The Haertel History II

See The Haertel History.

By summarizing plot elements and background details, I have made four works, with some input from a fifth (see below), sound like a much longer Heinleinian future history with successive interplanetary and interstellar periods.

Haertel's anti-gravity device is not fuelled whereas the DFC-3 is. Therefore, the Haertel overdrive is not merely an interstellar application of Haertel's anti-gravity. The latter is his theoretical and practical discovery of the late 1980's whereas the former follows from his theoretical discovery of 2011 according to one of the Jack Loftus/Heart Stars novels. The Haertel and Loftus timelines diverge at some point which may be after 2011 in Terrestrial history but has to be much earlier in terms of galactic history because Loftus' galactic center is occupied by the ancient Hegemony of Malis, not by any telepathic "Central Empire."

There are similarities but also differences of which some can be incorporated into a single timeline whereas others cannot:

Loftus and his colleagues serve a UN world government in the mid-twenty first century, not a Matriarchy in the further future;

Like a handful of Matriarchy diplomats and Marines in that alternative future, Loftus and two other Earthmen make a long journey home to warn of a threat from a heart stars civilization;

their FTL drive is not a Standing Wave that has replaced the Haertel and Arpe drives but a modified Haertel overdrive that is called "the Standing Wave";

Loftus' mentor refers to Garrard's strange temporal experiences with the Haertel overdrive Mark I;

an "Angel" allied to the UN informs us that Earthmen have withdrawn in confusion from the Centaurian beadmungen.

Thus, even a novel set in an alternative scenario imparts some information about the primary Haertel timeline.

Having introduced and defined a galactic conflict between telepaths and their natural opponents, Blish saw no reason either to recount or to resolve the conflict. This sequence of stories would have been extended only if some later story idea had required a reference to the Matriarchy or to the Central Empire just as the story introducing them had required a reference back to Arpe's discovery of microcosmic telepathy and as Arpe in turn had referred back to Garrard as the first man to reach Alpha Centauri.

Complete Works Syndrome

With Poul Anderson and James Blish, I try to imagine an optimal reading order which is also potentially a way to repackage the volumes for any future Complete Works editions. Several of Blish's works fit together as two-volume sequences or "diptychs." Thus:

Welcome To Mars
the Galactic Cluster trilogy

The Star Dwellers
Mission To The Heart Stars

The Quincunx Of Time
Midsummer Century

Further, the Cities In Flight Tetralogy makes sense as a "double diptych":

They Shall Have Stars
A Life For The Stars

Earthman, Come Home
The Triumph Of Time

These four titles express or evoke a prelude, a life, a return and an ending, thus a complete Wagnerian Tetralogy. Neat.

Of the ten volumes listed here, five are adult novels, four are juvenile novels and one is a collection - in fact, a very short collection if we include only the "trilogy." Of the adult novels:

two are in fact amalgamations of shorter, previously published, works;
one is an expansion, still very short, of such a work;
and another, Midsummer Century, is itself very short, less than a hundred pages of text;
thus, perhaps only The Triumph Of Time is a full-length adult novel written as a unit.

Adolph Haertel, Jack Loftus and John Amalfi are, respectively, the unifying characters of the first, second and fifth diptychs listed above. The third diptych is unified by the presence of Thor Wald in the first volume and a reference to him in the second. The fourth is unified by the presence of Dillon and Wagonner in the first volume and the existence of the Dillon-Wagonner graviton polarity generator in the second.

Black Easter and The Day After Judgement formed a further diptych with a common cast of characters but came instead to be classified and published as a single novel and as Volume II of a Trilogy. Volume III, A Case Of Conscience, comprises "A Case Of Conscience," set on Lithia in 2049, expanded as Book One, and a continuation or sequel, set on Earth and the Moon in 2050, as Book Two. Thus, of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, only Volume I, Doctor Mirabilis, was originally conceived as a single novel.

Thus, this "diptych" analysis has enabled us to summarize or survey the contents of Blish's Haertel Scholium, Cities In Flight and After Such Knowledge.

My motto is "There is always more."

Short Stories

Earlier, I identified three diptychs by James Blish -

Haertel: Welcome To Mars and Galactic Cluster;
Loftus: The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars;
Wald/Dirac: The Quincunx Of Time and Midsummer Century.

A curious feature of these diptychs is that each of them is also loosely linked to a single shorter work and that these three shorter works are all included in Anywhen which, like Galactic Cluster, is a collection, not a novel.

