(listen to episode on Spotify)
Nate:
Good evening, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, JM and Gretchen, and this month we are going over time travel stories. If you are interested in this theme and would like to listen to more, you can check out our previous two episodes on Octavia Butler's Kindred, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or perhaps more relevant to this particular story, the first segment of tonight's episode, L. Sprague De Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, which this story we're covering, Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" is pretty much a direct response to.
So, despite the fact that we are a science fiction literature history podcast, a lot of our authors, perhaps until pretty recently on the podcast anyways, that we've covered haven't really been career science fiction writers. We talked about Jack Williamson a few episodes ago, when we did an episode on Amazing Stories, and our author tonight has a somewhat similar story in that he was a lifelong science fiction author whose career spanned more than 50 years. As such, there is probably less to say about science fiction authors who wrote science fiction, as there is about outsiders who approached the genre from some other outside angles, or perhaps shifted to different things in their career like an H.G. Wells.
But before we get started on tonight's story, we'll say a little bit about Poul Anderson, who was born on November 25th, 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania. For a science fiction author who wrote science fiction stories, 1926, also the birth of Amazing Stories, is a pretty good year to be born in. And the family shortly after moved to Port Arthur, Texas. His father died in a car crash when he was 11 years old. And after that his mother moved the family around a whole bunch to Denmark, Maryland, then Minnesota, where Poul spent all his money on science fiction magazines. He was involved in the Minneapolis Fantasy Society and met his wife, Karen Cruz, at the 1952 World Science Fiction Convention. The couple moved to San Francisco and was involved in the science fiction community for the entirety of his life. He was the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and among other accolades, won three Nebula and seven Hugo Awards, a Locust Award, and even has an asteroid named after him, 7758 Poulanderson.
JM:
So I think this is definitely our most celebrated modern sci-fi author to date.
Nate:
I think so far, yeah. I mean, Butler has gotten a fair amount of acclaim, but only, I think, recently in the last, like, 15, 20 years or so. Whereas Anderson seems to be very celebrated throughout much of his life. And he also wrote a huge volume of work from his first story to appear in Astounding, which was "Tomorrow's Children", written with an F. N. Waldrop for the March 1947 issue, when he was still in college, to his death on July 31, 2001. And by huge volume, it really is a huge volume. I think there's over 100 novels, countless short stories, which appear over dozens of collections. And there's probably more to say about the man's work than the man himself. And there's certainly a lot of it. This is my first time with him. Have either of you read his works before?
JM:
I've read a little bit. I've read, I'm trying to remember. I've read quite a number of short stories. And I think I've read, yes, I've read the novel Tau Zero, which was really good, and it's kind of hard science fiction. It reminds me a little bit of Arthur C. Clarke, but it has a different feeling to it. And I also read his fantasy novel, The Broken Sword, which is inspired by some of the Icelandic sagas. And it felt, I felt definitely like he was at home in this timeframe, because he did write a lot of fantasy books as well. And some of them definitely harken to that. And not all of them, though. Despite being a science fiction writer in the science fiction community, he does have quite a diversity of themes and concepts in both fantasy and science fiction. And I believe a couple of nonfiction works as well. He wrote something on nuclear power or nuclear weapons or something like that. I can't remember now, I didn't write it down, but I came across it at some point.
Nate:
Yeah, there was a reference in the New York Times obituary. I don't know if they misquoted him or what, where they attributed something to him saying that he preferred not to think of himself as a science fiction author, but a magic realism author. So I thought that was kind of interesting.
JM:
Yeah, I don't know. That's, I mean, maybe he dabbled in that, but I don't think, I think he was very proud to wear the mantle of science fiction.
Nate:
Yeah, so I don't know if they misquoted him or what.
JM:
It doesn't really seem to make sense. I don't think, maybe they took him out of context somehow.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
When he said that, maybe he was referring to a specific work. Who knows.
Nate:
Have you read anything by him before, Gretchen?
Gretchen:
I have not read anything by him. I've come across his name quite a few times, but this is my first time actually reading one of his works.
Nate:
Yeah, I certainly like this one. And since he's got a lot of it, I certainly wouldn't mind covering him more in the future.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I would be open to reading more of him.
Nate:
Yeah, but this was definitely a good one.
