Exploring The Center Of The Cloud Universe

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 26 Nov 2014.

Jaccavrie identifies and approaches a star of a particular type;

Laure descends in his sled to the surface of an orbiting airless body while Jaccavrie hovers directly above;

Laure takes analytical readings and mineral samples and observes the larger bodies from a distance;

they repeat this procedure for different stellar types;

because of the radiation levels, he finds no life;

next, he plans to measure element distribution on the surface of a planet with an atmosphere even though the air will impede visual contact and the charged ionosphere will prevent radio contact;

spectra, spots, flares, prominences and coronas indicate surface turbulence on the stars in the Cloud Universe;

however, infalling matter continually changing their already unusual compositions makes their cores also violently variable;

a nova-like outburst from the sun "...might be akin to the Wolf-Rayet phenomenon..." (Flandry's Legacy, p. 781);

either the increased irradiation triggers a cyclone or the conductive dust transfers energy into a vortex or something else happens;

the sudden wind wrecks Laure's sled.

On Kirkasant

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 25 Nov 2014.

The Kirkasanter crew are of the Hoborkan clan and speak its tongue. Reyad is the need to search, to hunt, to find the new or to be alone in wild places. The crew are fifteen men and five women. Women are included because they are better at some jobs but every woman is accompanied by an older male relative!

Kirkasanters are instinctively, not culturally, motivated to have children and will not limit their population in any circumstances. With an initially small population in a hostile, radioactive environment, the race survived only by reproducing as much as possible, helped by mutations. The Hoborkans initially refuse to give cell samples for chromosome analysis because this would violate the body which is the citadel of the ego. This attitude hinders medicine but encourages dignity and self-reliance.

Graydal tells Laure that, on Kirkasant, they will:

watch the sunset in the Rainbow Desert, followed by the bright night with auroras;
see flying flocks rise from dawn mists over salt marshes;
stand on the battlements of Ey beneath the banners of knights who "'...rid the land of firearms...'" (Flandry's Legacy, p. 748);
watch dances welcoming the new year.

I am not sure what is meant by ridding the land of firearms - Graydal carries a gun - and, of course, I do not remember noticing this phrase before I started to summarize information about Kirkasant. Graydal also wears a uniform, a practice that has become obsolete in the Commonalty civilization.

Serieve II

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 25 Nov 2014:

In the region of space where the planet Serieve has been colonized, stars are an average of four parsecs apart whereas Sol and Proxima Centauri are about 4.24 light years apart. Since one parsec is about 3.26 light years, this is a big difference. In the Serievan region, stars are just over 13 light years apart.

The thin interstellar medium has not been greatly enriched by earlier stellar generations. Local systems, including that of Serieve's sun, are poor in heavy metals. Hence, the extraction of minerals from ocean currents in the arctic waters around Pelogard.

Laure, who feels young and awkward, just as Falkayn had been conscious of still being only a journeyman, is annoyed when Vandage patronizingly lectures him about:

"'The interstellar medium from which stars form...'" (Flandry's Legacy, p. 720) -

- but, of course, what is really happening here is that the author is ensuring that his readers understand the cosmological context. It is not possible to tell Laure that.

Imagine living not in the northern hemisphere of Earth but near the northern verge of another spiral arm with only the galactic halo beyond; also working in an office high in a tower of Pelogard with automated extractor plants visible down at the waterfront; and knowing that, beyond the nearby Dragon's Head Nebula where human beings are barely beginning to explore, lies the unknown.

Serieve

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 25 Nov 2014:

When human beings colonize a planet, they spread across its surface and therefore build low. When the planetary population has become considerably larger, then they:

build higher;
preserve wilderness areas;
discourage procreation;
encourage emigration.

At least, these generalizations apply to the civilization served by the Commonalty - although they seem to make sense for most interstellar colonists? (We were told earlier in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization that the Gorzuni spread their dwellings underground, regarding the planet as a Mother.)

