Sweeney On Ganymede

"Nothing was left but Sweeney, falling toward Ganymede, head first."

-James Blish, "Seeding Program" IN Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), pp. 5-66 AT 1, p. 11.

Sweeney, in a spaceship on pp. 6-11, falls toward Ganymede on p. 11 and, after some reminiscences on pp. 11-14, remains on that Jovian moon until the end of this story. 

On another Jovian moon, Jupiter V, Robert Helmuth, listening to inter-satellite ham radio, hears:

"A strong voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in and out to the currents of an atmosphere; that would be Sweeney on Ganymede."

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 89.

Same guy, right? Wrong. Can't be. Sweeney in "Seeding Program" is an Adapted Man. He has been genetically engineered to live on another planet, in his case Ganymede. There are no Adapted Men in They Shall Have Stars. And the political set-up back on Earth is completely different in both works. 

But both Adapted Sweeney and Helmuth are involved in helping refugees to escape from the Solar System so their narratives parallel each other. These are different but similar works of fiction by a single author. Let us say that a "Sweeney on Ganymede" in the author's imagination splits two ways when the narratives are written.

Other phrases in The Seedling Stars paralleling Cities In Flight:

"'...ultraphone...'" (p. 109)

"'...an Oc dollar...'" (p. 111)

"Gods of all stars..." (p. 182)

The planet, Lithia, destroyed in 2050 in A Case Of Conscience, survives millennia later in The Seedling Stars. But, of course. This is a different timeline.

Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines III

In The Star Dwellers:

It is 2050:

"...nearly two decades after the discovery of the Haertel faster-than-light drive..."

-James Blish, The Star Dwellers (London, 1979), 3, p. 34.

That year, 2050, makes the events of this juvenile novel contemporaneous with those of A Case Of Conscience, Book Two, although the two novels are set in different timelines. Four other intelligent species are known of in The Star Dwellers whereas, in A Case Of Conscience, the Lithians are the first such species.

The Haertel field protects passengers from the effects of acceleration in over-the-atmosphere rocket flights and in interplanetary flight.

Milne had transformed Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction and mass increase from natural laws into a teaching convenience, thus eliminating the light-speed limit. Haertel had used Mach's axiom to show that this limit disappeared if the mass of the whole universe was taken into account. Engineers inserted different probable values for M into Haertel's equations until one worked.

Every time that we read about Haertel's discovery, it is a different account. I do not think that there is any comparable information in A Case Of Conscience but, in any case, incapacitated with a cold, I am not about to look for it. Probably a retreat to passive reading for the rest of today.

Scholium Criteria

The criterion for inclusion of a text in the New Testament was whether this text proclaimed the Resurrection of Christ in fulfilment of scripture, not whether the text was otherwise consistent with other texts in the canon. 

A comparable criterion applies to James Blish's Haertal Scholium. A story or novel may refer either to Haertel himself or to some other element of an earlier narrative while not necessarily maintaining full consistency with every other such additional instalment. Thus, "A Dusk of Idols" and Mission To The Heart Stars both refer back to The Star Dwellers but are not necessarily mutually consistent. Haertel and Garrard exist in the past of a story where a telepathic "Central Empire" occupies the galactic centre and also in the past of a novel where the non-telepathic Hegemony of Malis occupies that same volume of space.

Story elements even extend beyond the Scholium:

in "A Case of Conscience," which became Book One of the Scholium novel, A Case Of Conscience, the planet Lithia exists in 2049;

in Book Four of the non-Scholium collection, The Seedling Stars, Lithia still exists millennia later;

in Book Two of A Case Of Conscience, Lithia explodes in 2050.

The Dirac transmitter:

first appeared in Blish's Okie series;

was developed more fully in the independent story, "Beep";

was not only developed further yet again but also incorporated into the Haertel Scholium when "Beep" was expanded as The Quincunx Of Time and linked by a Dirac message to Midsummer Century.

Einstein and Mars exist in alternative fictional futures. So likewise may Haertel, Lithia and the Dirac transmitter.

Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines II

See: Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines

Publication Order

The Star Dwellers (1961)

Mission To The Heart Stars (1965)

Welcome To Mars (1966)

Midsummer Century (1972)

The Quincunx Of Time (1973)

Only the first, second and fifth of these Haertel Scholium novels present a scenario of interstellar civilization with regular use of the Haertel overdrive. Mission To The Heart Stars, a direct sequel to The Star Dwellers, culminates when "Angels" (energy beings) and Earthmen begin to lead an alliance of other intelligent species, including dolphins, beadmungen and the feline Aaa, against the Heart Stars federation, the Hegemony of Malis, whereas, in The Quincunx Of Time, Earth alone, monopolizing the instantaneous Dirac transmitter with its messages from the future, leads a utopian intergalactic civilization. If the Haertel Scholium had comprised a single linear sequence, then the Martian dune-cats in Welcome To Mars might have taken the place of the Aaa in the two Jack Loftus novels.

