Narratology

Miss Gohrlay

Back in 2016 I began struggling to find the right girl to tell the Secret History of Humanity in Exode Saga. At that time, I was auditioning Alpha Gohrlay, the clone of Gohrlay who received a vast collection of infites from R. Gohrlay containing several million years of accumulated memories. With her access to memories from all past Realities, Alpha Gohrlay was an excellent candidate for the task of narrating the Exode Saga, but any story told by her would be at continual risk of becoming a story about her. So, no. I simply could not allow Alpha Gohrlay to take control of the Exode Saga. However, several other clones of Gohrlay also auditioned for the part, including Roben and Zeta, but they are only supporting cast members in Exode.

Tez in Grendel keep

Then in 2017 there was Tez. Sadly, Tez was never allowed to believe in the reality of space aliens visiting Earth. However, embryonic within Tez was the idea that one of the Editor's grandchildren might be able to tell the Secret History of Humanity.

And why wait for the Editor to exit from Earth before allowing one of his grandchildren to start investigating the the Secret History of Humanity?

Agonist

The Georgy-Verella link.

Towards the end of 2018 another grandchild (Verella) stepped forward and volunteered to to become the Agonist. The Editor begins calling his grand-daughter "Agonist" as a kind of joke. In the Exode Saga, it is as if the Final Reality has been constructed as an opportunity for we humans to spread ourselves to the stars rather than be replaced by the Prelands. At the point in Time when the Huaoshy made all further time travel impossible, the Final Reality had been constructed as a mechanism, as a vast device needing one remaining piece to activate the process by which the human species would successfully ascend to the stars.

The Femtobot Hack

That final required component of the Trysta-Grean Pact is the individual who can tell the Secret History of Humanity as a science fiction story. Human society has been crafted to be like a receptor protein and Verella is like the needed agonist drug that can activate the receptor.

Mind Bridge
As a late arrival on the scene, there are only limited sources of information that are still available to Verella when she starts to investigate the Secret History of Humanity. In order to provide Verella with access to the vast information resources at Observer Base, she is linked into the "mind clone network" which includes two copies of a newborn baby who was genetically constructed with half of its genes from Georgy White and half from Verella. Georgy is now living at Observer Base and caring for one of these "mind clones".

cover art by Jim Burns

Verella can link through her own baby to Georgy's "mind clone" at Observer Base via the Bimanoid Interface. Their daughters are thus a two-way link, a communications conduit between Verella on Earth and Georgy at Observer Base. Georgy comes to function as a important source of information for Verella, allowing her to tap into the available data at Observer Base (particularly science fiction stories from Deep Time that are in the archives of the Writers Block).

The only other source of information available to Verella are the stories that have slowly been accumulated by the Editor during his long life.

True Science Fiction

end of the road

25,000 years ago, the last remaining Neanderthals on Earth lived in North Africa along side their Anatomically Modern (AM) Human neighbors. The demise of the Neanderthals was of great interest to the Observers. Neanderthal-human hybrids were the best natural telepaths that had ever been observed on Earth.

In the First Reality, the introduction of Prelands into Earth's ecosystem had been delayed until the extinction of the Neanderthals. However, a colony of Neanderthal scientists continued to reside at Observer Base and the telepathic abilities of Neanderthal-AM Human hybrids were still being studied when Gohrlay's brain was used as the template for the first positronic brain.

cover art by Bruce Pennington

It is fun to imagine that there was an ancient city of Neanderthal-human hybrids in Africa that was the pride and joy of the Grendel Interventionists and which gave rise to lingering legends and eventually morphed into the idea of a great lost civilization of Atlantis.

Narration Collaboration
The telling of the Exode Saga is a collaborative effort, too large in scope for any one person. Describing the key events that took place in the past Realities of Earth is a daunting task... I hope that Rylla (Verella) will be able to handle the job.

Next: Gift Clone

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Retrotelepathy

in the Ekcolir Reality

I've previously described the influence that Ed Smith's Lensman stories had on me. Back in the 1970s when I started hunting for science fiction novels, many stores near where I lived only stocked a few Sci Fi titles, usually those by just the most famous authors. It is no surprise that many of the first books that I bought were by Smith, Asimov and Heinlein. Often there were no other options available to me.

Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak
Asimov was quite transparent about the fact that many of his own story ideas can be traced back to the stories he read in the early Sci Fi magazines when he was a kid. It is tempting to theorize about which of Simak's old stories could have most influenced the young Isaac Asimov (example).

