Livewell Street

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 11 Nov 2014.

Any fictional series can make a fictitious place seem real by presenting it as a constant backdrop of the characters' activities:

Conan Doyle has 221b, Baker St, and Victorian/Edwardian London;

Poul and Karen Anderson have the city of Ys;

Poul Anderson has Manse Everard's New York apartment.

Although Livewell Street appears only twice in a single novel, Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind, its fictitious ontological status is comparable to that of the other places listed. This street is in the city of Centauri on the Gulf of Centaurs on the planet Avalon in the Domain of Ythri. Christopher Holm and Tabitha Falkayn walk down Livewell Street. They see:

barges on an oily, littered canal;
dingy, ten- or twelve-storied buildings;
glaring signs for drink, food and fun;
ground vehicles and twelve kinds of pedestrians - one of Anderson's descriptive lists.

Sounds and smells are also listed. Chris calls the street a sty; Tabitha calls it fun. She insists that the Founder wanted nothing but freedom, not a purer way of life.

Later, an Ythrian flies above the Livewell Street canal. When the Terrans strike, she burns and falls into a burning house beside the boiling canal.

A Mixed Ecology

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 11 Nov 2014:

Ferune is an Ythrian:

his ancestor's shields hang in his house;
outside grow Ythrian trees - thick hammerbranch, high lightningrod and water-gathering sword-of-sorrow;
a trumpet calls his sons and chothmates to fly with his litter, led by his widow and torch-bearing daughters.

However, Ferune has lived on Avalon, where his choth is Mistwood:

cold, wet fog blows from the sea;
inland is Old Avalon;
the noise of a boomer tree frightening away animals rolls beneath the house and echoes from the shields;
flying as high as they can, the litter-bearers see on the horizon the sunlit snow peaks of the Weathermother;
at sunrise, the new Wyvan of Mistwood blows the horn, calls the dead and speaks the New Faith;
the litter is tilted above crags, boulders and streams;
Ferune's widow leads a sky dance by a hundred Ythrians watched by hovering human Avalonians.

Life On Avalon

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 9 Nov 2014.

So many extrasolar planets are being discovered, including I believe one thought to be similar to Earth, that I am hopeful that some of them might after all be colonizeable, as in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization. In the early 1960's, reading comic strip sf and starting to read sf novels, I took extrasolar planets for granted but was then surprised and disappointed to read in a book by British astronomer, Patrick Moore, that no such planets could be detected. If they were there, then they were too small and far away and not luminous so how could they have been detected? How are they detected now? Gravitational perturbation is one answer. One theory of planetary origin, cited by EE Smith, implied that planets were rare, not the norm.

Poul Anderson knew that, even if some planets were terrestroid, it would not be a simple matter to go and live there as if they were previously undiscovered continents on Earth. Space travelers learn to change their circadian rhythms. Human colonists on Avalon adjust their fluid balance and kinesthesia to 80% G. Ythrian colonists shift their breeding cycle to a different day, year, weight, climate and diet and have low fertility in their first generations but survive and then flourish.

When Rochefort and Helu crash land on an Avalonian island, Helu, grateful to be alive, asks how such a planet has a standard Terran atmospheric pressure. Rochefort explains but, for once, I find it difficult to summarize the technical explanation, on p. 540 of Rise Of The Terran Empire. Ironically, Helu's gratitude is premature. He is soon killed by an Ythrian.

Anderson's vocabulary again: on p. 541, the sea is "...syenite..." This is a kind of igneous rock so Anderson's omniscient narrator or his viewpoint character, Rochefort, must be comparing the colors.

Diomedean Evolution II

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 2 Nov 2014.

Intelligence requires a long childhood during which behavior is learned. Therefore, both parents must protect helpless infants and ignorant children. Diomedean adults are kept together not by permanent sexuality but by the need to cooperate to survive migration. The prolonged effort of migration concentrates sex hormones so that arrival in the tropics triggers indiscriminate mating. Children must all be born at about the same time if they and the mothers are to survive the long migration. The family is not a couple and their children but a matrilineal clan. However, Diomedeans living at sea near the equator have continual labor and sexuality and therefore also patriarchal monogamy. Migrators and sea-dwellers see each other as perverse.

