Lazarus Long And Hugh Valland

If a lot of people lived indefinitely extended lifespans, then younger immortals would have to find ways to recognize and respect older immortals, at least some of whom would have become maturer and wiser over their centuries or millennia.

When Robert Heinlein's Howard Families - not immortal but long-lived - meet, Mary Sperling declares her age, one hundred and eight-three, and, when no one present claims to be older, chairs the meeting because she is the Senior. When Lazarus Long, challenged about his identity, discloses that his birth name was Woodrow Wilson Smith, he is asked in astonishment how old he is and, when he owns up to being two hundred and thirteen, he must replace Sperling in the chair. His style is far less formal than hers but is accepted because he is the Senior. He will turn out be a mutant immortal that need not have been born among the Howards who have been merely selected for longevity.

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, when Felipe Argens meets Hugh Valland, the latter:

"...thrust out a muscular hand. Archaic for certain!" (II, p. 10)

When Valland declares his name, Argens is startled because:

"...I'm old enough to recognize that anyone bearing a name like that must be a great deal older.'" (p. 11)

Indeed, Valland is the Lazarus Long of his timeline. Heinlein made a mess of writing further volumes about Long but Anderson would have done a good job if he had continued the biography of Valland. 

To ship under Captain Argens, Valland must be a gunner who can double as a second deck officer and ideally must also have some xenological skill. Valland is old enough to have learned from experience before anyone had started to teach such skills:

"'I think I can claim the whole lot,' he answered. 'No formal trainin'. By the time they got around to foundin' academies in such subjects, I'd already been in space for quite a spell.'" (p. 12)

What an asset Valland would be as an academy student. He would know how to learn whatever there was to be learned from an academy course and would also know how to pass on his accumulated knowledge without patronising or denigrating anyone else. A true Senior. He would be asked to stay and teach but probably would not want to.

Would immortals just keep working in the same line of work indefinitely? I think that people would find different ways to use all that time like long periods of what would call "retirement" followed maybe by complete changes of career direction. In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, as I recall, one character had spent a normal working lifetime on Earth. Thanks to suspended animation, he was able to emigrate to an extra-solar colony. Thanks to boosterspice, the Known Space equivalent of anti-agathics or the antithanatic, he would then live through a second working lifetime in a different profession. What a life experience.

Valland And Smeth

World Without Stars.

Hugh Valland is the dying Enver Smeth's closest approximation to both a doctor and a chaplain, asking his permission to remove his suit to see if he can be helped. When Smeth complains about the unfairness of his thirty years as against Valland's three thousand, Valland softly tells him to shut up and reminds him that he is a man.

At Smeth's request, Valland sings the song about Mary O'Meara. Again, we should notice that Mary is not active in the song. This stanza ends:

"And whisper your name where you lie." (V, p. 34)

Where she lies... She is dead and buried. And Smeth dies as this line is sung. Valland has helped Smeth to die as well as he can.

Later, Valland will show the inhabitants of this planet that their God is present even when not seen. Valland's survival skills overcome every obstacle, all to get him back home to Mary O'Meara.

Valland And Smeth

World Without Stars, V.

Valland would have made a good counsellor/clergyman for the dying. Smeth's ribs have pierced his lungs and his spine is broken. Valland asks whether he can remove Smeth's suit:

"'I've only had thirty years,' Smeth shrieked. 'Thirty miserable years! You've had three thousand!'

"'Shut up.' Valland's tone stayed soft, but I've heard less crack in a bullwhip. 'You're a man, aren't you?'

"Smeth gasped for seconds before he replied, 'Go ahead, Hugh.'" (p. 33)

Smeth asks Valland to sing and even specifies a song that is very personal to Valland and, after only a very slight hesitation, the latter complies.

What else could have been done? Smeth receives the best possible send-off in the circumstances. Valland is effortlessly good for everyone that he meets.

(The unfortunate Smeth was created - as a fictional character - only so that he could be painfully killed but authors cannot be compassionate towards their characters. Smeth's death is an important occurrence in World Without Stars.)

Two Unaging Men

Rereading Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, I wanted to write something briefly about Anderson's two longest living characters (but see the first comment below): Hanno from Boat and Hugh Valland from World Without Stars. Each is, like Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long and (maybe) James Blish's John Amalfi, the oldest man in his universe. (One difference of approach is that Blish shows us Amalfi dying with everyone else at the end of their universe whereas the others just keep going if not forever then for longer than we can see.)