1939 Interior art by
Hans Wessolowski

Increasingly, those old magazines are available for download off of file servers of the internet, so I now occasionally come across old Sci Fi stories from the 1920s and 1930s that can easily be imagined to have influenced the writing of a science fiction story that I have previously read or seen in a film.

"Cosmic Engineers" by Clifford D. Simak was published in the 1939 Feb., March and April issues of Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. You can download these issues from archive.org. It is fun trying to imagine what Asimov thought when he first read "Cosmic Engineers".

My advice is to skip over part one of the story and just read the summary of part one that is provided at the beginning of part 2 (in the March installment).

In Part 1

1950 cover art by
Edward Cartier

Part 1 begins with two roving news reporters (Harper and Nelson) who I suspect influenced the creation of Asimov's characters Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Harper and Nelson live in the far future, a time when while driving across town flying through the Solar System you must be on the lookout for space junk that was left behind by the folks from previous centuries. Inside one such hunk of junk, Harper and Nelson discover Caroline Martin (see the cover image to the right), a scientist from the past who has been drifting through space in suspended animation.

Mind-Body Dualism

on Pluto

As a biologist with interest in the human brain, I immediately have problems with the idea that Miss Martin's brain has been continuously active during the past 1000 years. According to Simak, "only" her body was in suspension, leaving Caroline's brain (not a part of her body?) free to do a lot of thinking during those 1000 years:

"I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers." (source)

Harper and Nelson revive Caroline and take her to Pluto, a base of operations from which she is able to launch a mission to the edge of our universe seeking out the mysterious Cosmic Engineers.

Astounding!

The writing style that was deployed by Simak never allows you to forget that you are inside of a 1930s pulp magazine. Exclamation points fly in swarms through the vacuum of space!

Hi Tek communications of the year 6948!
Mamas, don't let your babies grow up
and name their spacecraft "Space Pup"!

The first few pages of "Cosmic Engineers" are amusing because Simak carefully explains the super advanced spaceship technology that allows people to fly around the Solar System with ease. The advanced space travel technology of the future has now positioned Humanity at the brink of making faster-than-light trips to nearby stars. However, when radio transmissions are sent to spaceships, the messages get printed out IN ALL CAPS by klunky teletype machines.

arrival at the city of the Cosmic Engineers

I was amused to discover that much of the plot for the 1997 film Contact can be found on the old and yellowed pages of "Cosmic Engineers" as published in 1939. Simak places his alien-designed space warp "Machine" on Pluto and Caroline, just like Ellie Arroway, goes through some kind of space warp tunnel in order to travel a vast distance through outer space and chat with space aliens. There is a scene in Contact where Ellie pops out of a worm hole and finds herself in a new star system with multiple stars and giant alien cities on the planet below...

The 1997 film Contact. In the top panel, Ellie as a radio astronomer who obtains instructions from aliens for how to build a space warp-generating Machine. In the middle panel, Ellie travels through a space warp that is opened up by the Machine. Bottom panel: on her trip to the Galactic Core, Ellie gets a glimpse of an alien city on a distant exoplanet. These scenes in Contact seem quite similar to events in "Cosmic Engineers".

the wonders of cosmic rays

For Simak, in 1939, the idea of making First Contact by detecting radio signals from a distant alien civilization would have been far too pedestrian (radio waves from the black hole at the center of our galaxy were actually detected in 1933). In Contact, Ellie is a radio astronomer who detects a message from the stars. In "Cosmic Engineers", the aliens send a message across space in the form of mysterious signals that at first are confused with cosmic rays. At the base on Pluto, scientists have slowly discovered how to decode this alien broadcast that was hidden among the cosmic rays.

in the Ekcolir Reality

"And then we figured maybe we were getting pure thought. Thought telepathed across the light years of unimaginable space. Just what the speed of thought would be no one could even guess. It might be instantaneous... It took us months to build that machine you saw in the other room. Briefly, it picks up the signals, translates them from the pure energy of thought into actual thought, into symbols our mind can read." (source)

Superscience story: spaceships
moving between galaxies
"at the speed of thought".

The first time I read a story about "pure thought" was in a story by Ed Smith in which space travel "at the speed of thought" could move people across vast intergalactic distances. Radio waves are simply too slow for many science fiction stories that are set among the stars!

