Numciamento

source

Here in August, I'm celebrating the fiction of Jack Vance. Recently I mentioned fictional places invented by Vance that I would like to visit. One such destination is the remote Smade's Planet. The only attraction on Smade's Planet is Smade's Tavern, a place where Mr. Smade welcomes visitors from both the civilized worlds of the Oikumene and the frontier worlds of the Beyond. However, due to its location and lack of other nearby attractions, sometimes weeks go by without any guests being in residence at Smade's Tavern.

Don't worry about Smade becoming lonely during those times. He lives with three wives and eleven children who constitute the working staff of the Tavern. Smade's daughter, Araminta, grew up to be a prolific author, so we know many details about her life while growing up on Smade's Planet.

Welcome to Smade's Tavern!  Mr. Smade with one of his wives and one of their children, ready with a cold brew for
a new guest. Also available from the bar: Fraze and Hannah's Mascarene Rum from Copus.

Death on Smade's Planet

In the Asimov Reality.
original cover art by John Styga
and Edmund Emshwiller

With no formal landing procedures, guests arriving at Smade's Tavern simply landed their space ships on the heath behind the tavern and then walked within the confines of the white-washed stone fence that surrounded the grounds. Before arranging for use of a room on the second floor, the tired and thirsty guest might first down a cold glass of Smade's Own Ale.

Araminta's mother, Úna Nybröm, was an agent for the secretive IPX. When Lugo Tehalt was murdered at Smade's Tavern, Úna was at work, trying to make sure that Kirth Gersen would come into possession of Tehalt's space craft. She had deployed a special IPCC cloaking shield over Tehalt's ship, preventing Malagate the Woe from finding it and thus depriving the Demon Prince of the data encoded upon its Flight Course Monitor. See "Reality Simulation" for details.

cover art by
Alex Schomburg

Those data were valuable: providing the location of a pristine new world, just the kind of planet that Malagate wanted for his personal domain.

Cosmopolis, October 1923

Vance introduced readers to Smade on the first page of his Demon Princes saga. Smade is a minor character in Star King. By my count, he speaks a total of 69 words (not counting the interview transcript that was published in Cosmopolis magazine, part of which Vance transcribes for readers and includes at the start of Chapter 1).

Even before Smade's interview, Vance provides readers with some quoted text that is attributed to His Majesty, Balder Bashin. Through the entire Demon Princes saga, Vance sprinkles in little historical nuggets illustrating the twisting course of religion through his imagined future society. Balder Bashin's words were lifted from the pages of an Ecclesiarchic Numciamento.

Wyst: Alastor 1716

"Balderdash" is exactly the type of word that readers should expect to grace the pages of stories written by Jack Vance. I believe it is a typical Vance joke for him to name a religious leader "Balder Bashin".

Vance used "balderdash" in his first published novel, Vandals of the Void (1953, download here). According to this page, Vance's novel was one of 37 novels that were published in the Winston Science Fiction series from 1952 to 1961. Writing in the Forward to Vandals of the Void, Vance predicted that humans would travel to the surface of the Moon by 1965, only overly optimistic by a few years. He also predicted that there would be permanently manned bases on Mars and Venus by 1980, which from the perspective of 2019 might be labeled as "balderdash".

The Languages of Pao

Rated PG
Since Vandals of the Void was written for a young audience, there is no sex, but a smattering of death and violence. Everyone knows that the protagonist will win. Vandals of the Void is a story about how the young (15 years old) Dick Murdock goes on summer vacation and ends up helping the Space Navy capture an evil space pirate. Dick is then invited to attend the Las Vegas Space-Training Academy in preparation for a career in the Space Navy.

The last scene in Vandals of the Void is very similar to what happens to the young Jantiff Ravenstroke (Wyst: Alastor 1716) when he is invited by the Connatic to join his staff. In Vandals of the Void, Dick is assured of a position on Commodore Hallmeier's staff when Dick graduates from the Academy.