Valland will live for at least three thousand years in our future whereas Hanno, already an adult in 310 BC (correction: I should have said "already about 670 years old in 310 BC"; see comments), will survive into an indefinite future and will then travel relativistically so is probably older than Valland. Both will experience the entire period of human interstellar travel although with the important difference of FTL for Valland and STL for Hanno. (I think it is legitimate to employ these acronyms for a fannish as opposed to a mundane audience?)

Near the end of Boat, Anderson makes us think that Hanno is about to die but he doesn't yet. Anderson pulled the same stunt with Dominic Flandry near the end of A Stone In Heaven as Heinlein did with Lazarus Long at the end of Time Enough For Love. However, I do not regard Time Enough For Love or any of its successors as valid continuations of the Future History so that for me the only Lazarus Long worthy of our attention is the one in Methusaleh's Children.

Wanting to write something about these two old men, Hanno and Valland, I checked back and found that I had already written all that I immediately wanted to say in "Immortality," reproduced below from my Science Fiction blog.

                                                                       Immortality

Fantasy

“Immortality” in science fiction (sf) can mean just that someone is immune to disease and old age but not also to accident or violence. He is not indestructible. By contrast, in Neil Gaiman’s fantasy series, The Sandman, the source of Hob Gadling’s immortality is supernatural, not chemical or genetic. The anthropomorphic personification of Death has agreed not to come for Hob. Consequently, he enjoys, or endures, more than just perpetual good health and middle age: he can be immersed, burnt and deprived of food but cannot be drowned, burnt or starved to death.

Hob’s immortality differs from that of Bernie Capax who is older – he remembers the smell of mammoths – but who meets Death when a wall collapses. Bernie then learns that his soul has a different kind of immortality. The fantasy Sandman presents the full panorama of Heaven, Hell and states between. Although Hob, like a few other deathless men, welcomes his physical immortality, The Sandman presents two other characters who, having become physically indestructible, long for extinction, the mythical Orpheus and the super-heroine Element Girl. (All mythologies and many comic book characters co-exist in this series of “graphic novels.”)

Fictional vampires have the same problem of living indefinitely and needing to conceal their longevity but we know how they can be killed.

SF

Although there are many other examples, I will mention briefly just twelve instances of sf immortality. Of the three Campbell future historians, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and James Blish, two addressed the idea. In Heinlein’s Future History, the Howard Families breed for longevity. After a few generations, they live well into their second century. The oldest member present chairs meetings. Like Hob and similar characters, they practise what they call the Masquerade: to conceal the fact of longevity, they periodically move elsewhere and change their identities. Later, public disclosure of the Howards’ longevity inspires a research project that finds a means of indefinitely extending anyone’s life span. Such artificial means of longevity exist in other works to be mentioned below but, first, there is another idea in the Future History.

An early Howard, Lazarus Long, lives indefinitely, for millennia, and becomes “the Senior”, the oldest member of the human race. Thus, he is a mutation who need not have been born to Howard Family parents. “Lazarus Long” is a Masquerade name. His birth name, Woodrow Wilson Smith, is a clue to his real age. In The Boat Of A Million Years by Poul Anderson, a small group of such mutations survives through recorded history and into an indefinite future. Crossing interstellar space, they split up but plan to meet again in another million years. 

Of course, Anderson could not possibly have written what these characters would be like after a million years. By that time, either they would all have died in accidents or those who yet survived would have become different characters. How much would they even remember? Each of them had already preserved his or her sanity by somehow marshaling inner resources in order to resist being overwhelmed by accumulating memories. By living that long, they perform functions that are usually performed by successive organisms without a memory accumulation problem. Death is the natural mechanism for memory deletion.

In Asimov’s future history, extra-solar colonists, inhabiting a germ-free environment, extend their life spans well into a second century and usually record their age in decades, not in years. A year becomes more like a month on that time scale. The only immortal being in this future history is a humaniform robot, not a human being. Thus, Robot Daneel Olivaw, having been introduced in the Robot novels, appears again millennia later in the Foundation novels which had originally been an unrelated series.

In James Blish’s Cities In Flight future history, antigravity and antiagathics make interstellar travel possible. Star-traveling characters live for centuries although we only realize later in the main volume that so much time has elapsed since the beginning of the book. Logically, some of the characters happen to live until the end of the universe although, for story purposes, that ending is brought much closer to the present than we would have expected. In fact, the date given, 4004 AD, contradicts suggestions in the previous volume that several millennia have elapsed during the interstellar period. Despite antiagathics, everyone dies but new universes begin.

