Assessing A Planetary Environment

 

The People Of The Wind, IX.

Rochefort has crash-landed on an island in an archipelago which, it will soon be confirmed, is Oronesia whose home guard includes the business partners, Tabitha Falkayn and Draun, both of Highsky Choth. Rochefort is already well-informed concerning the core, rotation, magnetic field, atmosphere, vegetation etc of Avalon but is also able to sense and deduce some further details.

Lower gravity causes exuberance. Although the Avalonian diameter is only 11,308 kilometers, the horizon does not seem closer than the Terrestrial or Esperancian. The sky is bluer, the sun sinks twice as fast and Morgana looks larger than Luna. It is smaller but closer and causes twice the tides. He thinks that the dense ground-cover helps to explain why the hexapodal animals have remained reptiloid and are no match for mammalians or avians.

Diverse Avalonian Territories

 

The People Of The Wind, I.

Stormgate country:

"Above valleys steep-walled, dark and fragrant with woods, snowpeaks lifted. Closer was a mountainside down which a waterfall stood pillarlike under the moon. A night-flying bugler sounded its haunting note through stillness." (p. 447)

(Three senses.)

Elsewhere:

the Plains of Long Reach;

arctic marshes;

scorching New Gaiilan savannahs;

the Sagiittarius basin;

uncounted islands.

 

An Ythrian female who marries out of her choth has to adjust to different laws, customs, culture and geography. However, winged Ythrians naturally travel farther and more frequently than human beings. Eyath's mother, Blawsa, often revisits her native Sagittarius - the basin, not the constellation. Eyath plans to marry Vodan who is also of Stormgate. However, war will intervene.

The Rogue Planet, Satan, Recedes From Beta Crucis

 

The Rebel Worlds, X.

As the rogue recedes on its hyperbolic orbit:

raw mountains

gashed valleys

naked stone plains

chill, stagnant seas

night

rare lamps

blue fluorescence

dreary wind-skirl

rushing sterile waters

inanimate, unaware, toiling machines

a dragon's hoard of synthesized isotopes

sufficient reason to garrison and colonize Sector Alpha Crucis

where High Admiral Hugh McCormac waits while battle is joined

Heidhin's House

(Heidhin is Veleda's foremost man but, since he is entirely fictional, we stay with images of Veleda.)

"Star of the Sea," 18.

The fire in a trench down the middle of the floor scarcely warms the house, its smoke hazes the air and its red light does not penetrate the darkness between pillars and beams yet, despite all this, Heidhin's house is "...as grand as many a royal hall"! (p. 616)

The historical Burhmund and the fictional Heidhin discuss a political intervention by Everard whom we but not they know to be a Time Patrolman. At this stage, we read pure historical fiction. However, before long, Veleda arrives mysteriously, having been borne on the timecycle/holy bull. The diverse genres blend seamlessly.

Veleda's tower and Heidhin's house deserve our attention as well-realized settings.

Veleda's Dwelling II

(I have just returned from an evening meal in the White Cross with two beautiful former work colleagues, Rachel and Caz.)

See Veleda's Dwelling.

Veleda, on her high stool, wraps her cloak around her, hood up, against the chill. Heidhin, visiting, sits on the floor with his back against the shut-bed. Veleda's breath is visible when she speaks.

On a later visit, they walk around her grounds between respectful field workers and the dark holy grove. She will withdraw into her tower to think, brew witchcraft and call the goddess while Heidhin carries her word to the tribes.

Later again, when the war goes badly, she walks alone, broods under a tree and returns from the halidom to her tower where she sits on the three-legged witch-seat, cloak tight, peering into the shifting shadows. Gloom makes objects look like trolls. The floor groans and light shines as the goddess arrives...

Veleda's Dwelling

(A statue of Veleda.)

"Star of the Sea."

Let us stretch the scope of the phrase, "Cosmic Environments." It is usual to contrast the cosmic with the mundane but, of course, this world (mundus) is part of the cosmos. In this sense, perhaps, everything is cosmic, especially when it is given some transcendent significance. An organism's environment is everything surrounding it, whether natural or artificial, thus including human dwellings.

Veleda dwells in a tower:

"...heavy-timbered, iron-bound, raised for her to dwell in alone with her dreams." (3, p. 497)

It is guarded by a man with a spear. Servants abide in the single chamber on the ground floor. Veleda dwells in the loft-room approached by a ladder. She sits on a high stool while a lamp casts wavering shadows among beams, chests, pelts, hides and instruments of witchcraft. Perhaps there is a cosmic connection?

Going out for the evening. To be continued...

Atlantean Tides

Virgin Planet, CHAPTER XVI, p. 115.