Apparently, Vance chafed at the restrictions imposed on those who wrote science fiction stories for television or for children in the early 1950s. In 1957 Vance published another novel in which his 15-year-old protagonist, Beran Panasper, got to live with his girl friend, Gitan Netsko.

Asimov on Venus

In the early 1950s, Vance got a high-paying job writing scripts for the Captain Video television show. I like to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, Isaac Asimov became famous for his Lucky Starr television program.

I've previously lamented the fact that the writing of stories about human colonists on Venus persisted for so long in the science fiction genre. During the 20th century, astronomical observations and robotic probes revealed that the surfaces of both Mars and Venus are inhospitable. Kids of the Vance and Asimov generation grew up reading stories about life on Venus (example) and, unfortunately, they had to write their own stories in the Planetary Adventure genre (See Asimov's Oceans of Venus). Vandals of the Void begins on Venus, at a settlement called Miracle Valley, the birth place and home of Dick Murdock.

Welcome to the Future

James Webb space telescope

Lucky for us, atomic engines are ready to lift us off of Venus and get our adventure underway. Traveling millions of miles through space takes time (going faster would use up too much expensive plutonium), but the lucky space ship passengers have access to a microfilm library! The word "computer" does not appear in this story.

in the Ekcolir Reality

Dick is off to the Moon where his father runs an observatory that is equipped with a telescope that has a 36-foot metallic lens. The precision of their stellar observations is limited by the quality of their photographic plates. There is mention of a smaller space telescope: the Harvard Camera, but the telescope on the Moon is more powerful... and they have room for accumulating a library containing hundreds of thousands of photographic plates... not to mention a single printed copy of the star catalog that has been painstakingly assembled by the local Librarian.

Pirates Vandals

1953

The Vandals of the Void are space pirates. Dick can't have a nice peaceful vacation on the Moon because pirates have been attacking the space ships that travel between Earth, Mars and Venus much like ocean liners going from New York to London. "Dick had a sudden vivid picture in his mind: roaring bestial men in the calm streets of Miracle Valley, burning, destroying, carrying off women." This is exactly the scenario later used by Vance as the backstory for his Demon Princes saga, but in that case it was Kirth Gersen from a settlement called Mount Pleasant that was destroyed by space pirates.

In Vandals of the Void, the pirates are defeated and the United Nations Space Navy stands prepared to usher Humanity into the age of interstellar space travel. Ta-da! Through most of the story, nobody can figure out where the pirates come from, much like the silly "plot" in You Only Live Twice.

The Palace of Love

If you want to read Vandals of the Void, stop reading this blog post now...

Spoiler
The only thing that has the potential to rescue Vandals of the Void from collapsing into a black hole of its own Hardy-Boys implausibility is a quirky resident on the Moon known as Crazy Sam who tells wild stories about meeting native residents of the Moon, aliens who he says live in deep caves. Sadly, poor Sam is murdered and Dick must solve the mystery of the space pirates on his own. In later novels such as The Palace of Love, Vance would luxuriate in his quirky characters such as the mad poet Navarth.

original cover art
by Henry Van Dongen

More Spoilers
Although Vance mentions abandoned alien cities on Mars and inside deep lunar caverns, we meet no space aliens in Vandals of the Void. The evil pirate leader can magically both be 1) a working scientist and second in command at the Lunar Observatory and 2) the head pirate leading a large force of: "Hard, mean, shifty-eyed ruffians; bloated and arrogant bullies; sly-eyed men... scarred, pulp-nosed, weasel-faced—the stench of evil..." Sadly, Vance would later give his readers a similarly unconvincing multiple-identities wielding character in The Killing Machine: Kokor Hekkus, a hormagaunt. In Vandals of the Void, the pirate leader goes by the name "the Basilisk" and he wears a disguise (with large yellow eyes), trying to make his minions believe that he is an alien creature with telepathic powers.

Next: origins project, Star King

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Weirdlands

Glisten on Dessimo Beach near Balad.

