Series Within Series

I am yet again contemplating Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization in its original publication order. OK. This is an obsession. But the Technic History is such a rich future history series both in itself and when compared with any other such series.

This future history begins with a Nicholas van Rijn series, three stories collected as Trader To The Stars. This series could have been extended indefinitely or at least as long as the later Dominic Flandry series. However, nothing remains the same for long in the Technic History.

The van Rijn series is followed by a David Falkayn series, three stories collected as The Trouble Twisters. Unlike its predecessor, The Trouble Twisters is a fictional biography, following Falkayn's early career as apprentice, journeyman and Master Merchant. Further, the third story becomes a trader team story - Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan - and cameos their employer, van Rijn.

The trader team and van Rijn series merge in Satan's World and reach a conclusion in Mirkheim. In fact, time had passed and the trader team had been disbanded but van Rijn reassembles them for a different kind of mission, one that eventually signals the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League.

Thus, here is a complete series of series comprising eight instalments in four volumes. However, there are eight more Polesotechnic League instalments set before or between the eight that are in the initial tetralogy. These second eight consist of:

1 Adzel

3 van Rijn

1 trader team

1 van Rijn and trader team

2 others

Thus, there is a move away from a focus just on van Rijn or Falkayn. There are also six other Technic History instalments to be read between Mirkheim and two contemporaneous League stories:

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" about young Adzel;

"Margin of Profit," the earliest published van Rijn story.

And all of this is less than half of the Technic History.

An Andersonian Action Scene

The Byworlder.

Poul Anderson liked action scenes and what could be more active than an assassination attempt? Posing as a uniformed employee of her conurb, a professional hitman gains entry to Yvonne's apartment and points a gun at her but then acts unprofessionally, offering her time to pray and continuing the conversation. She drops her robe and offers him sex. He continues to talk, asking if she is crazy instead of just shooting her. She invites him to the bedroom but then runs into the kitchen and, when he follows, throws a boiling saucepan into his face, after which she grabs his dropped gun, presses it into his stomach and squeezes the trigger repeatedly until the gun is empty.

"'A pity you killed him,' [Almeida] said." (VII, p. 61) (later)

It did not have to happen like that. We could have been informed of a failed assassination attempt without the action in the kitchen but, as I said, I think that Anderson liked action scenes which he inherited from pulp fiction.

Skip And Yvonne?

The Byworlder.

The Tuatha de Danaan Keeper caravan are restoring the land around Lake Tahoe, distributing soil,  planting trees and bushes and reintroducing wildlife, as well as decontaminating the Lake itself. (III, p. 27) The windows of the chief's headquarters shack are "...filled with a mountain." (VII, p. 64) and:

"A breeze gusted through, bearing odors of pine, noises of machinery." (ibid.)

Three senses: the view through the window, odours and noises. The odours remind us of the natural environment that is being restored while the noises remind us of the work that is being done to restore it. Succinct.

Chief Keogh is trying to arrange for Skip to meet Dr. Yvonne Canter. Her idea about communication with the Sigman apparently ties in with Skip's. Plot lines converge as they were going to have to. Will Skip leave Earth and meet the Sigman? I do not remember exactly.

The Sigman's Significance

So far, Poul Anderson's The Byworlder has been less about human-Sigman interactions and more about human interactions caused by the Sigman's mere presence.

The Theontologists have come to believe that the Sigman, an alien from Sigma Draconis, is "...a direct manifestation of God..." (I, p. 8) They chant, dance, kneel and prostrate when the Sigman's ship rises:

"Hail...Ave...Om..." (ibid.) etc.

The Chinese and Americans try to gain a military advantage from their contacts with the Sigman. As one part of this endeavour, they try to keep the science secret. (Bad idea. Read James Blish's They Shall Have Stars where every new discovery is automatically labelled secret.) The Chinese even try to have the American expert, Yvonne, assassinated. Such short termism! The whole of humanity stands to gain yet their response is try to kill the woman who has made the breakthrough in Sigman communication.

Skip cuts short a just-commenced relationship and travels across the US, seeking contact with the President or someone else highly placed. He has an idea about the Sigman but, in order to do anything about his idea, he must first deal with his fellow human beings. 

In Anderson's "A Chapter of Revelation," there is not an alien visitation but a literal miracle yet still lobbyists and interest groups try to use even a miraculous event not to learn the Message but to push their own preconceived messages. We imagine God asking Himself, "Why do I bother?" But do we agree that this is how humanity would respond to an extra-terrestrial visitation or to a supernatural revelation?

A Soothing, Then Unsettling, Helicopter Ride

The Byworlder, VI.

Almeida flies Yvonne home by helicopter:

"The ride was balm. Only a murmur of blades and wind, the gentlest quiver through seat and flesh, broke stillness." (p. 53)

The wind always plays along in Poul Anderson's texts. Yvonne is enjoying a metaphorical quiet after the storm so this wind merely murmurs. During the journey, she becomes unsettled when Almeida challenges her liberal intellectual world-view. Consequently (?), on arrival:

""A cold wind streaked by, ruffling hair and slacks, sheathing her face." (p. 56)

While they are still airborne, Anderson places them in their cosmic context by listing some visible stars and constellations:

Deneb

Vega

Pegasus

the Great Bear

Draco

Polaris

Almeida's profile joins our list of objects:

"...seen against the Milky Way..." (p. 53)

Almeida:

"'I think [America] can better be trusted than anyone else -'" (p. 56)

How many people think that their country can be trusted better than any other? But this time it happens to be true? They all say that as well. I happen to think that the world needs something more than just one of the current super powers gaining more power than any of the others. Do I think that my view is right? Of course I do. Otherwise, it would not be my point of view. Does my thinking that my view is right prove that it is right? Of course not! How many people need to grasp this distinction?