Welcome To Mars shares its background with "No Jokes On Mars";
the Loftus novels share their background with "A Dusk Of Idols";
The Quincunx Of Time refers to the background of "A Style In Treason".

In each case, there is a query as to whether the shorter work is fully consistent with the novel or novels in question. Welcome To Mars explains the Martian "canals" as natural phenomena whereas "No Jokes On Mars" refers to Canal Masons but both the novel and the short story feature the Martian dune-cats.

I will shortly reread "No Jokes On Mars" to check whether any further comparisons are appropriate.

Welcome To Mars III

Jack Loftus stars in The Star Dwellers and in its immediate sequel, Mission To The Heart Stars;

Adolph Haertel stars in Welcome To Mars and appears in "Common Time," the first of three connected short stories in the collection, Galactic Cluster;

Thor Wald appears in The Quincunx Of Time and is referred to early in Midsummer Century.

Thus, there are three instances of two volumes linked by one character. Loftus and Wald also refer to Haertel but only in the same way as they refer to Einstein.

Haertel:

was introduced in "Common Time";

became a historical character common to alternative futures inhabited by Loftus, Wald and others (Arpe in "Nor Iron Bars" and Ruiz-Sanchez in A Case Of Conscience);

then, in a third and final stage, was adapted as the teenage hero of the juvenile novel Welcome To Mars - although we might ask whether this younger Haertel is quite consistent with any of the various older versions.

Mission To The Heart Stars was written after The Star Dwellers;
Galactic Cluster was written before Welcome To Mars;
Midsummer Century was written while "Beep" was being expanded as The Quincunx Of Time.

Non-technical readers usually trust the scientific information imparted in works of hard sf. In Welcome To Mars, we:

(i) understand that Haertel, in this work called "Dolph," has the urgent problem of how to survive indefinitely when marooned on Mars;

 

(ii) soon come to accept that he has solved this problem;

(iii) might come to wonder whether we have been given enough information to warrant the transition from (i) to (ii).

The information is there but maybe, for some of us, needed to be spelled out a bit more. More on this later. (See here.)

A Short Interstellar Trilogy

Three short stories by James Blish are a better written and more imaginative interstellar-themed science fiction trilogy than Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation Trilogy. This Blish trilogy, which can be called "Galactic Cluster" after the collection containing these stories among others, has a definite beginning, middle and end:

"Common Time": a first faster than light interstellar crossing with the Haertel overdrive;

"Nor Iron Bars": a second FTL crossing with the Arpe drive;
                        exploration of the microcosm with the Arpe drive;
                        discovery of the microcosmic basis of telepathy;

"This Earth Of Hours": FTL on the Standing Wave;
                                 early contact and conflict with a telepathic interstellar empire.

FTL, interstellar empire and mental powers are all familiar from Asimov but Blish does far more with these ideas in far fewer words.

Since "Common Time" features the scientist Adolph Haertel and since Blish's juvenile novel Welcome To Mars features the teenage Haertel, the latter volume can be seen as a prequel to the Galactic Cluster trilogy but there the linear sequence ends, with Blish's "Haertel Scholium" volumes presenting several alternative or divergent futures rather than a single series.

Because, in the Haertel Scholium, it is Thor Wald that invents the Dirac communicator and because Wald, while appearing in one volume, is referred to by name in another, he might count as the unifying character of his diptych as Adolph Haertel and Jack Loftus are of theirs.

I have yet to finish rereading and posting about Welcome To Mars but meanwhile wanted to commend the short trilogy to which it can be seen as a prequel.

Welcome To Mars

We can perceive any one book very differently. Some - the Bible, the Koran, The Origin of Species - are so influential that we acknowledge their significance and have some idea of their content, or message, even if we have never read them.

Of the books that we have read, it makes a difference whether we have merely read them once or twice in the past, have reread them recently or have studied them. Certain works by James Blish are almost designed to re-arrange themselves in our heads if they are reread or studied closely:

both Welcome To Mars and Galactic Cluster feature Adolph Haertel;

both The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars feature Jack Loftus;

The Quincunx Of Time and Midsummer Century are linked by a "Dirac message";

of the four works mentioned here that do not feature Haertel, three nevertheless do refer to him, as does A Case Of Conscience;

thus, these seven volumes are closely interconnected without forming a linear sequence.

I am currently rereading Welcome To Mars (London, 1978). Having already introduced Haertel as an adult and a future equivalent of Einstein, Blish now tells us about Haertel's parents and his teenage years, when he is known as "Dolph." Mission To The Heart Stars describes Milne and Dingle as intermediate between Einstein and Haertel and Welcome To Mars shows us Haertel studying these intermediaries.

