Platonism

"...Platonic word..."

I wanted to check, as far as possible, whether this phrase in James Blish's Doctor Mirabilis was a misprint for "...Platonic world..." However, it is "...Platonic word..." in both of the editions that are in my possession.

The references are:

-James Blish, Doctor Mirabilis (New York, 1971), p. 37.

-James Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), p. 49.

The phrase is in Chapter II, "Northover."

However, I think that "world" would have fitted the context better. See here.

After Such Knowledge In One Volume

My Christmas presents included the one-volume  After Such Knowledge (London, 1991) (see image).

pp. 521-522 are printed in the wrong order.

When The Day After Judgment was originally published in a single volume, it had a four page Prologue which began:

"The events leading up to the disaster were as follows:..."
-James Blish, The Day After Judgment (New York, 1971), p. 9 -

- and which then summarized the plot of Black Easter. This Prologue, presumably regarded as no longer necessary, was omitted when The Day After Judgment was published in a single volume with Black Easter and then here in the one-volume After Such Knowledge. However, I think that this impersonal summary adds to the work and should be retained.

For a discussion of ASK, Vol I, Doctor Mirabilis, on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog, see here.

One Story Grows Into An Exotic Future History

Perhaps the most exotic fictitious future in sf was created by James Blish: a timeline extending from Haertel surviving on Mars to Martels' disembodied consciousness surviving inside a computer. Between these two end points is Thor Wald, (scroll down) revering Haertel and receiving a Dirac message (and see here) sent to Martels' computer. The timeline contains quite a few other exotica, including a High Earth/Traitors' Guild/Green Exarchy period (and see here) and a world-line cruiser traveling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of a planet on the rim of a galaxy eleven million light years away.

This bizarre future history grew in two stages. First, the single story, "Beep," featuring Thor Wald, set in our future, includes messages from several further futures. Secondly, when "Beep" was expanded as The Quincunx Of Time, connections to three other works were added:

Welcome To Mars (Haertel);
"A Style in Treason" (The Traitors' Guild etc);
Midsummer Century (Martels).

Since Midsummer Century was being written while "Beep" was being expanded, a reference to Wald was included in ...Century.

The result is neither a pyramidal future history like those of Heinlein and Anderson nor a more linear sequence like Blish's own Cities In Flight or The Seedling Stars. Instead, several otherwise independent works have been interestingly connected.

The Haertel Scholium

James Blish's Haertel Scholium could be published in a single omnibus volume internally divided as follows:

ADOLPH HAERTEL
Welcome To Mars
Galactic Cluster

JACK LOFTUS
The Star Dwellers
Mission To The Heart Stars

THOR WALD
The Quincunx Of Time
A Midsummer Cenury

FIVE OTHERS
"No Jokes on Mars"
"How Beautiful With Banners"
"And Some Were Savages"
"A Dusk Of Idols"
"A Style In Treason"

By Galactic Cluster, I mean only the short trilogy, one story featuring Haertel and two sequels. There are reasons why I think that these works in this order make sense but it would need to be discussed if it ever became a practical proposition! 

Galactic SF III

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation today:

Poul Anderson wrote many works about interstellar travel and three novels about intergalactic travel. James Blish wrote a tetralogy whose volumes are successively interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic and inter-cosmic. Blish is comparable to Anderson but with a much smaller output.

Since both wrote galactic sf, I wondered how much information either of them imparted about the structure of the galaxy. Blish describes both a photograph and a model. See previous post. He also recounts this exchange over the instantaneous Dirac communicator:

"'EARTH POLICE AA EMERGENCY ACOLYTE CLUSTER CONDENSATION XIII ARM BETA...SYSTEM UNDER ATTACK BY MASS ARMY OF TRAMP CITIES. POLICE AID URGENTLY NEEDED. LERNER LIEUTENANT FORTY-FIFTH BORDER SECURITY GROUP ACTING COMMANDER CLUSTER DEFENSE FORCES. ACKNOWLEDGE.'"
-Cities In Flight (New York, 1981), pp. 394-395.

