Tuesday 31 October 2017

Living Wild

How do wilderness-dwellers evade aerial surveillance, not to mention bombardment? The Viet Cong hid in a vast, three-dimensional maze of narrow, booby-trapped tunnels.

"Karlsarm had explained that the Free People laid out as many small, interconnected, more or less parallel ways as the traffic in a given area demanded, rather than a single broad highroad. It was easier to do, less damaging to ecology and scenery, more flexible to changing situations. Also, it was generally undetectable from above."
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 38.

To summarize, small, interconnected paths are:

easier;
more ecological;
less unscenic;
more flexible;
less detectable.

Also, the scents of mutant plants mask human metabolisms from chemical detection. The outbackers are extremely sophisticated wilderness-dwellers.

I hope that Poul Anderson enjoyed devising all these details half as much as I enjoy detecting and analyzing them.

Human Aliens

Terran characters discuss the difficulty of spying within an alien society. Their agents can penetrate the human population of Avalon but cannot learn anything that is not already public knowledge. Human Avalonians no longer think, talk or even walk like Imperials and imitating them is unfeasible.
-copied from here.

Karlsarm, a Freehold outbacker, experiences the same problem from the other side:

"Sometimes he thought that humans from the inner Empire were harder to fathom than most nonhumans. Being of the same species, talking much the same language, they ought to react in the same ways as your own people. And they didn't. Their very facial expressions, a frown, a smile, were subtly foreign.
"Ridenour, for immediate example, was courteous, genial, even helpful: but entirely on the surface. He showed nothing of his real self."
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 37.

But even on one planet, Earth, human beings differ so much that they might be members of different species. Noah Arkwright elegantly argues that other intelligent species are so alien that they cannot show us their inner selves. See also Noah Arkwright II.

Freehold Details

There are three continents on Freehold. (Captain Flandry, p. 29) I said in an earlier post that I thought there were only two.

I said here that "dragon" must be a messenger bird's idea of a flying vehicle whereas, of course, the messenger bird does not have ideas. It merely repeats messages. I was falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing a bird merely because it seemed to be conversing.

The outbacker Karlsarm travels on Arulian ships to spy within the Terran Empire where he even attends universities. In this, he resembles the Scothani (also within the Technic History) and the Alori (in the Psychtechnic History). The outbackers' anti-mechanistic, back-to-nature routine resembles the Alorian culture or way of life. The outbackers are human beings whereas the Alori are implausible humanoid beings. We appreciate Poul Anderson's development of similar ideas in different directions.

Nukes

I am alarmed by the casual use of nukes in Poul Anderson's "Outpost of Empire":

"'Harder on the countryside, I suppose,' he added. 'We felt free to use nukes there. They sure chew up a landscape, don't they?'"
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 10.

Chew up? Anderson describes a formerly cultivated, now crater-pocked valley where square kilometers had burned and most of the fields had been irradiated. Fire and fallout had also hit some of the wilderness beyond although Ridenour is soon flying over untouched forest - untouched only because there has not been an all-out exchange of nukes.

Despite their concern for the environment, the outbackers use nine captured nuclear rockets to destroy the captured and evacuated city of Domkirk, leaving only a large vitrified crater surrounded by burning fields. Not good, whatever cause it was meant to serve.

Sainte Chapelle

In the combox here, Sean compares the Cathedral of Domkirk on the planet Freehold to the Sainte Chapelle of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Always willing to blend life and art, I googled the Sainte Chapelle and found the above image. We may imagine that the Freeholders were inspired by Notre Dame and other Terrestrial cathedrals when they built their cathedral in Domkirk.

In the history of Freehold:

three hundred years ago, many Christians and Hedonists fled from the cities into the outback when the Mechanists came to power;

two hundred years ago, the cathedral was built in an already ancient style;

now, Arulians and outbackers fight the cities;

outbackers destroy Domkirk, including its cathedral.

Outbacker Organisms

(i) Messenger birds, having heard information or orders spoken in Anglic, repeat them in bird language, which military leaders and scouts can understand.
(ii) Weasel-like intelligencers report what they see: men talking to their wrists must have radiocoms etc.
-copied from here.

Messenger birds do not merely repeat sounds heard but somehow "translate" them into another language. How do they do this? Intelligencers go further, describing what they have seen albeit without understanding, e.g., of technology. How intelligent are intelligencers?

We are familiar with articulate or anthropomorphic animals in less realistic kinds of fiction, most of it juvenile - that man Lewis again. Poul Anderson approaches this concept in "Outpost of Empire." Instead of just accepting this animal communication when it occurs on the planet Freehold, the reader needs to reflect on its feasibility.

John Ridenour And CS Lewis

A Poul Anderson character and a Christian apologist? Please bear with me. Important issues are implicit in every narrative. Ridenour, discussing the current "Bearers of the Horns," political leaders on Aruli, says:

"'...remember that they succeeded by revolutionary overthrow of the legitimate heirs. Never mind what abuses they claim to be correcting; only recall that they are Merseian-sponsored revolutionaries.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 13.