The narrator of Anderson's "Starfog" refers to "...our race..." and to "...our own culture..." and mentions something of what "We know..." about "...other branches of humanity..." (Flandry's Legacy, p. 718). Thus, this narrator is not able to give us an overview of the two or three spiral arms that have been humanly colonized. Maybe Donvar Ayeghen, President of the Galactic Archaeological Society, who commented on the much earlier Terran Empire, would have been able to do so.

Despite the usual practice of building low, the Serievan city, Pelograd, is on an island where minerals can be extracted from sea water and is therefore built high. From an office high in a tower, Laure looks down across metal, concrete, glass and plastic buildings linked by trafficways and freight cables to the automated extractor plants, warehouses, sky-docks and cargo craft at the waterfront.

Serieve is near the northern edge of the spiral arm and the galactic halo of thin dust and widely scattered ancient globular clusters. Do any explorers venture out into intergalactic space?

The Center Of The Cloud Universe

Copied from Poul Appreciation Appreciation, 4 May 2014.

Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794. 

The "Cloud Universe" in Poul Anderson's "Starfog" is simultaneously both a globular cluster and a gaseous nebula. I have tried to convey the richness of Anderson's imagination by summarizing his accounts of this spatial environment but there is always more. The accounts permeate the narrative rather than being confined to an introductory passage.

At the center:

nebular gas and dust are so dense that they present "...a nearly featureless glow..." (p. 772);
the glow is pearl-colored, with rainbows;
the stars are so close that thousands are visible despite the "starfog";
the plasma is actively energetic;
denser clouds conceal hazards - drifts of dust, rogue planets and dead stars;
the hazards, "...more than fog...," are compared to "...shoals, reefs, and riptides" (ibid.);
the two exploratory spacecraft are compared to "...frigates on unknown seas of ancient Earth..." (ibid.), but this sea is not flat and has no horizon;
gas and dust are so gravitationally concentrated that there is an unbelievable rate of star-production;
every time the cluster gathers material from the clouds of the galactic center, there are several supernovae per century for at least a million years;
radiation has sterilized every planet within a fifty light year radius;
atoms have been through a dozen supernova explosions, far more than elsewhere;
giant planets do not have shells of frozen water and smaller ones do not have silicate crusts;
iron, gold, mercury, tungsten, bismuth, uranium and transuranics abound;
some planets will have to be explored only by heavily armored robots;
the planets will be intensively mined for heavy elements rare elsewhere but abundant here;
the discoverers, drawing royalties on millions of the richest mines in the galaxy, will "'...command more resources than many civilizations...'" (p. 791).

Wealth beyond the dreams of Nicholas van Rijn: Satan and Mirkheim were each only one planet. An entire new phase of interstellar history, now spread across several spiral arms, is about to begin as the series ends.

In Space

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 2 May 2014.

In much sf, space is a mere void to be crossed to reach a planet whereas, in several of Poul Anderson's works, space is an environment that his characters spend time in:

a spaceship attracts spores as they spread through asteroidal space;

one spaceship tracks another through interstellar space;

a Bussard ramjet accelerates at relativistic speeds through intergalactic space;

Commonalty Ranger Daven Laure's self-aware spaceship, Jaccavrie, explores the opaque space of a globular cluster where glowing gas and dust conceal over a quarter of a million stars mere light-weeks or light-months apart.

I am still studying the "Cloud Universe" of Anderson's story, "Starfog." The crowded and clouded cluster is called "the Cloud Universe" because, when human beings who had been isolated for millennia within the cluster finally re-emerged into dark space, the difference between the two spatial environments was so complete that they thought that they had traveled between universes.

The cluster on its eccentric orbit has passed through the dense clouds near the galactic center twenty or thirty times, each time scooping up vast quantities of matter which then condense into several generations of giant stars.

