Resignation

Murder Bound, xviii.

"'He's still at the office,' the agent's wife said in the resigned tone of wives." (p. 157)

For narrative purposes, Poul Anderson need just have written:

"'He's still at the office,' the agent's wife said."

That additional "...in the resigned tone of wives" is very well observed, like Brian Aldiss' "...resigned attitude of workers..." See here.

In fact, the word "resign" is full of meanings. See:

Words And Meanings II, where it is possible to resign by not re-signing;

various other blog references to "resignation." (Scroll down.)

Googling also reveals religious ramifications of resignation, relevant to Poul Anderson's "The Problem of Pain."

"'Maybe you can find a text in Job. I don't know, I tell you, I don't know.'
"The sun lifted higher above the burning horizon."
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 103-134 AT p. 134.

I can't get over how good Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is. But now I am resigned to finishing blogging for this evening.

Two Kinds Of Series Characters

"TV Series" Types
A pilot episode or opening narrative introduces and defines the characters. Every subsequent installment is a discrete and chronologically interchangeable incident in the lives of these already defined characters who rarely if ever go through any major life-changes during the course of the series. An occasional extra-melodramatic installment might presage a life-change which however fails to materialize, e.g., James Bond drafts a letter of resignation from the Secret Service... The biggest life-change is death. Apparent deaths followed by returns are a recurrent motif in some kinds of fiction.

Developmental/Biographical Types
A central character begins young, matures, then winds up aged:

Poul Anderson's David Falkayn graduates from apprentice through journeyman, trader team leader and secret founder of Supermetals to acting CEO of SSL, then Founder of a colony;

Anderson's Dominic Flandry graduates from Ensign through intermediate ranks to Fleet Admiral and informal Imperial adviser;

Anderson's Manson Everard progresses from Time Patrol recruit to hard-working Unattached agent to respected senior agent, still active while also supervising others.

Which kind of character is Nicholas van Rijn?

Ys And The Village II

(i)-(vii) here.

(viii) One Prisoner episode set in a Wild West town with a Mayor instead of a No 2 turns out to have been a drug-induced illusion. However, it raises the possibility of projecting the Prisoner scenario into other times and places, for example an Ysan version:

when the King dies other than by combat in the Wood, the Ysans buy and crown a slave;

we imagine a British slave branded VI;

spectral forms prevent VI from escaping along the beach;

he fails to change the Ysan constitution but outmaneuvers his opponents on the Council, e.g., forcing the resignation of a hostile Lir Captain;

he stows away to Britannia but is returned to Ys;

the Witch-Queens conjur visions of other fabulous realms;

VI, the avatar of Taranis, realizes his identity with the God and destroys Ys.

(ix) Back to the original series and novels: life continues. When the freed No 6 returns to his apartment, the hearse that had abducted him passes again. The forces of unfreedom are ever present. Even when no longer King, Gratillonius continues to resist the decay of civilization.

(x) No 6 emphasizes the claims of the individual as against society whereas Gratillonius emphasizes both justice to individuals and the social good.
No 6 is a self-sufficient individual whereas Gratillonius is a competent leader.
No 6 aims to retire and do what he wants whereas Gratillonius continues to work for the good of society.
No 6 emancipates himself from social control whereas Gratillonius emancipates Ysan and Armorican society from barbarian attacks and imperial control. (Later: see comment.)

Life In 209 BC II

As if he had been there then, Poul Anderson reports on aspects of life in Bactria, 209 BC.

New ideas:

"At last the teaching of Gautama Buddha would ebb from his native India until there it was all but forgotten. Today it still flourished, and the tide of it flowed strongly outward." (The Shield Of Time, p. 47)

Travel:

"...those merchants, caravaneers, guards, mendicants, monks, and other travelers were numerous, hailing from a wide range of territories." (ibid.)

An urban environment:

"The sanctuary-cum-hostel was a modest adobe building, a former tenement, in Ion's lane off the Street of the Weavers...the neighbors crammed wall to wall against it..." (ibid.)