There are three issues there:

abuses;
Merseian-sponsored;
revolutionaries.

Abuses should be "minded" and corrected, sometimes by revolution but never with Merseian sponsorship!

A hostile foreign power can try to control or influence a justice campaign for subversion and destabilization purposes but also defenders of a status quo may try to discredit justice campaigners by calling them agents of a foreign power. Also, some justice campaigners who are not agents of a foreign power may nevertheless entertain dangerous illusions about the intentions of such a power.

CS Lewis, incarnated as a character in one of his own novels, reflected:

"I suppose everyone knows this fear of getting 'drawn in' - the moment at which a man realises that what had seemed mere speculations are on the point of landing him in the Communist Party or the Christian Church..."
-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT p. 150.

When I first read Perelandra, in my teens, I was shocked that Lewis bracketed the Communist Party and the Christian Church together like that. I started to learn something when I had left school!

The Nine Cities Of Freehold

For the list of names of cities, see Freehold II. We know only six of the nine.

The Arulians have bombarded Sevenhouses and Oldenstead and captured Waterfleet and Startop. For Nordyke, see here.

Domkirk is on the coastal plateau of Onyx Heights, close to tidal marshes and to the outbacker-controlled Windhoek Range and Upwoods. Domkirkers cultivate the surrounding land with humanly supervised robotic machines and have a two hundred year old cathedral.

The outbackers attack and destroy Domkirk.

Monday 30 October 2017

Spica And Betelgeuse

"...those few stars - like diamond Spica and amber Betelgeuse - which were too bright and near to be veiled."
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 1.

This deceptively simple opening paragraph of a short story makes passing reference to two stars that in fact play major roles in Poul Anderson's Technic History, which is why I have linked to the previous blog posts mentioning either Spica or Betelgeuse.

Previous Posts Connected With "Outpost Of Empire"

See:

Aruli
John Ridenour
John Ridenour
Finishing "Outpost Of Empire"
More On Freehold
Freehold Miscellania
Freehold
More On John Ridenour
Ridenour And The Arulian
Arulians And Outbackers
Freehold II
John Ridenour II
Why Freeholders Leave The Cities
What Survives
Colonizing Freehold
Colonizing Freehold II
Skills
Outbackers
Nordyke 

A Tripartite History

OK. Again I am diverted into thinking about how to republish Poul Anderson's Technic History. Please skip this post if you find the subject boring or overdone. I imagine three boxed sets:

The History of Technic Civilization
Box 1: League And Empire
I Rise Of The Polesotechnic League
II Decline Of The Polesotechnic League
III Rise Of The Terran Empire
Box 2: Empire
IV Young Flandry Of The Terran Empire
V Outposts Of The Terran Empire
Box 3: Empire And After
VI Captain Flandry Of The Terran Empire
VII Admiral Flandry And The Children Of The Terran Empire
VIII After The Terran Empire

This gives Boxes 2 and 3 a kind of symmetry: both comprise Flandry followed by non-Flandry.

Volume V, Outposts Of The Terran Empire, would contain only:

"Outpost of Empire"
The Day Of Their Return

Recently, we referred to Freeholders in the former and to Jaan in the latter. I will probably reread "Outpost of Empire."  

Living In Trees II

See Living In Trees.

By "living in trees," I meant "living among the branches of large trees." However, we have recently referred to two kinds of beings that lived inside hollow trees. See Alori Houses.

On Poul Anderson's fictional planet of Freehold, many people fled from the cities into the forests where they developed biological sciences and built a sophisticated post-civilization but did any Freeholders live not among but in the trees? Maybe we can either remember or reread?

Living In Trees

See:

In The Trees
On The Highroad River II
Cynthia

Other treetop dwellers are to be found:

on Mongo;
on ERB's Venus;
in Eryn Muir of the Dunedain in Montival.

In Eryn Muir, where several large redwoods grow close together, merging platforms supported by carved beams hold an assembly hall that is approached by a suspended foot-bridge, then by a walkway decorated with rose-covered arches, and is surrounded by gardens of flowers, bushes, paths and benches. And I don't like heights.

Connections

I like to immerse myself in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Any detail, e.g., roof gardens on Earth, Aeneas, Avalon and Daedalus, suffices. There is also a continual interplay between the works of Anderson and of SM Stirling, e.g., it was a roof garden in the Emberverse that reminded me of several in the Technic History.

I often google historical or mythological references in either of these authors' works but do not always link from the blog to the search results. Presumably, other readers of either author can also google the references if they want to know more. However, here is one such link. Stirling's Orlaith reflects on:

"...Cliodhna's three sweet-songed birds..."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eighteen, p. 396.

The Wiki article connects Cliodhna with Manannan Mac Lir. Both Lir and his son, Manannan, play major roles in other works by Anderson. Thus, here is yet another connection, this time involving not Anderson's hard sf but his heroic fantasy and historical fiction.

Roof Gardens In Many Worlds II

See here.