JM:
So I had a funny experience with Poul Anderson, and I remember actually, you know, we've talked a little bit already about like being put off by some authors tendencies and stuff like that. And I at one point just decided, and this has kind of changed for the podcast out of necessity, but I at some point just decided that I wasn't going to read authors' introductions. I wasn't going to read authors'' forewords or autobiographies of writers and stuff, and that I just wanted their work to be their work. And I didn't want to necessarily know what they thought about politics and stuff like that. Actually, Poul Anderson was one of the people that made me make that decision. And that was because I read something that he wrote once, and it was an introduction to something or other where he was talking about spaceflight. And he said he basically was saying that he was so obsessed with the idea of spaceflight, and this has been noted by a few people who wrote about him, that he was so obsessed with the idea of space exploration and how important it was to the future and how important it was to science and how important it was to the human race and how it was absolutely necessary that we spend every available resource that we have at our disposal to get off into space. But I think that it perhaps blindsighted him to some other things. And he, I guess this was very topical at the time, which was like maybe the mid 70s or something like that. And he basically spent a lot of time deriding people who thought that there were more important causes like, you know, maybe fixing some of the problems that we have here and now for everyday people, rather than like spending all this money on space travel. And I get that a lot of people thought that way in the time and certainly as a kid, I was like, yeah, all the billions of dollars you can throw at it, right? Let's do it. And I still would. I mean, I dream about it, you know, I would I would like us to explore space, but I also think that there's only so much resource to go around, right? So I mean, people are in a really messed up state in this world right now and here and now, and they're never going to get into space. And it is worthwhile to care about them. And I think later on, reading a bit more about him and actually like reading more of his fiction, because I wasn't put off to the point where I didn't want to read his books anymore or anything, but I kind of understood that he was a pretty nuanced person and that he has a lot of cool things and that like he has a lot of interests and they also show through in a lot of his work. But he was one of those really gung-ho guys and he wanted this to be the real aim of advancement and moving forward. And if people need to be sacrificed so that we can get off into space, so be it, was kind of his attitude, I thought, at the time. And maybe I was being a little bit judgmental, but maybe it was just a sensitive place I was in at that time where I was just kind of like, I don't know. I don't know. It's like, all right, I don't need to read this. Just get on with the story. And I started thinking that this was around the time when I started thinking this kind of same thing about some of the music that I was listening to, where I was starting to read interviews from musicians that I liked their music and then it was kind of like, I don't need to get that close to these people. And now that I'm a little older, I think I'm at the point where I can balance out the two and especially doing this podcast and reading authors' autobiographies, which is something that I said I'd never do. And it's like, yes, it's kind of interesting and it's cool. And sometimes you learn things that aren't altogether nice, but sometimes you also get surprised the other way and you're like, yeah, okay, cool. It's fun. It's good. And I don't mind. I get it. I think that a lot of people had that dream. And I'm not surprised that Anderson did because it figures into so much of his work too. Yes, he was a fantasy writer and yes, he wrote stories like this, but space opera and space exploration and a myriad of worlds was kind of one of his things for sure, like more so than de Camp, definitely.
Nate:
Well, this one, we don't really get to any of that.
JM:
No.
Nate:
This one was really good though.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
"The Man Who came Early". So this one was first published in the June 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but was reprinted several times afterwards. And I believe this is the first time we've done something from that magazine and we won't get too much into their history here, but they're one of the premier science fiction magazines of the 1950s who published all kinds of big names.
JM:
So Anthony Boucher was the editor, right? And this was kind of considered by many to be a follow up to Unknown and it lasted a lot longer.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Like right up till the nineties at least.
Nate:
Yeah. So major magazine at the time, I'm sure we're going to be seeing it a lot more as we go into the golden age in the upcoming episodes when we get there.