Urban life:

"The streets seethed." (p. 48)

Resignation:

"...most people in the ancient world were more or less fatalistic." (p. 49)

But also practicality:

"Events to come might work out for the better instead of the worst. Undoubtedly many a mind was occupied with schemes to make an extra profit from the situation." (ibid.)

Superstition:

"Fortune-tellers, charm vendors, and shrines did land-office business." (ibid.)

Curiosity:

"Men panted for any fresh word from outside." (ibid.)

Unhelpful obligingness:

"Maybe the respondent simply told Meander what he supposed Meander wanted to hear; that was an immemorial Oriental custom." (ibid.)

Piety:

"'...she's endowed a small temple of Poseidon outside town. A pious work.'" (p. 50)

But also cynicism:

"'It gives employment to her kinsman...its priest.'" (ibid.)

Fast food:

lentils and onions in a chapatti bought from a street vendor; not coffee but diluted sour wine. (p. 51)

Thus, we feel as if we have been there with Manse Everard of the Time Patrol.

Reading History

When I read in Bentham:The Final Years that a particular member of staff resigned from one of his positions within the school in 1981 whereas, according to my memory, that resignation had already occurred before I entered the school in 1980, I conclude that this is a slight chronological error in the text. A Time Patrol agent who, on returning from a mission to the past, reads a text that contradicts his memories has to wonder whether he has traveled forward into an alternative timeline. Life is complicated for time travelers in a mutable timeline. And this is just one example of how concepts from Poul Anderson's fiction can color our perceptions of this normally straightforward timeline.

"Star Of The Sea," a culminating Time Patrol story, is built on the discovery of a variant text of Tacitus' Histories. See:

Records Of What Did Not Happen II
Unstable Space-Time II

Today As Midnight Approaches

Here is an edition of Trader To The Stars that proclaims itself to be "THE FIRST BOOK IN THE FUTURE HISTORY OF THE POLESOTECHNIC LEAGUE."

I have had a good day recuperating with fifteen posts, including this one (which is spilling over into Saturday), plenty of blog comments, over 400 page views and some time for other activities like rereading a graphic novel and belatedly catching up with British political news - a resignation announced.

I am getting a better handle than ever before on Poul Anderson's Technic History. One of the best aspects is learning by rereading and googling while posting, e.g., one look at these dates:

The Trouble Twisters (1966)
"Day of Burning" (1967)
Satan's World (1968)

- explains why "Day of Burning" was not collected in The Trouble Twisters but Merseia was mentioned in Satan's World. It also shows us not only the Technic History in the process of being written but also the first stage of the collection of stories from magazines into books and the book publications of novels originally serialized in magazines.

I expect to be back here tomorrow some time.

An Incompletely Critical Look at DAGGERS IN DARKNESS, by Sean M. Brooks

I am calling this article of mine "incomplete" because I am commenting only on some of the highlights in that book which especially caught my attention the first time I read it. DAGGERS IN DARKNESS is the latest in the series of linked novels by S.M. Stirling which features Luz  O'Malley, an Irish American/Cuban field agent of the Black Chamber, an Intelligence agency created by President Theodore Roosevelt in an alternate universe where he won the Presidential election of 1912, after the premature death of President William Taft opened the  way to TR's victory.

DAGGERS IN DARKNESS gradually shows us how Luz and Ciara were coming into usually violent contact with increasingly senior agents of "The Mad Baron," Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a real, historical person who in our timeline briefly succeeded in making himself ruler of Mongolia in 1921. In the Black Chamber universe he came to rule Mongolia earlier and succeeded in staying in power.  His ambitions of gaining chemical weapons and the steps he took for achieving that were what drew the attention of the US and the Black Chamber to him.

 

DAGGERS IN DARKNESS opens in 1922, after WW I ended in a drastically different way from the Great War of our timeline. The US had conquered Mexico and annexed Canada; a Greater German Reich overran France and vast parts of eastern Europe and Russia; the British Empire was forced to evacuate Great Britain and relocate to India; Japan seized eastern Siberia, Manchuria, and chunks of China.