In the compound of the Stormgate Choth on Avalon:

At the middle lifted the old stone tower which housed the senior members of the family and their children. Lower wooden structures, on whose sod roofs bloomed amberdragon and starbells, were for the unwed and retainers and their kin.
-copied from here.

In Lulach on Daedalus:

Plants grow on roofs and flowering vines on walls.
-copied from here.

In Eryn Muir in the High Kingdom of Montival:

"...growth...included the vivid moss on shingle roofs, and the dense turf on others, starred with flowers..."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eighteen, pp. 390-391.

Colorful connections between planets and worlds.

Addendum: See the combox and -

Forever
Mirkheim, Chapter 1 
Breakfasts And "Good Morning"
In Archopolis

The End Of A Novel

In Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return, Aycharaych, the Chereionite telepath working for Merseia, manipulates the Aenean shoe-maker Jaan by imposing on his brain a false personality that is supposedly the returned Ancient, Caruith. Thus, Jaan becomes a (false) "prophet." When Aycharaych's deception has been exposed, Jaan remains schizophrenic, conducting an internal dialogue with the fictional Caruith. When he inwardly asks for help, only Caruith answers. However, the answer is without:

Dido, the morning star;
the sudden Aenean dawn;
light everywhere;
whistles;
wings;
fragrance;
banners;
trumpets.

When Jaan goes to seek the help of men:

"He had never known before how steep the upward path was." (Captain Flandry, p. 238)

This is true both physically and spiritually.

Roof Gardens In Many Worlds

On the roof of the Winged Cross in Chicago Integrate during the Solar Commonwealth:

"The garden was fragrant around him in a warm deep-blue summer's dusk; at this height, the sounds of Chicago Integrate were a murmur as of a distant ocean..."
-Poul Anderson, "Esau" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 517-553 AT p. 519.

In the same location, later:

"This high up, only a low machine throb reached my ears. I walked among roses and jasmine to the door."
-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 273-327 AT p. 276.

In Nova Roma on Aeneas during the Terran Empire:

"The typical structure was a block, two or three stories tall, topped by a flat deck which was half garden - the view from above made a charming motley - and half solar-energy collector."
-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 75-238 AT 3, p. 86.

To be continued.

Sunday 29 October 2017

Tolkien, Stirling And Anderson

I have just seen the conclusion of the film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, Vol III, The Return Of The King, for the first time because it was re-shown on British television. This prompts three observations:

Tolkien knew how to create a myth of endings and farewells;

SM Stirling's Emberverse History is a sequel to Tolkien's Middle Earth History to the extent that some of Stirling's characters regard Tolkien's fictions as Histories and they also call their post-Change period the Fifth Age of Middle Earth;

Poul Anderson adapted Norse mythology as fiction contemporaneously with and independently of Tolkien -

like his contemporary, J.R.R. Tolkien, he is a significant successor to the Eddas, sagas and William Morris;
-copied from here.

Anderson was also a successor to several other very different authors as can be seen by reading the linked post.

See also None Better? II and Anderson And Tolkien.

Powers In Contention

"'The Powers are in contention here, and the world's self screams at the weight of it. Aye, it tears the cloth the world is woven from back to the threads that made it!'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Seventeen, p. 367.

Are those threads the elementary particles that condensed in the quantum void? See here.

I wanted to compare this passage in Stirling's Emberverse History with a similar passage in CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy. However, searching the blog for the phrase, "unmake Middle Earth," revealed that I had already compared the Ransom passage with an earlier Emberverse passage: see here.

While reading any of these works by Lewis, Anderson or Stirling, we directly appreciate the particular text while also remembering the other authors' treatments of common themes. As Kevin in our sf group once remarked, "It's endless, int it?"

The Solipsist

I will try to summarize rather than to quote. In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), Chapter III, p. 24, Steven Matuchek loses consciousness. In Chapter IV, p. 25, Steve:

is nowhere and nowhen;
has neither body nor senses;
thinks of infinite, eternal darkness, coldness and emptiness;
is not even a spatiotemporal point because there is nothing else;
is all that exists;
despairs;
after either no time or a very long time, is regarded by the Solipsist;
shares an ultimate, hopeless egotism;
overhears diabolical thoughts;
is cast free by the force of a huge malevolence.

In SM Stirling's The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Seventeen, Orlaith sees in the eyes of a dead enemy:

"...a nothing that thought it was everything, a futility that believed it was perfection. Where there were no lies because there was no truth, only an endless chewing of stale memory into smaller and smaller bits beneath the gaze of the Solipsist." (p. 365)

So there is a Solipsist in both of these fictional multiverses. I find it difficult to understand either why such malevolence should exist or why the benevolent Powers are unable to prevent that evil from infecting humanity.

Stars Like Sand

"...oceans of space and time...stars like grains of sand."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Seventeen, p. 362.

Sf authors consciously write against this cosmic background even if they do not always make it explicit. See "...And Stars As Sand Or Stage" here and "Imaginary Science?" here. CS Lewis' character, Ransom, had problems with cosmic vastness but most of us welcome it. Here is an article on how many galaxies there are.