Upon reaching the base on Pluto, Caroline is discovered to have "the right stuff" to telepathically communicate with the Cosmic Engineers. The aliens provide Caroline with instructions for building a space warp machine. These instructions include mysterious equations for high-dimensional physics. I suspect that during the 1930's, if you submitted a story to Astounding editor John Campbell that included telepathy and equations then he was likely to publish it.

in the Ekcolir Reality

"They want us to build a machine," said Caroline, "a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them." (source)

1967 cover art by John Gaughan

Caroline decodes the telepathic alien signals that explain how to make a Machine that will open a tunnel through space, allowing our intrepid human crusaders to visit the Cosmic Engineers who reside somewhere far away from Earth, near the edge of our universe.

Part 2
When Caroline and her friends from Pluto reach the city of the Cosmic Engineers, the aliens appear to be composed of metal, not carbon-based cellular tissues. These robotic beings communicate with our Earthly heroes by some form of telepathy.

Viewing future Earth

One of these metal creatures, Engineer #1824, explains to the visiting humans that our universe is doomed to destruction. Even worse, after our universe is destroyed, it will be resurrected as the toy and plaything of the evil Hellhounds, a dastardly alien species.

Part 3
After a quick time travel journey to the far future of Earth, Caroline has all the knowledge that she needs to solve some tricky 5th-dimensional astrophysics problems and she manages to devise a way to save our universe and defeat the evil Hellhounds. We readers finally learn that the robotic Engineers were made three billion years ago by an alien species that once lived on Pluto.

by divine fiat, Campbell
put his own story on the cover
of the March 1939 issue

The Cosmic Engineers believe that humans evolved on Earth, but are related to the ancient beings who created the Engineers. The Cosmic Engineers are ready to share with Earth all of their advanced technology, but Caroline and the others fear that humans are not yet ready for that much technological power.

There is a story called "Cloak of Aesir" by John Campbell in the March 1939 issue of Astounding. That story is set in the far future of Earth after alien invaders have taken control of Earth and, of course, telepathy plays a big role in Campbell's story.

Daneel

Eventually, starting on June 10, 1939, Isaac Asimov began writing his own stories about robots. His most famous robot is the telepathic robot Daneel. How much influence did Simak's robot #1824 have on the development of Asimov's imaginary tribe of positronic robots?

Contact by Carl Sagan

"Cosmic Engineers" was first published in book format in 1950. I wonder if a young Carl Sagan read that book and was influenced by it. Sagan eventually wrote the science fiction novel Contact, in which a woman scientist travels through space warps, chats with aliens and learns that our universe was created by beings who designed the physical properties of the universe so as to encode a message that new species such as we humans can find and decode.

a future edition, without teletype

Related reading:

• "An Experience in Telepathy: In Which Clairvoyance and Spiritual Telegraphy Play a Part" (see).
• The telepathic Venusians of Asimov (Oceans of Venus).  
•  A Columbus of Space, by Garrett P. Serviss (see).
• "The man who mastered time" by Ray Cummings.
• Asimov ranks the best stories of 1939.

Next: telling the Secret History of Humanity

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Exocycle

Agent Smith

Still shaken by her dream, Elizabeth looked at the glowing face of her watch. She had decided on Wednesday to drop Dr. Herged's Biological Psychology course, but now, because of the dream, all had changed. She sprang out of bed, crossed the cold floor and opened the closet.

Her new green party clothes were hanging there. They looked so warm and, well, green, that she quickly dressed herself exactly as she had for the big celebration at her grandparents house on Christmas day. She desperately wanted something soothing that could push the eerie red tint of her disturbing dream out of her thoughts.

Tonya and Elizabeth

The holiday parties had been three weeks ago, but those had been good times for Elizabeth after a harrowing first semester at the university. And now with a shortage of dorm rooms and all of the over-full courses, this new semester was not starting smoothly.

Elizabeth knew that she would have to hurry in order to avoid being late for class. And based on conditions in Tuesday's first class session, it was again going to be an over-full classroom so professor Herged would notice any late arrivals trying to squeeze in. Ignoring the fact that she was now quite over-dressed for a routine day at school, she stepped out into the chilly winter morning. Fresh snow blanketed the campus. The red brick walls of the old dormitories seemed to ooze red directly into her psyche. The once familiar and inviting appearance of her world had been corrupted and morphed into something alien and unsettling. There would be no escaping her dream.

Psyche. Elizabeth recalled what professor Herged had said in class on Tuesday about that ancient Greek word, but her dream was fresher in her mind, making it impossible to think about enjoyable topics like courses and parties. This had been another one of her strange and increasingly frequent dreams about Grean. This particular dream had been more vivid and detailed than any of the previous dreams about Grean, allowing Elizabeth to now realize that Grean had once been her mentor. Grean her master. In this most recent dream-like memory, they had sat together in Grean's home on a distant world under a red sun and they had spoken the ancient Greek language of Athens.

