Magic And Goetics

Poul Anderson's "Operation..." series began with the same premise as Robert Heinlein's "Magic, Inc.":

magic works and is practised like a set of technologies.

The series presents not any new premise but some new implications of Heinlein's premise. However, the concluding novel, Operation Luna (New York, 2000), changes the premise.

First, new terminology is coined. The characters practise "goetics"; magic was merely protogoetics.

Secondly:

"...goetic quantum-wave transference across a potential difference..." (p. 99)

 - is a new energy source and all energy, whether from fuel, goetics, a waterfall etc, is conserved. Thus, Operation Luna,and retroactively the earlier "Operation..." stories, are science fiction (sf) whereas their inspiration, "Magic, Inc.," about supernaturally based magic, was fantasy.

Operation Luna presents a history of goetics.

The Stone Age

There were mammoths, bears and cave men but also dragons, centaurs, elves and even "half-world...plants..." (p. 126) Dead half-world organisms dissolve in sunlight and natural chemistry and therefore leave no fossils. This difference caused human fear or abhorrence so that Stone Age art shows little or nothing of the half-world. Some shamans contacted it but warlocks and witches mainly tried to control the elements.

The Bronze Age

Warrior aristocrats discouraged any magical challenge to their power but diviners etc practiced their arts and paranatural Beings flourished beyond areas controlled by humanity.

The Iron Age

As ferrous materials spread, ferromagnetism cancelled rheatic forces, the paranatural ecology withered and the Beings began their Long Sleep. European dwarfs withdrew underground because, although unharmed by iron, they had lost their trade with gods and Faerie and their goetically charged jewelry, weapons etc became unacceptable to human beings now abhorring paganism and witchcraft.

The Goetic Age

Instead of Einstein originating relativity theory and Planck originating quantum theory, they cooperated to originate rheatics. Moseley applied rheatics to degaussing the effects of cold iron, thus releasing the goetic forces from their electromagnetic inhibition. The Sleepers Awoke but to a changed world:

"...wilderness reduced to a few enclaves...goetics...essentially a new set of technologies..." (p. 48)

Some of the Fair Folk fled to the Moon. To avoid sunlight, they must travel back and forth between Earth and Moon only during an eclipse.

Thus, Operation Luna considerably extends the story as told in Operation Chaos.

WALB

In recent posts:

Three Moons
Wells' Selenites;
Lewis' Sulva;
Anderson's evil Beings from Earth.

Three Earths 
Anderson's goetics;
Blish's Armageddon;
our current crises.

The third Earth is the real one where the others are imagined. However, Steve Matuchek on the goetic Earth imagines two Earths similar to ours:

one without goetics;

another with what we recognize as Nazism and Stalinism.

Blish acknowledges Lewis who acknowledges his debt to Wells.

Demons speak in works by Lewis, Blish and Anderson although, of these three authors, only Lewis believed in their literal existence and did not claim to know any details.

Wells' The Time Machine was published in 1895;
Anderson's Genesis in 2000;
Anderson's Mother Of Kings in 2001;
Anderson's For Love And Glory in 2003.

With Lewis and Blish between, these four authors span the twentieth century.

The Time Machine and Genesis present alternative fictional accounts of the ultimate fate of mankind on Earth.

Character References

Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (New York, 2000).

Moriarty was the Napoleon of crime so Fu Ch'ing is its Genghis Khan. (p. 144)

Ginny dons a cloak that is:

"...a minor talisman; Fritz Leiber had once played Prospero in it." (p. 145)

Here we have:

a reference to another fantasy and sf writer;
a reference to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream;
by extension, also a reference to Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest;
a reminder that, in this fictional universe, talismans have real power;
a reference, I suspect, to a real cloak owned by the Andersons?

Her owl pin is "...much more potent..." (ibid.) not only because it is the badge of her order but also because it has been to Hell. Although this "Hell" is a planet in another universe, not a supernatural realm, it is somehow connected with magic/goetics. A "demon"/denizen of Hell hears and implements a curse and the demons serve the Adversary.

How does "goetics" work? Anderson makes it sound like an extension of known science:

"'...goetic quantum-wave transference across a potential difference...'" (p. 99)

- is an energy source like fuel or a waterfall and, like them, is conserved. When a scryotronic communicator malfunctions, it is thought that it has:

"...gone into wave-mechanical oscillations, jumps to and fro between alternate histories..." (p. 114)

The apparatus for testing this idea involves mandrakes, described as "...cantankerous buggers." (ibid.)