In Larry Niven’s Known Space future history, “boosterspice” performs the same function as antiagathics and protector-stage humanoids are immortal, although at the expense of no longer being “breeders”. However, in his alternative future history, A World Out Of Time, Niven imagines an elegant alternative source of immortality. If teleportation is possible, then the chemicals associated with aging can be teleported out of the body. Thus, the instant elsewhere is a young forever. It is perhaps a more acceptable form of immortality than another in the same book which arrests physical development before puberty, producing immortal children who must preserve mortal adults for breeding.

In Anderson’s Psychotechnic History, modeled directly on Heinlein’s Future History, it is suggested that an organism can be made immortal only by shielding it from all radiation, thus by incarcerating it underground, consequently producing a human being with an extremely limited experience and mental range. Scientists care for an immortal hospital patient: a dead end. Appropriately, this story is called “What Shall It Profit?” In Anderson's Technic History, “antisenescence” explains why Dominic Flandry remains active and might yet have more children although he is nearly seventy. However, antisenescence delays aging but does not prevent death.

By contrast, in Anderson’s World Without Stars, every human being uses “the antithanatic.” A few immortals lead changeless lives on planetary surfaces or in orbiting space stations but many trade and explore endlessly between galaxies which are made accessible by a series of instantaneous jumps in a spaceship. Many memories are artificially deleted to prevent cerebral overloading but it is necessary to preserve the overall pattern of the past and the important details. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, remembers Mary O’Meara who died young in 2037 just before she would have had access to antithanatic. He revisits her grave on Earth as if revisiting a living woman and recounts experiences on many planets but must also have deleted many intermediate memories. He has somehow made sense of his indefinite longevity by focusing on one set of memories.

At any given time, what exactly does Hugh Valland remember? First, he has normal memories of whatever he has experienced since his most recent memory deletion. Secondly, he preserves vivid memories of Mary O’Meara. Thirdly, he remembers the pattern of his life since leaving Mary. Fourthly, within this pattern, he has perhaps a natural life span’s worth of memories of experiences in space, on other planets and back on Earth. However, he must have had to delete far more details than he has been able to retain. He maintains his purpose and remains celibate by focusing on ever fresh memories of one person. Only at the end when we realize that that one person is long dead do we doubt Valland’s sanity.

It seems appropriate to begin a brief consideration of fictitious immortality with the fantasy character Hob Gadling and to end with the sf character Hugh Valland.

Addendum, 5/6/12:  

Hob is thought to be the Wandering Jew;
Hanno is asked if he is the Wandering Jew;
in one of four speculative Secret Origin stories, the DC Comics character, the Phantom Stranger, is the Wandering Jew;
so is Lazarus in A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr ("What the lord...raise up, it stay up.")

Posted by Paul Shackley at 21:21

Hugh Valland

Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland is like:

Robert Heinlein's Jetman Rhysling because he is a singer of the spaceways;

Heinlein's Lazarus Long, Anderson's Hanno and James Blish's John Amalfi because he was been alive for a long time and longer than anyone else.

However, Valland has more going for him even than that. When he is communicating with an alien, Valland's musical instrument, the omnisonor, enables him to form sounds that are impossible for a human throat. Thus, his musical ability can be adapted to another purpose.

Of these and some other fictional "immortals," Valland is the only one who needs to use technology to edit memories in order to prevent memory overload leading to insanity. Thus, after living for nearly three thousand years, he retains only the memories of a normal lifetime.

Valland's fiancee, born in 2018, dies in 2037, just too soon to benefit from the antithanatic. In Amalfi's timeline, the antiagathics begin to be developed in 2018.

I have just watched a Smallville TV episode where Clark Kent, time traveling forward to 2017, is horrified to see that his future self is a straight-looking guy in a business suit wearing large glasses! 

We in the early twenty first century live at a Crossroad of Time.

Age And Wisdom

World Without Stars.