Elizabeth wanted to be a writer like her grandmother and her mother. She saw remembered words in her mind's eye and now that dreamed conversation with Grean unrolled in her thoughts like a script.

Elizabeth's dream had reminded her that she was not anything as simple as Elizabeth Smith. She held memories that went far back in time and encompassed the lives of many other women.

The Etruscan Intervention (image credits).
Luri being teleported by Grean

Those old memories returned like a flood to Elizabeth's consciousness. She had been Xanthippe during the Athens Intervention and Princess Luri during the Etruscan Intervention. Through the centuries she had been a frequent visitor to Earth, living out parts of many lives, secretly involved in many efforts to shape the course of human history. As an Interventionist agent she was recycled again and again, repeatedly trained and prepared for new missions. Somehow, she even had memories that seemed to be from the future.

Luri in the future (source)

When Elizabeth's mother had dropped her off at college the previous fall, she had encouraged her daughter to obtain a degree in some field that could likely provide employment. "I know you enjoy writing, but you need a backup plan. Almost nobody can make a living by writing."

Elizabeth was still struggling to imagine her future and the shape her life might take. She loved science but she did not want to have to be a pioneer, fighting to break into a male-dominated science. Back in September she had begun her exploration of science with an introductory biochemistry course, but out of sixty students only five had been women. It was a team-taught course, but none of the professors was a woman.

In October Elizabeth had discovered Christine Ladd and found a copy of her book, Colour and Colour Theories. Now Elizabeth was trying to gain entry to the psychology department, but it was one of the university departments bulging at the seams with baby-boomer students, many of them young women. She had gotten the last available slot in a 7:30 AM class session. Somehow Elizabeth had allowed herself to imagine that the instructor for the class might be a hip young woman. After learning that her new instructor was the exasperatingly dry and wooden Dr. Herged, Elizabeth had begun looking for an alternative course to take. Out of frustration with all of the full and over-subscribed courses, she'd even toyed with the idea of joining the swim team.

Racing across campus and thinking deeper into her dream, Elizabeth was now certain that during the night she had "dreamed" of receiving orders to keep attending Dr. Herged's course. Was it the intrusion of those new orders into her mind that had triggered her ancient memories of Athens and Grean?

Right up until the last minute, Elizabeth hoped that some of the psychology students would have already dropped out of Dr. Herged's course, but she saw that the classroom was crowded and every seat occupied. Students were supposed to be in their assigned seats, and Elizabeth stopped next to her seat, which was occupied by a tall, red-haired girl. "You're in my seat."

It was 7:30 and Dr. Herged was ready to begin lecturing, and he said, "On Tuesday, I mentioned the pre-Socratic-" but he paused and said to Elizabeth, "Is there a problem?"

The girl with red hair got up from Elizabeth's assigned seat and went to the back of the classroom. Elizabeth sat down and Dr. Herged said, "I must insist that any auditing students stand at the back of the room... at least until we get our first wave of dropouts and over-sleepers."

Elizabeth could only half listen to Dr. Herged's lecture. Her thoughts were trapped in the cascade of memories that was flowing into her consciousness, memories of her previous lives.

When the lecture was over, the boy sitting next to Elizabeth said, "I hope you apologize to Tonya."

The red-haired girl had made her way through the ocean of chairs, moving against the current of students leaving the lecture hall. She gave Elizabeth a quick head-to-toe visual inspection and said to the boy, "Don't bother, she's too stuck up... she won't even admit to knowing us."

Elizabeth tried to clear her mind of thoughts echoing from her previous lives and she struggled to keep her thought stream in the present moment of her current body and not drift into the vast ocean of newly revived memories that lured her into the past. Cluelessly, Elizabeth asked, "Do I know you?"

The boy explained, "We were in the same introductory biochemistry class last semester." He stood up and slung his backpack over his shoulder.

Elizabeth rose to her feet and looked carefully at the red-haired girl. Elizabeth decided that her hair had been dyed red and now the roots were coming in as another color, a bland light brown. Elizabeth also noticed that the boy was a couple of inches taller than her own six feet. For a moment she had a flash of memory -or premonition- of putting her arms around his broad shoulders. Finally, she recovered a vague memory of them both from the previous fall: just two of the sixty or so students who had been in her biochemistry class. Elizabeth now recalled that in the second half of the semester, these two had always been together, apparently a couple. All of those thoughts passed through Elizabeth's mind in two seconds then she said, "Now I remember you two." She reached out and placed a hand on Tonya's shoulder. "I'm sorry that I kicked you out of my seat. When I arrived late I should have stood in back."