In Welcome To Mars:

Einstein maintained that gravity was not a force but a condition of space and tried to prove that it lacked polarity;

Milne's relativity incorporated Einstein's;

in the late twentieth century, Adolph ("Dolph") Haertel, aged seventeen, studied Milne, Dingle and any other theoreticians of gravity;

Haertel discovered that gravity has polarity and can be easily manipulated by working with it instead of against it.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, control of gravity (with polarity) leads to a faster-than-light interstellar drive. Is this what happens in the Haertel Scholium, at least in that branch of the Scholium represented by Welcome To Mars? Alternatively, one Haertel discovers anti-gravity and another discovers FTL. Texts bear alternative interpretations.

In The Quincunx Of Time:

Haertel, aged seventeen, assumed that the geometry of ultimate particles is Pythagorean, not Euclidean, applying to points, not to lines, and thus transformed particle physics;

Haertel's assumption generated a Unified Field Theory and abolished both the equivalency principle and most of quantum mechanics except the part that is necessary for the Dirac transmitter;

Thor Wald, inventor of the transmitter, jocularly suggests that Haertel "'...must have been God...'" (James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), CHAPTER SIX, p. 67)

The Quincunx Of Time follows Welcome To Mars by stating that Haertel did something important at the age of seventeen. However, he either discovered anti-gravity or assumed Pythagorean particle geometry. These seem to be completely different. 

Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines

 

If the central character of James Blish's Welcome To Mars had not been surnamed Haertel, then there would have been no reason to classify this novel as belonging to the Haertel Scholium. 

Publication Order

The Star Dwellers (1961)

Mission To The Heart Stars (1965)

Welcome To Mars (1966)

Midsummer Century (1972)

The Quincunx Of Time (1973)

The first and second titles form a pair as do the fourth and fifth. Thus, these five novels present three narratives.

In Mission To The Heart Stars:

Einstein ruled out faster-than-light travel;

"Milne...taught that the speed-of-light limitation was only a mathematical limitation, not a natural law."

-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER FOUR, p. 47;

in the mid-1960's, Dingle found errors in Einstein's reasoning;

in 2011, a paper by Haertel showed that Einstein's relativity was a special case of Milne's which was a special case of Haertel's;

in 2030, faster-than-light interstellar travel began.

Jack Loftus is the hero of these first two novels. Jack's mentor, Dr Langer, thinks that Haertel was the greatest theoretical physicist ever.

It remains to summarize information about "Haertel" as given both in Welcome To Mars and in The Quincunx Of Time. However, it is getting late here and there is always tomorrow.

Radio, Dirac And Cats

James Blish's Haertel Scholium begins with Welcome To Mars and ends with Midsummer Century.

See: One Story Grows Into An Exotic Future History.

In Welcome To Mars, Dolph Haertel, stranded on Mars in the twentieth century, unexpectedly receives a radio signal originating from somewhere else on that planet whereas, in Midsummer Century, John Martels, who has been time-projected from 1985 to 25,000 AD and who is now embodied in a sentient computer, unexpectedly receives a message transmitted as a Dirac beep. These two mysterious receptions suggest a bond between these two characters although they are not in any direct contact with each other. The Scholium is all about faster means of travel and communication. Haertel and Martels are indirectly linked by Thor Wald who reveres Haertel and invents the Dirac transmitter.

The Scholium includes two cat-like intelligent species, one on Mars in the two Mars instalments and another on an extra-solar planet in the two Jack Loftus novels. If the Scholium or selected parts of it had been edited into a linear series, then maybe these two species would have been conflated.

Haertel Timelines

Although James Blish's Haertel Scholium does not comprise a single linear future history series, it could be republished in a boxed-set uniform edition with minimal editing. Such a set should exclude the novel, A Case Of Conscience, because that is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy and need not be collected twice, which leaves six volumes:

Two Adolph Haertel Volumes

Welcome To Mars

Galactic Cluster: Revised Edition ("No Jokes on Mars" + the short Haertel trilogy)

These first two volumes cover:

Haertel on Mars

Mars

Haertel

Haertel's successors

Two Jack Loftus Novels

The Star Dwellers

Mission To The Heart Stars (+ "A Dusk of Idols")

Two Thor Wald Volumes

The Quincunx Of Time (+ "A Style in Treason")

Midsummer Century

The second and third pairs cover alternative successors of Haertel.

There are alternative versions of Mars and also of the galactic centre. The Haertel who is directly referenced in Mission To The Heart Stars and the Haertel who is indirectly referenced in "This Earth of Hours" cannot be the same Haertel because these works present mutually incompatible accounts of what is to be found at the galactic centre. Consequently, Haertel exists in different timelines.