Age is not wisdom but can be used to become wise. Imagine someone who has been doing that for nearly three millennia. Hugh Valland lives up to our hopes and expectations. When idolized by a mere thirty year old:

"Valland took the situation well, refrained from exploiting or patronizing, and managed to slip him bits of sound advice." (IV, p. 24)

When the Meteor, emerging from a space jump, plunges toward a planet that should not be there but that fills the viewscreen, Captain Argens is paralyzed but Gunner Valland issues the necessary order:

"Then Hugh Valland's tone cut through, sword-like with what I should have cried. 'Pilots! For God's sake, reverse us and blast!'" (V, p. 29)

Argens, jarred from his stupor, scans the meters and takes command. Valland does not mutiny but leads when necessary.

James Blish said in one of his collections of sf criticism - and I am not going to find it at this time of night - that most people, given an indefinitely extended lifespan, would use all that time to become worse specimens than they already were. But some would not. Individuals like Valland would become leaders of mankind, whether formally recognized as such or not.

Argens' Autobiography

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966), originally serialized in Analog as The Ancient Gods:

Chapters I, VIII and XIV are narrated from a third person alien point of view;

Chapters II-VII, IX-XIII and XV-XVII are first person narrations by Guild Captain Felip Argens;

of Argen's chapters, all but XVII were part of his published autobiography;

XVII was found among his effects and added to a posthumous edition.

Chapter II begins:

"On another evening, very far away, I had heard another song. This was when I got back to City." (p. 7)

The chapter then describes the orbiting starport called City and Argens' meeting with the singer, Hugh Valland. Thus we never learn what evening or what song Argens had been describing before he turned his attention to City and Valland. These chapters can only be a short extract from the autobiography of a man who had lived for centuries.

"Hugh Valland" is a familar kind of name to us but not to Argens:

"I'm old enough to recognize that anyone bearing a name like his must be a great deal older." (pp. 10-11)

The novel is set at least two removes into the future: Argens has lived for centuries but Valland for millennia and the antithanatic will be developed in the latter's lifetime but in our future. Valland describes himself as "'...medieval...'" (p. 16)

"One thing we have all gained in our centuries is patience. Could be that Hugh Valland simply had a bit more than most." (p. 16)

Argens - or rather Anderson - skilfully tells us how immortality works while also hinting at details of the autobiography that we will never read. Referring to himself and his fellow immortals, Argens writes:

"Sometimes we're a bit crazy, even. We don't have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Take my own case - but no matter." (p. 16)

In one other work by Anderson, the first person narrator tells us his friend's story but merely hints darkly at his own:

"'I looked into the abyss once, and saw nothing, and haven't looked since. You keep looking. Which of us is the braver?'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), pp. 103-134 AT p. 134.

The High Sierra

There is an extremely evocative passage just over a page in length on pp. 110-111 of Poul Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966). It is very difficult to quote any of it without wanting to quote all of it. It is impossible to find any sentence or two that are the core of the passage. They are all core.

First, Hugh Valland, nearly three thousand years old, remembers being young.

" 'Oh Lord, but we were young!' " (p. 111)

He refers to himself and Mary O'Meara.

Secondly, they were young at a very special time. Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, "Bliss was it to be alive that day, and to be young was very heaven." Valland and Mary were young when it was known that the antithanatic would "'...soon be in production.'" (p. 110) Thus, they were at the dawn of a biological revolution that would affect everyone. " 'Nobody who was alive would have to grow old.' " (p. 110) There would be no more fear of old age. Valland spells this out by contrasting a child like Argens' young daughter with a pre-antithanatic grandmother. The former would eventually become the latter " '...in less'n a century...'" (p. 110)

Thirdly, he tells us how the whole world population was responding to this imminent change. " 'The world had grown so quiet.' " (p. 110) Partly, people became cautious now having so much to lose and, partly, they just " '...needed a while to get used to the idea.' " (p. 110)

" 'It was an air...while the human race waited, it felt kind of like wakin' after a fever had broken.' " (p. 110)

Having described people who have become used to their immortality, Anderson now asks us to imagine those who were waiting for it.

Fourthly, though, Valland and Mary, being young, " '...couldn't sit still...' " (pp. 110-111) They had to do something to prove to themselves that they " '...were alive enough to rate immortality...' " so they backpacked in the High Sierras (p. 111). Valland explains to Argens that this was a mountainous region partly "'...kept as wilderness.'" (p. 110)

Fifthly, moreover, they did it to remember those who had loved the Sierras but had died and would never come back.

" 'We swore to each other we'd always remember our dead.' " (p. 111)

As we learn later, that is what he is doing for her. She died aged nineteen.