Tonya shook her head, "No, don't be silly." She patted Elizabeth's hand with her own. "When I tried to register into this course yesterday all I got was an audit slot. They warned me that it could be weeks until a seat is available for me."

The boy laughed, "It seems like brutal conditions in the Psych department! I can't believe that there are assigned seats and teaching assistants taking attendance during class. Still, some students are dropping. Just yesterday my waiting list slot was upgraded to enrollment."

Elizabeth nodded, "Yes, it is quite different than in Biochem where every class is under-subscribed. Strange that we are all switching over to psychology."

Tonya said. "We're still biochemistry majors." She slipped an arm around the boy's waist.  "Did you switch to psychology?"

How could she respond to that question? With access to her old memories, Elizabeth now realized that she had been switched to a new major so as to better carry out her secret mission. Sadly, she could not explain to these two Earthlings the nature of her secret mission on Earth. For one thing, she was herself having trouble remembering exactly what her mission was. Elizabeth said, "Yes, I switched my major. I'd like to get into a profession where there is some sort of balance. Last semester I got severely depressed by the fact that there are so few women in Biochemistry."

Tonya laughed. "That's only going to change if people like you and I become biochemists."

Elizabeth admitted, "True. To be honest, my real dream is to become a writer, but my family insists that I be practical."

The boy seemed to look upon Elizabeth with interest for the first time. He asked, "What do you like to write about?"

Tonya turned a chair around and sat down, tired from having stood during the long lecture. Elizabeth and the boy also sat down so as not to tower over her.

Elizabeth said, "I write alternative histories. Currently, I'm writing a story about a timeline in which Lincoln was never assassinated."

The boy asked Elizabeth, "Did you ever read The Last Starship from Earth? It is a novel about an alternate timeline."

Image credits

Elizabeth had never heard of that novel, but she realized that somehow she knew all about that book and its author. For ten minutes the three of them discussed the alternative timeline of The Last Starship from Earth and then Dr. Herged had finally finished talking to students and exited from the classroom, giving the three of them a long look as he walked past.

Tonya winked at Elzabeth and said, "Just to annoy professor Herged, you two should write a story about an alternate history in which Socrates was not put to death."

Elizabeth had personal memories of the day when Socrates had died. He had been experimenting with coniine and other drugs, trying to alter his brain's activity and gain control of the Bimanoid Interface. But the Overseers had made sure that he over-dosed and died. Only later did a Reality Change occur, leading to the current timeline which included the legend that Socrates had been put on trial and executed by his fellow Athenians. Elizabeth now looked even more carefully at Tonya and realized that she was a tryp'At.

The boy laughed. "Interesting idea, Tony, but I don't think Herged would be amused."

Tonya said to Elizabeth, "Can you forgive me for calling you 'stuck up'?"

Elizabeth glanced at the boy's faded and torn jeans and knew it was possible that her fancy party clothes cost more than all the clothing he owned. She replied, "Only if you promise to sit in my seat during class next Tuesday."

Tonya and the boy slipped into a nerdy discussion of a time travel novel by Isaac Asimov called The End of Eternity. Elizabeth realized that she also knew all about that story, although she was certain that she had never read it. Like pushing away a wall of cobwebs, Elizabeth's mind finally cleared and she could remember how it was possible to know about things without personally experiencing them. She knew that she was being summoned.

Claiming the need to get to another class, Elizabeth excused herself and departed. Exiting from the classroom, she went up a flight of stairs and into a women's room. Passing through the door, Elizabeth tried to understand why she had been maneuvered into meeting Tonya, but that mission detail did not seem to exist in her memory streams. She went into a stall, closed the door and suddenly she was teleported off of Earth.

Elizabeth found herself in Svahr's workshop. She was somewhat disoriented and knew that she was no longer on Earth, but Elizabeth was thankful that there was no murky red light and no sign of Grean or any other Kac'hin. It was not clear that Svahr was human, but at least she had taken care to give herself the appearance of being human. Elizabeth suspected that they were hidden away in some corner of the Hierion Domain, however, for security reasons, she had never been told the location of Svahr's secret base of operations.

Svahr casually said, "Welcome back."