Milne died in 1950. This was "...nearly twenty years before Dolph's birth..." (p. 18). Let us call that eighteen or nineteen years. So Dolph is born in 1968 or '69.

"At the age of seventeen, Dolph Haertel had discovered anti-gravity." (p. 14)

- so that was in 1985 or '86. Blish's Foreword and Afterword are dated 1965 and the text of the novel assumes no Moon landing yet, not even by '85 or '86. Dolph, flying his tree hut to Mars, will be the first man on another planet.

Dolph discovers that gravity "...has polarity..." (pp. 18, 27) and therefore "...could be manipulated..." (p. 18). Although Haertel does not mention the Blacket-Dirac equations, gravitational polarity does sound like the graviton polarity generators, nicknamed "spindizzies," of Blish's Okies or Cities In Flight series and, in fact, Dolph's "...breadboard rig..." (p. 19) does indeed function like a mini-spindizzy by lifting the Haertel's garage an inch from the Earth, thus confirming that it is able to lift a smaller object into space.

There were plans to film two of Blish's juvenile works, this Haertel novel and the second Okie novel. If this had been done, might the two films have become a series with the Haertel overdrive and the Dillon-Waggoner graviton polarity generator merging into a single Haertel graviton polarity generator?

Finally, for this post, Haertel's device functions like Cavorite: Dolph leaves Earth by shutting out terrestrial gravity, then approaches Mars by letting in Martian gravity. Never forget Wells.

Fifteen Volumes

Before Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization was gathered into seven omnibus volumes, it had been spread across perhaps eighteen regular-sized volumes, whether novels or collections. Other authors, of course, have written linear series of comparable or even greater length. The central part of James Blish's more compact body of work comprises fifteen volumes including prequels, sequels and cross-references although without in this case combining into any single linear sequence:

The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars are companion volumes;
The Quincunx Of Time and Midsummer Century are, very slim, companion volumes;
each of these diptychs is loosely linked to one other, shorter, work;
the two shorter works, "A Dusk Of Idols" and "A Style In Treason," were collected in Anywhen;
each of the diptychs also refers back to an earlier work featuring Adolph Haertel;
Mission To The Heart Stars summarizes the plot of "Common Time," collected in Galactic Cluster where it does form a linear sequence with two other stories;
The Quincunx Of Time refers, less directly, to Welcome To Mars;
one other novel, A Case Of Conscience, refers to Haertel and is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy;
two parallel linear "tetralogies" are the pantropy series, collected in one volume, and the Okies series, collected in four regular volumes or one omnibus volume.

These fifteen regular-sized volumes contain six series with mutual cross-references and sometimes even overlapping contents. Since Volumes I and II of After Such Knowledge are, respectively, a historical novel and a contemporary fantasy, they seem to be far removed from the remaining thirteen volumes. However, the central character of Volume I is Roger Bacon, the founder of scientific method, thus an early predecessor of Blish's fictional scientists, including Haertel.

Divergences

(i) In "Common Time," Garrard makes an interstellar round trip with the Haertel overdrive and confers with Haertel on his return.

(ii) In "Nor Iron Bars," the Arpe drive replaces the Haertel drive.

(iii) In "This Earth Of Hours," in the further future, Terrestrials representing a Matriarchy and using the Standing Wave, which has replaced the two earlier drives, encounter the civilization at the galactic center, which is called the Central Empire.

(iv) In The Star Dwellers, in the near future, the Haertel drive is called the Standing Wave.

(v) In Mission To The Heart Stars, Terrestrials, representing a peaceful UN world government and using the Haertel drive/Standing Wave, encounter the civilization in the galactic center, which is called the Hegemony of Malis, and discuss Garrard's journey.

(vi) In "A Dusk Of Idols," in the further future, the events of The Star Dwellers are referred back to.

(vii) In A Case Of Conscience, in the near future, Terrestrials, representing a nuclear shelter-based UN world government, use the Haertel drive and discuss Garrard's journey.

Clearly, these works have both continuities and divergences:

(i)-(iii) are the Galactic Cluster trilogy;
(iv)-(vi) are the "Heart Stars" trilogy;
(vii) is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, which starts not with Adolph Haertel in the future but with Roger Bacon in the past.

Mission To The Heart Stars mentions every aspect of Garrard's experience:

his subjective time variations;
the "psuedo-death";
the mysterious aliens encountered.

