Valya

The terrestroid planet Valya, close to its dwarf sun, Elena, has:

a forty plus hour day;
a calm ocean;
land covered by russet shrubs and turf;
tiny flyers, not insects;
long-limbed, spindly, blue-furred, mountain-dwelling, dancing, bronze-age natives with antennae on pointed heads and a strange grammar of personal pronouns;
a rich deposit of gold.

Gold attracts Stellar Metals. Bronze age natives cannot resist them. Like Tametha, another atrocity committed by a League company.

Early Morning News

Mirkheim, II.

While exercising, Grand Duchess Sandra watches an early newscast on her phone which she has switched to television reception.

Yesterday, a navy speedster known to have been stationed at the primitive planet, Valya, landed at Williams Field, generating rumors that Babur has issued a new declaration. Three previous Anglic-language pronunciamentos had been radioed to the scientific outpost on Valya by an orbiting Baburite ship. The original claim of the Autarchy of United Babur to Mirkheim had been radioed from Earth orbit. Because Mirkheim is close to Babur and because the supermetals are strategically important, the Autarchy will not tolerate possession of Mirkheim by any power hostile to Babur. The Hermetian throne, neither confirming nor disconfirming the rumors, will make a statement soon.

Addressing a convention of the Justice Party, Prime Minister Lapierre of the Solar Commonwealth said that his government was willing to negotiate but that Babur had not yet arranged to exchange ambassadors. The Commonwealth will not yield to aggression. Babur has amassed great naval strength.

Last night, the Liberation Front held a rally at a resort on the Longstrands where intemperate orators addressed a large and enthusiastic crowd of Travers.

Troubles both external and internal.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere

The previous post focused on what happened to van Rijn, Falkayn and Coya between the end of "Lodestar" and the beginning of Mirkheim, Chapter I. However (see Mirkheim, Prologue), we are additionally informed about intermediate events on:

Hermes
Babur
Valya
a Baburite moon

- and also about the independent discovery of Mirkheim.

My mind keeps being blown by the sheer mass of details in the Technic History. I had forgotten about Valya and Ayisha until I started to compile these lists and to make links to earlier posts.

On Tametha And Valya

"Lodestar."

Chee Lan tells us that Polesotechnic League company factors and field agents "'...set up a little dunghill of an empire...'" (p. 372) on Tametha. I took this to mean that the company representatives oppressively exploited Tamethan labor, which would explain why the natives rebelled, although we are not shown any details of this exploitation.

On Valya, we are told of injustices perpetrated by Stellar Metals although, in this case, the injustices do not involve exploitation of local labor:

Stellar Metals chased out the gold miners who had been there before them;

Stellar mining machines break up the herds which are the Valyans' main food source;

Stellar neither picks at veins nor sifts streams but extracts quartz from mountainsides, leaving heaps of poisonous slag;

Stellar also diverts rivers through hydraulic separators, destroying aquatic life.

Thus, "Lodestar" and, after it, Mirkheim, show us serious problems within the League and also an ingenious solution devised by David Falkayn.

Mirkheim, Prologue

Poul Anderson's Mirkheim has an unusual thirty-page, nine-part Prologue with dated headings.

Y minus 500,000.

A giant star goes supernova and one planet is so large that its core survives, covered in supermetals.

Y minus 28.

Benoni Strang lands on Babur and begins to cooperate with the Baburites.

Y minus 24.

This passage gives us our first sight of David Falkayn's home planet, Hermes, and informs us that Sandra Tamarin, who had been with Nicholas van Rijn on Diomedes, has had a son, Eric, by van Rijn.

Y minus 18.

Falkayn finds Mirkheim and founds Supermetals.

Y minus 12.

The Imperial Band has united Babur and Strang begins to arm them.

Y minus 9.

Coya Conyon has married Falkayn and will join his trade pioneer crew. The Polesotechnic League has become cartelized.

Y minus 7.

Eric Tamarin witnesses League injustice on Valya.

