Dialogue With God

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

See:

Thy Will (13 July 2021)

Thy Will (5 March 2025)

Joshua Coffin prays:

"Thy will be done." (7, p. 137)

However, he effectively engages in dialogue with God like a Hebrew prophet. First, he thanks God when lowland fruit proves to be edible because this seems to mean:

"...that He who fed the children of Israel in the wilderness would not let Danny die..." (ibid.)

(Recap: Coffin and Svoboda are searching the Rustumite lowlands for Coffin's lost son.)

Secondly, however, God's help seems to be withdrawn. Not finding his lost son yet, Coffin is compelled to struggle on through vines and thorns. Consequently, he reinterprets the edible fruit not as help but as a command. God has made it possible to continue searching through this hellish environment. Therefore:

"...His servant Joshua must continue to do so." (ibid.)

The name, "Joshua," makes this all the more Biblical.

Thirdly, he wonders whether he is mad to think that God had designed the Rustumite environment with him in mind. But, in any case, he must continue to do his duty.

This is prophetic dialogue. God's will can be reinterpreted but must not be doubted.

Life And Death

Waking and lying in bed, we reflect. The organism regains consciousness. Neuronic interactions cause consciousness which ends temporarily in sleep and permanently at death. 

Fiction reflects life. Lives have turning points whether recognized or not. In Poul Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, Dominic Flandry's murdered fiancee, Kossara Vymezal, lies in state in St Clement's Cathedral on Dennitza. She believed. He does not. He asks her for a sign that she still exists. This makes him the first person to pray to St Kossara, later canonized by her fellow Orthochristians. Flandry hears only a priest chanting and does not interpret this as a sign. Brains/minds/souls process experiences differently. Some Dennitzans would feel their faith strengthened. Others would doubt. A Catholic colleague in Merseyside who had lost her young son was later asked about her faith and replied, "That's all gone now."

Any hypothetical greater consciousness observes Flandry and my former colleague with compassion.

Exercise: Find three more turning point moments in Poul Anderson's works. 

Giving Thanks

Again, what looks like plain English might turn out to be a Biblical quotation.

In Poul Anderson's works:

"'Father, I thank Thee,' he said."

-Poul Anderson, Tau Zero (New York, 1970), CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE, p. 197.

"'Father,' Coffin murmured, 'I thank Thee.'"

-Orbit Unlimited, part four, p. 134.

And in the Fourth Gospel:

"Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me." (Jn. 11:41)

We have quoted The Same Prayer In Two Timelines before but this is the first time that it has occurred to us to check whether that straightforward-sounding expression of thanks was Biblical in origin.

We have previously checked on Coffin's equally straightforward-sounding phrase, "'Strengthen me, God...'" (see here)

A full list of Biblical allusions is impossible because they are embedded in our language.

(Less posts today because of physical exercise and also other rereading: A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine, highly recommended and a good contrast with sf, like Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.

(I need toast and hot chocolate.)

Ginnungagap

Rereading Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, we (editorially speaking) find a reference to Ginnungagap. Before posting about this mythological reference, we search the blog to check whether we have posted about it before and find that we have done: see Revelation And Ginnungagap. However, we also find so many other blog mentions of Ginnungagap that we think that it would be worthwhile to draw attention to them again: see here. (Scroll down.)

The idea of a primordial, pre-cosmic, void connects mythology and science - and preeminently so in Poul Anderson's works, as the previous blog posts demonstrate. 

In our current rereading, Svoboda and Coffin are still climbing down that Cleft but we will accompany them no further tonight. I will shortly switch on the TV to learn whether - in our timeline - World War III has started yet.

More About POV's

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

("pov" = point of view.)

I said before that Svoboda remains the viewpoint character in section 5. Careful reading confirms this. A single sentence:

"Svoboda was glad to oblige." (p. 126)

- is ambiguous. It could mean either that Svoboda felt glad (Svoboda's pov) or that he was visibly glad and obliging as observed by his companion (Coffin's pov). However, the immediately preceding sentence is:

"Coffin seemed eager to talk impersonally." (ibid.)

Here we are not told directly what Coffin wanted (Coffin's pov) but what he seemed (to someone else) to want (Svoboda's pov). And this confirms that "Svoboda was glad..." is also Svoboda's pov.

A friend who reads a lot of fiction told me that he never notices points of view but surely he must be aware of them without realizing that he is?

All of this matters. When two people, A and B, disagree and argue about what happened during an incident at which both were present, they can be insufficiently aware of the distinctions between (i) A's pov, (ii) B's pov and (iii) the total event which is more complex than either person's perceptions. Communication can fail completely. How often does this happen?

Improbabilities

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the universe:

"...produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes."

-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 7 -

- and many of these intelligent organisms meet and interact because some of them develop faster-than-light interstellar travel whereas, in the same author's Genesis, intelligence emanates only from Earth and post-organic intelligences traverse interstellar distances only at sub-light speeds.