See:

Atlantean Astronomy
The Astronomy Of Virgin Planet
Religion, Astronomy And Society

Astronomy affects tides:

Atlantean tides vary but are "...always enormous..." (p. 115);
up to seven times Terrestrial;
a bore is like a tsunami;
shores are either cliffs or salt marshes fading into ocean;
estuaries are swamps, shifting between flooded and merely drenched;
seabirds seek stranded fish;
the damp wind smells of decaying kelp;
trees grow above high tide;
grass is amphibious;
there are feathered, flippered seal-equivalents;
a few women -

live in huts on high ground;
hunt and fish in pirogues;
catch rainwater;
are weaker families living where no one else wants;
have a neolithic culture;
earn trade goods as guides.

Solis Township

"The Chapter Ends."

Dornford Yates' novels, set in Austria in the early twentieth century, describe narrow winding cobbled streets with overhanging buildings such that, in one case, it would have been possible to pass a basket from an upper window to someone reaching across from the facing house.

In Poul Anderson's "The Chapter Ends," the far future Earth wallows in archaisms:

houses low, white and half-timbered;
roofs thatched or red-tiled;
smoking chimneys;
carved, overhanging galleries;
narrow, cobbled, twisting streets;
wooden clogs;
the ruined walls of Sol City;
wooded hills;
fields;
orchards;
distant sea;
farm buildings;
cattle;
winding roads;
marble and granite walls;
"...all dreaming under the sun..." (p. 196);
smells of leaf, earth, trees, salt, kelp and fish.

Jorun's Home Planet

"The Chapter Ends."

The planet is at the Galactic center where "...uncountable hosts of suns..." (p. 198) are visible;

it is a "grim world," niggardly by contrast with the life-covered Earth;

it has moors, crags and spindrift seas;

its features are also described as "...hills and tundras and great empty seas..." (p. 211);

because everyone controls cosmic energies, there is no need to live close to others;

from his home, Jorn sees only moors;

some nights are very dark because there are no visible lights on the planetary surface although (see above) there are many stars in the sky.

I would like it because I appreciate solitude and, at the same time, rapid communication and transportation mean that Jorun has easy access to company and to civilization.

The Light

Anderson, Poul, "The Light" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 164-181.

Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" is a first person narration addressed to a single auditor, a priest. "The Light" is another first person narration addressed to a single auditor, this time a historian who is being told government secrets - and the surprise ending of the story reveals why. Someone reached the Moon before the Americans. (The background of da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks does look as if it might be a Lunar landscape, doesn't it?)

"The Light" is a first Moon landing story published in 1957, so how much did it get right? Americans, three of them, previous circum-Lunar missions, an embarrassing "first man on the Moon" speech written in advance by someone else. However:

they set off from a space station, not from the Earth's surface;
all three go down to the Lunar surface;
they have no radio or television link back to the Earth.

Thus, the first to step onto the surface can get away with:

"'May I suggest that the captain write in the log that the speech was delivered?'" (p. 170)

Description of the Lunar surface:

eerie;
bright;
dead;
huge, razor-cornered rocks;
horizon near;
deep, sharp shadows;
cracked, ocherous land;
indescribable light;
a lava plain like polished black metal;
oven in sunlight, freezing in shade;
a mysterious mist;
meteoric dust;
a familiar fog-glow;
prints of hob-nailed boots worn by a tall man...

The First Man on the Moon learns the identity of the real First Man on the Moon.

In a pre-Apollo cinema adaptation of The First Men In The Moon, a UN Moon expedition discovers that Cavor and Bedford were there before them. A post-Apollo TV adaptation asks us to accept that Wells' account of Cavor and Bedford and the TV transmissions from Armstrong and Aldrin both happened, then ingeniously fits both of these "first Moon landings" into a single narrative.

Paradox

Poul Anderson, "A Little Knowledge" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 599-630.

A subjovian planet should retain a large quantity of hydrogen and helium. However, the extra-solar subjovian, Paradox, captured an asteroid which became a moon with an eccentric orbit. Passing through the Paradoxical atmosphere, the moon blew large numbers of lighter molecules into space before breaking up and crashing onto the surface. Metallic atoms spread across the planet might have combined with any remaining hydrogen. The atmosphere became early terrestroid: carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, ammonia etc, except for more helium than usual. Life and photosynthesis began, generating an oxynitrogen atmosphere. Despite fifteen Terrestrial masses, Paradox is solid with a humanly breathable atmosphere.

Another large planet that loses its hydrogen and helium, gaining an inhabited solid surface, is Ramnu. (Scroll down.)