Elizabeth recalled that "she" had been sent to Earth 18 years previously and inserted into the zeptite endosymbiont of the newborn baby named Elizabeth Smith. As a deep agent on Earth, she had come to be Elizabeth, but now Svahr apparently felt the need to interrupt Elizabeth's mission. Still feeling disoriented by her sudden access to an ocean of suppressed memories, Elizabeth muttered, "Hello, Svahr."

Wasting no time on small talk, Svahr gestured towards a projected image of Tonya. "Allow me to explain why I have positioned both you and Tonya at the Triversity." Svahr was carefully monitoring the activity of Elizabeth's brain and shoring up its weaknesses. Those weaknesses had been revealed by her unusual response to the new infites that Svahr had teleported into Elizabeth's brain during the night. Elizabeth should not have spontaneously recovered her ancient memories of Grean, memories that Svahr had so carefully obscured.

Elizabeth nodded. "It startled me to discover that Tonya is tryp'At. Is she taking-over my mission?"

Svahr sighed. She had allowed Elizabeth to become aware of the fact that Tonya was tryp'At. Left to herself, Elizabeth would never have noticed that little detail. "I need you to assist Tonya. It is important that she become a successful biochemist and win the Triversity undergraduate biochemistry prize three years from now."

Elizabeth was swimming through a cloud of old memories. Somehow she knew the basic outlines of her current mission, but the details had been covered over by a lifetime of being on Earth as Elizabeth. She asked uncertainly, "Wasn't that my original reason for being on Earth?"

Svahr replied, "Exactly so, however, not knowing what difficulties might arise, I originally positioned several of my agents on Earth as possible biochemistry prize winners. Now I've decided that you and Tonya need to team-up in order to win the prize."

Elizabeth complained, "I don't understand the importance of this. Why should Tonya win the prize?"

Svahr was irked by the fact that Elizabeth felt herself to be competing against Tonya. "This has nothing to do with Tonya. Or you. We simply must prevent her boyfriend from winning the prize."

Elizabeth guessed, "That boy, the nerdy biochemistry major who is obsessed with science fiction?"

Svahr nodded. "Yes. If he were to win the biochemistry prize then he would stay on at the Triversity and not ever meet Gohrlay."

Elizabeth had forgotten all about Gohrlay: the fixed point in Time, the girl from the First Reality whose brain had become the template for the positronic brain. She asked, "Wouldn't it be easier to bring Gohrlay to the Triversity?"

Svahr laughed, "You might think that should be so, but no. This is how it must be: she's waiting on the West Coast. Remember, we are improvising and flexibility is our key to success. I need to make use of your skills as a writer. From now on, you will do all of Tonya's written assignments and craft her senior thesis and, most importantly, allow her to focus on her laboratory experiments. At the same time, you will play a roll in turning the boy away from his interest in writing. Take every opportunity to share drafts of your alternate history stories with him. I've seen the future and the example of your excellent writing will discourage him from spending time developing his own lesser writing skills."

Elizabeth felt uneasy about that. "Is that a good idea? All of my story ideas are based on past Realities. And besides, I don't mind helping someone like Tonya become a successful biochemist, but I don't want to hurt someone, or even diminish the joy they get from writing."

Svahr shrugged. "That is no problem. In the future, when the time is right, he is to be the one who will reveal the Secret History of Humanity to the people of Earth. You will only temporarily deflect his interest in story telling. Eventually, far in the future, he will realize that your stories were based on fact, but that is all part of our plan."

Elizabeth had no memory of having traveled through time to the future. She asked, "So it is true? We can travel to the future?"

Svahr explained, "You have some memories of the future because I have allowed you to View parts of the future. I provide you with everything you need in order to complete your mission on Earth, but - I will say no more! Time travel is a sensitive topic and it would not be wise to let Earthlings become aware of the existence of time travelers. And there is one last thing you need to know." Svahr raised her hand and sent a cloud of infites into Elizabeth.

For a minute Elizabeth tried to assimilate the new information that flooded her mind. Finally she blurted out, "You expect me to take this boy away from Tonya? I can tell that they really like each other... I don't want to take that away from them."

Teleporter Tricks

Svahr calmly suggested, "Think it through." Svahr allowed Elizabeth some additional time with the new infites, then she continued, "The best way to attract Tonya's attention is by showing a romantic interest in the boy. Eventually, you and Tonya will move in together and become a team. The three of you are tryp'At, so his love for Tonya will not be derailed when he also falls in love with you. Also, before he moves to Seattle, the boy will become romantically involved with another girl named Hana. But, ultimately, he must move on to Seattle and link up with Gohrlay."