An Isaac Asimov title is The Stars Like Dust whereas a Brian Aldiss title is Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand! Four sf novels that do show us a multiplicity of galaxies, and not just in their titles, are:

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson;
World Without Stars by Poul Anderson;
The Triumph Of Time by James Blish;
Into Deepest Space by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle.

Let's have more cosmic sf.

Defende Nos

SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Sixteen, p. 346.

"Sancte Michael Archangele,
"defende nos in proelio;
contra nequitiam
"Et insidias diabloi esto praesidium!"

Translation?

"Holy Archangel Michael,
"Defend us in battle;
"Against evil
"And against this insidious defense of demons!"

("...insidious..." is definitely wrong. Maybe "insidias" qualifies "diabloi," not "praesidium.")

Note: My grammar here is all wrong. See the combox.

Swine-Array And Sea Elves

Continuing the quote from the previous post:

"Deor and Thora had a place of honor in the front rank only a little behind Godric's sword-hand, next to his son and heir Leofric. As honor usually did, it also meant greater peril. The mass behind them added weight, but they were at the point of the spear. Others would step forward to take their place if they fell dead or wounded." (ibid.)

This further account explains more fully the structure of the wedge formation or swine-array.

As they march on, Deor imagines:

"...glimpsing the sae-aelfen in the spray." (p. 319) (See also Elves And The Sea.)

Saturday 28 October 2017

The Return Of The Swine-Array

"The rest of the fyrd fell in behind Godric and the banner in a blunt wedge - the swine-array of battle, Woden's gift to brave men, where the strength of each was the strength of all."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Fifteen, p. 318.

We saw Woden give that gift here. (It's a search result. Scroll down.)

It is time I wasn't here but I had to link to those earlier swine-array references first.

Hail, Odin!

Fate And War

Poul Anderson's goetic universe has God and the Devil and is part of a multiverse that also encompasses Norse, Aztec and other pantheons. A Lutheran minister suggests that a Catholic priest or a Neo-Chassidic rabbi might be better able to invoke a saint. See here. SM Stirling's Emberverse has emergent trans-cosmic Mind manifesting as Odin to a heathen, as the Triple Goddess to a Wiccan and as the Virgin Mary to a Catholic priest. Thus, Catholics operate in both contexts although maybe not as they think.

Ian Fleming's Vivienne Michel, brought up as a Catholic, invents an elaborate composite cosmology when under extreme stress. James Bond has said that, if anything happens to him, she must tell the authorities who he was:

"Why did he have to say such a thing, put the idea into the mind of God, of Fate, of whoever was controlling tonight? One should never send out black thoughts. They live on, like sound-waves, and get into the stream of consciousness in which we all swim. If God, Fate, happened to be listening in, at that moment, on that particular wave-length, it might be made to happen. The hint of a death-thought might be misunderstood. It might be read as a request!"
-Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (London, 1980), Chapter Thirteen, p. 139.

Where did she get all that from? "God" is there, unorthodoxly. She admits that her German lover, Kurt, had been full of "...Germanic magical double-talk..." (ibid.), like:

"cosmic chain reactions";
"cryptograms of the life-force";
the "Central Dynamic."

Kurt, with his ideas of racial purity, was a hang-over from World War II no less than Bond's target, the ex-Gestapo SPECTRE assassin, Horst Uhlmann. That War casts a long shadow both forwards and sideways in time:

as late as 1964, Bond works with a former Japanese combatant;
in Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, the War on our Earth parallels the supernatural conflict in the Carolingian universe;
Charles Whitcomb is recruited to the Time Patrol after being demobbed from the RAF in 1947;
Stirling's Japanese Imperials remember that their ancestors fought the ancestors of the Montivalans.

Friday 27 October 2017

New York In Space And Time


As the narrator/heroine of Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me drives into New York State, we reflect on New York in fiction - which however is too big a subject to address here.

For me, New York makes two major appearances in science fiction. The first is as the location of Manse Everard's apartment in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. See here. Secondly, in James Blish's Cities In Flight, Manhattan flies between stars faster than light and winds up on New Earth in the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

Until just now, when I searched the blog for New York, I had forgotten about Niyork.

Meanwhile

A fictional realm gains depth and solidity when its readers learn what is happening in different places at the same time:

in Robert Heinlein's Future History Vol II, an accident occurring in one story is mentioned in another;

in Poul Anderson's Technic History, John Ridenour, who had been on Starkad with Dominic Flandry, visits Freehold while Chunderban Desai, working on Aeneas, reads an intelligence report written by Dominic Flandry;

in SM Stirling's Emberverse series, one volume describes a "Quest" whereas the following volume tells us what had been happening back home meanwhile.

The central character of some installments can be mentioned tangentially in others:

Heinlein's astrogators refer to old man Harriman;

in the Technic History, one character has seen Nicholas van Rijn on their equivalent of television;

in a later period, another character has heard of the exploits of Admiral Flandry.