I've previously blogged about Dessimo Beach, beside the Moaning Ocean, on planet Wyst in Alastor Cluster. That was the place described by Jack Vance as being where the protagonist of Wyst: Alastor 1716 (1978), Jantiff, rescued Glisten from some witch hunters. Jantiff is baffled by Glisten's refusal to speak.

Later, in his book Ecce and Old Earth (1991), Vance made explicit the idea that one way to expand the parapsychic powers of the human brain is to restrict children from using language. When Jantiff Ravensroke first meets Glisten, the young Weirdlands Witch, he observes that she and everyone in her family apparently never speak. Jantiff is not even sure if Glisten understands his own spoken words and he must name her "Glisten". She seems to exist in some parallel reality, one where people such as Glisten are somehow isolated from the types of normal human social behavior that we take for granted.

Glisten, beside the Shard Sea on Zeck, Alastor 503.

Weirdlands
Glisten grew up as a nomadic wanderer, living in the Weirdlands of planet Wyst. According to Anney and Angela Fersoni, Wyst was inhabited by an advanced alien species before the arrival of humans. Anney suspected that those aliens were a form of artificial life, composed of hierions and they could easily hide from humans.

Eventually, Jantiff learns that when removed from planet Wyst, Glisten can use spoke language. In the last scene of the novel, Vance allows us to witness Glisten speaking to Jantiff on his home planet, Zeck.

source

Before the time period described by Vance in Wyst, the natives of Wyst drove most humans out of the Weirdlands. The so-called "Weirdland Witches" were allowed to remain because they were telepathically in contact with the natives.

According to information gathered by Anney, Glisten functioned as an inter-world agent of the Phari. In some ways, this account of Glisten functioning as a kind of "double agent" reminds me of what I have been told about Flitz and the creation of Clonia. Clonia and Glisten may both have been "manufactured" and used as agents (in human form) who could infiltrate human society.

A report from the Writers Block.
Original cover art by Harold McCauley
and Howard Brown.

Anney proposed that within Alastor Cluster there was constant competition between Phari endosymbionts and the "regular" endosymbionts that would function to suppress human para-psychic abilities.

Faster-than-light telepathy
I wonder how Vance imagined that telepathy worked. In Araminta Station, Glawen seems to receive a telepathic signal that is coming from several miles away. Assuming that this "signal" is not just his imagination, does it arrive instantaneously? Earlier in the book, it is suggested that Glawen is sensitive to some sort of telepathic signal coming from all of humanity, spread throughout the galaxy.

Time Warps
If there are some things that move faster than the speed of light (such as the spaceships in stories set in Vance's future history) then exactly how fast do they travel? See: superluminal

Google "internet search" results for "Jack Vance"

source

While searching for webpages about Jack Vance (and using Google's search feature to restrict my search to pages created in the past week) I came across a 2009 commentary about Star King. Wow... a message in a search engine time warp. In his comments about Star King, Ian raised the issue of there being some very unlikely coincidences that advance the plot in Vance's story about Kirth Gersen hunting down an adversary; Malegate, the first Demon Prince that Kirth can locate. Is Gersen just lucky? Was Vance just sloppy in his writing? Or, did Vance give us an indication that Kirth Gersen had some "para-psychic abilities" that might have guided him towards success?

source

At the start of Star King, Kirth and/or his grandfather have been searching for the Demon Princes for about two decades. As famous criminals who the IPCC would be glad to capture, the Demon Princes keep secret their identities and their travels. Malegate the Woe must do quite a bit of traveling. He controls several worlds Beyond and also has a position at a famous university at the core of human galactic civilization.

Hildemar Dasce

When his henchmen hear Teehalt speaking about the wonderful new planet he discovered, how do they contact Malegate and receive his orders for Teehalt: that he should meet Maligate at Smade's planet? Presumably Smade's planet is roughly halfway between Maligate's location and Teehalt's. The communications between Maligate and Dasce must travel quite fast.

Strangely, Vance never provided an account of interstellar communications for those future times when humans had spread among the stars. I suppose that for Vance, he enjoyed imagining a future where travel between the stars was similar to sailing the seas of Earth before the invention of radio.

