Mannschenn Drive And Standing Wave

The Dark Dimensions.

It seems that the Rim Worlds have three means of FTL. The main means is the Mannschenn Drive and the other two are mentioned somewhere earlier in this text. (Addendum: I think I got this wrong. One FTL and two something else.)

"Flandry looked at Grimes. His face was pale. He said, 'So this is your Mannschenn Drive. I think I prefer our Standing Wave.'" (Chapter 15, p. 223)

Flandry's people do not call their quantum hyperdrive the Standing Wave. However, it turns out that the Standing Wave does have some relevance to Poul Anderson. See here. (Scroll down.) Certain kinds of phrases come to be repeated in sf discussions of FTL. "Hyperdrive" is overused.

James Blish On Poul Anderson IV

See Gadgets and James Blish On Poul Anderson III.

In More Issues...
On pp. 43-44, Blish, discussing sf "energy screens," writes that:

EE Smith thought of the screens "...as stationary wave fronts...," (p. 43), as if light from a star stopped in space and prevented "...outside light of identical frequencies..." (p. 44) from passing;

"Such effects are often seen in wave-guides and in other phenomena of that general field, which is called resonance..."; (ibid.)

either resonance without a resonator or the Standing Wave of gravity theory would generate such effects in space;

Poul Anderson has written at length (?) about the Standing Wave. See here. (Scroll down.)

And, in some works by Blish, the FTL drive is called the Standing Wave. See the above link.

The Martyr II

A few times before, I have posted immediate impressions of the opening passage of a short story, then later have posted about the story's conclusion. In the case of Poul Anderson's "The Martyr," however, I prefer to leave it to others to read the conclusion. Suffice it to say that, as in Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, we might have here an alien race able to answer questions as to the truth or falsity of religious beliefs.

But let us consider the theoretical basis of the story: a cosmic psionic standing wave increased by each new psycho-physical organism and not decreased by their deaths, thus an advance of the universe towards spirituality. Psychic powers, including even almost instantaneous interstellar teleportation, do not deplete any individual psychic's energy because the powers are exercised by accessing the standing wave.

Maybe the wave can provide an inter-cosmic meeting place for the Black Nebulans and the Chereionites of the Technic Civilization universe and the Cibarrans of this single story universe - their version of the Old Phoenix? Nebulans and Cibarrans can teleport across interstellar distances. Chereionites seem either not to have had or to have lost this ability but their last survivor is a universal telepath.

There is scope for a further story to unify this cosmic or, conceivably hyper-cosmic, basis of psychic phenomena.

(I want to complete the month with a round number of posts like either the current 90 or maybe 100 so, if less than 10 more posts are written before the end of August 31, they will be saved and posted on or after September 1.)

Another Means Of FTL

We have seen hyperspace as a series of quantum jumps in the History of Technic Civilization and have encountered the Mach hypothesis in The Star Fox/Fire Time. See here. Now, in After Doomsday (St Albans, Herts, 1975), we have a third means of faster than light travel (FTL).

The superlight drive is based on:

"The mathematical depiction of space as having a structure equivalent to a set of standing waves in an n-dimensional continuum." (p. 29)

(The "Standing Wave" is one of James Blish's means of FTL along with his Haertel overdrive, Arpe Drive and Imaginary Drive. Blish preferred to avoid the cliche of "hyperspace.")

In After Doomsday, where the waves interfere, a spaceship can move between them. In interstellar space, where gravitational distortion is minimal, interference fringes are sufficiently close that spaceships can skip most of the straight-line distance to their destination. Whereas galaxies recede as intergalactic space is generated, a superlight ship exploits zones where space is cancelled out - except that the field physicist winces at this summary by a mechanical engineer.

More interesting is the kind of interstellar society that Anderson imagines in this, and only this, novel. It is not known whether superlight ships were invented once or more than once. Explorers found primitives, civilizations not interested in space travel or those that were able to learn and apply superlight, which thus spread not like a cone of light but like dandelion seeds. Each space-traveling species deals regularly only with other species in its own civilization-cluster because there are too many for regular contact elsewhere. The galaxy is too big for any single Federation or Empire. No one can have an overview or know the full history. This makes sense and would have been a perfect premise for a series of novels.