"'LERNER ACOLYTE DEFENSE FORCES YOUR MESSAGE IN. SQUADRON ASSIGNED YOUR CONDENSATION ON WAY. HANG ON. BETA ARM COMMAND EARTH.'" (p. 395)

This tells us something about police, defense and galactic structures. The Acolyte Cluster is in the thirteenth condensation of the second spiral arm. I know that stars form from condensation of primordial elements but nowhere else have I seen "condensation" used to describe a part of the galaxy. Here, a condensation is intermediate between a cluster and an arm.

Galactic SF II

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation today:

After "galactic sf" would come "inter-" or "trans-galactic." However, there is not a great deal of this and the subject has been addressed in some previous posts. See here.

Regarding the features of this galaxy:

in "Starfog," Earth lies in the spiral arm behind the one containing the interstellar civilization served by the Commonalty, an organization covering an estimated ten million planets;

the human race has occupied two or three spiral arms in total;

the colonized planet Serieve is near the northern edge of the Commonalty's spiral arm;

thus, beyond Serieve is only the galactic halo containing thin gas with little dust and old, widely scattered, globular clusters.

In two different works by James Blish, it seems that random stellar movements have opened a galactic chasm or valley called "the Rift" which is so immense that it is difficult or impossible to traverse it even with the existing faster than light drive. But random movements do not work like that, do they? In conversation, Blish said that he probably had in mind something like the space between two of the spiral arms.

In The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), Blish describes a color-coded photograph, taken from at least ten million light years distance, of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. A southern area of the disc and the Clouds are colored red and the north is green while gray wanders between them and spreads to the west. The colors are political and need not concern us here but I find it interesting to read of the points of the compass being applied to the galaxy. Earth, in this period called "High Earth," is "...far out on a spiral arm in the red area, near the Clouds..."(p. 95).

In Blish's Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), Jack Loftus views "'...a galactic model or map...'" (pp. 31-32) that appears initially as a glowing sphere, each evenly distributed point of light within it representing a three-hundred-light-year-diametered globular cluster of about a hundred thousand Population One stars. Secondly, the map adds a line representing the galactic equator; thirdly, a central sphere, occupying a fifth of the total and containing individual Population One stars; fourthly, the Heart Stars (a political term), a spindle spreading out along the equator; fifthly, all the remaining Population Two stars, which transform the spindle into a lens stretching across the larger sphere along the equator; sixthly, an equatorial band representing remaining dust from which more Population Two stars may condense.

Rivers of dust run from the rim between the spiral arms towards the Heart Stars. In fact, according to this text, the dark areas between the arms are not empty but are places where the dust conceals the stars. Thus, when that dust has condensed into stars, the Milky Way will join the class of elliptical galaxies.

Poul Anderson's World Without Stars is set in a planetary system in intergalactic space. In Cities In Flight (London, 1981), Blish discloses that it was discovered in 1953 that "...tenuous bridges of stars...connected the galaxies like umbilical chords..." (p. 577). This is mentioned only because at that point in the narrative a planet is flying through intergalactic space. Blish hoped to find a way to incorporate the bridges of stars into an sf story.

Matter And Energy

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 7 April 2014:

A passage in James Blish's Black Easter and The Day After Judgment (London, 1972), pp. 173-17, is relevant to the discussion in the previous post. To paraphrase -

Baines: The conservation laws apply to matter and energy but demons are neither.

Satvje: They may be unified fields of electro-magnetico-gravitic energy with 100 per cent negative entropy.

Buelg: Completely negative entropy is impossible but stable negative entropy would be H(x)-Hy(x)=C+E.

Satvje: That would be eternal life.

Buelg: Eternal barring accidents. We ought to be able to disrupt the electromagnetic part of the system and thus to kill spirits.

However, I do not understand the equation.

Adapted Men II

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation:

In "Starfog," the last story of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, descendants of the Aenean rebels who fled from known space at the end of The Rebel Worlds, have spent so many generations ingesting, and becoming dependent on, heavy metals and becoming tolerant of ionizing radiation that they can no longer interbreed with standard humanity; they are no longer human.

In "Watershed," the last story of James Blish's pantropy series, Earth has changed so much that it will now be colonized by Adapted Men while standard humanity must adapt to the new social role of a racial minority - a historical watershed for the sometimes despised Adapted Men.

