Ramnuan Society

Before The Golden Tide

On one part of Ramnu, each of the six dzai'h'u (clans), including Kulembarach, Arachan, Arrohdzaroch and Ngaru, occupies a territory and consists of households whose female leaders gather at a yearly moot to trade etc and also to "...make Oneness." -Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 107.

Didonians also "make Oneness" but in an entirely different sense. On Dido, this phrase means three animals linking their nervous systems to form a single intelligent entity. One of the three units resembles a rhinoceros, as do the onsars used by Ramnuans but this is another coincidence.

Each clan is named from a different Forebear and Ramnuans outside the territories have different ways. 

During The Golden Tide

The volcano erupted, emitting the Golden Tide, and the land doubled its fertility. The population increased until kin-moots were insufficient to maintain law. Then, the clans raised a stone hall near the precipice for the Lords of the Volcano, its doors flanked by statues of the Forebears and also by a seventh statue representing the chosen family, bred out of the clans, from which the Lords of the Volcano are elected.

The clans live by ranching whereas the Lord's household lives by hunting because the country around the mountain is rich. Also on the mountain are artisans and the College where the Seekers of Wisdom keep books, instruments and ceremonial items.

The Ice Returns

Plants are dying. A landslide destroys the tomb of Kulembarach and the Shrine with its books and art. The clans hope that the star-beings can help but a senior Seeker opposes off-world influence.

A Ramnuan Landscape

When, in A Stone In Heaven, Poul Anderson describes a Ramnuan landscape, he makes clear that, apart from the autumnal light, the scene is unEarthlike:

a river flows too fast;

leaves are large, cup-shaped and several colors but not green;

tall grass-like "pyrasphale" hides herds of small animals though not the giant onsars, just large enough for a man to mount;

an onsar is like a rhinoceros with a hump, dorsal fin and extensors ending in clawed, prehensile tendrils.

Meter-high Ramnuans have emerged from forests and hills to conquer the plains by riding onsars from which they see prey and glide towards it. There is more to be said on a future occasion about Ramnuan society.   

Ramnu

When Poul Anderson describes the planet Ramnu in A Stone In Heaven IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), I have to google phrases like "climax forest" (p. 86) and "graviportal" (p. 87). (The latter sounds like a science fictional device: a portal between gravitational fields?)

How Plants Have Adapted To The Frequency Of Fires
deep roots or bulbs;

rapid reseeding;

"pyrasphales " or "nullfire" - ubiquitous plants like Terran grasses or Hermetian yerbs but synthesizing a silicon compound that makes them incombustible and that herbivores either excrete unchanged or break down with symbiotic microbes whereas earlier species unable to digest or excrete the fireproofing became extinct. 

How Organisms Have Adapted To Long, Cold Nights
some plants secrete antifreeze;
others make freezing part of their life cycle;
some exotherms sleep where they won't freeze or be dug up;
others "...start a new generation by sunset whose juvenile stage can survive." (p. 87)

Ramnuan Animals
are generally small because of high gravity;

if larger, have cooling surfaces like big ears, dorsal fins or wings;

are often featherless flyers, because the thick atmosphere offsets gravity, but usually keeping low because pressure drops swiftly with altitude;

if "pleurochladoi," have intermediate false limbs, "extensors," aiding locomotion;

sometimes have membranes on extensors for cooling and gliding.

The Golden Tide

A nearby supernova causes a superjovian planet of 3000 Terrestrial masses to lose all its hydrogen and helium, over 90% of its mass, transforming it into Ramnu, a glacial globe of 310 Terrestrial masses, later inhabited by small, intelligent gliders.
-copied from here.

The italicized passage above is copied from "Unusual Heavenly Bodies," which was originally published on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog from where it was then copied to the current Poul Anderson Cosmic Environments blog earlier this month. 

The idea of the new blog was, first, to make it easier to find earlier-published posts summarizing information about the many extra-terrestrial environments described in Anderson's works of hard sf and, secondly, maybe to add to this information. 

One feature of the Ramnuan environment not mentioned before is sulfur:

abundant because of vulcanism;
redistributed by forest fires that are caused by oxygen concentration and lightning; 
metabolized by microbes;
vital to several biological functions, including reproduction.

Around an active volcano, the microbes multiply until they are visible as yellow smoke, the Golden Tide. Dying, they enrich the soil but their dwindling brings famine and the sulfur trade has dominated Ramnuan history.