The BBC TV series, Doctor Who, primarily aimed at school children, was also watched by University students. When a stereotypical militarist, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, said (paraphrasing), "And, of course, the only country that all other countries could trust not to misuse military intelligence in its own interests was Great Britain!," University students laughed. Was that script written very cleverly as nationalist propaganda for one age group but as satire for another?

Wang Li

Poul Anderson's The Byworlder, Chapter V, presents a sympathetic treatment of Wang Li, a well-meaning scientist obliged to live and work under Maoism. His father was wounded by the Americans in Korea and killed by the Russians in Siberia.

Remember that line of reasoning to the conclusion that a technologically advanced race must have solved its social problems? The Maoist version of that, expressed by Wang Li's superior, General Chou Yuan, is:

"'Some believe that the Sigman will inevitably put itself at the disposal of the people's sacred cause, when communication has become good enough for it to realize what conditions are like on Earth.'" (p. 45)

Put itself at the disposal! Of the Chinese government? We really do not know what will happen. My hope would be that a wiser and more technologically advanced alien would introduce, gradually, technological innovations that would ease the most pressing problems on Earth, thus starting to address the most immediate causes of conflict. Beyond that, it would be up to us - "the people" - how we responded to any help offered by an alien.  

Poul Anderson's Time Travel

We would like to see uniform editions of Poul Anderson's time travel works presented as a single discrete sub-category of his complete works. Thus, the Time Patrol series would be reissued in either two or four volumes. A revised and completed Past Times collection would still of course culminate in "Flight to Forever." There Will Be Time should be presented as the culminating volume of a trilogy beginning with the collected Maurai short stories and continuing with the long novel, Orion Shall Rise. Of these three volumes, only There Will Be Time deals with time travel but it nevertheless belongs with the Maurai History since, in this case, Anderson merged time travel with future history. That leaves The Corridors Of Time and The Dancer From Atlantis as two one-off time travel novels although I also link the latter to Conan The Rebel and The Golden Slave because these are Anderson's three novels set B.C. Anderson's time travel works considered as a whole are one massive successor to H.G. Wells' contrastingly brief The Time Machine.

We would also like to see long and detailed screen and graphic adaptations of Anderson's time travel works. A single actor would be able to play Brann in The Corridors Of Time and Merau Varagan in the Time Patrol series - as well as the Master in the Doctor Who series. In particular, the many future periods visited in "Flight to Forever" deserve different and special visual treatment. There is the climax of the restoration of the Galactic Empire followed by several even remoter future periods leading to the dissolution and reconfiguration of the universe, then a journey forward through Earth's past and back to this time traveller's starting point. These concepts and images deserve to transcend their original formulations as prose fiction.

A Special Post

Fiction reflects life. Futuristic sf reflects the period when it was written and sometimes explicitly comments on contemporary society. Time travel fiction set in the past can comment also although perhaps not as often. Manse Everard meets Chaim and Yael Zorach, an Israeli couple who run the Time Patrol base in Tyre in 950 B.C., during the reigns of Hiram and Solomon. Chaim explains:

"'...this post is special for us. We don't just maintain a base and its cover business, we manage to help local people now and then. Or we try to, as much as we can without causing anybody to suspect that there's anything peculiar about us. That makes up, somehow, a little bit, for...for what our countrymen will do hereabouts, far uptime.'

"Everard nodded."

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 246.

The trouble with that is that the Patrol exists to preserve every atrocity that was ever committed in history. This brings us back to the paradoxes. It seems to me that, if an event is known to occur/have occurred at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates - and there can be more than one temporal coordinate - then it is not the case that that event also does not occur at that set of coordinates. If we change the temporal coordinate, i.e., move to an alternative or parallel timeline, then of course, in that timeline, there might be a different or altered sequence of events. Thus, the Danellians and the Patrol could leave behind them their original timeline in which there is both a Holocaust and a Nakba and bring about a completely different sequence of events although they would then be unable to return to their original sequence of events.

Poul Anderson's Non-Humanoid Aliens

The Reardonite in "the Pirate" in the Psychotechnic History.

Rax in A Circus Of Hells in the Technic History.

The Baburites in "Esau" and Mirkheim in the Technic History.

The Dreamer in "Flight to Forever."

The Sigman in The Byworlder.

Baburites and Sigmans chew food with their claws. Baburites dissolve it in a pouch and suck it through a snout whereas Sigmans ingest it up an arm. Sigmans face both ways and have no front or back. Poul Anderson designed them to be physically disgusting to human beings. Read his description and see what I mean.

Communication with the Sigman failed for three years but then Yvonne made a breakthrough because she realized that human scientists had been synthesizing sounds that were unpleasant or even painful for the Sigman.

Steps To The Top

The Byworlder, III.

Skip approaches Chief Keogh of the Tuatha de Danaan Keeper caravan so that the latter will pass him on to a reputable scientist or engineer who can get him an interview with President Braverman or Commissioner Uchida. Skip reckons that no one in the US is more than ten steps away from the top. For example, he knows his father who knows a state committeeman who is friendly with Senators who know the President but Keogh must know more scientists and engineers than Skip's father and their word will carry more weight in this matter.

We made this same point in relation to Targovi and Flandry in Targovi IV. We still do not know what Skip wants to say.