Is it coincidence that Gersen just happens to learn that Maligate is one of the space pirates he has hunted for years and then at his next port of call, on a planet that is populated by about 20 people, he sees Malagate? By this time point in his career, Gersen has already established a working relationship with the IPCC.  What if Gersen is being used by the IPCC to get at Malegate? What if all the apparent "coincidences" in Star King are actually the result of Gersen being secretly guided towards his goal, which might actually be the goal of the IPCC, or the IPX? If an unseen force is making use of Gersen, some sort of technology-assisted telepathy might be guiding him towards "lucky" encounters such as his first contact with Malegate on Smade's planet.
Related Reading: 2018 Cosmic Justice
                     2019 another look at Gersen

Next: investigating a tryp'At agent and her activities on Earth

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Good work Google!

I don't usually use Chrome. I recently used it and found that Google is no longer going to make an effort to support my computer with updates for their web browser. Yet, at the same time, their browser software wants me to do an update.

More fun with Google
I often use Google's image search in order to hunt for the origin of an image. Today, when I went to use the image search utility, I got a popup message inviting me to participate a crowd sourcing project (Image Labeler). I followed the link and was asked to select a category of images from a list of categories:

I selected "sky" and was told immediately that there were no images available in that category. Persisting, I clicked that category again and got the image shown to the right, which obviously includes some sky seen through the trees. I suppose they have to first test their "crowd" members to see if they will get a reasonably answer.

I really wonder what they hope to accomplish. Maybe they are training a computer program to label images and they want to use results from human visual processing to train their "AI" system.

My fear is that the poor image search results from Google already reflect their use of the information that they obtain from a "crowd" of volunteer image analysts. 

2020 update

100x

In the Ekcolir Reality.
original cover art by Earle Bergey
and Rudolph Belarski

This is my 100th blog post of the year. Since I like to celebrate arbitrary numerical milestones, I'm going to take this as an excuse to continue my celebration of the first 100 years of the Vance Era.

As this current year moves towards its end, I'm also making preparations for 2017 and the 25th anniversary of the death of Isaac Asimov.

The subject of this blog post is a sparkling eclipse; the interface between Asimov's adventures in Deep Time and what Vance wrote about them in our previous Reality.

Retrofuturians
In the Ekcolir Reality, the replicoid of Asimov organized the Writers Block and made it possible for science fiction writers such as John Vance (an analogue of Jack Vance) to write stories that reflected events in the previous Reality: the Asimov Reality.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Hannes Bok.

Zeta claims that she also had an analogue in the Ekcolir Reality. That "earlier version" of Zeta had extensive interactions with an "earlier version" of the Dead Widowers who carried out investigations of Deep Time.

According to Zeta, that team of historical investigators in the Ekcolir Reality had a formal name that they had borrowed from Deep Time: the Historical Institute. However, on a day-to-day basis, they usually referred to themselves half jokingly as the Retrofuturians. With our attention focused on Deep Time, soon, Zeta and I were discussing exobiology from the perspective of Ifness, an agent of the Historical Institute.....

Mount Pleasant on the planet Providence

The Historical Institute
I asked Zeta if there was any relationship between "the Institute" as described in the Demon Princes series and the Historical Institute of the Durdane series. She replied, "After Dwyddion took control of the Institute, he called upon Zodiac Control to launch an investigation into the hidden force that was behind Treesong's attempt to take control of the Institute. That investigation led to discovery that the IPX was close to taking control of the production of Intersplit space drive engines by acquiring the Jarnell Corporation.

During the early period of the "Trysta Truce", R. Gohrlay was content to explore ways to adapt humans to the Bimanoid Interface by doing experiments at isolated communities such as Mt. Pleasant. However, Grean had a much more audacious plan. After allowing humans to spread outward from Earth to thousands of nearby exoplanets, Grean wanted to halt further space travel, isolate each settled world and use those worlds as biological laboratories.