I remembered the phrase "the Golden Tide" from earlier readings but not its meaning until I reread again in search of further details. 

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.

Stars Between Galaxies

Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 6 March 2013.

In Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, a spaceship crossing intergalactic space passes a red dwarf star with planets. The astronomer on the ship does not know whether the red dwarf had originated in the normal way within a galaxy or in some unknown way between galaxies.

Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966) answers this question:

hydrogen clouds condensed into galaxies;
smaller condensations became intergalactic star clusters which, however, did not endure because

(i) their giants went supernova,
(ii) cosmic expansion dispersed matter, thus preventing any further star formation,
(iii) galactic gravitation broke the clusters up;

thus, only the long living red dwarfs were left.

Captain Argens, en route to a planet of such a star, explains all this to his two new crew members and thus to us. I thought that two spacemen would not need to be told how stars formed. Sure enough, Rorn complains:

" 'Please...Valland and I do know elementary astrophysics.' " (p. 19)

Valland agrees that he does but is beginning to realise the implications in intergalactic space: old stars and planets that are metal-poor because supernova enrichment stopped early but with lighter elements and life, including intelligent races that might have needed millions of years to industrialise and therefore have learned different things along the way.

These Yonderfolk can travel only to the galactic rim and then only with heavy radiation screening because the radiation level within any galaxy would kill them. Valland wonders whether they have natural immortality but Argens points out that quantum processes, viruses and chemicals can also mutate cells. Valland's speculation echoes Anderson's story "What Shall It Profit?" in which a man is made immortal by shielding him from all radiation in a very restricted environment deep underground. He is physically immortal but mentally undeveloped, an experimental dead end.

In Space

 Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 6 Mar 2013.

This is an old question: can human beings leave Earth, cross space and colonise other planetary surfaces, whether solar or extra-solar? A lot of science fiction (sf) just assumes the answer "yes" although Poul Anderson at least questions whether it will be a straightforward matter to breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food etc on any terrestroid planet.

Here are some variations on the question. Might people instead colonise the Asteroid Belt, as they do in sf series by Poul Anderson and Larry Niven? Or might they just construct self-sustaining habitats in space itself as in another series by Anderson? Certainly, any group that crosses an interstellar distance at sub-light speeds must take its environment with it and therefore need not depend on the extreme improbability of finding a habitable environment awaiting them on arrival.

In Anderson's World Without Stars (New York, 1966), humanity has undergone three transformations.

(i) A spaceship can make a series of instantaneous interstellar or intergalactic jumps. Humanity is expanding, exploring, trading and regularly contacting other races.

(ii) Anithanatic prevents aging. People die only by accident or violence. Living indefinitely, they remain sane by allowing a machine to edit their memories. Thus, a man who has lived for thousands of years consciously remembers only several decades' worth of experience and must consult records about the rest of his past life.

(iii) They mostly live in space.

"...I suppose that a gene complex still crops up occasionally which makes the owner want to belong to a specific patch of earth." (p. 7)

Colonizers of planets:

"...wanted nature and elbow room. There is no other good reason for planting yourself at the bottom of a gravity well. The reason is not quite logical - after all, most of us can satisfy our ape instincts with an occasional groundside visit somewhere, or just with a multisense tape..." (p. 7)

So where do most of them live? The narrator, Captain Felipe Argens, describes the satellite starport called "City", which has grown over several centuries. Approaching it in a space boat, he sees:

"...towers rocketing from parapets, domes and ports glowing brighter than stars, the Ramakan memorial rakish across the galactic clouds; I could see ships in dock and boats aswarm; and as nearly as any spaceman (except Hugh Valland) ever does, I felt I was at home." (p. 9)

Argens is at home in City but has wives in several ports and each of them has several space travelling husbands who rarely meet each other.

He also describes the view from his wife Lute's porch:

"Space dropped dizzily from the viewport, thin starred black here on the rim. Huge and shapeless - we still being more or less within it - the galaxy streamed past and was lost to sight; we looked towards remoteness." (p. 12)

Here are true space dwellers. And Argens' guest, Hugh Valland, nearly three thousand years old, had "'...shipped on the first star craft.'" (p. 16)

After all these changes, can they still be human beings? Anderson describes them as such but he acknowledged elsewhere that a fiction set in the far future has to be regarded as a translation from a different language and worldview. And how long can they remain what we would recognise as human beings? A sequel set later might have shown greater physical and mental adaptations in these immortal space-dwelling organisms.