Sixthly, he recalls that most people eventually agreed with him and Mary that immortality would be useless if it just meant centuries of " '...bein' careful...' " so they " '...went to the stars.'" (p. 111)

And that ties in with Earth being quiet and depopulated in the concluding chapter.

I have tried not to quote too much but every short quotation has been apt and my attempted summary is about as long as the passage that I set out to summarise.

Valland's Versatility

World Without Stars.

The natives bring a meat animal as a gift but the stranded spacemen do not know whether it will poison them so what should they do? When Valland burns it, the natives understand that this is how strangers from the galaxy accept an offering. To communicate with the Azkashi, Valland supplements his own voice with his omnisonor to reproduce any humanly unpronounceable Azkashi phonemes. He is enough of a poet to generate "...meaningful phrases." (VII, p. 51)

But mutual understanding is not always straightforward. The following chapter, narrated from the point of view of Ya-Kela, the One of the Pack, reveals that, by claiming to have come from the galaxy, ya-Valland has implied that he is "...the emissary of God." (VIII, p. 52) Yet his many physical weaknesses contradict such a claim. Is Valland putting himself at risk by accompanying the natives back to their home? Read on.

Thor And Hugh Valland

This is the seventh post this week to have been inspired by Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, Chapter II.

Gods live in us. Hugh Valland, born about 2018 (a very significant year: see also here), is old enough to remember still earlier stories about Thor, who has been mentioned on this blog more often than I had realized.

Valland is also creative enough to compose new stories about Thor. The god will come to help Wenli if asked because he owes Valland a favor:

"'I helped him out once when he got into an argument with an electrostatic generator. Now let me tell you more about him.'" (p. 15)

Valland, a successor of the skalds, then recounts the tale of Thor and the world serpent. All of Poul Anderson's works are set in a single - multiverse.

Stars Between Galaxies

In Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, a spaceship crossing intergalactic space passes a red dwarf star with planets. The astronomer on the ship does not know whether the red dwarf had originated in the normal way within a galaxy or in some unknown way between galaxies.

Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966) answers this question:

hydrogen clouds condensed into galaxies;
smaller condensations became intergalactic star clusters which, however, did not endure because -

(i) their giants went supernova,
(ii) cosmic expansion dispersed matter, thus preventing any further star formation,
(iii) galactic gravitation broke the clusters up;

thus, only the long living red dwarfs were left.

Captain Argens, en route to a planet of such a star, explains all this to his two new crew members and thus to us. I thought that two spacemen would not need to be told how stars formed. Sure enough, Rorn complains:

" 'Please...Valland and I do know elementary astrophysics.' " (p. 19)

Valland agrees that he does but is beginning to realize the implications in intergalactic space: old stars and planets that are metal-poor because supernova enrichment stopped early but with lighter elements and life, including intelligent races that might have needed millions of years to industrialize and therefore have learned different things along the way.

These Yonderfolk can travel only to the galactic rim and then only with heavy radiation screening because the radiation level within any galaxy would kill them. Valland wonders whether they have natural immortality but Argens points out that quantum processes, viruses and chemicals can also mutate cells. Valland's speculation echoes Anderson's story "What Shall It Profit?" in which a man is made immortal by shielding him from all radiation in a very restricted environment deep underground. He is physically immortal but mentally undeveloped, an experimental dead end.

Another Evening

IN Poul Anderson's World Without Stars:

Chapters I, VIII and XIV are narrated from an alien pov;

everything else, culminating in Chapter XVII, is extracts from Guild Captain Felipe Argens' autobiography.

Chapter II begins:

"On another evening, very far away, I had heard another song. This was when I got back to City." (p. 7)

We are distracted by Argens' account of the colonized planet, Landomar, and do not return to the song in City until the bottom of p. 9. By then, we have forgotten the haunting quality of that two-sentence opening paragraph. Is Argens writing in an evening and remembering that other evening in City? Or has he just discussed one evening, then remembered that "other evening"?

An evening is an ending. An evening remembered is a past ending. And the evening referred to was "very far away." It is distant in space as well as in time. So Argens is not writing in City, where (we soon learn) he had a portwife called Lute and a young daughter called Wenli, so where is he and what has happened in between?

An autobiography is about the auto, the self, but these extracts have been selected to tell us about Valland, not about Argens. The latter tells us that immortality makes people patient but also eccentric and even crazy:

"We don't have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Like my own case - but no matter." (II, p. 16)

No matter, indeed. We never learn what bugs Argens but this remark about not editing certain memories is a clue to Valland's psyche.

