Happy New Year

We are just back from a party. (The time on this lap top is out of sync with the time here.) Thank you for your attention.

Yesterday, the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog recorded 297 page views although it had no new posts whereas this blog received 33 page views although it had 3 new posts. Later today, I will copy this post and the three from yesterday onto PAA.

This is sheer self-indulgence. I am wallowing in Poul Anderson's Technic History for as long as possible. However, Anderson's texts make it possible to focus on the many details of their narratives and descriptions for a very long time. There is a lot more to post about Dominic Flandry but not right now.

The Approach To Talwin

When traveling through space, the inside of a spaceship becomes very much a "cosmic environment," albeit an artificial one. If, like Dominic Flandry in A Circus Of Hells, CHAPTER ELEVEN, you are a human prisoner/passenger in a Merseian destroyer, then the crew themselves become the most obtrusive part of your environment:

larger than human
green
hairless
spined
tailed
in foreign-cut black uniforms
with belted war knives
sharp, dry body odors
and dark whiteless eyes
practicing centuries-old ritual deferences

Pretty frightening to anyone without Flandry's training and experience? He converses politely in Eriau with appropriate salutes.

Approaching Talwin, he sees peaks that dwarf the Himalayas but are naked rock. An extensive swamp informs him that, in winter, the icecap extends to 45 degrees latitude and the glaciers flatten everything whereas, at midsummer, lakes and rivers boil. He travels with aliens towards a frightening environment.

More On Planets

The previous post lists twelve planets visited in four novels. Also, Therayn is mentioned but not visited in A Circus Of Hells.

Lists of planets might become a feature of these blogs. See:

Planets Of The Long Night
Fully Realized Planets
Fully Realized Planets II

Point of view makes a difference to how any planet is perceived:

in Ensign Flandry, Terra is perceived not by the title character but by Lord Markus Hauksberg when he attends the Emperor's birthday celebration at the Coral Palace;

however, in The Rebel Worlds, young Flandry visits Admiralty Center in the Rocky Mountains;

in Ensign Flandry, Brechdan Ironrede, Hand of the Vach Ynvory, surveys his ancestral domain on Merseia (see Merseian Customs) but that planet is also, very differently, perceived by the young Flandry who has become aide to Commander Abrams of Intelligence. See Merseian Scenery.

There is much scope here for rereading and the studying of details. I had completely forgotten Ysabeau and the unnamed planet in A Circus Of Hells.

Planets In The Young Flandry Trilogy

Ensign Flandry
Terra
Starkad
Merseia

A Circus Of Hells
Irumclaw
Wayland
Talwin
an unnamed planet
Ysabeau

The Rebel Worlds
Terra
Shalmu
Llynathawr
Aeneas
Dido 

A Hostile Environment

Poul Anderson, "Territory" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-76.

(The contents page classifies "Territory" as a "novella": longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.)

There are many terrestroid planets in sf but Anderson also shows us some that are different, e.g.: t'Kela:

temperature 60 below;
enough nitrogen to induce narcosis;
enough ammonia to burn lungs;
no water vapor;
enough oxygen to sustain life for several minutes.

Human beings have several kinds of business on t'Kela but must be permanenetly protected from its environment. Would you want to spend any time there? And why is van Rijn without a helmet in that cover illustration?

Cosmic Environments In Tau Zero

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero opens in the Millesgarden.

The characters visit Stockholm Old Town.

They see stars from space, venture into interstellar space and go EVA.

There is a garden in the ship.

The universe looks strange at high speeds.

The ship passes through the galactic center, leaves the Milky Way, traverses intergalactic space and passes through other galaxies and clusters.

The next passage is through inter-clan space, here, here and here.

The universe ages and the ship enters the outermost abysses.


A new monobloc forms and the ship explores a new universe here, here and here before finding a new planet.

Sibylla

Poul Anderson, "The Alien Enemy" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness And Other Stories (London, 1977), pp. 69-85.

Sibylla is a humanly colonized planet:

33.25 light years from Sol;
50% more diameter than Earth;
a third more gravity;
pressure gradient steeper;
lowlands too hot;
highlands lacking air;
metal-poor;
low density;
slow rotation;
very low magnetic field;
strong radiation background.

These are not just facts. They are adding up to something. And we have not been told who the alien enemy is yet.

Roland

Poul Anderson, New America, "The Queen of Air and Darkness."

Roland has a million inhabitants, all on one continent and half in one city, Christmas Landing, on the shore of the Boreal Ocean. 5000 live in Portolondon on the Gulf of Polaris in Arctica, past the Arctic Circle. The planet was colonized a century or more ago. Eric Sherrinford immigrated from Boewulf twelve years ago.

Surface gravity is 0.42 x 980 cm/sec (squared). I don't know what that means. Does it just mean that the gravity is 0.42 (less than half) of Terrestrial?

The sun, Charlemagne, is 40% brighter than Sol, even brighter in the ultraviolet, and emits more charged particles. Roland's orbit is eccentric so that insolation varies from more than double to slightly less than Terrestrial.

Yet another concretely realized fictional planet.

Another Planet

Poul Anderson, New America, "The Queen Of Air And Darkness."