JM:
Yeah. I really like this one a lot too. I think this is very short. So it's probably best to talk about more of it after we're done summarizing it. I really enjoyed the whole vibe of it, the whole like there's been such a nice connection between all the works we've been doing lately. And this one, even though it's by far the shortest, it kind of feels in a way like a good way to end it because Anderson is taking what Twain and De Camp did, but he's condensing it to this very fine point where it's like, yeah, it doesn't need any extra baggage. I'm just going to tell this fun short story of what I think might actually happen if somebody was in this situation. It probably happened very quickly.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And I think also the way that we have structured how we've covered these stories, this feels like a turning point to how the concept of time travel seems a little more optimistic in the last story, you know, and then we get this. And the next story we'll cover, "Vintage season", there's this continual move towards ambivalence towards the actual traveler. That's the person showing up into these people's lives. And you get to see more with Anderson's work and later, Moore's where they focus a lot more on the people that are being affected by the person that has just arrived in their time.
Nate:
And that kind of circles back to Kindred, where we kind of started this whole cycle with kind of interesting how it flows in a nonlinear fashion like a good time travel journey really would.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah. And it's interesting that here, who Anderson chooses, somebody who's like the model citizen of the current military industrial complex, and just has him fail miserably to accomplish anything of value.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I feel like this is the much more realistic way that at least I would feel like if I were suddenly transported a thousand years ago, like, yeah, of course, I'm not going to know how to do anything. And it really does get to, I love the line that "you don't have the tools to make the tools to make the tools", which is such a different mindset than what Twain had and even what De Camp had.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think pretty much all the literary criticism surrounding it that I read anyway said it's more or less a direct refutation of Lest Darkness Fall. And that is the idea that a sophisticated future guy would just waltz into the past out with all these ignorant peons and establish him as king or a major player in a few months. And in a way, I think De Camp is like way more guilty of this kind of romantic engagement with history as a power fantasy than Twain was because Twain's point in writing Connecticut Yankee wasn't really like the serious engagement with the history. In fact, it was like deliberately playing with myth and anachronisms that is the whole like King Arthur mess. And he's clearly doing that deliberately, but I think he's really trying to refute this idea that De Camp would portray this as like a realistic way of going about a time travel voyage of being able to establish yourself and bring yourself into a position of like major political power within a very short amount of time.
JM:
I guess so. I mean, I think it's all a matter of degrees, really. I mean, you could say that on the level of realism, actually, this is something that Tom Shippey does in his "Science Fiction and a View of History" essay. He puts them on a kind of axis, different levels where like he talks about, he doesn't mention the Anderson, but he talks about the De Camp, the Twain and a couple of other works, one by William Golding. Yeah, he kind of puts it on an axis of how they tend to treat the situation. And I, okay, when you put it that way, De Camp isn't that realistic. And it doesn't matter that he's more realistic than Twain because Twain is not taking the history seriously anyway. Right. So maybe the fact that, yeah, okay, De Camp being a little more realistic than Twain doesn't necessarily count in his favor. I mean, I think it kind of does. Like, not to say that it's better than Twain, because I agree. But I think it does count in his favor that he tackled the problem and he did it in a long form way that where he really tried to work out some of the issues. But Anderson is definitely more, very to the point about everything. I like this, that the situation is told from the other side too. Like that's definitely something that's missing at both Twain and De Camp.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I think even, of course, there's the way that it's interpreted, obviously, there were people who thought that Twain was merely criticizing the English people that he came across when there is the critique also of American industrialization and capitalism and everything. But it can be read as, Sir Boss does consider the people he's around as like animals and like primitive savages. And it's so it's nice to see like here is that point of view of like someone that probably would be considered the savage. And he's like, "this traveler guy is kind of, you know, I think he's pretty annoying and I don't like him being around".
JM:
Yeah. And this story does a thing that I really like too and that it really is just a guy telling a story like it doesn't feel like it's written, you know, it feels like I'm sitting here just listening to this guy talk. It's the one side of the conversation. But from his responses, you can kind of tell what the priest is saying, you know, it also is a bit funny like it also has the humor a little bit that the other stories recently that we did have.
Gretchen:
I like the little asides and I like the one especially when he refers to someone as glassy-eyed and he's like, "yes, I know what glass is, I've traveled, you know", it's like. (laughs)
JM:
"Yeah, I've been around a little bit. I'm not ignorant. Here, pass me another beer."