The narrator of Anderson's "The Problem of Pain" looked into the abyss once, saw nothing and stopped looking. However, he tells us not his own story but that of Peter Berg who continues to seek answers. Similarly, Argens, at least in these extracts, tells us not about himself but about the millennia-old Hugh Valland.

Argens, Valland and their contemporaries:

live indefinitely extended lifespans;
but never retain more than an ordinary life-time's worth of memories;
therefore (maybe), keep journals and write autobiographies, like Argens;
can make instantaneous jumps between galaxies;
therefore, theoretically, could continue to travel outward through the universe throughout historical ages.

Anderson's Time Patrolers:

live indefinitely extended lifespans;
can spend years in the past or the future yet return to their "present" the moment after they left;
remember some events that "did not happen," at least not in the current timeline;
know the general course of future history and of human evolution;
can learn languages electronically, then erase the linguistic memories when they are no longer needed.

How would both groups perceive time? Would they remain human?

Limitations

World Without Stars, VIII.

Ya-Kela thinks that ya-Valland has:

"...curious weaknesses.'" (p. 52)

He is blind at night, awkward in the marshlands, lacking either tail or webbed feet, and ignorant of dangers like dart bushes. Of course Valland is awkward and ignorant in this environment! That ya-Kela does not understand that is a limitation on his part, not on Valland's. In a city, if he ever visited one, ya-Kela would not know to look both ways before crossing a street.

More seriously, if the stranger is not after all "'...from God...,'" (p. 53) then ya-Kela:

"'...will plunge the first spear into ya-Valland.'" (ibid.)

Many on Earth would regard the Azkashi's devotion "'...to God alone...'" (p. 54) as admirable but we have learned from experience how this can go wrong. In London, an Evangelical preacher went to the assembly point of a demonstration in order to address Muslims with remarks like:

"They say that He is not the Son of God and what a blasphemy that is!"

Not a blasphemy, just a different belief!

(What constitutes respect or disrespect to the Lord is largely a matter of tradition. Someone who entered our meditation hall was shocked to see people sitting for meditation with their backs to the Buddha.) 

Here at Blog Central, we, editorially speaking, are suffering from a mild cold, therefore reading and posting sluggishly. Also, we are still giving some attention to the less-read James Blish Appreciation blog.

Go with God. (As Blish's Jorn the Apostle says.)

Thor And Hugh Valland

Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966).

See Dream Country plus combox.

OK. I got it wrong about Thor so here's the deal. Valland tells young Wenli that:

Thor has a red beard;

goats pull his wagon;

the wheels make thunder;

Thor throws a hammer at trolls;

he will come if they ask him;

Valland helped Thor in an argument with an electrostatic generator;

Thor caught the snake that encircles the world.

Born in the twenty-first century, Valland remembers - and adds to - the myths.

Valland And Rorn

World Without Stars.

Argens wants a gunner and second deck officer with some xenological skill and Valland claims all three from experience, not from training. Also:

"'Been an engineer myself, several kinds of engineer, now and then...'" (VII, p. 47)

- and:

"'I've done soldierin' now and then, here and there...'" (XII, p. 88)

What has he not done? Valland puts all this experience to practical use, predicting what will happen and assessing what can be done.

Yo Rorn's verdict on Valland:

"'A loudmouthed oaf.'" (X, p. 66)

Can one man work with another and yet make such an uniformed judgement about him? Yes.

Hugh Valland

Rereading a novel involves noticing details that were meaningful to the author and to some of the characters though not to the reader on a first reading. This instance is particularly poignant. In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966), three thousand year old Hugh Valland, who travels between stars and galaxies, explains why he is content to visit his Mary O'Meara only occasionally on Earth.

" 'Earth's no place for a live man to live any more. Fine for Mary, not for me. It's not unfair to either of us. We get together often enough, considerin' that we'll never grow old. Between whiles, I can remember...' " (p. 16)

Earth is no place for the living but fine for Mary because Mary is dead. They'll never grow old because he has the antithanatic and she has died. Valland visits a grave. He remembers all the time.

The narrator of the novel did not know this when he conversed with Valland but does know it when he narrates. Like the author, he keeps the surprise till the end. And we forget this early conversation unless and until we reread the novel.

Anderson readers, reread! You have nothing to lose but insufficient appreciation of well-crafted stories and novels.