These different scenarios have in common the understanding that, over long periods of time, everything changes, from planetary environments to DNA. And there is no unchanging human nature.

Adapted Men

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation:

Compare and contrast:

James Blish's four "pantropy" stories, collected as The Seedling Stars;

Poul Anderson's four post-Terran Empire stories, collected in The Long Night and again in Flandry's Legacy.

Both these tetralogies are hard sf with interstellar themes:

Blish's theme is artificial adaptation of human beings to extraterrestrial environments;

Anderson's theme is natural adaptations by human beings left isolated in extraterrestrial environments.

When I had explicitated this comparison, I realized why I had been thinking of these two series in parallel.

The pantropy series is a short but complete future history, covering:

an early interplanetary period;
intermediate periods on two extra-solar planets;
longer term galactic hegemony for humanity in its many adapted forms.

The post-Empire stories also cover a future historical period:

post-Imperial anarchy in the mid-fourth millennium;
an intermediate period while the Allied Planets restore interstellar civilization;
longer term, human civilizations have spread through several spiral arms and one is served by the Commonalty.

The main difference is that the post-Empire stories are not complete in themselves but are merely the concluding section of the much longer History of Technic Civilization.  

Thermonuclear Warfare

I found passages in Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963) that were relevant to four of his fictional works:

Twilight World
"Kings Who Die"
The Psychotechnic History
Planet Of No Return

This passage:

"Many will object that the requirements of an aggressive policy will lead to national regimentation, until we are hardly distinguishable from our opponents." (p. 153)

- is relevant to James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy. In Volume I, set in the early twenty first century, American anti-Communism becomes as repressive as Russian anti-Fascism so that the two systems come to be indistinguishable and are bloodlessly united under a single Premier! - although this Spenglerian Fall of the West is preceded by the escape of a few Westerners from the Solar System in FTL spaceships. Centuries later, the Terrestrial Bureaucratic State falls when anti-gravity is rediscovered and entire cities are able to escape, seeking work among the Colonials.

Thus, this is a future in which thermonuclear war is prevented. The Russians conquer by stealth. Another Blish work, A Case Of Conscience, Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, presents a different outcome of the Cold War. The arms race leads to a Shelter Race until the entire population lives permanently in subterranean cities where there are Corridor Riots. Anderson discusses shelters in Thermonuclear Warfare but does not suggest permanent life underground.

Anderson hoped that the Soviet Union would be defeated by persistent limited wars whereas instead its inefficient command economy was bankrupted by its self-imposed arms race.

Films II

(See previous post.)

The titles, Welcome To Mars and A Life For The Stars, express the ideas of interplanetary and interstellar travel, respectively. These works are two of James Blish's five juvenile novels. Since A Life For The Stars is also one volume of Blish's Cities In Flight or "Okies" tetralogy, we are talking about eight volumes in total.

I suggested that, for purposes of screen dramatization, Welcome To Mars could be reconceptualized as the prelude to the Okie series, thus replacing They Shall Have Stars since the latter was not going to be filmed. I have no idea whether anyone else considered this but it is an obvious implication in the circumstances.

This raises the question whether the remaining three juveniles could also have been fitted into such a film series. Answer: one yes, the other two no. The Lost Jet, set either in the present or in the very near future - "day after tomorrow" sort of thing -, features orbital space flight, the stage before either interplanetary or interstellar travel. Otherwise, there is no overt connection between these works but a connection could have been added on screen.

That leaves the Jack Loftus diptych, The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars. Although, of course, these novels introduce new themes and ideas, they are structurally a sequel to the first Adolph Haertel story, "Common Time," explicitly referring back to the characters and events of that story. This does connect the diptych to Welcome To Mars but differentiates it from Cities In Flight. Loftus, flying a spaceship, not a city, contends with a Malan Hegemony, not with a Vegan Tyranny.

Also, intergalactic politics differ. In the Okie series, the planet He and the Web of Hercules, both originating within the Milky Way, contend at the Metagalactic Centre before an imminent cosmic collision whereas, in the Loftus novels, some of the energy beings called Angels date from the first twenty minutes of the universe while others were born later in the same processes that generate stars. The First Born possibly participated in the First Cause. The Angels have been allied to ten previous galactic federations, collapsed three of those galaxies and communicate between themselves throughout the universe into an indefinite future.