 

In the US, Theodore Roosevelt's "Progressive Republican" policies were so popular and seemingly successful that he had become virtually President for Life, easily winning every election since 1912. One of the things that first caught my eye and which I thought deserving of comment was this bit from Chapter 1, pages 8-9, about TR's eldest son Theodore: "Organizing the American Legion for veterans in '18 had shown he could move men to action in peacetime by his words and force of personality. The job in Manila [as Governor General of the Philippines] was a chance to show what he could do as an administrator. If he did well in it, there was no reason he couldn't be President himself someday, perhaps after a stint in a Cabinet post... Secretary of State or War, say... or nomination as Vice President in '28, and in either case in '32, when the young man was in his prime."

 

The US had become so vastly more powerful and larger that it was more an empire than anything else.  What we are seeing here, whether TR himself understood it, were  the old institutions coming to seem too small and inadequate for managing the demands of ruling an empire. We see TR coming more and more to think in dynastic terms, of his eldest son eventually succeeding him as President. If the younger Theodore governed as successfully as his father and was also blessed with an able son, would that son be proclaimed Emperor of America, instead of being only President?

 

Next, on page 27, I saw this: "Luz and Ciara's theoretically and legally adopted orphans were in biological fact half-sisters who now unmistakably resembled their mothers AND their sire, a man named Sven Lundqvist, who'd met her and Ciara under carefully arranged false circumstances. With the expectation that he'd soon be five thousand miles away and under the impression that his extremely entertaining weekend at a hot-springs resort in West Virginia had been just good luck and charm on his part; in fact his ship had disappeared on the way back to Stockholm; possibly a U-boat, probably a mine."

 

In many ways, I found Luz and Ciara's behavior here open to criticism. They wanted children, but refused to get them by either marrying men or honestly asking a man to knowingly become the father of their children.  I did not like the obvious implication that Luz had no intention of ever telling Sven that he had become the father of four daughters. He too had rights over those children!

 

It was too convenient, to have the hapless Sven Lundqvist disappearing on the way home to Sweden.  It meant there would be no awkward personal and legal difficulties in the future if Sven found out about his hitherto unknown children. It also meant there would be no trouble when the twins started asking questions why there was no father in their lives when other children they knew had fathers. And these children might want to know about Sven's parents and possible brothers and sisters. Which again could be awkward for Luz and Ciara. His too convenient death made that less likely, at least for a long time!

 

Candidly, I thought Luz's treatment of Sven callous and cynical, he was a mere sperm donor for her and Ciara. An impression which this bit from page 161 (Chapter Nine) did not lessen, after Luz learned of how the Swedish ship carrying Sven and other diplomats had been sunk by a German mine or U-Boat early in 1918: "...sinking a Swedish flagged merchant liner not far off the Kattegat, while carrying diplomats back to Stockholm in the spring of 1918. She'd been mildly sorry to hear that via naval connections, and hoped it had been quick at least..." A casually used and discarded sperm donor!

 

I also thought it very implausible that both Luz and Ciara would have twins, and that ALL of those children would be girls. it's far more likely that either Luz or Ciara would have had only one child, not twins. And I thought it very unlikely, even granting that,  that none of them were boys. It was far more likely that at least one or two of them would have been boys. It was too neat and schematic, for Luz and Ciara to both have twins and that all four children were girls.

 

Despite my distaste for the methods Luz took for her and Ciara to get children, that does not mean I am hostile to those children! Colleen, Mary, Patricia, and Luciana are thoroughly likable, bright, active, and energetic. I did wonder if they seemed too ideal, too perfect to be entirely convincing. But, I can see how if, the parents were healthy, intelligent, and free of any overt disabilities, that kind of selective breeding would maximize the chances of any children they had also being intelligent and healthy. But I continue to have my doubts about the plausibility of all four of them being girls.

 

And here is as good a place as any to state frankly I did not like the lesbianism of Luz and Ciara. Because I believe homosexuality is a distorting, a warping of the sexual and reproductive drive. So I read through the more lesbian parts of DAGGERS with resignation.