Thus, appropriately, "Common Time" fits both as the opening story of Galactic Cluster and as a Prelude to a Heart Stars collection. "Common Time," the pivotal events of the two novels and "A Dusk Of Idols" set in a further future would make an impressive "future history" volume.

POV In CIF etc I

POV is point of view. CIF is James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy.

James Blish knew the importance of point of view in fiction and, as William Atheling Jr (his pen-name when writing science fiction criticism), adversely criticised a short story in which POV jumped arbitrarily between characters, even, apparently, entering a dog.

If, according to the rule that has emerged for the writing of fiction, either an entire novel or, at least, each chapter or discrete chapter section is narrated as from the POV of a single character, then is any role left for an omniscient narrator? Presumably it is such a narrator that divulges to the reader the inmost momentary thoughts of a POV character? That character may forget such thoughts or die before he can relate them to anyone else.

Nevertheless, the omniscient narrator can remain so much in the background that we are unaware of (which pronoun is appropriate?) presence. To make a comparison with stage drama, he (since we must use some pronoun) not only never comes on-stage but is not even an audible voice from off-stage. He is more like the director without whom the play would not have been performed but of whom we do not even begin to be aware during the performance.

Knowing all this, Blish nevertheless has some transactions between POV and, apparently, an omniscient narrator. "Common Time" is and can only be narrated from the point of view of Garrard who is alone in an experimental interstellar spaceship and, for some of the time, unwilling or even unable to move. Nevertheless, section 3 begins:

"That Garrard did not die completely...was due to the purest of accidents; but Garrard did not know that. In fact, he knew nothing at all for an indefinite period, sitting rigid and staring..." (Blish, Galactic Cluster, London, 1963, p. 19)

So who is telling us this? The second paragraph begins with Garrard waking and we are back in his POV. The concluding section 4 has three unnumbered subsections. In the third of these, Garrard, back on Earth, discusses his experiences with Haertel and gains some understanding of them. So maybe the passage relating what Garrard did not know at the time represents his POV not at that moment in the story but later when he had had time to reflect on it?

Microcosm And Macrocosm

In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time/A Clash Of Cymbals, the Hevians and New Earthmen must send a probe, called Object 4101-Alephnull, into the anti-matter universe in order to measure its energy level and thus to predict the date of the cosmic collision.

The probe, like the first sputnik, Object 1957-a, is named after the year in which it was launched. This date was revised from 4001 to 4101 in later editions of the novel but, through an oversight, the title of the relevant chapter was not revised accordingly. Thus, in Cities In Flight (London, 1981), Object 4101-Alephnull is launched in CHAPTER SIX: Object 4001-Alephnull.

A mere additional century was in no way sufficient to overcome the chronological discrepancy between Volume III, Earthman, Come Home, which implies thousands of years of interstellar flight, and Volume IV, The Triumph Of Time, in which Blish echoed Bishop Ussher's 4004 BC cosmic creation date with his 4004 AD cosmic collision date.

The probe, "...a stable, electrically neutral, massless plasmoid...," has to be constructed, by what would now be called nanotechnology, from zero-spin particles and massless, chargeless neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs that are held inside an invisible, rotation- and magnetic spin-controlling spindizzy field which, made visible by a jet of smoke, appears to observers as a six foot bubble containing concentrations of electron gas, stripped nuclei, thermal neutrons and free radicals, with, at its center, a minute crystal of anti-salt (pp. 554-555). Blish makes the point that the particles are unvisualizable because they do not correspond to any macroscopic experience.

Nevertheless, the characters in Blish's Story, "Nor Iron Bars," do see an electron, probably by de Broglie waves. Gordon Arpe's interstellar drive is meant to repel a spaceship from Earth faster than light by giving it negative mass. However, negative mass can exist only in the microcosm so the ship collapses down to inside a carbon atom of a nearby object. Arpe and a companion land on an electron whose position is uncertain so that its surface resembles a waist-deep swirling substance. Further, the ship with negative mass must be echoed by an electron elsewhere in the universe. Switching of the drive restores positive mass, thus returning the ship to the macrocosm in that other part of the universe. And that is how the Arpe drive works. Unfortunately, this idea was not explored any further. The next story in that series involves a different kind of interstellar drive. And Blish said in conversation that Arpe's experiences, bizarre though they were, did not correspond to the real microcosm.