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So I thought, yeah, the narrative voice was really fun. The way that this story was told was definitely, definitely engaging. And it was perfect for the length too, like it feels like a very well-managed short story, I think, in terms of just the way it's constructed and told. Nothing is wasted, but it's still really fun. He still makes a lot of fun asides like the one you just mentioned Gretchen where it's like, okay, you know, you're dealing with somebody who's like, yeah, he's this badass old Viking who's been through a lot of slaughter, but he's pretty cool and he's pretty smart. And he's not that easy to outwit. And the fact that it's a conversation with a priest, too, is interesting and also ties it into the book we just did where we didn't mention it that much, but religion plays a serious part in the story, like it's always coming out. It's always like, Padway always has to think about whatever religion the person that he's talking to is so we can figure out how to say the right thing, right?
Gretchen:
Witnessing a bar room brawl over religion at one point.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nate:
But do you guys have anything else on the non-spoiler stuff before we get into the actual story?
JM:
No, let's get into it. It's really short. So we've already, I don't know, we'll talk about it a bit more when we're done.
Nate:
Okay.
spoiler plot summary and discussion
(music. An electronic ocean, maybe)
Nate:
So our story opens up with our narrator, Ospak, and I'm going to be butchering these Icelandic names, so again, I apologize as always. But he's in a dialogue with a priest who has apparently come up to Iceland to do some missionary work. There are some obvious cultural differences between the pagans and the Christian, but Ospak assures the priest that the world will indeed not end in two years as the priest thinks. Of this, he is quite certain. He also knows that Christianity will eventually triumph over Thor, and that it would make sense for Ospak to join the winning side. It isn't visions that he's had, but rather the words of somebody who arrived five years ago, that no one seems to have believed but him as no one lying could have wreaked so much harm.
JM:
Interesting viewpoint.
Nate:
Now, Ospak has gotten drunk enough where he'll tell the tale to the priest. And five years ago, Ospak and his wife, Ragnhild, live with their youngest son, Helgi, and their daughter, Thorgunna, as well as 10 hired hands help around the house. They're about five miles outside of Reykjavik, and there had been a storm the night before. Since wood is scarce in Iceland, he goes off with Helgi to collect some driftwood. As they're rooting through the foragings, Helgi shouts and points with his axe at something. And it's somebody dressed quite strangely with an incredible looking helmet. There's no nose guard on it. It's cast in one piece, and he's speaking a totally unknown tongue that sounds like dogs barking. His clothing bears the Roman letters MP, and he can speak the Norse tongue, but with a very thick accent and with several foreign words that Ospak just does not understand. He's speaking of a city where Reykjavik is, and asking about the Vikings, and Sigurd, one of the hands on hand, thinks that he's mad and starts to run away, or he's fearing that he's cursed somehow. Ospak stops him, and the stranger keeps mentioning the H-bomb, and if the war has started.
JM:
Yeah, Aitch-bomb.
Nate:
Yeah, what's that? He says that he's Sergeant Gerald Roberts of the United States Army Base on Iceland, and was in Reykjavik and got struck by lightning or something. And after stammering through the political events and geography, he asked them when it is, and they say it's the second year after the Great Salmon Catch, which is not particularly helpful, but they're not able to express it in Christian terms. But they think it's roughly about a thousand years since Christ was crucified, and this makes Gerald recoil in horror. They take Gerald Samson, for Sam was his father's name, back to the hall, as the patronymic is still used in Iceland to this very day, actually. There at the hall he makes eyes with Thorgunna, the daughter, and Gerald is a bit taken back by the beer, which is quite sour. He asks them if they've heard of Leif Erickson, but nobody has, but they have heard something of Eric the Red, who had recently settled with other people in Greenland. Gerald pulls out a cigarette and starts a smoke, which surprises them, but doesn't startle them. And he then tells them what he think has happened.
JM:
Yeah, "Out of the Void" flashbacks there.
Nate:
Yeah. It seems to be a common thing of people being rather afraid of the cigarettes.
Gretchen:
Thinking of Twain.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
That was in Twain too, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But Gerald says that he was outside in the storm and was struck by lightning and sent back to the past, and that he was born in 1932, and in a land far to the west that anybody has yet to hear of. They think he's mad, and he expresses surprise that they have a lot of fleas. They must think it's a sign that he's sick, that the bugs are avoiding him and wherever he's from.
