"A Wilderness Of Suns..."

See "A Wilderness Of Stars."

When discussing how to track down Snelund's associates:

"McCormac thought of the wilderness of suns and worlds where his life had passed, and said, 'Probably most will succeed in disappearing.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 367-520 AT Chapter Six, p. 422.

"Traffic was sparse, here where the Empire faded away into a wilderness of suns unclaimed and largely unexplored."
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 4.

McCormac has worked in the Terran Empire and Snelund's associates will disappear into that Empire whereas the unclaimed suns are outside the Empire. Thus, McCormac and Ridenour do not refer to the same "wilderness of suns." I realized this only when I had tracked down these two passages to quote them together.

Quest

In the introduction to "Quest" in Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), Poul Anderson uses the phrase "...a wilderness of stars" (p. 204) for a fourth time. In the story itself, there is a variation: "...a wilderness of uncharted suns." (p. 205) These are powerful phrases so I intend no adverse criticism when I draw attention to their repeated use.

Anderson draws a solid picture of a Grand Council including many nonhuman great folk on Planet Winchester. Some nonhumans have risen high in the English Empire by accepting the True Faith, indeed Archbishop William himself is a Wersgor, but, of the former space captain Insalith, we are told that:

"He was an obstinate pagan who attributed all events to the operations of quantum mechanics." (p. 207)

Here we see our own world view observed completely from the outside.

Having read this story twice before, I remember an intriguing Grail Quest that is somehow disappointed although I do not remember precisely how.

Before the English invaded the Wersgor empire, Insalith saw:

a planet unoccupied except by what could have been a Christian monastery;
a monster or dragon that gave him and his companions no trouble as they approached;
a few beings that might have been human;
through an open door, what might have been a silver chalice on an altar -

- "...and heard ineffably sweet music." (p. 208)

This is intriguing enough. I cannot remember whether Insalith was lying for some reason or, if not, what other explanation was given as to why the Real Grail was not to be found when the planet was revisited but I will shortly find out.

I have thought that an sf novel might be written along these lines. A spaceship from Earth with a small crew reaches an inhabited extra-solar planet and establishes communication. At an early stage, an inhabitant mentions that someone else came from Earth a long time ago and is living in seclusion on the other side of the planet. Dismissing this as a mistake or misunderstanding, the Earth crew continues its dialogue with the natives and its exploration of their environment but, before they return to Earth, one of them flies around the planet to investigate this claim since it has been made again. He reports back by radio in hysterics and seems to be repeatedly swearing. When two of his colleagues have flown to the rescue, he insists that the previous visitor from Earth was Jesus Christ who had come to this planet after the Ascension. Since human exploration has now reached this far, he has departed, going straight up under his own power, saying, "I go to continue my Father's work at the end of the galaxy..."

- or something as elusive and allusive as the concluding passages of the Gospels.

"A Glory Of Suns"

"Heaven was darkness filled with a glory of suns. Viewscreens framed the spilling silver of the Milky Way, ruby spark of Antares, curling edge of a nebula limned by the glare of an enmeshed star. Brightest in vision stood Borthu's, yellow as minted gold."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 160.

Recent posts have summarized:

the problem in "Margin of Profit";
suggested solutions;
van Rijn's solution.

However, this does not exhaust the story as the above quotation demonstrates. Anderson often describes space and stars as seen from a spaceship, mentioning familiar details like nebulae and the Milky Way. However, the descriptions are always fresh. In this passage, the phrase, "...a glory of suns...," replaces "...a wilderness of stars..." which we have encountered several times before. See here and here.

I will continue rereading "Margin of Profit" and will then revisit "Hiding Place" which also has Nick van Rijn in action in space instead of receiving reports from subordinates in the Winged Cross.

Finding Familiar Phrases

Poul Anderson, After Doomsday, CHAPTER THREE.

Tau Ceti II, like some other planets known to us, has "...hurtling moons..." (p. 28) (Scroll down.)