It is impossible to navigate because:

the clouds of gas and dust absorb and diffuse the light even of supergiant stars;
the supergiants emit detectable neutrinos but so do many other sources;
the stellar proximity produces many magnetic effects;
many of the stars are doubles, triples or quadruples which revolve rapidly, thus twisting the force lines;
radiation keeps much of the interstellar medium in plasma form;
there is every kind of electromagnetic activity, synchrotron and betatron radiation and nuclear collision;
these and other unstated factors generate too much noise for any theoretically possible instrumentation;
inertial navigation would work at kinetic velocities but hyperdrive is necessary to cross parsecs and too rapid a change of gravitational potential between stars so close moving on such complicated paths would cause uncontollable perturbations;
the high cosmic ray background implies a high rate of nova and super-nova production which in turn indicates large numbers of navigational hazards like neutron stars, rogue planets, large meteoroids and thick dust banks.

Another Unusual Planet

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 2 May 2014.

In Poul Anderson's "Starfog," a subjovian planet had had:

a cloudy hydrohelium and methane atmosphere;
a core surrounded by ice and frozen gases;
an orbit a billion and a half kilometers from its primary, which:

received an abnormal infall of matter;
swelled and cooled;
consumed its inner planets;
blew away atmospheres, boiled oceans, melted ice and unleashed tectonic forces on the outer planets.

Consequently, the former subjovian is now an Earth-sized ball of metal and rock with mountains, cratered plains and an immense blue-red sun. However, a newly formed star, as bright as a thousand Sols, passes close while at the same time the glowing cluster of red, golden, emerald and sapphire stars rises behind the expanded sun.

Events on uninhabited planets become as fascinating as activities on inhabited planets.

Inside The Cloud Universe

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 1 May 2014.

Space is never completely empty. In "Starfog," Poul Anderson imagines a volume of space full of gas and dust illuminated by hundreds of thousands of closely packed stars at every stage from condensation to explosion. Gas, condensing into stars, is enriched by novas and renewed when the cluster's eccentric orbit approaches the galactic center.

Standing on the bridge of his spaceship, Daven Laure sees clouds and colors glowing, streaming, eddying, piling into cliffs and darkening into grottoes. He traverses not apparent emptiness but landless cloudscapes, hears sounds, feels vibrations and remembers fire and ice meeting in the Void of Norse mythology.

His computer remarks that the external view is an illusion:

the interstellar medium is not as dense as a planetary atmosphere but appears so because absorption and reflection effects are cumulative over light years;
the swirling appears accelerated because the ship is under hyperdrive;
space does not shine - excited atoms fluoresce;
the sounds heard are from instruments within the ship;
quantum micro-jumping across variable magnetic fields, the ship interacts with them and thus seems to be buffeted by tangible currents.

Through Space

Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 6 March 2013.

Very often in science fiction, interesting events occur on another planet and space is merely the distance that has had to be travelled, or the void that has had to be traversed, in order to reach that planet. If events do occur en route, then they usually occur entirely within the closed environment of the spaceship. It is rare that space itself is presented as an environment where events can occur or where there is the equivalent of a landscape with distinctive features that can be discovered by travelling between them.

As can be expected, Poul Anderson does more than once focus on what space travellers see and fly past outside their ship while they are travelling. In "Starfog", we learn that, millennia earlier, a ship fleeing from a conflict had traversed two spiral arms and passed through a dark nebula before colonising a planet in a bright opaque cluster. Descendants of those colonists, travelling in an experimental interstellar ship, emerge from their cluster into what is to them the unfamiliar environment of dark space where stars are distant points light years instead of light months apart.

Remembering legendary accounts of space as dark and sighting the distant Dragon's Head nebula, they reason that their ancestors might have passed through such an even darker region in order to evade pursuit so they steer towards and through the nebula. There, on the far side of the nebula, they locate an industrialised colony planet by detecting its neutrino emissions and manage to reach it before running out of fuel. Thus, the journey itself has involved passing through physically different regions and steering by the landmark of the nebula.

In Tau Zero, a spaceship making an interstellar journey but accelerating uncontrollably must fly into the space between clusters of galaxies to attempt repairs but must then fly between clusters of clusters to effect the repairs, steers across a hundred million light years of dark and empty space to the next "clan" (cluster of clusters) but, unable to stop, keeps going between and through clans until the universe contracts at which point the ship orbits around the new monobloc until that explodes into a new universe.

The ship's crew colonises a planet in the new universe but, obviously, the main point of the story has been how they got there.