Her head swirling with new ideas, Elizabeth realized that some of her new "memories" were from Svahr and provided a glimpse of the future events that would occur as Svahr had just described them. Elizabeth began to wonder how she could be sure that Svahr's vision of the future was all for the best, but her questioning thoughts were silenced and she found herself back on Earth, now only vaguely aware that she, like Tonya and the boy, was tryp'At and thus well-suited to perform her role as an Interventionist agent.

Elizabeth's memories of Svahr and the future quickly receded into a dark cloud of sinking memory fragments, like her waking dream of that morning. Her vast chain of ancient memories stretching far back into her many lives in past ages would remain available as the basis for her competence, empathy and wisdom and as topics for her stories, but those memories would not distract her from being Elizabeth and accomplishing her current mission.

Elizabeth knew that she was an Interventionist agent who could not discuss her secret mission with any Earthlings, but at that moment, mostly she was still just Elizabeth Smith, would-be writer and unable to stop thinking about the tall boy she had spoken to after her psychology class.

At that moment, Elizabeth suddenly recovered one more "dream" from the previous night. She had been watching Tonya via a hierion tube and had seen her sleeping. Her boyfriend was there, too, and when he had finished reading a paperback novel, he awakened Tonya with a gentle kiss.

And now, mysteriously, Elizabeth had a clear memory of the location of his dorm room and knowledge that later that evening, after the science library closed, she would intercept the boy on his way back to his room. Now Elizabeth had no doubt about the shape of her future.

Next: telepathy in 1939

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The Big 60

Cult of Trump

Having reached the age of 60, Isaac Asimov published an article called  “A Cult of Ignorance”. In that short essay, Asimov lamented the fact that some people distrust well-educated authorities and don't read very much. It would have been interesting had Asimov lived to a ripe old age and had a chance to comment on the state of American society in 2019.

a micro-title book
fantasy art by Peter Elson

Asimov was a persistent promoter of his own writing, so it is not a surprise that in 1980 he re-published one of his "space ranger" stories (Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, originally published in 1954). We have to ask: wasn't Asimov "dumbing down" the science fiction literature by re-publishing one of his "Lucky Starr" juveniles without any obvious indication on the cover that this story had originally been written for kids, long before the age of space exploration? By 1970 it was clear that the surface of Venus was dry, hot and crushed under a thick carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

life on Venus (1950)

I suspect that Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus played an important role for Asimov as a writer in that creating this particular story allowed him to explore both 1) the impact of telepathy on human society and 2) how humans might interact with alien life forms native to other planets. In a sense, Oceans of Venus allowed Asimov to get the conventional Space Opera approach to telepathy and aliens "out of his system". When Asimov returned to writing science fiction novels (after a 20 year hiatus), telepathy was still on his mind, but he wove that plot element into Foundation's Edge and the Robots of Dawn and did so in a much more subtle and intellectually stimulating way than had been possible in Oceans of Venus.

1991 cover by Steve Youll

The idea that Thomas would write a fantasy novel called Daveed the Luk'ie  was inspired by Asimov's adventures of Lucky Starr (which I read when I was about 12 years old) and the positronic robot Daneel.

In 1980, Asimov published  In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. Most of his autobiography was an obsessive account of how he had published his work, but he also told the story of the pain of his divorce and the joy of his second marriage. Asimov was one of the science fiction story writers interviewed by Charles Platt in 1980.

Asimov interview

In 1980, Asimov also did an interview that appeared in The Mother Earth News, which you can read online here.

The Red Queen

In that interview, Asimov mentioned that in 1957, after the launch of Sputnik, it was a good time to write books that took on the task of explaining science to the public. There was concern among many scientists that America needed to "catch up" technologically with the Russians and the American people needed to become more knowledgeable about science.

"it's my opinion that anyone who can possibly introduce science to the nonscientist should do so" ... "it is very important that people be able to 'follow [science]' well enough to have some intelligent opinions on policy" (source)

In the Mother Earth interview, Asimov also mentioned that he had recently been writing more mystery stories than science fiction stories. In 1980, Asimov published Casebook of the Black Widowers, which included some of the more recent mystery stories he had been writing in the Black Widowers series. My Dead Widowers were inspired by Asimov.

1980

I recently mentioned Asimov's story "The Key", one of Asimov's tales that includes the recurring character Wendell Urth. In 1980, an essay by Asimov about his series of Wendell Urth stories appeared in The Great Science Fiction Series.