Meanwhile, The Triumph Of Time takes us back from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, this novel addresses the question: if stars are grouped into galaxies, then what are galaxies grouped into? - although the answer given here is slightly different. The "inner metagalaxy," comprising about fifty galaxies, including the Milky Way and the Andromeda, revolves "...in spiral arms around a common center of density..." (p. 576) Such metagalaxies form spiral arms around the metagalactic center from which the Saturn-sized monobloc had exploded.

Flying their planet to the metagalactic center, the Hevians and their companions occasionally glimpse a distant galaxy but do not see any of the "...tenuous bridges of stars which connected the galaxies..." (p. 577). Poul Anderson in World Without Stars describes isolated red dwarfs in intergalactic space though not any "...bridges of stars..." Blish hoped to find a way to work the bridges into a story although there was the problem that traveling between galaxies by these bridges would not be any quicker than traveling direct. 

Six Volumes

My proposed "Eight Volumes" for James Blish's interconnected works do not make sense for publishing because three of the volumes would be very short. However, six would be practicable, starting with The Galactic Cluster Trilogy And Other Works:

Part One, Some Early Blish;
Part Two, The Galactic Cluster Trilogy;
Part Three, The Haertel Scholium Coda.

This single opening volume would form a triad with:

The Jack Loftus Novels;
After Such Knowledge.

A second triad would be:

The Seedling Stars;
Cities In Flight;
The Quincunx Tetralogy.

After Such Knowledge is a Trilogy overlapping by one volume with the "Haertel Scholium," works referring to or connected with the character Adolph Haertel or his interstellar drive. The "Early Blish" stories are not part of this Scholium but are precursors to it.

The second triad moves away from Haertel but returns to him in its concluding volume which synthesizes the Dirac transmitter, introduced in Cities In Flight, with the Haertel overdrive, introduced in "Common Time," the opening story of Galactic Cluster. Thus, these coherent and interconnected works deserve to be republished in uniform editions.

Eight Volumes?

A James Blish Complete Works could include eight volumes collecting connected works. I have said most of this before but am trying to refine it.

Vol I, Early Blish: several early stories refer to common characters and technologies. These include "The Real Thrill," which later provided material for a Dirac message received in The Quincunx Of Time, thus in Vol VII below.

II, The Galactic Cluster Trilogy: from Garrard's test flight of the Haertel overdrive through microcosmic exploration to the beginning of interstellar conflict between the Terrestrial Matriarchy and the Central Empire. (In publishing terms, this volume, just three short stories, would be far too short but that is not the point here. Its contents form a linear sequence and are substantial.)

III, The Jack Loftus Novels: from first contact with energy beings called "Angels" to the beginning of a UN-Angels alliance against the Heart Stars Empire.

IV, After Such Knowledge: from Roger Bacon's discovery of scientific method through a magical metaphysical metamorphosis to a conflict between theology and science on an interstellar scale.

V, The Seedling Stars: from the invention of "pantropy," the science of adapting organisms for different environments, to the colonization of the entire galaxy and even of a changed Earth by Adapted Men.

VI, Cities In Flight: from the discovery of antigravity and anti-agathics through flying cities and planets to the end of the universe.

VII, The Quincunx Tetralogy: from Haertel's discovery of antigravity through an unexpected application of the Dirac transmitter (introduced in Vol VI) to both an expanding intergalactic civilisation and a "Rebirth" of human terrestrial civilization.

VIII, The Haertel Scholium Coda: Haertel-related works that do not fit elsewhere. I suggested before that these be included in a Galactic Cluster: Revised Edition but they should be read after all the linear sequences. Thus:

a short story set on not quite the same Mars as that visited by Haertel in the opening novel of Vol VII;
earlier, shorter versions of the second and third works collected in Vol VII;
a short story set in an alternative version of the Angels-Heart Stars history (Vol III)
etc (an editor would decide which other works to collect here and which to place in other volumes of a Complete Works).

Overlapping Trilogies

Not every trilogy is three long volumes. In the British edition of Galactic Cluster by James Blish, three short stories formed a linear sequence:

"Common Time":
an elderly Adolph Haertel and his faster than light overdrive, strange temporal experiences in the spaceship;

"Nor Iron Bars":
the Arpe drive replacing Haertel's,
a planetary explorer called Hammersmith,
microcosmic telepathy;

"Beep":
an unspecified faster than light drive,
a planet called Hammersmith,
the Dirac communicator,
a mention of "...time phenomena..." which I took to refer to "Common Time." (1)

However, the American edition of Galactic Cluster also included "This Earth Of Hours" which fits in more neatly with the first two stories, thus:

"Common Time" and "Nor Iron Bars": as above;
"This Earth Of Hours": the Standing Wave replacing both earlier interstellar drives, macrocosmic telepathy.

