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.

Future Education

The Byworlder.

While Skip travels, a bore on a bus gives us more background information. Education has been technologized with the teaching machine (?), psychophysiological conditioning, subliminal exposure, simpler, subtler, deeper approaches and effective positive reinforcement. It sounds as if the methods of the Psychotechnic Institute have survived in this future. The bore bemoans the loss of scholarship but then says that he would joyfully nuke the Satanic Sigman! Not scholarship but obscurantism and worse. If an alien arrived tomorrow, then some among us would say precisely that.

Skip reflects:

"Frustration breeds fanatics..." (III, p. 26)

Yes, frustration. There is a social explanation.

Death And Completion

Aycharaych tells Dominic Flandry that death is a completion. See Reflections On Death. 

"'What did Paul Atreides tell you, woman?' he demanded...'He told you that completion equals death!' The Preacher shouted."

-Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York, 1977), p. 226.

So death is a completion and completion equals death? I question that second statement. I doubt that there is any connection between the two texts.

Occasionally rereading other future histories, I appreciate Poul Anderson's Technic History more by contrast. I must now complete my lunch and walk to Morecambe. We will return to Anderson's The Byworlder shortly.

The Earth Book In The Technic History

As regular readers of this blog already know, the first section of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, corresponding only to the first three of the seven volumes of Baen Books' omnibus collection, The Technic Civilization Saga, comprises:

The Polesotechnic League Tetralogy

Trader To The Stars

The Trouble Twisters

Satan's World

Mirkheim

Two Ythrian Volumes

The People Of The Wind

The Earth Book Of Stormgate (which is also the 5th League volume)

Three Other Stories

"The Saturn Game"

"The Star Plunderer"

"Sargasso of Lost Starships"

The three stories could be collected to be read between League and Ythrians although "The Saturn Game" is pre-League.

The Earth Book illuminates earlier volumes because it collects:

the first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," which was quoted, in a passage adapted as an introduction, at the beginning of the second of the three stories in Trader To The Stars;

"The Season of Forgiveness" which is a sequel to the first of the three stories in The Trouble Twisters;

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" which expands on Adzel's student days which were first mentioned in the third story in The Trouble Twisters;

"Esau," The Man Who Counts "Day of Burning," and "Lodestar" which shed light on different aspects of Mirkheim;

"Wings of Victory," "The Problem of Pain," "Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon" which are prequels to The People Of The Wind;

"A Little Knowledge" which is of more general significance.

Skip Travels

The Byworlder, III.

Despite having just begun a casual relationship with Urania, Skip:

"...burned to be off with the word that had come to him..." (p. 22)

This word must be important although we still do not know what it is. He burns to convey it to:

"...the President of the United States or the High Commissioner of the Peace Authority..." (ibid.)

- or someone like that. We are learning more about this future world state of affairs by subtler means than Urania's list of "income guarantee" etc in Chapter I. Skip is about to travel so we will learn more about the world as he travels through it although not tonight as I sometimes say. The first thing that Skip does is to phone data service and enquire about Keeper caravans...

High Tech Survival

The Byworlder.

We will not know what another rational species is like until we encounter one and, so far, they have been conspicuous by their absence on Earth, in the Solar System and as far as we can see beyond that. I know that the universe is a big place but maybe it is such a big place that the nearest technological civilization is several galaxies away and not even contemporary with ours. I am certain that, if and when we do make First Contact, then the Others will not be remotely like what anyone has ever imagined. (Although, of course, I could be wrong even about that.)

"'I agree with those who hold that star-exploring civilizations must be peaceful because otherwise they would have destroyed themselves before reaching the required level of technology.'" (II, p. 19)

Well, it depends what level of technology is required, doesn't it? But, more generally, I agree with a point that I first read somewhere in Arthur C. Clarke's non-fictional works. Any species that has had a very high level of technology for a very long time must have ceased to conduct intra-species conflicts because otherwise it would surely have destroyed itself before now? Can nuclear weapons continue to be manufactured and stockpiled indefinitely without ever being used? Have we just been lucky all this time? (Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers think so.) How long before terrorists get nukes? What news might we wake up to tomorrow morning? As part of the same argument, indeed even more obviously, the high tech species must have prevented its technology from destroying its environment.

The speaker goes on to say that the extra-solars cannot have any motive to attack Earth. Again, I tend to agree but we cannot be certain and would have to be prepared for anything.