Over the next few days, he gets a grip on where he is, and he says he can make himself useful around the farm and tells Ospak that he still maintains that he's from the future and can prove it. He learned modern Icelandic, and fortunately the language hasn't changed much in a thousand years, so they're still mutually intelligible. They're going to sacrifice a horse tonight, and Gerald will show them how to use the strange metal club that he has to efficiently kill it, rather than clubbing it with a hammer and slitting its throat. His pockets contain all kinds of strange things: Coins of remarkable roundness and sharpness, a small key, a stick with lead in it for writing, a flat purse holding many bits of marked paper. He solemnly tells Ospak and his family that this paper was money, much to the disbelief of everybody there. In response to the fineness of his clothing, and that he must be rich, Gerald says that their king gives everybody the same set of clothes. The Icelanders in Iceland are there to escape the kings, and they want no part in any kind of aristocracy. When they go out to the shrine, Gerald mutters to Thorgunna that the carving is clumsy, which offends Ospak, but they soon lead the horse to the altar. Gerald takes his gun and just shoots the horse in the head. The demonstration is quite impressive, but Ospak feels like this is very wasteful because the brains are now unusable, plus, it isn't very practical in battle given how scarce iron is. He's telling Thorgunna various tall tales from his own time of cities like New Jorvik with 8,000 or 9,000 people in them, which just seems incredibly far-fetched to anybody who would have any kind of sense here.
Gerald is useless at cowherding, but perhaps he can be of use metalworking in a smith. The stories he tells about the United States are quite amusing. The Icelanders are having trouble understanding the concept of conscription, as well as understanding Gerald's avulsion to blood feuds. However, at iron smithing, he is totally worthless with these medieval tools and ruins several spearheads. He can't herd goats, he can't spin, and doesn't seem to be even grossly insulted when asked to do women's work. It seems the only thing he can do is fight, which even the Icelanders have trouble believing, thinking he's played everybody for a fool up to this point. However, fight he can actually do, as he easily tosses around this one guy, Ketill Hjalmarsson, who has taken a rather dislike to how Thorgunna is sticking close to Gerald. Gerald mentions something about making a cannon, but quickly realizes that casting it would be impossible. There's not enough material, and as Gretchen said earlier, there's not the ability to make the tools required to make the tools required.
JM:
Yeah, that dream gets broken very, very quickly, that's for sure. It's such a contrast to like that. So I mean, despite what we were saying about Twain earlier, it does seem like not many people actually understood what he was getting at. You get things like that Will Rogers adaptation from the 30s, where they storm Morgana's castle to rescue King Arthur and the Boss with machine guns and all this stuff. That's how it ends, you know?
Nate:
No, I mean, it would just sounds totally ridiculous to anybody from that time period. So Ospak sends Gerald and Helgi out on a party to an ice fjord in a boat, and Thorgunna asks to go along, and they initially reject this, but Gerald says that there should be no superstition in letting a woman go with them. And Gerald tries to explain and improve rudder design and sail system, which might not be practical, and the Icelanders think he's greatly funny, but Thorgunna keeps sticking up for him and thinks that his ideas are interesting. Ospak doesn't like how Thorgunna takes to Gerald, as he's pretty useless, but still can't help not but like him. Gerald sings a modern song in Old Norse, which Thorgunna likes, and Ketill makes some jest, and insults Gerald, and Gerald tells him to settle it outside. And Gerald thinks by this he means fists, but Icelanders do it with weapons. So Gerald takes the axe, and Ketill takes the sword, and it turns out Gerald can't fight with an axe, and he's wounded a great deal, and Ketill looks like he's going to kill him, but at the very last second Gerald just pulls out his gun and shoots him to save his life, which horrifies all the onlookers. This clearly isn't honorable combat, and some kind of magician's trick, and Ketill's family wants vengeance. Ospak in the end decides not to take Gerald in to keep the peace between the two families, and tells Gerald that he's on his own now. Gerald tries to clandestinely get passage off of Iceland, but since he fails to notify the garth of a manslaying, and as is the law before the judgment of the thing, he is considered an outlaw and fair game. I guess the people need to rule on the fact of whether this slaying was just or not, and before they do so, which will be several months, he can't leave. But he has no way of knowing this, so he inadvertently breaks their customs. So now it's fair game. Ketill's family hunt him down, and while Gerald shoots a few of them, his ammunition soon runs out. He defends himself valiantly with sword, but is ultimately slain. His body, with his possessions, are burned for fear of him being a warlock. And the story closes with Ospak, telling the priest that he did indeed believe that Samson was from a different time, and it ends with some musings on if these warriors of the future will ever wonder about the warriors of the past.