The Haertel Scholium And The Technic History

Recent posts have delineated parallels between future history series written by Anderson, Asimov, Blish and Niven so here is another obscure comparison, again between Anderson and Blish:

in James Blish's Welcome To Mars, Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity and flies to Mars;

in Blish's "No Jokes on Mars," Mars is colonized;

in his "Common Time," the Haertel overdrive is tested;

in his "Nor Iron Bars," the Arpe Drive is tested and telepathy is discovered in the microcosm;

in his "This Earth of Hours," the Standing Wave has replaced the two earlier FTL drives and the telepathic Central Empire of the galaxy threatens the Terrestrial Matriarchy just as, in Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Merseian Roidhunate served by the telepathic Aycharaych threatens the Terran Empire -

- similar ideas in different combinations.

The Technic History originated because Anderson connected two previously independent series and some other stories whereas the Haertel Scholium originated because Blish added sequels and prequels to "Common Time," thus generating a non-linear sequence from which I have summarized a linear sub-sequence constituting the trunk of a temporal tree from which other works branch in different directions.

Another feature of future history series is that often there is no direct connection between the opening and closing installments, e.g. "Marius" and "The Chapter Ends" in Anderson's Psychotechnic History; "The Saturn Game" and "Starfog" in his Technic History. In the Haertel Scholium as summarized here, each new installment is linked to one earlier one without any overarching narrative.

Coming Of Age

See Ensign Flandry And Cadet Loftus.

Coming of age is a major theme in juvenile fiction. I just remembered two passages.

"She enjoyed the rest of the voyage, even after she had identified the change in him, the thing which had gone and would never quite come back. Youth."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Fifteen, p. 152.

"When the long jump from Ss'pode to Malis had begun, Jack had been on the down side of eighteen years old. When the alarm exploded and the Argo came off the Standing Wave, he had turned twenty. But it felt much more like eighty."
-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), Chapter Eight, p. 92.

Both Dominic Flandry and Jack Loftus come off age on long interstellar journeys.

Ensign Flandry is Volume I of the Young Flandry Trilogy, part of the Dominic Flandry series, which is part of the History of Technic Civilization.

Mission To The Heart Stars is Volume II of the Jack Loftus diptych, which is part of the Haertel Scholium.

Addendum: In SM Stirling's Emberverse, pages become squires become knights. Coming of age is formalized.

Interstellar Conflicts

Are interstellar conflicts possible or probable?

If there are no other technological civilizations, then they are impossible.

If there is no FTL, then they are improbable.

If there is no FTL and if technological civilizations are rare, then they are improbable verging on impossible.

What would there be to fight about over such distances? 

The Ai Chun in Poul Anderson's World Without Stars and the Aleriona in his The Star Fox have very old static cultures and are genetically incapable of tolerating engulfment by a younger, dynamic species. The Alori in Anderson's The Peregrine have an organically based culture that cannot tolerate engulfment by a mechanically oriented civilization. The Merseian Roidhunate in Anderson's Technic History is racially supremacist and cannot tolerate any species that remain independent of it.

In James Blish's future histories, there are mainly imperialistic relationships between interstellar civilizations. In one branch of his Haertel Scholium:

Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity and flies a tree hut to Mars;

Mars is colonized;

Garrard makes the first successful interstellar round trip with the Haertel overdrive;

Arpe replaces the Haertel drive with the Arpe drive and experiences microcosmic telepathy;

using a third interstellar drive, the Standing Wave, the forces of the Terrestrial Matriarchy encounter an outpost of the telepathic Central Empire. 

Thus, an interstellar conflict begins at the end of a future historical sequence. Species that think with ganglia instead of with brains detect the weak parapsychological forces and unite telepathically, regarding brained beings as insane, so that conflict is inevitable.

Issues And Comparisons

Waging war: The Star Fox;

the Change: Brain Wave;

conversion to Christianity: The Boat Of A Million Years;

a last battle: Hrolf Kraki's Saga and "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth";

series characters: the Dominic Flandry series and The Last Viking;

Christianity in different timelines: "The Problem of Pain" and "The Word to Space";

the sun standing still: "A Chapter of Revelation";

the Incarnation: The Game Of Empire;

an otherworldly scene: The Day Of Their Return;

melee: "Goat Song";

villains: the Technic History, the Time Patrol series and the Psychotechnic History;

linguistic change: the Technic History;

"lost world": "Time Heals" and The Shield Of Time;

single combat: "Holmgang," "Tiger By The Tail" and "Honorable Enemies."

I said here that I had compared SM Stirling's A Meeting At Corvallis "with several very different works by Poul Anderson." Above is a list of fourteen themes in ...Corvallis. Beside them are titles of twenty or so works by Anderson. These comparisons are drawn from recent blog posts. As always, the list turned out to be much longer than expected.

Shortly, I will go forth from this place to eat an Indian take away and watch a DVD with my daughter and granddaughter.