In the Ekcolir Reality. Original
cover art by Edward Palfrey.

The Institute had originally been created by R. Gohrlay as a way to find mutant humans who might arise and have an altered interaction with their nanites. The Institute claimed to act so as to put controls on the pace of technological innovation. "Behind the scenes", that control was already efficiently exercised by the zeptite endosymbionts inside each human, but the Institute could function as a "honey trap" to attract mutant humans who became free of zeptite control and who resented the publicized anti-technology goals of the Institute.

When Grean began to put restrictions on human space travel, R. Gohrlay shifted the mission and purpose of the Institute. It evolved into the Historical Institute, which retained a record of every human-settled planet and it deployed a group of agents who monitored those worlds, constantly searching for useful human variants. According to Zeta, R. Gohrlay had the ability to teleport her agents from world to world, so those agents did not need to bother with space ships. During that era, one goal was to create the Ek'col as a human variant that could be used to integrate some particularly useful Asterothrope gene combinations into the human population of Earth.

Roguskhoi. Cover art
by Edward Palfrey

Later, after about 10,000 years, when humans were again allowed to travel outward from Earth, the people of planets such as Durdane were brought back inside a unified human space-faring civilization. Vance's Durdane Trilogy takes place shortly before members of the Historical Institute such as Ifness were finally able to openly interact with the people of Durdane after a 9,000 year period of that planet's isolation from Earth.

Emphyrio by Jack Vance

Somewhat later, the people of Halma were also "liberated" and fully linked into galactic civilization during the time of the second great outward migration of peoples. Humans of that time colonized more distant parts of the galaxy, including Alastor Cluster.

According to Zeta, the Retrofuturians were able to piece together a fairly coherent account of the genetic engineering and artificial selection steps that led to humans who could use the Bimanoid Interface.

Sci Fi in the Ekcolir Reality

The last steps in the long process of searching the human genomic statespace involved the Pheni and sending some of the finely crafted humans back to the 20th century from the far future of the Asimov Reality.

Jump: 125th post of 2016

Next: new banner for The First Reality.

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Nicotiana Endosymbionts

In the Ekcolir Reality

I've been continuing recent discussions of the secretive IPX with my collaborator Gohrlay and today learned more details about how human brain activity is influenced by the presence of a zeptite endosymbiont. I'd previously learned that the interaction between a person's brain cells and their zeptite endosymbiont can be modulated by a femtobot endosymbiont that was recently (in evolutionary terms) provided to Earthlings.

Nicotiana Endosymbionts

The Femtobot Hack

I'd previously assumed that the surprisingly important role of tobacco in human civilization depends entirely on the nicotine content of tobacco plants. That was a big mistake. According to Gohrlay, the IPX was originally created as a special Overseer workgroup that was assigned to the task of containing the danger posed to humans by tobacco. The danger of tobacco went far beyond petty issues like addiction to nicotine and cancer.

nanites

In fact, I now suspect that I was tricked into placing special emphasis on nicotine so as to distract my attention away from a more important aspect of Earth's Nicotiana Saga. I previously realized that all of planet Earth has been infested by zeptites for about 2,000,000,000 years. However, I never previously thought about the importance of zeptites or femtobots inside plants.

In the case of humans, it is clear that all animals on Earth evolved their brains in the presence of zeptite endosymbionts. A human brain cannot function without its zeptite components. Interventionist agents (the Grendels) somehow (some subtle form of genetic engineering?) caused the human species to arise on Earth as a species specifically designed for efficient tool use. However, the zeptites inside human brains easily prevented humans from using tools in a sophisticated way.

image credits

In response to the Grendel Intervention and the presence of humans on Earth, the pek then brought Prelands to Earth as a "biological cleansing agent" and the Prelands quickly and efficiently drove the human population of Earth towards extinction.