These observations are inspired by a tantalizing passage in Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me. Uniquely in this novel by Fleming, the heroine narrates for nine chapters before she even meets James Bond. However, she does tell us this:

"I was still living with Susan. She had got a job with the Foreign Office in something called 'Communications', about which she was very secretive, and she had a boy-friend from the same department..."
-Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (London, 1980), Chapter Four, p. 50.

As the Japanese say, just so.

Four Series

The previous post referred to:

Ian Fleming's James Bond series;
SM Stirling's Emberverse series;
Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series;
Anderson's Dominic Flandry series, part of his Technic History.

Thus, we contemplated:

the Cold War period;
an alternative history;
the Time Patrol timeline;
a future history.

In the twentieth century, both James Bond of the Secret Service and Manson Everard of the Time Patrol remember World War II. Everard, recruited to the Patrol in 1955, revisits the War by time travel whereas Bond, operating in the 1950s and '60s, encounters several former Nazis and even a kamikaze volunteer.

In different versions of the twenty first century, the Emberversers cope with the Change whereas early Technic civilization addresses the Chaos. The Change is followed by neofeudalism whereas the Chaos and the Commonwealth are followed by interstellar feudalism. The Emberversers are helped by divine interventions whereas Technic civilization helps itself by utilizing extraterrestrial resources.

Bond drives a fast car and wields a gun;
Artos rides a wild horse named for a goddess and wields a magic sword;
Anderson's heroes travel through time or faster than light and wield futuristic weapons.

This bizarre post was occasioned by insomnia, not by malice.

Thursday 26 October 2017

A Saying And Its Implications

Like Gaul, Ian Fleming's Goldfinger (London, 1975) is divided into three parts:

Part 1, Happenstance;
Part 2, Coincidence;
Part 3, Enemy Action.

The table of contents begins with an explanatory quotation from the novel:

"Goldfinger said, 'Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action."'" (p. 5)

SM Stirling's characters present a variation:

"'Once is coincidence, twice happenstance...'
"'The third time is a foeman's plan or a message from the Powers...'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Fifteen, p. 308.

Can this tripartite analysis be applied, e.g., to Manse Everard's dealings with the Exaltationists or to Dominic Flandry's dealings with Merseians? At the beginning of The Shield of Time, Everard has thrice been in action against the Exaltationists, only once with any suspicion that they might be behind certain disturbances. Flandry meets Tachwyr once by happenstance, a second time by coincidence and thereafter they are professional opponents. I am sure that Fleming's, Anderson's and Stirling's texts will continue to connect.

Do we receive unrecognized help either from fellow mortals or from "Powers"? Some help is known, some is imagined, some is unknown...

More On Graphic Fiction

After a reference to a universally known comic strip character (see here), we next find the name of a major manga series, Lone Wolf And Cub. (The Desert And The Blade, Chapter Fourteen, p. 291) Maybe prose sf authors have become more inclined to recognize the contribution of graphic fiction? Niven and Pournelle quote from Alan Moore's Watchmen at the beginning of Burning Tower.

We have previously speculated about possible adaptations of Poul Anderson's works into the sequential art story telling medium. See:

The Graphic Poul Anderson?
The Graphic Poul Anderson II

- and also, of course, the Comics Appreciation blog, here.

Another Pre-Change Myth

"'...she and I decided to run away and go on a Quest of our own; to find the Solitary Fortress of Ice where the Super Man lives.'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Fourteen, p. 285.

How did two Changelings know about that?

Earlier blog references:

Superman
Clark Kent

an immigrant with a small town upbringing;
a champion of the American Way;
a hard sf character initiating a new genre.

It is appropriate that Superman is referenced in sf. I think that Poul Anderson would have been able to write an amazing Superman novel plausibly rationalizing the Kryptonian super powers and definitively addressing issues of power and society.

The Fabulous Past

Men-at-arms in full suits of armor are:

"...transformed from men to steel figures faceless except for the menacing black vacancy of the vision slits, like the fabled robots of ancient times."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eleven, p. 218.

Do Emberversers think that Asimovian robots existed until 1998? Somewhere earlier in the series, there was a suggestion that they thought that there had been an island of dinosaurs. See here. Of course, several works of fiction featured surviving or restored dinosaurs. Poul Anderson (more plausibly?) had dinosaurs encountered by time travelers. See here. Emberversers might think that dinosaur islands were real just as some among them think that Tolkien wrote Histories. (In one Poul Anderson novel, William Shakespeare did write histories.)

The past that seems fabulous to us seems realistic to post-Change school pupils. See here. That Change certainly did change everything.

Wednesday 25 October 2017

Luxurious Travel

We have compared Dominic Flandry's visit to the extrasolar planet of Merseia with James Bond's visit to the exotic country of Japan. Another unexpected comparison might be made between modes of transport. In some ways, the recent past seems to be more like the future. In Nicholas van Rijn's and Dominic Flandry's periods of the Technic History, privately owned spacecraft transport small numbers of passengers in luxury between planetary systems faster than light. The twentieth century had aircraft that seem:

"...far more interesting and glamorous than their modern equivalents."
-Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man And His World (London, 2005), p. 170.

