations. I doubt this because I see social interaction as fundamental to humanity and because I expect that mass collective action will be necessary to bring the full benefits of technology to every community and individual on Earth. That action will define a new society where each individual develops by interacting with many others both in small groups and as a member of a global but interconnected population. 

However, it is the task of sf (science fiction/speculative fiction) writers to consider the consequences of alternative possibilities as HG Wells did in The Time Machine (dystopian) and The Shape Of Things To Come (utopian).