Which is the more probable scenario? Check out Leonard Susskind. In one video, he argues that oxygen and methane in an exo-planetary atmosphere would be evidence that organisms are present and producing these gasses but they have not been detected so far. Also, of the many species on Earth, only one has evolved intelligence so how likely is it to evolve elsewhere? If intelligence is highly improbable on any planet, then increasing the number of planets does not increase the probability by much. SETI detects no messages or signs of intelligent activity. So which scenario is more likely?

Coffin And Svoboda In The Wind

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

Physical features of Coffin's and Svoboda's descent into the Cleft are wind, water and lifelessness:

quick, violent, booming winds dash the rising, roiling fog against the men but do not disperse it;

there are trickles, rivulets, springs and waterfalls but no plants.

Regular Anderson readers expect the wind but should also notice the other features!

When Svoboda says something that his companion does not appreciate:

"Coffin clamped his jaws. There was stillness except for the rush and whistle of wind, the dripping and chuckling of water. When he had himself under control, he said in a flat voice, 'Why?...'" (p. 124)

As ever, wind underlines a conversational silence although this time it is accompanied by water. Coffin getting himself under control might read as though the narrative point of view has shifted to him but it has not. Coffin's effort at self-control is visible to Svoboda who remains the viewpoint character of this section. I prefer Svoboda's perspective to Coffin's but that is my judgement speaking. Poul Anderson shows us very different characters for us to assess or argue about.

Coffin And Svoboda

Orbit Unlimited, part four.

At the end of section 4, Joshua Coffin:

longs to be back in space;

experiences burning eyes;

tries to stand but lacks will and strength;

feels that nothing matters;

overhears a conversation behind a closed door;

stands on the second attempt;

goes to a window and stares out;

hates Rustum;

despises Jan Svoboda;

feels guilt;

is baffled by Svoboda's merriment with his accuser, Wolfe.

Thus, Coffin is the viewpoint character of this passage. 

The opening paragraph of section 5 describes:

"The east side of the tableland called High America..." (p. 12)

At the end of the second paragraph, Svoboda looks with awe. Thus, we are now in the viewpoint of the man whom Coffin had despised even though the two men are now walking together down into the Cleft that splits the cliffs. Coffin's voice is loud and ugly to Svoboda. This happens all the time. We perceive others who perceive us. However, in real life, each of us is directly acquainted with only one viewpoint, his own, whereas, in fiction, the omniscient narrator can show us Coffin's viewpoint in section 4 and Svoboda's in section 5. Novelists have been developing these techniques since the seventeenth century.

The Daily Life Of The Future II

Orbit Unlimited, part four. 

What details have we already noted? See Some Details On Rustum. (I was bound to have noticed Joshua Coffin's reference to Lazarus.)

Although Jan Svoboda thinks of the airbus that he flies as "...this old rattletrap...," (p. 97) it and others like it are:

"...still so scarce and expensive as to be publicly owned..." (p. 100)

Svoboda, an engineer on Earth, is an iron miner on Rustum and has built his house beside the line that carries ore from his pit to the steel mill. In his garden, a phoenix nest lit by luminous fungi is "...like a goblin lantern." (p. 114). I am picking out colourful or notable details but there is much more where this came from.

"The wind, slow and heavy, rustled withering leaves with a sound which was not like October in New England, nor like anything Earth had ever heard." (ibid.)

Poul Anderson always tells us what the wind is doing: "...slow and heavy..." matches the mental states of his characters at this stage of the narrative. Although this wind is not October in New England, merely mentioning this does evoke October in New England! (Ray Bradbury, very unlike Anderson, has an evocative title, The October Country.)

There is more pathetic fallacy with the wind:

"The wind ruffled a loose lock of Mother's hair and made the trees sigh around her voice. She talked low and carefully..." (p. 103)

Appropriately, this wind, not heavy, makes the trees sigh around Mrs Coffin's low voice. Even casual readers must be subliminally affected by Anderson's fully integrated texts.

Isaac's Universe

Poul Anderson contributed two stories to Isaac's Universe, then adapted both of these stories into yet another of his own fictional futures, For Love And Glory.

For this universe that was to be used by other authors, Asimov specified five intelligent extra-solar species:

porpoise-like water-dwellers;

an insect-like species;

snake-like empaths;

small fliers;

block-like high-gravity beings.

This is not how to write original sf. For a start, the five species sound all too familiar. We have read about their like before. Secondly and more importantly, an sf writer has to start with a blank sheet or screen and question every previous premise. My current concern is: how often does unicellular life, which may be abundant on exo-planets, make the transition to multicellular organisms? But even that is just one current question. How does a writer discover an original idea? Anything that I could suggest would not be original.