A long childhood is our glory and our tragedy. Helpless, ignorant children can be:

educated or indoctrinated;
encouraged or intimidated;
taught how to think or told what to think.

The conflict between these two kinds of upbringing will decide the future of humanity. My upbringing: I was given good advice, which I ignored, and taught nonsense, which I took on board. No good, either way. I should have started zazen twenty years earlier. However, my daughter, now grown up, was not indoctrinated.

A human organism, as soon as it has been activated by social/linguistic interaction, has a unique and distinctive personality from an early age but I think that this comes from genes and environment, not from rebirth as many of my fellow meditators believe. The personality then responds to inputs which, however, can have contrary effects, as suggested above.

A possible future form of the conflict: Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic Institute began well, applying psychology, not imposing an ideology, but went wrong, doing too much too fast and taking disastrous short cuts, thus provoking a "Humanist" backlash. But that is in another future history.

Diomedean Evolution

Copied from Poul Anderson appreciation, 1 Nov 2014.

A small arboreal carnivorous glider inhabited a large forested tropical island far from the extreme polar seasonal changes. Rapid geological changes on the low density planet deflected ocean and air currents which, because of the great axial tilt and large fluid masses, bear considerable heat and cold. Drought reduced the forest to woods scattered across pampas.

The gliders:

developed wings to fly between woods;
grew in size to prey on large grass-eaters;
spread into different environments;
but, because of mobility, remained a single species;
developed intelligence to cope with environmental diversity;
flew north and south from the home continent;
found good hunting territories but could not survive the polar winters;
therefore, returned to the tropics where, however, they could not survive indefinitely;
consequently, learned to migrate regularly.

(To be continued.)

Diomedean Geography II

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 2 Nov 2014:

See Diomedean Geography.

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows presents a little more information about Diomedean geography. Kossara Vymezal and her ychan companion, Trodhwyr, arrived at Thursday Landing for a research project around the Sea of Achan. We already know that Thursday Landing and Achan are separated by the Ocean. We additionally learn that Thursday Landing is on the equator and on the east coast of a continent called Centralia. Originally a Polesotechnic League trading post, Thursday landing is now the seat of the Imperial resident.

Being on the equator, the Thursday Landing area originally had few permanent inhabitants. Instead, migrators annually arrived from north and south and agreed to hunt or harvest in exchange for portable goods. Later, "...a large contingent of [sea-faring] Drak'ho moved to these parts." -Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 431.

The Drak'ho were on the Sea of Achan so they have subsequently crossed the Ocean, having learned of Thursday Landing from van Rijn.

Like van Rijn before her, Kossara spends some time in mountains near the fortified town of Salmenbrok on the island of Lannach which separates the Sea of Achan from the Ocean. Scenes on Diomedes are scattered through A Knight... so a few more data may emerge.

This is an astronomical, not a geographical, datum but it is of interest to note that the two moons of Diomedes are twice the apparent size of Luna. Further, one is swift, the other slow, as on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars/Barsoom and Anderson's Aeneas.

Deductions About A Planet

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 4 Nov 2014.

The Imperial Solar spaceship, HM Ganymede, remotely controlled by aliens, crashes on a planet in the Black Nebula. Approaching the planet, it is possible to see that its star is an old, burnt-out dwarf. Since planets form at an early stage of stellar evolution, it follows that the planet also is old. On the surface, rocks, vitrified when the star exploded before its collapse, are almost completely eroded, a process that takes millions of years. It follows that rotation has slowed, therefore that the night will be long and cold.

However, there is still a breathable albeit thin atmosphere, frozen water and vegetation. These can have survived only with artificial help. Therefore, the planet is inhabited - by the aliens that wrecked the ship.

Additional information provided by Donovan, who has had previous contact with the aliens:

the star is near the center of the nebula in a hollow where the dust is too thin to force the planet into the star. Further, the star shares the nebula's velocity and therefore remains in the hollow.

Quite an exotic setting, like many others imagined by Poul Anderson, such as the Sky Cave and the Cloud Universe, both encountered in later periods of the Technic History.