 

And in Chapter Three, page 66, I saw this: "...plenty of Jews but not as many since the Germans and Austrians plagued them now far less than now-defunct Russia and Romania had before 1914."  The question I had being: what happened to the rest of Russia? I would expect a victorious Germany to annex Russian Poland, the Baltic States, and much of Ukraine, but not ALL of Russia (I assume Austria-Hungary annexed Romania). Because I read of how, in the earlier Black Chamber books, Nicholas II abdicated as Tsar in 1916, with his son succeeding as Alexis II, under the regency of their respected cousin Grand Duke Nicholas.  While I would expect the Regent to often be compelled to yield to German demands, I saw no mention of Germany deposing Alexis II and annexing all of Russia at least as far east as the Ural Mountains. But DAGGERS IN DARKNESS seems to clearly indicate that was what happened by 1922. Did Germany seize all of Russia east of Ukraine or not? Was there a Russian remnant state in western Siberia? We see no mention of what happened to Alexis II and the Regent.

 

I don't think Wilhelm II and Paul von Hindenburg would have tolerated a gruesome massacre of the Romanovs, of the kind ordered by Lenin in our timeline, which occurred at Ekaterinberg and Alapayevsk on July 17-18, 1918 in our universe! 

 

I especially loved the Chinese parts of DAGGERS, because of how I went through a Chinese phase earlier in my life, leading me to read a lot about Chinese history, including translations of parts of historical works such as Ssu-ma Chien's RECORDS OF THE GRAND HISTORIAN.  But I do have one quibble: Stirling's use of Pin Yin for Romanizng Chinese names and words jarred on me, felt like a false note. Because, in OUR timeline (and presumably the Black Chamber's), the Wade-Giles system for Romanizing Chinese words and names is what was actually being used a century ago. Lastly, I simply don't like Pin Yin, "Beijing" strikes me as inelegant and poor English compared to "Peking."

 

Next, a minor point. In Chapter Five, on page 96, I read this: "A big Marine marching band in smart dress blues and billed saucer hats cane first..." It was a mistake for Stirling to say Marines wore HATS, because the Navy (of which the Marines are a part of) insists on calling head wear "covers." A US Navy officer I used to know online made a point of stressing Navy personnel wore COVERS, not "hats."

 

 Mr. Stirling is a scrupulously careful writer. After showing so many of the seemingly beneficial things brought about by the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt's so called "Progressive" Republicans, he was careful to show us some of the darker things underneath the glossy surface. For instance, in the same Chapter Five, on page 103, I read this: "...San Francisco had always been a strong union town, and the Party heartily approved of labor unions, as long as they were safely Party-affiliated." 

 

"SAFELY Party-affiliated"?  I don't like that. It sounds all too ominously like the puppet "unions" controlled by the Communist Party both in and out of the USSR. It looks menacingly like the United States becoming a de facto one party regime ruled by TR's so called "Progressive" Republicans. The text quoted below came from the same page 103 of DAGGERS.

 

   "The International Workers of the World hadn't been. The Wobblies had tried

to call strikes during what they called the capitalist-imperialist Great War. Many

of the Wobbly leaders and militants had been summarily shot in the back of

the head for that under the Espionage Act, as de facto enemy agents, so estab-

lished in nice fair fifteen minute executive-court hearings. Others had been

lynched by local patriots on a free-enterprise basis; one group had been

locked in boxcars and left in the Arizona desert to die of thirst and heatstroke

just to drive home the neighbors disapproval.

 

 "Most of the remainder were still repenting their sins in Federal Bureau

of Security corrective-labor camps in very remote places doing very hard

work for very long days in very unpleasant climates on a diet of just

enough scientifically enriched and fortified corn-and-soy mush to keep

them going; it was also scientifically designed to be absolutely tasteless.

You didn't die of starvation on that, or of scurvy or pellagra, and the

profoundly unsympathetic FBS guards didn't beat you to death with their

lead-weighted rubber truncheons or shoot you or lock you in a small iron

box to broil or freeze... unless you tried to escape or shirked or disobeyed

orders... but after a while you might not want to live very much."