My blog search for "hurtling moons" found Rustum and Gorzun but not Barsoom. An Aenean moon also moves visibly. See here.

Interstellar explorers instruct newly contacted industrialized and outward-looking races:

"From these newly awakened worlds, then, a second generation of explorers went forth. They had to go further than the first; planets of interest to them lay far, far away, lost in a wilderness of suns whose worlds were barren, or savage, or too foreign for intercourse. But eventually someone, at an enormous distance from their home, learned space technology in turn from them." (p. 33)

Regular readers might recognize that it was the recurrent phrase, "wilderness of suns," that drew my attention to this passage. However, the passage was worth quoting at greater length and will generate another post.

Visible Stars And The Spiral Arm

Regular readers will understand why I quote the following passage in full:

"His gaze went to the stars in the viewscreen. Without amplification, few that he could see lay in the more or less 200-light-year radius of that rough and blurry-edged spheroid named the Terran Empire. Those were giants, visible by virtue of shining across distances we can traverse, under hyperdrive, but will never truly comprehend; and they filled the merest, tiniest fragment of the galaxy, far out in a spiral arm where their numbers were beginning to thin toward cosmic hollowness. Yet this insignificant Imperial bit of space held an estimated four million suns. Maybe half of those had ben visited at least once. About a hundred thousand worlds of theirs might be considered to belong to the Empire, though for most the connection was ghostly tenuous.... It was too much. There were too many environments, races, cultures, lives, messages. No mind, no government could know the whole, let alone cope.
"Nevertheless, that sprawl of planets, peoples, provinces, and protectorates must somehow cope, or see the Long Night fall. Barbarians, who had gotten spaceships and nuclear weapons too early in their history, prowled the borders; the civilized Roidhunate of Merseia probed, withdrew a little - seldom the whole way - waited, probed again.... Rigel caught Flandry's eye, a beacon amidst the great enemy's dominions. The Taurian Sector lay in that direction, fronting the Wilderness beyond which lay the Merseians."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT I, p. 348.

"Too big, this handful of stars we suppose we know..."
-op. cit., p. 349.

Familiar Themes
The size and shape of the Terran Empire.
The edge of a spiral arm.
The tenuousness of the Empire.
Impossibility of interstellar government.
Staving off the Long Night.
Barbarians with spaceships and nuclear weapons.
The long term goal of the Roidhunate.
Imperial Sectors.
The Wilderness between Empire and Roidhunate.

John Ridenour

We see John Ridenour from Dominic Flandry's point of view on Starkad, then as one of the viewpoint characters on Freehold - see also here.

Ridenour:

is a civilian xenologist, working for the Navy;
is tall, wiry, blond and hatchet-faced;
dresses more serviceably than fashionably;
smokes a pipe;
is married with children, at least one of them grown up;
is standoffish by nature;
learned about Freehold from conversation, reading and "...machine-enforced mnemonics..." -Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 4;
travels to Freehold on the Germanian merchantman, the Ottokar;
is annoyed when a crewman insists on talking as they get their first view of the planet but then cannot be ungracious to the younger man.

The passage introducing Ridenour includes the phrase "...wilderness of suns..." (ibid.), a slight variation on the appropriate and evocative "...wilderness of stars..." that we have noticed several times previously. See here, here and here.

Stars Seen From Space

Poul Anderson, Tau Zero, CHAPTER 2.

Stars throng space. They show their colors: Vega blue; Capella golden; Betelgeuse red. We remember Vegans in James Blish's Cities In Flight and Betelgeuseans in Anderson's Technic History. Stars invisible from Earth hide the constellations from untrained eyes.

"The night was wild with suns." (p. 18)

We remember Anderson's phrase, "A wilderness of suns...," see here.

The Milky way belts heaven but we have already quoted this. See The Milky Way Thread. The Magellanic Clouds glow and the Andromeda galaxy gleams. In the Technic History, other galaxies are mere background but Tau Zero will go intergalactic.