Also published by Asimov in 1980 was The Annotated Gulliver's Travels. I suppose some parts of Gulliver's Travels might be imagined to be a type of proto-science fiction, but for science fiction fans, there was not much production from Asimov back in 1980 as he turned 60 years old.

original cover by Barclay Shaw

However, in 1980 Asimov was publishing essays such as "The World I Invented" in which he commented on topics such as how a positronic brain might work. Lucky for science fiction fans, Asimov would soon return to writing science fiction novels: Foundation's Edge and The Robots of Dawn were on the way.

1976

1952

When Jack Vance turned 60 years old, it was the year 1976, still one year before I discovered the existence of his science fiction stories. In 1976, Vance published an essay introducing The Best of Jack Vance, a story collection that includes "Abercrombie Station", The Moon Moth and Rumfuddle. In 1977 I read "The Moon Moth" and since then I have never stopped reading his science fiction stories.

cover by Richard Powers

In 1976 Vance published the novel Maske: Thaery, which I have never read. I've seen it suggested that Vance proposed this novel to a publisher as the first book of a trilogy, but eventually that plan fell apart and there was only ever one novel, the start of what fans can fantasize could have become a series of books.

cover by David Mattingly

This commentary draws an analogy between Vance's fictional world of Maske and America. I've previously done the same with Vance's novel Trullion. I can't stop myself from wondering if Maske: Thaery began as an Alastor Cluster novel, but drifted in a different direction. Since I have previously imagined additional books in the Alastor Cluster series, I should probably read Maske: Thaery. Vance mentions "loch Maske" in his autobiography, but I wonder if he visited "Lough Mask" when he was in Ireland and later imagined the planet Maske.

cover art by Christopher Foss

1977
Arthur C. Clarke reached the age of 60 in 1977. In 1977, two collections of his writings were published: The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1937-1971 and The View from Serendip.

1984 edition

The View from Serendip was mostly a collection of essays and it included an essay called  "Introducing Isaac Asimov" from the January 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This particular essay describes snide comments that Clarke had made while introducing Asimov to an audience (as mentioned here). The so-called "Clarke-Asimov treaty" was part of the inspiration for the Trysta-Grean Pact.

1977 republishing

In 1977, a very short story by Clarke called "Quarantine" was published in the Spring 1977 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and also included in Asimov's Choice: Astronauts & Androids. An old idea in science fiction is that Earth might be monitored by space aliens and kept in quarantine to prevent primitive war-like humans from contaminating the galaxy. This story by Clarke was supposed to be a kind of nerdy joke.

In 1977, Clarke recycled his 1951 novel, Prelude to Space, publishing it along with an added essay that retrospectively acknowledged the actual method that had been used to put a man on the moon (which differed from what Clarke had imagined back in 1950). Clarke's science fiction story output was low at age 60, but his novel The Fountains of Paradise was on the way.

After 60

cover by Alain Brion

It is inspirational to look at the great science fiction stories that were written by Asimov, Vance and Clarke after they reached 60 years of age. For me, having grown up during the Space Race of the 1960s, some older science fiction stories such as Prelude to Space and Oceans of Venus were not of much interest to me because they were outdated and their imaginary settings in outer space had been paved-over by a new understanding of reality arising from actual 20th century space exploration.

Hard
However, Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise was able to provide a post-moon landing Sci Fi fan like me with an intellectually stimulating and updated adventure story going to the next step beyond Prelude to Space.

cover by Ed Valigursky

Medium
In this blog, I've frequently congratulated Asimov for his later science fiction stories in which he linked together his positronic robot stories with his Foundation Saga. For a deep thinker like Asimov, it was useful to take a break from science fiction after his early story writing period and then return with fresh eyes to his old plots and extend those old stories in new directions. Asimov was writing fun and interesting science fiction (Forward the Foundation, "Cal") right up until his horribly early death at age 72.

Soft
In the case of Vance, after turning 60 he completed his Demon Princes series, showing his mastery of what I'll call the "space detective" genre in his last two books in the series The Face and The Book of Dreams.

cover art by Boris Vallejo

Even at age 71, Vance was still at his story-weaving peak when he published Araminta Station, launching the Cadwal Chronicles as yet another variant of his "space detective" fictional sagas that were set among far stars of the galaxy.

The stories of Asimov, Vance and Clarke cover the whole range of science fiction approaches from hard to soft and with their works they provided us with a worthy "how to manual" for the science fiction genre.

100 years: Asimov, Vance, Clarke

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