Apart from the single word "Hammersmith," "Beep" is really on its own. However, when it had been novelized as The Quincunx Of Time, it then formed a sequence with two other novels.

Welcome To Mars: the young Haertel discovering antigravity;

 
The Quincunx Of Time: as "Beep" but now with explicit references to the young Haertel and his overdrive;

Midsummer Century: the transmission of a Dirac message received earlier in The Quincunx Of Time.

Thus, we wind up with two trilogies connected by Haertel. Since another message received in Quincunx refers to "A Style In Treason," the second trilogy can be upgraded to a tetralogy.

Haertel is also mentioned in a juvenile diptych and in one volume of another trilogy (see earlier posts), but "Common Time" and Welcome To Mars are his only two appearances. In any "Complete Works of James Blish":

the tetralogy as above could be collected in a single volume;

Galactic Cluster could be revised to highlight the trilogy, to shed unrelated stories to other collections and to include Haertel Scholium "loose ends," connected stories that do not quite fit into any linear sequence.  

(1) Blish, James, "Beep" IN Blish, J., Galactic Cluster, London, 1963, pp. 93-128 AT p. 103.

ASK Haertel

Works by James Blish referring to his character Adolph Haertel can be grouped as follows.

The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars are the Jack Loftus diptych.

"Common Time," "Nor Iron Bars" and "This Earth Of Hours" are the Galactic Cluster trilogy. (They form a linear sequence and are collected in a volume of that title.)

A Case Of Conscience (ACOC) is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge (ASK) Trilogy. (ASK Vol I, Doctor Mirabilis, and Vol II, Black Easter/The Day After Judgement, are respectively historical and contemporary, thus pre-Haertel.)

Welcome To Mars, The Quincunx Of Time, "A Style In Treason" and Midsummer Century are an untitled tetralogy.

Haertel, young in Welcome To Mars and old in "Common Time," is referred back to by:

Loftus in his diptych;
Arpe in "Nor Iron Bars";
Ruiz-Sanchez in A Case Of Conscience;
Wald in The Quincunx Of Time.

"This Earth Of Hours" refers back to Arpe. The future civilizations of "A Style In Treason" and Midsummer Century transmit Dirac messages received earlier by Wald. In true future historical style, a planet in The Quincunx Of Time is named after a planetary explorer in "Nor Iron Bars." (Quincunx is a novelization of  "Beep" which had been collected in Galactic Cluster, the British edition of which excluded "This Earth Of Hours" so that I originally regarded "Beep" as completing this trilogy.)

Thus, the Haertel Scholium comprises one single volume, one diptych, one trilogy and one tetralogy plus some loose ends:

a short story loosely connected to Welcome To Mars;
another, "A Dusk Of Idols" (see Anywhen cover, below), connected to The Star Dwellers;
earlier, shorter versions of Quincunx and "A Style In Treason."

Works are linked by:

Arpe and Wald, each appearing once;
Haertel and Loftus, each appearing twice;
conflict between sacred and secular knowledge, addressed thrice.

The characters' legacies are:

Roger Bacon in ASK I: scientific method;

magicians in ASK II: a changed relationship to deity;

Haertel and Arpe: interstellar drives, named after them;

Arpe: microcosmic exploration and the discovery that psi forces are characteristic of subatomic space as electromagnetism is of macrocosmic space;

Ruiz-Sanchez: the theological problem of sinless but Godless aliens;

Petard, also in ASK III: his instantaneous communicator, the circum-continuum radio (CirCon);

Wald: (i) his instantaneous communicator, named after Paul Dirac, which, unlike Petard's, receives messages not only from the present but also from the past and future; (ii) a metalanguage for scientific paradigms and multiple dimensions;

Loftus: the Haertel overdrive-using UN, dolphins, extrasolar races and star dwelling energy beings allied against the Heart Stars Empire;

the Traitor in Chief of High Earth in "A Style In Treason": Earth and colonies, using a post-Haertel Imaginary Drive, allied against the Green Exarchy Empire;

Oberholzer in "This Earth Of Hours": the Terrestrial Matriarchy, using a post-Arpe Standing Wave, mobilized against the telepathic Central Empire;

Martels in Midsummer Century: a telepathically guided "Rebirth" of human civilization mobilized against an evolutionary challenge from intelligent Birds.

