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Library Things
Jun. 14th, 2014 06:00 pmYesterday, at long last, I finished subcataloging all the books I have associated with the Britannica - the encyclopedia itself, The Annals of America, The Great Books, and several series of yearbooks. (They're down to just The Book of the Year now, but there were three others for a while there.) This was a long and tedious task; I didn't record everything (e.g., not the thousands of brief articles in the Micropedia), but there were enough pieces that I thought deserved mentioning that the whole thing took many months.
That done, I have begun working through the rest of my collection. That's going much faster; I knocked off five books in about half an hour, even though one of them was a collection of many brief essays on the 1996 baseball season. (The tools I've developed for rapid recording really showed their worth on that one.) But that's not what I want to talk about.
One of the books was The Earth Book of Stormgate, a loose-knit set of stories set in Poul Anderson's Future History series. Most of them are unmemorable, but the collection does include three stories central to the series: "The Man Who Counts", "Day of Burning", and "Lodestar". It's the first of these I want to comment on.
In "The Man Who Counts", Anderson's master trader Nicholas van Rijn is stranded on the planet Diomedes, inhabited by a rather primitive race of avian-derived aliens. In order to escape the planet, van Rijn guides the Diomedeans (or one of their societies, at least) into an Industrial Revolution. (I don't recall the details, nor how he got off planet again.) Anderson thought well enough of the story to reference it in his novel A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (one of his best stories, IMO). The story, though, seems to me another of those in which an author is arguing against himself - or, more precisely, against one of his other stories.
One of the classics in the subgenre of SF known as ISOT ("in some other time") is L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. In that story, a historian of late antiquity named Martin Padway is unexpectedly transported to... late antiquity, specifically, the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy just before Justinian's invasion, attempting to reestablish the Empire in the West. Padway manages to combine his modern and historical knowledge to work his way up to being a trusted advisor of the Ostrogothic kings, and enables them to repel Justinian's assault and begin the climb back towards full civilization. (The story's last words are "Darkness would not fall.") As I understand it, Anderson objected to the story, feeling that Padway could not possibly have had such an impact. (More recent ISOTs have tended to send entire towns back in time, perhaps in response to Anderson's critique.) He wrote a short story, "The Man Who Came Early", about a USAF pilot suddenly transported to medieval Iceland; the pilot ultimately makes too many cultural blunders and is outlawed and killed.
What interests me here is this: Lest Darkness Fall is much more parallel to "The Man Who Counts" than to "The Man Who Came Early"; I see no substantial difference between the achievements of Martin Padway and those of Nicholas van Rijn. At least Padway was dealing with creatures of his own species, and creatures whose social milieu he was already familiar with! (Van Rijn had had much experience with alien races, even if not with the Diomedeans specifically. Anderson's hapless USAF pilot isn't even in the running, in terms of prior knowledge.)
I do wonder whether Anderson ever recognized the parallel, and what he thought about it. Alas, he's been dead for many years now; I'll never know.
That done, I have begun working through the rest of my collection. That's going much faster; I knocked off five books in about half an hour, even though one of them was a collection of many brief essays on the 1996 baseball season. (The tools I've developed for rapid recording really showed their worth on that one.) But that's not what I want to talk about.
One of the books was The Earth Book of Stormgate, a loose-knit set of stories set in Poul Anderson's Future History series. Most of them are unmemorable, but the collection does include three stories central to the series: "The Man Who Counts", "Day of Burning", and "Lodestar". It's the first of these I want to comment on.
In "The Man Who Counts", Anderson's master trader Nicholas van Rijn is stranded on the planet Diomedes, inhabited by a rather primitive race of avian-derived aliens. In order to escape the planet, van Rijn guides the Diomedeans (or one of their societies, at least) into an Industrial Revolution. (I don't recall the details, nor how he got off planet again.) Anderson thought well enough of the story to reference it in his novel A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (one of his best stories, IMO). The story, though, seems to me another of those in which an author is arguing against himself - or, more precisely, against one of his other stories.
One of the classics in the subgenre of SF known as ISOT ("in some other time") is L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. In that story, a historian of late antiquity named Martin Padway is unexpectedly transported to... late antiquity, specifically, the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy just before Justinian's invasion, attempting to reestablish the Empire in the West. Padway manages to combine his modern and historical knowledge to work his way up to being a trusted advisor of the Ostrogothic kings, and enables them to repel Justinian's assault and begin the climb back towards full civilization. (The story's last words are "Darkness would not fall.") As I understand it, Anderson objected to the story, feeling that Padway could not possibly have had such an impact. (More recent ISOTs have tended to send entire towns back in time, perhaps in response to Anderson's critique.) He wrote a short story, "The Man Who Came Early", about a USAF pilot suddenly transported to medieval Iceland; the pilot ultimately makes too many cultural blunders and is outlawed and killed.
What interests me here is this: Lest Darkness Fall is much more parallel to "The Man Who Counts" than to "The Man Who Came Early"; I see no substantial difference between the achievements of Martin Padway and those of Nicholas van Rijn. At least Padway was dealing with creatures of his own species, and creatures whose social milieu he was already familiar with! (Van Rijn had had much experience with alien races, even if not with the Diomedeans specifically. Anderson's hapless USAF pilot isn't even in the running, in terms of prior knowledge.)
I do wonder whether Anderson ever recognized the parallel, and what he thought about it. Alas, he's been dead for many years now; I'll never know.