The Boeing Stratocruiser (see image) had:

two decks;
a bar;
sleeping berths;
space for 100 passengers.

There were also small air ferries and, later, the supersonic Concorde. Greatness is in the past and the future.

If you wonder how I keep finding exotic material to post, then so do I. But reading exotic books helps.

What We Expect

"...human beings were prone to see what they expected, and especially so in the heat of action."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Twelve, p. 233.

And hear. Outside a secondary school in the Republic of Ireland, ranks of senior pupils stood at attention in military uniform with a transport vehicle to their left. A corporal ordered, in Irish, "Right turn!" To the considerable amusement of onlookers, some turned right while others turned left. One even complained, "The corporal gave the wrong order!" Expecting an order to turn left and hearing an order given, he turned left. Then, instead of realizing his mistake, he spoke out of turn, criticizing the corporal who had tested his ability to hear and obey an order. Fortunately, the defense of the Republic does not depend on space cadets.

Once, glancing behind me, I saw a workmate lying on his back, one arm stretched towards a parked car. Immediately, I interpreted this odd sight thus, "George has dropped a coin or other small object that has rolled under the car and is lying down to retrieve it." In fact, I had just missed seeing another workmate, Chris, lay George on his back with an uppercut to the jaw.

Today, purchasing an item, I placed too few coins on the counter and put my hand in a pocket to get more. Meanwhile, the vendor, engrossed in a conversation on his mobile phone, scooped up the coins, put them in the till and walked into his back room, still conversing.

How much do we see and hear?

Answers To Prayers

"...Someone was always listening when you made a wish, and some of those Someones had a pawky sense of humor."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eleven, p. 218.

If there are Beings Who hear prayers, then They may or may not respond or Their answer might be "No." Gods are persons, not just natural forces. In Poul Anderson's War Of The Gods, offerings have been made to Thor but he has not intervened against a marauding giant. However, a man comes to fight the giant so did Thor send the man?

A Moral Tale From Nygel
A rising flood forces a man to climb onto his roof. Confident that God will answer his prayers for help, he refuses rescue first by a boat, then by a helicopter. When he has drowned, God tells him, "I did send you a boat and a helicopter..."

A True Story From Another Guy
A hitchhiker, needing to catch a plane and prepared to try anything once, said, "God, I want the next vehicle to stop and drive me straight to the airport." The next vehicle, a coach, drove past but then stopped and reversed. A head stuck out and shouted, "Hi. We're going to a Billy Graham rally and wondered if you would like to come?" Disliking God's sense of humor, the hitchhiker never prayed again. (I trust that God, having created a sceptical hitchhiker, respects this attitude.)

R, M, C Etc

Does a fictional secret agent need a superior to dispatch him on missions?

Somerset Maugham's Ashenden has R;
Ian Fleming's James Bond has M;
the real director of the British Secret Intelligence Service is C;
one director of SIS in John Le Carre's novels was known as "Control";
in later series, the TV Avengers acquired "Mother";
Matt Helm's boss is "Mac";
I think that there is another fictional secret service boss out there called "the Man";
Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry has Fenross.

Fenross appears only twice and Anderson devises an appropriately conflictive relationship for him and Flandry. The young Flandry was mentored by Max Abrams, then later sent on a delicate mission by Vice Admiral Kheraskov. Much later, the older Flandry answers directly to Emperor Hans.

Anderson avoided writing a repetitive, linear series.

(Both "C" and "M" derive from Sir Mansfield Cumming, the first director of SIS/MI6. Maugham met an intelligence officer called "R." Andy Diggle created an American "Max." I googled the Charles Vine films here to check whether Vine's boss was the Man but he was Rockwell. "The Man" is the boss of Amos Burke, Secret Agent. See here.)

Alala

SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eleven, p. 204.

Before a battle, Montivalans variously invoke:

Morrigu;
Holy Mary and St. Michael;
Alala, daughter of Polemos.

The third reference is to Greek mythology and Alala is Ares' niece. Greek gods have complicated family relationships. Heuradys who invokes Alala also refers to "the Spinners." Three women spinning fate are common to Greek and Norse mythologies.

The invocation of Greek war deities recalls Homer whom we have discussed before.

Tuesday 24 October 2017

Nondenominationalism

"'Fair harvest, friends! Corn Mother and Harvest Lord, be with you!'"
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Eight, p. 142.

"...he'd used the general terms rather than a specific deity's name, which was a witch's way of being nondenominational." (ibid.)

For other examples of pagan ecumenism, see here:

the Romans equate the Ysan Belisama, Taranis and Lir with their own Venus, Jupiter and Neptunus (Ys);

we chant "...Gods send..." or "...God send..." (Lancaster);

a priest of Poseidon might tactfully honor Athene (The Shield Of Time);

Gratillonius worships Mithras, incarnates Taranis and is the prefect of a Christian state (Ys).

(Thor is on cinema screens again.)