In New America, "To Promote The General Welfare" and "The Queen of Air and Darkness" are separated by a Publisher's Note which begins:

"Here ends the story of High America." (p. 158)

Without this note, how quickly would we have realized that "The Queen..." is set on another planet? Immediately, I think. Its opening section describes a different environment. Although a sunset glow lingers, there is no day during the northern winter but nevertheless local species thrive:

flamboyant firethorn trees;
blue steelflowers;
hill-covering rainplant;
dale-growing white kiss-me-never;
iridescent winged flitteries;
a bugling, horned crownbuck;
hellbats.

Above are two moons, which do not sound like the Rustumite two, an aurora covering half the sky and the first stars. A long-haired teenage boy and girl, wearing only garlands, sit on a barrow. He plays a flute while she sings. Named Mistherd and Shadow-of-a-Dream, respectively, they are "Outlings" (p. 162), no longer part of human society, and are shortly joined by a short, claw-footed, feathered, winged, tailed "pook" called Ayoch who carries a stolen human child.

OK. We are not in Kansas. Or on Rustum. 

Perspectives

Poul Anderson, New America, "Passing The Love Of Woman."

"Earth took one-point-seven years to complete a circuit around Sol, but spun on its axis in a mere twenty-four hours." (p. 61)

What is this? One year is the period of Earth's circuit around Sol. Twenty-four hours is the period of Earth's spin on its axis.

However, our viewpoint character is Dan Coffin who has lived all his life on Rustum in another planetary system. There are many differences:

"The sun was smaller in Earth's sky though somewhat more intense, its light more yellowish than orangy... There was a single moon, gigantic but sufficiently far off that it showed half the disc that Raksh did and took about eleven days (about thirty Earth-days) for a cycle of phases. Dan Coffin, who weighed a hundred kilos here, would weigh eighty on Earth. The basic biologies of the two worlds were similar but not identical, for instance, leaves yonder were pure green, no blue tinge in their color, and never brown or yellow except when dying..." (ibid.)

Pure green leaves! That "...single moon..." is the heavenly body that we call "the Moon."

In the previous installment, Dan had wondered why people could not:

"...learn to stay active for forty hours, then sleep for twenty." (p. 31)

Living on another planet will change people physically, psychologically and unpredictably. In the concluding installment of Anderson's Technic History, remote descendants of human beings are no longer human.

Rustumite Lowland Species

Poul Anderson, New America, "Passing The Love Of Women."

The Rustumite lowlands have ceretheres, terasaurs and giant versions of spearfowl and other species that are familiar on the colonized plateau called High America. There are place names like Lake Moondance, Ahriman and Ironwood. (Scroll down.)

Dan and Eva discuss a group of friends that are missing. Eva speaks but breaks off as Dan stiffens. She has said something that gives him a clue as to where the friends might have gone - in search of a herd of terasaurs. Moments of realization punctuate Anderson's narrative like his Pathetic Fallacies and descriptive passages appealing to at least three of the senses.

I can guarantee to find something to post about just by rereading a page or two of an Anderson text.

The Rustumite Lowlands

Poul Anderson, High America, p. 29.

"Grass" and trees. See Rustumite Plants.

Insectoids.

Huge winged creatures very different from those on the High America plateau.

Hot, heavy windless air. (Usually the wind is a powerful presence in Andersonian narratives.)

Pungent, sweet, rank or bitter odors, none familiar to a plateau-dweller.

Trills, whispers, buzzes, rustles, footfalls and "purling water" but no speech - until now.

Four senses. The explorers do not eat anything.

Rustumite Plants

There was a reference to grass on Rustum in Orbit Unlimited. Poul Anderson usually describes equivalents of grass on terrestroid planets, e.g., see "Yet Another Grass Equivalent" here and "Ancestral Grass" here. Sure enough, on Rustum:

"Tall, finely fronded blue-green stalks - plants of that varied and ubiquituous family which the colonists misnamed 'grass'..."
-Poul Anderson, "My Own, My Native Land" IN Anderson, New America (New York, 1982), pp. 9-50 AT p. 29.

Anderson also lists Rustumite trees:

goldwood
soartop
fakepine
gnome

Exercise: compare these with Avalonian trees whose names and descriptions can be sought here.

The Rustum Night Sky

Poul Anderson, Orbit Unlimited, part four, 4, p.113.

There are three interesting features.

Raksh, the outer moon...
at its closest and when full, "...twice the angular diameter of Luna seen from Earth...";

"...you saw it change size and phase while hanging in the sky."

Sohrab, the inner moon...
crossing the sky "...fast enough for a man to watch."

Constellations
Orion
Draco
Ursa Major
Cassiopeia
Sol above Bootes

Rustum is only twenty light-years from Sol, not enough to change the constellations.

Tau Ceti II

Tau Ceti II is the second planet of the nineteenth star in the constellation, Cetus. "Tau" is the nineteenth letter in the Greek alphabet and "II," obviously, is the Roman numeral, two.

See Tau Ceti in fiction and on this blog. (Scroll down.) "Tau Ceti II" as a post title means either that the post is about the planet or that it is the second post about the star.

In Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, the sub-arctic region of Tau Ceti II is described as follows:

safe;
rusty dunes;
a few thorn-plants;
a glaring red sun;
hot dry air full of carbon dioxide.

As a habitable planet of a nearby star, Tau Cet II makes sense as a place for the U.S.S. Benjamin Franklin to go after Earth has been destroyed but it plays no role in the rest of the novel. I was surprised to learn how many works of sf feature planets of this star.