However, the pek themselves had become fascinated by humans. The humans of Earth displayed unique patterns of social behavior and the pek began their own study of the human organism. During the course of that little science project at Observer Base, a small team of human scientists developed a new science of positronics. Then, as an experiment, the pek allowed the creation of positronic robots. The positronic brain was a powerful telepathic mind-control device and the positronic robots quickly took over Obsever Base and eventually the entire galaxy (as told in Foundations of Eternity).

science fiction in Deep Time

According to Gohrlay,  Interventionists then provided the humans of Earth with a means to escape cognitive limitations caused by our zeptite endosymbionts. However, even the Interventionists recognized the dangers posed to primates by rapid technological advancement. Thus, the femtobot endosymbiont that can provide humans with access to the Bimanoid Interface was never allowed to indiscriminately infest the brains of we Earthlings. Instead, certain plants such as cultivated varieties of nicotiana were used a reservoir for those special Interventionist femtobots and those femtobots were delivered to humans in a subtle and carefully controlled way that involves access to tobacco products.

Asimov Reality

Maghylose and Xista

Eventually, the positronic robots developed their own nanites and they became aware of the existence of the Interventionist femtobots that were present inside the brains of some humans. Eventually, R. Gohrlay learned how to control and make use of those femtobots.

in the Ekcolir Reality

According to Gohrlay, femtobot endosymbionts were occasionally deployed via tobacco to select humans prior to the Foundation Reality. For the most part, R. Gohrlay was content to keep humans constrained by their zeptite endosymbionts prior to the Foundation Reality. Under the sole influence of our zeptites, humans can not create and use advanced technologies. However, when a human brain is also provided with a femtobot endosymbiont, then there is a loosening of the cognitive restrictions that are imposed by the zeptite components of our brains and we humans can then efficiently develop and use new technologies.

travel into the Primitive Era

The most famous human who was a vector for distribution of femtobot endosymbionts in the Mallansohn Reality was Senior Computer Twissell. Under the influence of the femtobot endosymbionts carried into Eternity by Twissell's cigarettes, the first technological change since the early era of Eternity took place: creation of the special time travel device that could move into the Primitive Era of Earth's timeline, prior to the creation of Eternity.

nuclear war in the Asimov Reality

In the Foundation Reality, even after Earth was rendered uninhabitable because of high radiation levels, the Vega Sector of the galaxy continued to be a source of tobacco products. In the Asimov Reality, although there was a brief nuclear war in the 20th century, only a few major population centers were destroyed by nuclear blast or seriously contaminated by radioactive fallout. Tobacco cultivation continued on Earth after the nuclear war of the Asimov Reality, but during the Space Age little use was made of tobacco for distribution of femtobots. The last major technological innovation by humans in the Asimov Reality was development of the Jarnell intersplit.

cloning experiments

In the Asimov Reality, after humans began to spread from Earth to the exoplanets of other stars, there was very little technological innovation. Under pressure from the Institute, some technologies were even suppressed. Here is how Madian Carbuke described the Institute:
"...we are a reactionary, secretive, pessimistic organization. We have agents everywhere. We know a thousand tricks to discourage research, sabotage experiments, distort data.....in the Institute's own laboratories we proceed with deliberation and discretion."

home of the Chezy Corporation

The Asimov Reality was the apex of the Time Travel War. Both the Interventionists and the Overseers were working to develop new human variants, a process that required much time and careful artificial selection of the desired traits. Individuals with promising new human gene combinations that allowed better control of the Bimanoid Interface were highly valued by both sides and fought over. Agents of the IPX and Zodiac Control constantly vied for advantage and access to any new genetic patterns that were developed by the "other side" in their seemingly endless war.

three forms of matter

Within the Asimov Reality, the Chezy Corporation of planet Triskelion A was able to develop some specialized hierion-based technologies, but other than that, human technological progress was almost completely blocked during the Space Age in that Reality.

In the Age of tryp'At
We must ask: under the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact, how are zeptite and femtobot endosymbionts continuing to guide and constrain human behavior?

In my personal case, I have to wonder if my own father's pipe smoking was used as a way to facilitate my exposure to femtobots and shape my behavior and guide me towards my role as Editor.

Next: the Trilateroids

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