Under The Moons Of Vanessa

"Norman Bean" was ERB's pen name. "Under The Moons of Mars" by Norman Bean was republished as A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In the following passage, the planet Vanessa seems to me to reflect ERB's Mars/Barsoom:

"Dinner was served in the roof turret, which had a view like being outdoors. By night Vanessa took on beauty. Both moons were aloft, small and swift, turning the land to a fantasy of dim silver and moving shadows. The lake gleamed, the native towers looked like giant blossoms. Overhead, the sky was splendid with stars..."
-"A Sun Invisible," IV, p. 289.

Over dinner, Falkayn mentions and explains rogue planets. They will be crucial to the plot.

Cynthia And Woden

Cynthia
"Oh, treetop highways under the golden-red sun of Cynthia!"
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 175-197 AT p. 183.

"Oh, to be back on Ta-chih-chien-pi, Lifehome-under-Sky, again in a treetop house among forest perfumes!"
-Poul Anderson, "The Trouble Twisters" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 77-208 AT VI, p. 138.

"Ta-chih-chien-pi - 02 Eridani A II or Cynthia to humans - felt even more distant than it was, warm ruddy sunlight and rustling leaves around treetop homes lost in time as well as space."
-Poul Anderson, "Day of Burning" IN David Falkayn: Star Trader, pp. 209-272 AT pp. 224-225.

"'Light across a sea of leaves, but down below full of shapes and mysteries, a cry of color on wings and petals, a glen where a rill comes joyful -...'"
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT XXI, p. 289.

Woden
"Adzel's thoughts turned sentimentally back to Woden, the dear broad plains under the brilliant sun, where his hooves spurned kilometers..."
"The Trouble Twisters," V, p. 132.

"'That wild bright openness where the winds run loose, horizons endlessly before us but also flowers underfoot, a land that that is the living Nirvana -...'"
-Mirkheim, p. 289.

I will quote more about either planet if I find it.

Beauty On Ikananka

"The Trouble Twisters."

Tidal action has forced one hemisphere of the small, eccentrically orbiting, librating planet Ikrananka to face its red dwarf sun but such slow rotation generates a weak magnetic field so that the planet retains an atmosphere although most of its water has frozen on the cold side making the warm side a slowly deteriorating desert whose inhabitants, struggling for survival in their season-less, rhythm-less environment, regard nature as hostile, believing in demons but not in gods, whereas dwellers on the edge of the Twilight Zone with rain, snow, day, night and constellations, more conventionally believe in an annually dying and rising god and a single devil whose power can be neutralized. The latter are easier to trade with.
-copied from here.

As Falkayn and his Ershoka captors approach, then enter, the Twilight Zone:

they leave the wasteland;
the country grows greener;
mosslike growth carpets the foothills;
brooks become audible;
the wind sways "...forests of plumed stalks..." (p. 156);
mountains glow in the red light;
there are "...snow peaks and glaciers..." (ibid.);
stars and a planet become visible;
slopes reflect heat;
ice melts;
rivers foam down cliffs;
the royal purple sky blackens;
the city, Rangakora, occupies a plateau above a mountain pass;
a road joins mountaintops, city and green, gold, glimmering, misty sea;
above the city, rainbows crown a waterfall;
then forest hides the river as it flows near the city wall;
Falkayn is impressed;
so am I.

Jovian Sky And Surface

In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer and "Hunters of the Sky Cave," Jupiter has a solid surface.

In "Hunters...," Flandry, descending, sees:

a glowing, multi-colored planetary surface;

moving dark storms bigger than Terra;

thousand-kilometer-long clouds of ammonia crystals;

the blue and green streaks of free radicals;

lightning in a purple sky;

sodium explosions;

allotropic ice crumbled, then lifted, by methane ocean waves flattened by pressure and gravity;

a vast plain where organisms neither plant nor animal lash at hundred-meter-long flying ribbons;

colored, singing bubbles on a red wind;

an immense, blue, low-built, artificial structure;

flashing white energy;

Ymirites flying, or rather swimming, in the dense atmosphere, some on their own wings, others in gliders.

He also feels and hears titanic winds.

The Game Of Empire: Some Loose Ends

One more divine name: Tangaroa Zachary. Gatto and Tangaroa converse by eidophone.

Half a millennium after the events of "Day of Burning," Merseia still requires forcefield protection from the radiation of the supernova, Valenderay: a permanent reminder to the Merseians of their former vulnerability and dependency.

The moons of Imhotep are Zoser, Kanofer and Rahotep. In autumn, dead leaves are underfoot in Olga's Landing. In Old Town, Tigery trading caravans arrive from the lowlands. There are crowds, music and savory odors from foodstalls and Winged Smoke houses.

Through the transparent wall of a high Terra-conditioned floor of the Pyramid, Dominic Flandry, Diana Crowfeather, Targovi and Axor see:

scarlet, russet and amber woods;

outside the heated area, boulders, crags, native plants, frozen rivulets, sunlit snow-covered mountains and green glaciers.