Thus, ASK and Haertel present:

two theories of telepathy (Arpe's and Martels');
two instantaneous communicators (Circon and Dirac);
three theology-science conflicts (Bacon, magicians and Ruiz-Sanchez);
three interstellar empires (Heart Stars, Green Exarchy and Central Empire);
four interstellar drives (Haertel, Arpe, Imaginary Drive and Standing Wave).

Circon, reaching around the continuum, detects and replies to radio waves currently transmitted light years away whereas the Dirac communicator controls the placement of an electron in the circuits of another Dirac communicator by controlling the frequency and path of a positron moving through a crystal lattice accompanied by de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of the electron so that a message is received by amplifying the bursts and reading the signal.

Thus:

Dirac is not radio;
its effect is simultaneous, not wave-like;
CirCon and Dirac are not two names for the same device.

Bacon, wrongly accused of magic, is the historical forerunner of scientists including:

in our era, Einstein and Dirac;
in several Blish futures, Haertel;
in different Haertel futures, Petard and Wald.

Blish's imagined scenarios are both extrapolative and exotic. ASK and Haertel are not a continuous sequence, except for ACOC, but Haertel etc as scientists are Bacon's successors.

Blish appropriately extends the theology-science issue from a medieval monk in ASK I through modern magicians in ASK II to a future Jesuit biologist and an atheist physicist in ASK III. However, despite the seriousness with which Blish treats this issue here, all his other fictitious scientists simply expand human knowledge of the galaxy, the universe, the microcosm and space-time without being troubled by theology.

Ruiz-Sanchez's contemporary, Petard, a lapsed Catholic, parallels the entirely secular Wald's invention of an instantaneous communicator but Wald goes further by also inventing a metalanguage for discussing the succession of scientific paradigms that had been initiated by Bacon in Doctor Mirabilis.

Doctor Mirabilis can therefore be regarded not only as Volume I of ASK but also as a prequel to Blish's various sf series and, in fact, John Amalfi, the central character of Blish's non-Haertel Cities In Flight Tetralogy, does appropriately refer to Bacon when discussing the scientifically predicted imminent end of the universe which, of course, revives theological concerns in some other characters although the title of Cities In Flight Vol IV, The Triumph Of Time, conveys the entirely secular view that time, not eternity, is the final arbiter of human destiny.

This article began as an attempt to group together the works of the Haertel Scholium but, because that Scholium overlaps with the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, it became a discussion of that Trilogy in relation both to the Scholium and to the Cities In Flight Tetralogy. For completeness, we should also mention Blish's shorter tetralogy collected as The Seedling Stars.

In Book Two of The Seedling Stars, extrasolar colonists, temporarily separated from terrestrial scientists, revive the conflict between sacred (scriptural) and secular (scientific) knowledge. In Book Three, the pilot of a crashed spaceship remarks that, if he were a religious man (which clearly he is not), he would think that the crash resulted from divine vengeance for the hubris of trying to seed the galaxy with Adapted Men. He and his fellow "pantropists" play the god-like role of designing microscopic human beings to inhabit water pools on the planet where they have crashed.

In Book Four, Adapted Men have spread throughout the galaxy without encountering any divine vengeance or, as far as we can see, experiencing any further religious qualms although the pagan expletive, "gods of all stars," familiar from Cities In Flight, remains in use. Lithia, the planet whose sinless but Godless inhabitants had disturbed Ruiz-Sanchez, is mentioned. Destroyed by human interventions in 2050 in ACOC, Lithia exists unchanged millennia later in The Seedling Stars so Ruiz-Sanchez's conflicts have not occurred in the essentially secular history of this alternative timeline.

The Dirac transmitter first appeared in the Okie series that became Cities In Flight but the transmitter's capacity to receive messages from the future would not have fitted into Okie culture, where cities fly into the unknown, so it had to be developed separately in one of the Haertel timelines. Similarly, the Okies, interstellar traders, and the Adapted Men, extrasolar colonists, could have complemented each other in a single series but Blish wanted to show that the Okies, despite their anti-agathics, would not live forever and demonstrated this drastically by ending the universe in 4004 whereas the Adapted Men needed much longer to colonize the galaxy so these two series necessarily diverged despite some early common references:

a pantropist refers to the Okie currency, the Oc dollar;
pantropists, like Okies and Wald, have the faster than light ultraphone.

Okies and Wald, but not pantropists, have the instantaneous Dirac transmitter but only Wald and his colleagues receive the Dirac "beep" containing messages from the future and including messages from later stories. Thus, one potential series became three distinct series whose defining technologies are:

"spindizzies," gravitron polarity generators, moving spaceships and cities through space faster than light, later moving a planet between galaxies and to the Metagalactic Centre;

pantropy, adapting human beings to other planets;

the Dirac communicator, receiving Dirac messages transmitted from any other point in space-time.