Monday 23 October 2017

Telling Stories

People tell stories to make sense of life. Thus, a work of Catholic piety might advise its readers to bear their cross. This "cross" has become a burden to be borne. It is no longer an instrument of torture and execution. A novel may show characters thinking in this way. Thus, the "cross" becomes a story within the story. SM Stirling's Mathilda thinks in terms that would be echoed by Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn or Fr. Axor:

"God gave you a cross to carry - the weight precisely tailored to your capacity if you called on Him in your heart - and told you to drag it up to Heaven's gate. Ignatius had never faltered."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Seven, p. 109.

Here is another story: each of us must cleanse karma caused by beginningless greed, hate and delusion. Philosophically and spiritually, I am closer to this alternative story. Although I do not think that motivations are beginningless, causation might be. And I do not expect to reach the entrance to a hereafter. Meanwhile, hopefully, we cooperate in coping with life.

Conquest

Lao Tzu said:

"He who conquers others is strong; he who conquers himself is mighty."
-see here.

SM Stirling's Sandra Arminger said that self-command was half the secret of ruling well and and also of dying in power, old and of natural causes. (The Desert And The Blade, Chapter Five, p. 89.)

Thus, Sandra found a way to combine "conquers others" and "conquers himself." This would be the optimum human being although how well Sandra realized it is another matter.

Counter-Espionage

(I was going to use the cover showing Bond tied to the chair but then I found this historic first paperback cover.)

We discussed how to fool a "narcoquiz" and lie to a telepath here so we should also mention two other ways to extract information. First, torture - dreadful but standard in the Bond books. Secondly, in Poul Anderson's "The Big Rain," Simon Hollister's wife has been hypnotically conditioned to ask him leading questions so that she can be debriefed later. She does not know that she is spying on the man that she does not know is a spy: ultimate manipulation. Because Hollister, an Un-man, has advanced psychotechnic training, he is able to see through the deception and to counteract it. By hypnotherapy, he removes her conditioning so that she remembers her conversation with the secret policeman.

Saturday 21 October 2017

The Sword II

Orlaith thinks that the Sword of the Lady:

"...might not be matter at all, as humans defined the term, but instead a thought in the mind of her Goddess embodied in the world of human kind without being wholly of it."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 37.

I commented on this idea in The Sword but there is always more to be said:

minds and their thoughts originate in brains;
brains are material;
gods and goddesses are conceived as embodied, therefore as beings with brains;
thoughts are embodied in material artifacts.

Thus, a thought that is immaterial in origin and that remains immaterial even when "embodied" sounds right but may not be right. I think that disembodied minds are logically possible but no more than that. The idea of embodied but immaterial thoughts requires further elucidation.

Not By Beringia

Dr. Alice Roberts has just been on British television, presenting evidence that human beings were in the American continents long before Beringia became passable and that they got there by crossing the Pacific. This would be one more piece of evidence that the timeline guarded by Time Patrol is not our timeline:

their human route to the Americas was via Beringia;
their Persia had Mithraism earlier than ours did;
their Sherlock Holmes was a real person, not a fictional character.

Anderson avoided presenting information about the near future in the Time Patrol series. Manse Everard lives through a 1955-1990 period that is indistinguishable from ours. However, Anderson had no way to defend his narrative against increasing knowledge of the past.

IMPORTANT Addendum, 22 Oct 2017: It seems that I got this wrong, having seen only a part of the program. Certain questions were asked but the answers given apparently were that people could not possibly have crossed the Pacific and must have traversed Beringia. Oh well. (Dr. Roberts researches how people got from Africa to everywhere else.)

The Time Of Legends In Stirling, Niven, Lewis, Gaiman And Anderson

"...the Change did more than end the era of the machines. It reopened a doorway in the world. One that had slowly closed over many thousands of years, a passage to the time of legends, so that they walk among us once more."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 38.

A common fantasy premise is that legends were real but the world has changed:

Larry Niven has a series in which the magic was used up, the swordsmen started to defeat the sorcerers and a new way to control nature had to be found;

for a Neil Gaiman version, see Ramadan;

CS Lewis even had the time of legends ending in a fantasy realm but, when the Telmarine conquerors had banished even the memory of Talking Beasts and of mythological beings from Narnia, Prince Caspian, a Telmarine but also a true Narnian, wound Queen Susan's horn and called the ancient kings and queens down from the high past.

Although these are valid fantasy premises, it would be an unacceptable intrusion if the time of legends were to return in the middle of a contemporary novel or of a hard sf series like Poul Anderson's Technic History. Each work of fiction must retain its own integrity. But each kind of work can also acknowledge that its world is one of many. That is why it is appropriate when Nicholas van Rijn from the Technic History rubs shoulders with characters from other kinds of timelines in the Old Phoenix Inn.