JM:
And the way he says it is pretty interesting too, because he talks a lot about how Gerald was always saying that he's from a free country and stuff, and he's like, "but were they really free? They could say whatever they wanted, but they couldn't do whatever they wanted, and they couldn't own the kind of land that I have. And maybe the people in the future will look back on the grave of somebody like this, buried now, and think, what freedom these people in the past had."
Nate:
Yeah, and it's very interesting how it portrays a difference in cultures, in a way that I think that, well, I guess Butler does get into it a bit, but certainly Twain and De Camp don't really get into that much at all of what it means to be from a place like America, and what it means to be from a place like Viking Age Iceland. You're just going to have a totally different outlook on life and what it means to exist and live.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, you get to see that because, again, this is from the other perspective, where with the other two, you don't get a chance to hear the actual voices of the people living in that time.
JM:
Right, and that was something I jokingly lamented about with Twain. I mean, I didn't really mind because Sir Boss was just usually so much fun, even when he was being a dick. But I jokingly lamented that we didn't get Clarence's perspective, and it would be nice to hear what somebody else thought about all this. And De Camp is just too interested in being kind of quirky and funny that he doesn't really, like, he makes his characters fun, but it's different. But I was going to say, I haven't read this, but in the Hard Reading essay in "Science Fiction and a view of History", Tom Shippey actually talks about another De Camp story called "Aristotle and the Gun", which I think I mentioned in my bio a little bit. But this is another time travel story about somebody going into the past, and this time with a time machine that he has. And he goes into the past to, I think he's, well, he meets Aristotle, basically, and he wants to do some changes. And something happens, and he has to defend himself, and he defends himself with a gun. And later on, when he goes into the present, and this is a story that does not use the same time travel philosophy as Lest Darkness Fall. So when he goes into the present, everything is changed, and now America is no longer. Something happened in Europe, and the indigenous peoples are the main societies in America. And he finds a library at some point, and he figures out, of course, that he made the change. And Aristotle wrote this thing denouncing science because he was trying to, like, show him all this new cool stuff, and he ended up doing something stupid, and so in the end, all his philosophies were repudiated. And I can't remember what year it was published, but it's sometime in the 50s as well. So it's probably somewhat contemporaneous with this story as well. So I don't know if Anderson necessarily read it, but if he was definitely aware of Lest Darkness Fall, which I didn't know, but doesn't surprise me. They were certainly aware of each other as writers. So I didn't actually check to see if De Camp had any anecdotes about Anderson, but he might given that he's De Camp. (laughs)
Nate:
Yeah, probably.
JM:
But it's just kind of interesting that De Camp did look at this from a slightly different angle as well. This kind of situation.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think what's interesting about these four stories: the Anderson, the De Camp, the Twain, and the Butler, the first two we looked at, they were using the historical time travel vehicle as a way to comment on the present.
JM:
Yes.
Nate:
Whereas De Camp and Anderson seemed to be more focused on actually engaging with the historical society at the time. Now, of course, Anderson and De Camp do it in completely opposite ways, but regardless, neither of them really try to make a point about the present that much. I mean, we do have some discussions of what it means to be free.