Go and catch a falling star,

    Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

    Or who cleft the devil's foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy's stinging,

            And find

            What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.
-copied from here.

Neil Gaiman quotes Donne's poem at the beginning of Stardust.

Vampires

I have searched the blog for references to vampires. (Scroll down.) Poul Anderson's "Interloper" gives us a fictional origin of vampire legends.

I strongly dislike the whole idea of vampires and cannot understand how one author has written a whole series about them. (There are also some Young Adult series.) Alan Moore developed the idea that, although vampires cannot cross running water, they might be able to survive and thrive by living under the surface of still water - until someone causes the water to flow.

SM Stirling's Shadowspawn turn out to be vampires among other things which does not endear them to me. However, I remain interested in their evolution, history, mental powers, means of social control, civil war and dilution by interbreeding.

The Shadowspawn are homo sapiens nocturnus and the Alfar in "Interloper" are nocturnal life. See Alfheim. Anderson also has "half-world" organisms that dissolve in sunlight when dead in his Operation Luna. See Magic And Goetics.

There is a very old tradition that a different kind of life coexists with familiar life forms on Earth and imaginative authors can tap into this idea. It is as if they were confirming something that we already knew.

Magic And Entropy

Copied from "James Blish Appreciation" here:

In James Blish's Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, magic is control of demons, which are fallen angels, and is practised in the twentieth century although most people do not believe in it. It is theorized that stable negative entropy would be eternal life. See here.

In Poul Anderson's Operation Otherworld, set on a parallel Earth, magic, practised in earler centuries, was protogoetics whereas goetics is a new energy source. See here. Demons are inhabitants of Hell, a chaotic, entropic universe.

Thus, Blish and Anderson present alternative imaginative takes on magic, demons and entropy.

What Is Magic?

(i) For the answer given in Poul Anderson's Operation... series, see Magic And Goetics. (Sometimes, all the work has already been done in an earlier post.)

How many other meanings are there?

(ii) In one popular meaning and in the Harry Potter series, waving a wand and uttering incantations creates matter and breaks the conservation laws.

(iii) In SM Stirling's Dies The Fire and somtimes on Earth Real, "magic" means Wiccan rituals.

(iv) In James Blish's Black Easter/The Day After Judgment, magic is control of demons which are fallen angels.

(v) The DC universe includes magicians like Zatara, Zatanna, Arion of Atlantis, Merlin, Tim Hunter and John Constantine. The theory is that belief alone is enough to generate supernatural beings and realms and working magic. Kryptonians are vulnerable to magic as to Kryptonite. Many fictions coexist as in Poul Anderson's and Michael Moorcock's multiverses.

An evening of alternative reading usually generates material for a comparative blog post.

Different Kinds Of Universes

Sf writers regularly present rationales for concepts like FTL, telepathy, time travel and multiple or alternative universes. Becoming familiar with such rationales, we can take them for granted and not notice if the details differ slightly. Here are two hypotheses:

that alternative histories occur in parallel universes;

that what is myth or fiction in one world is real in another.

These hypotheses are not identical. An alternative history may contain a Hitler who won World War II and another world may contain a real Sherlock Homes but these are not the same idea. Hitler winning the War diverges from the familiar (to us) Hitler who lost the War whereas, in our world, Sherlock Holmes does not exist in the first place. No mere divergence within or from our history would bring him into existence.

Of course, a single multiverse comprising many parallel universes might encompass both alternative histories and real fictions but these would remain different kinds of other universes.

In Poul Anderson's works:

alternative histories exist, e.g., in one, quantum mechanics and relativity were combined as "goetics";

Sherlock Holmes exists in the Time Patrol universe;

Time Patrolmen sometimes enter alternative histories and speculate about one in which Hitler was not born;

"real" and fictional people, including Sherlock Holmes, meet between universes in the Old Phoenix.

Thus, Anderson seems to cover every possibility.

SM Stirling's works present:

parallel universes in Conquistador and the fourth Draka novel;

divergent histories, The Peshawar Lancers, the Draka and the Change;

a divergent history caused by the arrival of time travelers from the future of another timeline, i.e., the Nantucket Trilogy.

In the Change series, The Sea Peoples introduces for the first time the idea that:

"...what is dreams or tales in one is sober truth in the next." (See here.)