Emperor And Roidhun

This blog is becoming a bit encyclopedic. When I want to know, e.g., about the Roidhun of Merseia, I first search the blog for any relevant summaries before checking back through Poul Anderson's texts. Now, having found a post specifically about the Roidhun, we are able to compare him with the Emperor of Japan:

"She knew that for much of her nation's history Emperors had been cloistered symbols rather than rulers, recluses whose role was mainly to exist as a link between the world and the spirits. Revered, godlike, theoretically omnipotent but practically powerless, seldom glimpsed by ordinary folk. And very separate from the aristocracy of the sword, the bushi whose warlord masters had held the powers of State in their iron fists."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 30.

The Emperor is descended from the Goddess whereas the Roidhun is elected by the Hands.

In Britain, we have:

a head of state, the Queen;
a head of church, the Archbishop of Canterbury; (But see Comments)
a head of government, the Prime Minister.

The Queen is "Defender of the Faith" but, under the Revolutionary Settlement, no longer rules by divine right.

The Japanese Emperor's life sounds idyllic:

cloistered;
symbolic;
reclusive;
linking the world and the spirits;
revered;
godlike;
far away from all the swords, except the mystical sword used in the Imperial Enthronement.

Amaterasu-Omikami

"...that the line of Amaterasu-omikami be preserved."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 27.

Japan is a modernized, industrialized, Westernized country that is not even nominally Christian. The Emperors are believed to be descended from the Goddess. An American or European author wanting to imagine what it might be like to visit an extrasolar but terrestroid and inhabited planet, e.g., Merseia or Ythri, might:

visit and/or study Japan;
highlight everything that seems different or "alien";
extrapolate the aliennesses while downplaying any human commonalities.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, both the Merseian Roidhunate and the Ythrian New Faith are monotheist. "What is alien about that?," readers might ask. However, to give the aliens gods and temples would be equally anthropocentric. We soon learn that the Merseian and Ythrian monotheisms are distinctive and in no way compatible with any Terrestrial religions.

Remember...

"A man at the point of death was supposed to review his whole life, but Hollister didn't feel up to it. He was too tired."
-Poul Anderson, "The Big Rain" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), pp. 201-280 AT VIII, p. 278.

But this would have been an opportunity for Anderson to summarize several decades of his Psychotechnic History. Both Falkayn and Flandry remember:

The End

Near the end of A Stone in Heaven, the reader believes that Flandry and Chives will die in space. Flandry remembers…then they are rescued. While he remembers, he assesses his life: he had wrought evil but enjoyed life and saved more lives than he ruined. Is it true that he sold his soul to prolong the doomed Empire? (8) Flandry himself does not put it as strongly as that and neither would I. He does contemplate the erosion of his spirit but not the loss of his soul.
-copied from here.

Years And Ages

Poul Anderson's "The Big Rain" is set in 2150 and its central character, Simon Hollister, is thirty eight. It follows that Hollister was born in 2012 or 2013. We are not always told either the date of a story or the age of a character. However, these questions begin to matter when an author constructs a series.

A speculative chronology suggests that James Bond was born in "1920?" Sandra Miesel's Chronology of Technic Civilization published in Poul Anderson, The Technic Civilization Saga, states that Dominic Flandry will be born in 3000 although see here. A year date for Flandry serves two functions. It locates Flandry in the future history chronology and also connects his life events together. Thus, Flandry is known to have been nineteen in Ensign Flandry and to be approaching seventy in The Game Of Empire. Therefore, these works should be about fifty years apart in the Chronology. They are not.

W. Somerset Maugham's and John Buchan's fictional World War I spies inspired real life World War II spies and also the fictional Cold War spy, James Bond. Simon Hollister and Dominic Flandry come later although both were published before Bond. Anderson's adventurer, David Falkayn, refers indirectly to another earlier fictional adventurer, Simon Templar.

Friday 20 October 2017

Current Reading

Blog readers might be able to deduce what has happened. I have been given a book on James Bond. See image. (Given by Nygel.) I am conflicted between reading this new book and continuing to post on the blog. The result is a sequence of comparisons between the works of Poul Anderson and Ian Fleming, bizarrely with Arthur Conan Doyle and CS Lewis also included among the comparisons. See recent posts. They all wrote series and the other three all have points of contact with Anderson.

Meanwhile, I have yet to finish rereading Anderson's "The Big Rain" and have read only the Prologue and Chapter One of SM Stirling's massive The Desert And The Blade. So there is no shortage of "what to read." It is just a matter of "what order to read it in."

Beginnings And Continuations

Some series have two beginnings, the earliest published installment and a later written prequel. Two such series are CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry series. Flandry first appeared as a captain. In the later written Young Flandry Trilogy, he begins as a teenage ensign, then rises rapidly through the ranks.

John Watson begins by telling his readers how he met Sherlock Holmes. Later, Holmes tells Watson, and thus also us, how he got into private detective work and the details of his first case.

By contrast, we began to read about James Bond's career at an arbitrary starting point. Bond then moved forward in real time, revealing some later revised details about his earlier life. Current continuers of the series should fill in the earlier years, not keep the character impossibly in our present.

Dominic Flandry could have kept going for longer thanks to antisenescence but Anderson had other things to write.