Thus, here are two alternative cosmic histories and potentially two spectacular film series.

Films

The Spindizzy
In James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, an anti-gravity device, the Dillon-Waggoner graviton polarity generator, nicknamed the "spindizzy," is invented;

in Volume II, A Life For The Stars, spindizzies are used to fly cities between stars faster than light;

in Volume III, Earthman, Come Home, they also fly a planet between galaxies and two cities to the Greater Magellanic Cloud;

in Volume IV, The Triumph Of Time, they fly a planet not only between galaxies but also to the Metagalactic Centre.

The Haertel Overdrive
In Blish's Welcome To Mars, Adolph Haertel discovers anti-gravity and flies a tree hut to Mars;

in "Common Time" and later works, the Haertel overdrive flies spacecraft between stars faster than light.

Thus, the spindizzy and the Haertel overdrive are alternative interstellar drives.

Film Ideas
Proposed films based on Blish's works were:

Welcome To Mars;
A Life For The Stars;
The Space Witch, an original flying cities film for which Blish wrote a plot outline.

One way to tie these films together would have been to rename the spindizzy as the "Haertel graviton polarity generator."

Stages Of Haertel

James Blish's character Adolph Haertel developed through five stages:

(i) in "Common Time," section I, Garrard, en route to Alpha Centauri, reflects that Haertel had predicted how the ship would accelerate, that the Haertel transformation was non-relativistic and that Haertel's equation had covered both ship and pilot by the same expression, thus not predicting any temporal difference between them;

(ii) in "Common Time," section IV, Garrard, returned from Alpha Centauri, discusses his journey with Haertel;

(iii) several works refer back to Haertel as a successor of Einstein;

(iv) Haertel became the teenage hero of the juvenile novel, Welcome To Mars;

(v) Haertel was the hero of the unfortunately unfilmed screen treatment of Welcome To Mars.

Thus, the chronological order of the published works is (iv), (i), (ii), (iii) although (iii) diverges into alternative timelines.

Blish's unfinished and projected works were not set in further Haertel futures but were based on entirely new concepts:

travel to Beta Solis;
time travel in a finite, spinning universe;
an energy crisis in a far future era of philosophical inquiry.

But could Haertel's career have been extended in screen sequels to the film of Welcome To Mars?

One Word Each

We can differentiate and define James Blish's several series with one single word each:

Okies;
pantropy;
telepathy;
Angels;
Dirac;
knowledge.

The Okie flying cities are based on two technological advances, spindizzies and anti-agathics, so that, in this case, the one word splits into two others. The Okies also use the Dirac communicator though not in the same way as in the Dirac series.

After Such Knowledge is a thematic not a linear trilogy. Thus, each of its volumes has a different defining word: Bacon, demons and Lithia.

In the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon sought knowledge through observation and experiment;
in the twentieth century, Theron Ware sought knowledge by controlling demons;
in 2049, a UN science team will gather knowledge on the planet Lithia.

Thus, two of the key words are names of scientists, Bacon and Dirac. However, Doctor Mirabilis is a biographical novel about Bacon whereas the Dirac series features a fictitious instantaneous communicator named after Paul Dirac.

Two other significant scientists are the historical Einstein, whose theory must be surpassed if there is to be faster than light travel to Lithia or to anywhere else, and the fictitious Haertel, whose theory does surpass Einstein's. The telepathy, Angels and Dirac series and the Lithia novel all refer to Haertel who thus achieves a role in Blish's fictitious histories comparable to that of Einstein in our history.

The Last Temptation III

More curious features of James Blish's "A Style in Treason" (Anywhen, New York, 1970):

(i) Some professional traitors are valuable because they can never have an identity crisis but Simon is High Earth's most distinguished traitor because he has them regularly (p. 15). I am not sure what this means.

(ii) "'...Gro's own horns...'" (p. 54) ER Eddison's Gro was a member of a horned race, as far as I remember, although this cannot be true of the Traitors' Guilds' Lord Gro.