Noetics

Poul Anderson wrote about goetics and also mentioned noetics. (I am trying to keep the terminology straight here.)

Anderson respected Edward Mitchell's school of noetics because Edwards had been on the Moon. I do not think that that is a reason to respect a man's views on anything else. Nevertheless, I do approve of the aims of Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences which at least overlap with those of the Society for Psychical Research. 

IONS researches:

psychic abilities

channeling

mind-matter interaction

energy healing

intention

spontaneous remission

meditation

alternative healing

consciousness-based healthcare

spirituality

human potential

psychokinesis

survival of consciousness after physical death

yoga

ESP

lucid dreaming

telekinesis

precognition

Every alleged phenomenon should be investigated. The outcome should be either debunking or confirmation and understanding of a specifically identified phenomenon. Maybe telekinesis works but precognition doesn't or vice versa or both or neither. I don't know. That's what we need to find out, just as we try to learn about anything else: electromagnetism; gravity; the strong and weak nuclear forces; quantum mechanics etc. The fact that any particular line of enquiry is difficult makes it worthwhile.

Looking Back At Looking Forward

I remember my father saying, "D-Day was twenty years ago," as if that was a long time. Now it is sixty five years ago. That is a long time. Back then, I was entirely focused on the future through reading science fiction. I would have read a novel set in 2020 rather than a history of 1945.

In 1999, Poul Anderson imagined his character, Steven Matuchek, in about 1945. See the previous post. Thus, sf writers look not only forward but also backward and sideways. But now let us look forward again. What shape would the Earth of the goetic universe be in by 2020? We imagined back then that space travel would have become common by now. If goetics has enabled Valeria and her generation to avoid some of our problems, then what other problems would they have had instead? Notionally, that Earth still exists in its fictional or parallel realm. It did not cease to exist at the end of Operation Luna. Valeria is now sixty-nine and her parents are long dead. The generation that was alive during World War II is passing away. World War I veterans are gone by now. We can imagine similar changes in the goetic universe although usually we stop thinking about it as soon as we reach the end of the novel.

Imagining Alternative Histories

Characters in Poul Anderson's Operation Luna speculate -

If Einstein and Planck had not cooperated in 1901, then they might have developed distinct, mutually incompatible, theories of relativity and quantum mechanics instead of the single theory of rheatics.

Next, if Moseley had not released goetic forces by applying rheatic equations and thus degaussing cold iron, then:

fossil fuels and electricity would have been major energy sources;

transport would have been by horseless carriages or dirigibles;

astronomers would have analyzed spectra, not specters;

paranature would have remained Asleep, concealed;

witches and warlocks would have been cranks, not respected professionals;

werebeast DNA would not be understood;

those who had maintained magical traditions (Africans, Australians, Native Americans) would not have had their head start in practical goetics.

Imagining inhabitants of other timelines speculating about our timeline is a way of commenting on our timeline. I have found some comparable examples of this in graphic fiction.

A DC Comics supervillain, traveling between alternative Earths, claims to have found one where no one has gained any super powers. A colleague comments that that sounds unlikely.

Superman flying between parallel Earths passes briefly through the sky of Earth Prime, where superheroes are fictions. A man looking up shouts, "Look, up in the sky, it's...it's nothing!"

Alan Moore's Watchmen universe had real superheroes so their comics were about pirates, then horror, and a comics shop was called "Treasure Island," not "Forbidden Planet."

A Watchmen universe newspaper headline asks "RR for President?" A character asks, "Who wants a cowboy actor in the White House?" We realize that they mean Robert Redford.

One of the "Watchmen" comments that the US would have gone mad as a nation if it had lost in Vietnam.

Jews And Comics

Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (New York, 1995).

Having read about Christians and Muslims (see here), next we read about Jews:

"'...when religion forbids most [Jews] to originate spells, and the Orthodox don't use goetics at all, the proportion of them who serve as dogfaces and Rangers is simply too high to ignore.'
"I myself had gotten tired of comic-strip supermen and pulp-magazine heroes having such monotonously Yiddish names - don't Anglo-Saxons belong to our culture too? - " (p. 14)

There are dog soldiers in one part of the DC Universe.

I had found three references to comics in Poul Anderson's works. See here. Now we have a fourth. Of course, Anderson imagines the reverse of the situation in our universe. Our Golden Age (from 1938) comic book superheroes were exclusively WASPs. Black superheroes first appeared in the Silver Age (from 1960). Marvel Comics even introduced a Black Panther who, I gather, was the first black superhero.

