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.