The text of  "A Style In Treason," and even the Dirac message received from that period, assume faster than light but not instantaneous communication, ultraphone but not Dirac. However, the politics of the period are somehow based on institutionalized deception and Blish would have been able to resolve any inconsistencies in his projected High Earth/Traitors' Guild/Green Exarchy novel.

The various series are also differentiated by their beginnings. Blish laid a sound basis for each series by describing the discoveries underlying his characters' later activities:

antigravity in "Bridge," incorporated into Cities In Flight, Vol I;
anti-agathics in "At Death's End," also incorporated into CIF, Vol I;
pantropy in The Seedling Stars, Book One;
antigravity, this time discovered by Haertel, in Welcome To Mars;
test flight of the Haertel overdrive in "Common Time";
test flight of the Arpe Drive in "Nor Iron Bars";
the theory of telepathy that later accounts for the Central Empire, also in "Nor Iron Bars";
the Dirac transmitter in "Beep," novelized as The Quincunx Of Time;
scientific method in Doctor Mirabilis.

Blish did not envisage any single political future:

when anti-gravity and antiagathics have been discovered and some extrasolar planets colonized, Russia wins the Cold War and bans space travel but, later, with anti-gravity rediscovered and the Vegan Tyranny defeated, a new confederation, roughly based on the former UN, rules Arm II until replaced by the Web of Hercules although New Earthmen continue to control the Greater Magellanic Cloud and the planet He explores the Andromeda galaxy;

the Greater Earth Port Authority, so enriched by tolls that its police force has absorbed the United States armed forces, aims to charge landing fees on terraformed planets and nearly suppresses pantropy but Adapted Men escape and occupy the galaxy;

ACOC's UN has imposed a world government in response to Corridor Riots in the self-sufficient city-sized underground nuclear air raid shelters controlled by Target Area Authorities derived from self-policing port authorities;

Loftus' UN world government, which controls a high-energy culture maintaining a large unemployed majority in comfort but not allowing them to vote or procreate, learns that the Heart Stars is a stagnant tyranny and allies with other races against it;

in Oberholzer's future, sperm electrophoresis enables parents to predetermine children's sex, causing a glut of males and a Matriarchy which discovers that planets of Population I stars in the galactic center and the clusters are populated by beings with hive mentalities and ganglia instead of brains and who regard brains as tumors so are hostile to the brained inhabitants of planets of Population II stars like Sol;

in the High Earth period, neither the ultraphone nor the Imaginary Drive permits hegemony over more than ten light years but a uniform interstellar economy is maintained with traitors as brokers in a bourse where planets seek financial advantage although half of the human worlds are ruled by the Green Exarch which draws tithes from six fallen empires older than man;

Wald's successors in the Earth intelligence bureau foresee themselves preventing disasters and presiding over peaceful intergalactic expansion, then do what they have foreseen themselves doing. (As Brian Aldiss wrote in an Introduction to The Quincunx Of Time, this novel really is about the future. Not only do we read about a fictitious future but the characters receive a series of messages from different periods of their future.)

These are seven very differently imagined futures although the High Earth-Green Exarchy conflict is supposed to be incorporated somehow into the peaceful expansion supervised by Wald's successors - unless, contradicting both their theory and their policy, this Dirac message turns out after all to originate from a merely potential future which they prevent instead of causing? (I don't think so but there you are.) 

ASK, Haertel, Okies and pantropy are not one series but they are a single coherent body of work: one diptych, two trilogies and three tetralogies. Uniform editions could comprise six volumes including a revised Galactic Cluster containing the short trilogy and the "loose ends."

"It was not until 2011 that the great Haertel succeeded..." (1)

Haertel's achievements, not necessarily mutually compatible, were:

to incorporate Einstein's relativity into Milne's and Milne's into his own (he did this in 2011, last year!);

to prove that there is only one fundamental particle;

to assume at the age of seventeen that a Pythagorean geometry of points, not a Euclidean geometry of lines, applies to ultimate particles like positrons;

also at age seventeen, to discover anti-gravity and fly a tree hut to Mars.

Loftus' mentor regards Haertel as the greatest theoretical physicist ever and Wald sometimes thinks that he must have been God so it is unsurprising that he is prominent in several timelines.

(1) Blish, James, Mission To The Heart Stars, London, 1980, p. 48.