Do pulp heroes seem a bit like comic book superheroes waiting for the comic book industry to get started?

Souls

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

In the goetic universe:

the nature of souls is unknown;

however, valid observations have proved that they exist;

but the observations are "'...scattered and not repeatable under controlled conditions...'" (p. 224), as with other paranatural phenomena;

paraphysical forcefields, like similarity and ergody (?), are not limited by light speed;

therefore, they can in principle move energy between any points in space;

thus, a small input can give a large output;

therefore, qualitative understanding is more important than quantitative and rapid progress is possible in goetics;

souls may be supernatural or paranatural.

Ginny thinks that a soul:

is an energy structure within the parafields;
is formed by but outlives a body;
can move between universes;
can remain disembodied on Earth as a ghost;
can enter a fertilized ovum to reincarnate;
can be allowed to approach the Highest and thus be saved;
can be attracted to the Lowest and thus be damned.

Using the parafields, scientists devise new spells which work. In James Blish's Midsummer Century, between any two topologically identical events, there is a diagrammatically expressible affinity or repulsion which can be acted out by dances. Thus, protective rituals can work.

Alternative Fiction

Alternative history fiction is a kind of science fiction written by HG Wells, Poul Anderson, SM Stirling, Harry Turtledove and others. Imagine that a familiar event happened differently and has been remembered that way by fictional characters. In a BBC TV series, a character who was a TV script writer had agreed to write a series set during what to him and his contemporaries was the historical 1940's when the Germans invaded and conquered Britain after the death of Churchill. Asked how he would handle it, he replied, "Well, I can't rewrite history," whereas, of course, history has already been rewritten to bring such a character and his entire social context into (fictional) existence.

Anderson's main alternative historical speculations are in "The House of Sorrows," "Eutopia" and some installments of his Time Patrol series. More fanciful alternative histories feature not just events happening differently but also alternative laws of physics allowing magic to work. But, even here, historical events, Einstein originating relativity and Planck originating quantum mechanics, are given an alternative twist: Einstein and Planck cooperated in originating "rheatics," which led to the degaussing of cold iron and thus to practical magic.

See:

Magic And Goetics

Imagining Alternative Histories

Characters in that alternative timeline imagine ours.

We sometimes draw attention to works by other authors in which ideas discussed here have been taken further or developed differently. Thus, our familiar fictional narratives might have taken alternative directions. Superman, as written by Alan Moore, experiences a scenario in which Krypton did not explode. A heckler interrupts a political speech by Jor-El, asking which catastrophe is coming now, the planet blowing up again or just floods and plagues this time. Jor-El laments the passing away of a noble and proud Krypton - the Krypton of the old comics! In Moore's Watchmen, superheroes in the real world caused comic books to switch from superheroes to pirates. A news vendor remembers that there used to be SUPER-MAN and FLASH-MAN...

Imaginative writers take us out of our reality and back into it.

Magia And Goeteia

OK. I have found a direct linguistic link between Poul Anderson and CS Lewis. Lewis' evil scientists/magicians:

"'...thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving them and knowing them and reverencing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia - the brutal surgery from without.'"

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 13, 4, p. 648.

Anderson, following Robert Heinlein's Magic, Inc., presents magic as technology in Operation Chaos but switches to the terminology of "goetics" in the sequel, Operation Luna. 

Anderson treats Christian characters sympathetically. Lewis imaginatively re-presents Christianity three times:

The Narnia Chronicles

The Ransom ("Cosmic") Trilogy

The Great Divorce

Read Anderson and Lewis.

Saving The Appearances

See:

Fairy Lands Forlorn
Elves Versus Trolls
Elves And The Sea 

Operation Luna, 13.

If there were dragons, centaurs and elves in the remote past, then where have they gone and why have they been forgotten except as myths?

First, their bodies crumble after death so they leave no fossils.

Secondly, fear might explain why they were not recorded in Stone Age art.

Thirdly, folk tales of fleeting visits to strange realms might preserve memories of "'...those eerie, evanescent elfin civilizations...'" (p. 126), with their "...soaring spires..." (ibid.), shimmering like rainbows.

Fourthly, Bronze Age kings and warriors discouraged magical competition.

Fifthly, the paranatural ecology withdrew before the Iron Age.

For a similar history, see Alfheim.

For a more detailed summary of the goetic history, see Magic And Goetics.