The Life Of Hugh Valland

Hugh Valland was born on Earth in the early twenty first century.
The antithanatic was developed in his lifetime.
He shipped on the first starship.
He composes and sings songs.
He has soldiered now and then.
He joins exploratory spaceship crews as a gunner.
He never accepts a captaincy because he wants to be free to return to Earth every few years or decades.
He is nearly three thousand years old.
For four decades, he wages war on an intergalactic planet until he and his companions are able to build a spaceboat, contact a technological civilization on another planet in the same system and return home.

We want to know:

how long Valland lives;
what other galaxies he visits;
more about this amazing intergalactic civilization;
how many human beings live in "...timeless oneness..." (p. 8) with a planetary surface and how many rove like Valland.

Remote Galaxies

We are used to interplanetary or interstellar travel in science fiction. In Tau Zero, Poul Anderson, defining "families" as clusters of galaxies and "clans" as clusters of clusters, presents both inter-family and inter-clan travel at relativistic speeds. In World Without Stars (New York, 1966), he presents intergalactic travel by instantaneous jumps.

A remote galaxy is said to have a relative velocity that is "...a goodly fraction of c." (p. 7) Surely even remoter galaxies have relative velocities just under c? A ship in galaxy 1 accelerates to the relative velocity of galaxy 2, then jumps to galaxy 2 where it can rest and resupply in a starport. From this base of observation, it can establish the position and relative velocity of galaxy 3, then accelerate enough to jump to galaxy 3. Thus, the entire universe is accessible. With aging ended by the antithanatic, a spaceman might visit every galaxy? Unfortunately, Anderson does not develop this idea further, writing only this one novel about an expedition to a planet in intergalactic space.

The crew of the Meteor (as identified in Chapters III and IV):

Felipe Argens, captain;
Hugh Valland, gunner, second deck officer;
Yo Rorn, electronician;
Enver Smeth, chemist;
Alen Galmer;
Chu Bren;
Galt Urduga;
two others.

Like Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long, Valland is probably the oldest member of the human race. Like Heinlein's Jetman Rhysling, he is both a spaceman and a singer. He discloses that, five centuries previously, he had composed a song that is known to Argens. Differences from Rhysling: Valland is not blind and plays an "omnisonor," not an accordion. Cover artists have depicted the omnisonor.

Unfortunately, Heinlein went on to write hundreds of pages of drivel about Long. Also unfortunately, Anderson wrote nothing more about Valland, although he did give us another immortal, Hanno, in The Boat Of A Million Years. Hanno crosses interstellar distances at relativistic speeds and agrees to meet fellow immortals again in another million years. Even Anderson was not able to envisage such a meeting.

Hugh Valland's Competence

World Without Stars, V.

The Meteor crash lands:

"We hit." (p. 30)

When Captain Argens regains consciousness and goes to find his men, he meets Valland who:

gives him a full report on the half-flooded ship with two dead, one mortally injured and the survivors in the saloon;

suggests that the captain joins the rest while he himself looks outside before reporting back.

Definitely the kind of man that you want to have with you in a shipwreck or in any other catastrophe. He remarks:

"'I came through fairly well, myself,'..." (p. 31)

He has been coming through fairly well for three thousand years. We can bet on Valland continuing to survive for quite a while yet. 

Usually, we do not see fictional characters' deaths although James Blish felt obliged to show us his antiagathics-user meeting their ends at nothing less than the end of the universe. 

Galactic Wonder

I first read Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein some time in the period 1956-60. It was then a novelty for me to read a matter of fact prose account of a young man's first glimpse of an extraterrestrial. I get something of the same feeling reading Poul Anderson's account, in World Without Stars (New York, 1966), of two men drinking cocktails on a porch with space dropping away from them on the galactic rim. The galaxy streams past their viewport and they look beyond it. See also how I felt while reading a chapter in a book by James Blish here.

In World Without Stars, Captain Argens tells Hugh Valland that they will be dealing with some Yonderfolk, i.e., extra-galactics. Valland asks. "'Like M 31?'" (Chapter II, p. 12) Googling reveals, to my surprise, that this is the Andromeda Galaxy.

When James Blish's John Amalfi discusses traveling between galaxies, he says that the nearest, apart from Andromeda, is NGC 6822, about a million light years away. See here. Knowing that both Valland and Amalfi had referred to another galaxy, I had to check whether it was the same one. Intergalactic sf is rare. It is good to read about journeys not to Mars or Proxima Centauri but to M31 and NGC 6822.