Y minus 5.

Strang's group has a base on a Baburite moon. Strang is fanatically opposed to injustices on his home planet, Hermes. I accept Anderson's characterization of Strang but hope that it can be recognized that other Hermetians may be equally opposed to the same injustices without becoming fanatics.

Y minus 1.

Mirkheim is discovered independently...

Thus, of the nine parts:

three are about Mirkheim;
three about Strang;
two about Tamarins;
one about van Rijn and co.

However, there are other interconnected themes. Van Rijn, speaking to David and Coya, complains about the degeneration of the League, Eric experiences it and Strang, we are yet to learn, is a major part of it.

Planets In Mirkheim

Poul Anderson's sf novel, Mirkheim, features or refers to the following planets:

Mirkheim
Babur
Hermes (see also here, here and here)
Ivanhoe
Diomedes (see also here)
Woden
Valya
Luna
Vanessa (see also here)
Merseia (see also here and here)
Cynthia (see also here)
Gorzun (see also here and here)

Ikrananka:

Tidal action has forced one hemisphere of the small, eccentrically orbiting, librating planet Ikrananka to face its red dwarf sun but such slow rotation generates a weak magnetic field so that the planet retains an atmosphere although most of its water has frozen on the cold side making the warm side a slowly deteriorating desert whose inhabitants, struggling for survival in their season-less, rhythm-less environment, regard nature as hostile, believing in demons but not in gods, whereas dwellers on the edge of the Twilight Zone, with rain, snow, day, night and constellations, more conventionally believe in an annually dying and rising god and a single devil whose power can be neutralized. The latter are easier to trade with.

Vixen:

In the Cerulian system, resonance with the jovoid planet Ogre has multiplied perturbation and brought the eccentricity of the terrestroid Vixen's orbit close to one-half so that, with a 24 degree axial tilt and midsummer nearly at periastron, once every eighteen month year the northern hemisphere is scorched with four times the radiation that Terra receives from Sol - snow melts, rivers overflow, lakes bake dry, storms rage, fires break out, erosion prevents mountain formation, hot wind blows dust and ash across dry plains.

- Ikrananka and Vixen copied from here.

Further Repercussions Of "Lodestar"

At different times, rereading Poul Anderson's "Lodestar" has initiated discussions of the author's treatment of differences between generations. See here and here.

In the opening section of "Lodestar," van Rijn's trade pioneer crew experiences the problems of the Polesotechnic League on Tametha, an exploited planet alluded to in:

Wealth Of Imagination And Economy Of Writing
Fine Tuning The Chronology
What Happened On Tametha?
Transitions In "Lodestar"
Polesotechnic Problems
Valya
The Van Rijn Show
Something Is Rotten In Technic Culture?

"Lodestar," like "The Star Plunderer" - about the Founder of the Terran Empire -, is a pivotal episode in the History of Technic Civilization. 

Injustices

(Problems with copying images.)

Mirkheim, Prologue, Y minus 7.

By his dispossession of the native Valyans, Sheldon Wyler of Stellar Metals has made an enemy of Lord Eric, son of Sandra, Grand Duchess of Hermes. Wyler replies to Eric:

"'...as for your threat - I admit I'm no expert on your people. But I do seem to remember they've got their own discontented class. Will they really want to take on the troubles of a bunch of goddam outsiders, long after these operations are over and done with? I doubt it. I think your mother has more sense.'" (p. 27)

As far as this goes, Wyler is correct. Hermetian inequities cause so much conflict that social change becomes inevitable. Sandra thinks that Hermes, while remaining nominally a duchy, will become in practice a republic.

A response to the injustices on Valya is really the responsibility of the Council of the Polesotechnic League. By founding Supermetals, David Falkayn has helped many of the poorer planets and species in Technic civilization but this does not prevent the continued perpetration of injustices elsewhere. The Technic History is very like real history. Later, in the Imperial period, Dominic Flandry will participate in the conquest of a planet.