JM:
There's some political commentary in this one, but it's not that much. I mean, it's a short story anyway. So I think it's there, and it's gone into as much as it needs to be gone into, or you just kind of think, yeah, maybe he has a point, and like, that's it, right? But it's definitely still there. But yeah, I think that's definitely a difference between a lot of the older proto-science fictional works, and the more modern style is that often just engaging with a historical time period, or alien culture even, or something like that, like for its own sake, was not really part of the agenda of some of these other older writers, not to count Butler in among those. And of course, like, there's still every perfectly good reason to write the other kind of science fiction story now, right? And just because we have a more modern style doesn't mean that you can't use it as an allegory or something like that, or use it to tell a story about something else, right? Like, yeah, you're putting a character into the past, or into another planet, or whatever, but almost that's not really the point, right? Like, of something like Yankee, it's arguable. Although Sir Boss is a fun character, and it's nice to see him and Sandy and Clarence and all that. Like, almost they don't feel like real people, you know what I mean? Because he is making a point, and that's really on his mind. And I think that that is one of the prerogatives of science fiction, is that it actually wants to engage with this stuff. And it does, I guess, bear that in common with historical fiction, and that's something that I think both Anderson and De Camp were interested in, is just straight historical fiction. And some of Anderson's fantasies, like, they have a lot of magic in them and stuff, but some of them read pretty straight, except for a few things, and maybe that's why, like, the whole magical realism thing might have come up at some point.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I still doubt that he said what he said exactly in that quote, because I do think he was happy being a science fiction writer, and he was proud of that tradition, but I can see it coming up. And I do think there is more to Anderson than some of these writers, who maybe, I guess, didn't really... I mean, even somebody like Asimov, though, like, he was so prolific, right? Like, he wrote things in a million different nonfiction genres, like science and history books, literary criticism, not just a science fiction writer in a lot of ways, right? Also wrote a lot of mysteries, so... And some of these writers, they were quite diverse, like the whole idea of Unknown, too, is to try and diversify the output of some of this staple, because, and we'll be getting into John Campbell a little more later on in another episode, I'm sure, we'll be talking about him more. I mean, his name has already come up a lot, and it came up a bit today, and we're kind of pointing in the direction right now anyway, I am. Definitely not liking him very much as a person, but finding that he was actually a really good editor, and a lot of the people that worked with him said that he pretty much helped establish them as a writer, and even though, like, somebody like Isaac Asimov had a lot of problems with Campbell's views and ideas, he kind of stuck to them out of this sense of loyalty or whatever, and some were willing to do that, and some less so, as time went on. Campbell got crazier and crazier, but here we are, the magazine field is really diversifying, too, and you're seeing a lot of different viewpoints, I don't know if, for example, the kind of political commentary that is present in this story would be something that Campbell would welcome. I do feel it's a little bit considering the time period and everything, but apparently Anderson was pretty gung-ho about, like, I guess, American military efforts as well, so that comes through from time to time, but I do think the showing of the different cultures, like you said, Nate, and how they fail to interact perhaps in certain key ways is something that, again, science fiction can do really well, and that Anderson is more than willing to engage with in this case.
So yeah, this is a really good, really good story. It's definitely one of the shorter Anderson stories that I've read, and I just read it very quickly, it was a really fun read. I do think that it's a really nice way to cap off this particular batch of stories, but I mean, there is a lot more that we could go into, and that's always the funny thing when we do these episodes now that are sort of based on a theme, and I find myself kind of drifting a bit into, oh, but what about this? What about this? What about this? All this other stuff that we can include, and obviously a lot of these things are themes that we will revisit at some point in the future, and we will, just because we've covered something doesn't mean we've covered everything about it, and we're certainly more than willing to return to things. We'll be doing a lot of random short story episodes and things like that in the future, and we'll be revisiting perhaps, if not the works from the past that we've done, but revisiting things that would logically, I guess, go alongside them that we might not have thought of at the time, or that we didn't have time for at the time, or that we wanted to move to a more modern example, which I'm sure we will be doing a lot more of as times move forward. This story from 1956, I should say, certainly places it, that would be the second most recent story that we've done then, after Kindred?
Nate:
I think so, yeah.
JM:
I think so, yeah, so there's our first 50s story, guys. So cool. I really like this too, and I can't think of a better way to finish off this batch of stories. The best way to get this story is just to read it. It's good, it's fun, and I think its points are pretty solid, and although that did not shut the book on the random accidental modern-day traveler into the past subgenre, I think it's going to close our particular moment with this part of science fiction literature history. And now, if you guys have nothing further to add, then I think it's time to finish up with a very different kind of story that involves time travel into the past, and you can view this one as a sort of vacation, if you want.
Bibliography:
Martin, Douglas - "Poul Anderson, Science Fiction Novelist, Dies at 74". The New York Times, August 3, 2001
Nevala-Lee, Alec - "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction" (2018)
Shippey, Tom - "Science Fiction and the Idea of History" in "Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction" (2016)
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