 

The understated sarcasm in the passages I quoted above makes it plain Stirling himself did not approve of how the Wobblies were treated.  And I agree with him!  However much I would disagree with the views of the so called International Workers, they had every right to their own ideas and beliefs, as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. They should never have been treated so brutally and any trials of the Wobblies should have been in the regular state or US courts, with all the protections granted to accused persons in United States law. AND only for charges based on actual crimes allegedly committed by the Wobblies. Not for mere political opinions.

 

In Chapter Seven, page 136, I saw this: "This is Universal Imports," a voice said at the other end." As all readers of Ian Fleming's James Bond stories should immediately see, Stirling was having a little joke with the "Universal Exports" used as a cover by 007 and other agents of the British Secret Service.

 

Here I digress to touch on a minor misprint I noticed on page 276 (Chapter Fourteen): "Beds of chrysanthemums glowed gold and white and red in the dusk against the green LAWS...."  Of course I realized at once this was simply a misprint and Stirling had meant "lawns."

 

Some of my comments above, especially of Luz and Ciara, were critical. But I don't want readers to think I did not enjoy reading DAGGERS IN DARKNESS. I did! So much so that I stopped taking as many notes as I should have for writing a really satisfactory article about this book. I loved the story and it was a true page turner.

 

DAGGERS is very much an action/adventure novel, and not all readers might care for that, especially the more violent incidents to be found in the book. But Stirling, like Poul Anderson, always added so much more than simple blood and thunder and derring-do to his stories. Many times, through out the tale, readers will find historical and philosophical asides adding richness, depth, and nuance to the plot.  The example I quoted below, selected almost at random, came from Chapter Thirteen, page 268 of DAGGERS, Luz speaking first.

 

"What I've heard is that the Red Gang...the Honghang...and a faction within the

Green Gang...don't want to cooperate with Mr. X. Partly it's a regional thing; the

Red Gang are linked to southern China and the Canton triads, and so are some

elements within the Green Gang. Politics are involved too; the Green and Red

gangs were allied for a while to support Sun Yat-Sen and the Kuomintang a few

years back, before and during the war...they called it the Mutual Progress Asso-

ciation of the Chinese Republic. The Honghang want to revive that."

    "We heard about that," Tommy said. "Didn't come to much, after Yuntai's Dad

declared himself Emperor."

 

Here Stirling shows his knowledge of Chinese history, in particular of how Sun Yat-Sen's base of support was mostly limited to southern China, with the northern provinces either indifferent to or hostile to his aspirations of founding a Republic of China after the fall of the Ch'ing Dynasty in 1911-12.  And "Yuntai's Dad" was none other than the treacherous Yuan Shikai who, after deliberately not fighting as hard as he could have for the Ch'ing, made a deal with the naive Sun that in return for forcing the abdication of the last Ch'ing Emperor, Sun would agree to Yuan becoming President of China. In our timeline Yuan tried to secure his grip on power firmly enough that he could proclaim himself Emperor, but failed. In the Black Chamber timeline, he succeeded, but only at the heavy cost of becoming a puppet of Japan. To quote some more from page 268:

 

    It's ever so common, just being a President,"  Holly said, with an ironic quirk

at the corner of her mouth, as she glanced sidelong at the Americans. "Even a

President for life with a son being groomed for the job."

"As opposed to being Lord Protector," Ciara said, her tone equally pawky-dry.

    The fact that he'd chosen Cromwell's title didn't endear Viscount Milner to her,

and she hadn't liked him to begin with. The Irish Republican Brotherhood had

sympathized with the Boers during the South African War and its guerrilla after-

math, and she'd heard a good many stories--some even true--of Milner's and

Kitchener's cruelties when she was an impressionable child.

 

In the Black Chamber's timeline Theodore Roosevelt had become de facto President for Life and was grooming his eldest son to eventually succeed him. And in our history the British had been harsh in breaking Boer resistance to their rule, including the use of concentration camps as a means of doing that. And anyone knowledgeable in British history understands at once what "Lord Protector" means!  All these are good example of how much Stirling could "pack" into his stories.