(iii) Lord Gro writes that the question why entrust traitors with important information should never be answered but he writes this in The Discourses which therefore are not public documents?

(iv) Simon's original mission was simply to bribe the Boadacean Traitor-in-Chief, Valkol, but, when this failed, he had to devise an alternative plan. However, I am still not clear how offering Valkol documents damaging to High Earth, then adding further documentation for a Boadacea-High Earth alliance when Valkol was not expecting this was supposed to work.

(v) Gro writes that traitors should have no personal loyalty to rulers because it "...tears the economic tissue..." and that "For the professional, loyalty is a tool, not a value." (p. 28) But Simon is motivated throughout by obligation to High Earth and hatred of the Green Exarch, not by economics, and the story would have taken a strange turn if he had suddenly accepted a large payment from Boadacea and hidden from High Earth, as Da-Ud suggests.

(vi) Did Simon come to Boadacea to bribe, "...to gull..." or to forge an alliance? (p. 29)

(vii) High Earth has ways of showing displeasure with "...failed traitors..." (pp. 38-39) So they expect him to forge an alliance with Boadacea, not to sell them out, even though he is a "traitor" with no personal loyalty to them?

There may be more but that is it for now.

28/4/13: (viii) Why will Simon be no further use to High Earth after his experience on Boadacea?

The Last Temptation II

Despite his status as a "traitor," Simon de Kuyl remains loyal to High Earth throughout James Blish's "A Style in Treason" and we would be shocked if he did anything else. Simon tells Da-Ud that he, Simon, must complete his mission but does not tell him what it is.

Since the Boadacean Traitors' Guild has killed Da-Ud's half-sister while she was with Simon, both have a motive to cheat the Guild but how is Simon's deception meant to accomplish this? Using the Rood-Prince's "...toposcope-scriber..." and "...brain-dictation laboratory..." (I am not sure what these are), he generates documents purporting to show that he has sold to Da-Ud partial evidence that High Earth has conspired against several major human powers "'...for purposes of gaining altitude with the Green Exarch." (Anywhen, New York, 1970, pp. 33, 34) Both High Earth and the Exarch would pay for such documents. Da-Ud is to tell the Guild that the remaining evidence is also for sale at a higher price. However, this is a "...double blind..." (p. 35)

When Da-Ud has dealt with the Guild and suggests that Simon directly sell them the remaining evidence instead of cheating them, Simon senses that Da-Ud is helping the Guild against him. He proposes to sell the remaining evidence to the Rood-Prince so that the Guild can acquire it by attacking the Principality, thus saving Simon from assassination by a hypothetical second agent from Earth if he is seen to approach the Guild directly with the information.

When Simon, having been captured, is interrogated by the Traitor-in-Chief of Boadacea, he informs the latter that the apparently human representative of the Exarch who is with him is in fact a vombis, a metamorph entirely loyal to the Exarch. Then he turns his coat under Guild laws, offering the information which was not found in the attack on the Principality but to Boadacea, not to the Exarch. His stated motive is that he wants to deal fairly with Boadacea, then become honest with himself. His offer accepted, he writes the requested document, whose authenticity can be confirmed toposcopically, and adds an alliance with High Earth, which was his object from the start.

An alliance with High Earth would not have been acceptable as long as Boadacea was linked to the Exarch but Simon has severed this link by revealing the identity of the vombis and by the impressive elegance of his surrender. Does this make sense?

The Last Temptation

Sometimes we read a work of fiction trusting that it will make more sense as we proceed - or if we remember to think about it afterwards - or maybe if we read the sequel?

The Covenant governing magic is invoked in James Blish's Black Easter but not explained until the later conceived sequel, The Day After Judgement. In his "A Style in Treason" (Anywhen, New York, 1970), why do governments employ self-proclaimed "traitors"? Has the word changed its meaning? Are they merely intelligence officers whose self-description recognises that they might be double or triple agents? They do not work in secret but can be identified because they "'...wear the traitor's clasp...'" (p. 24).

 A man currently called Da-Ud tam Altair is Court Traitor to the Rood-Prince on the planet Boadacea. His duties include "...singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of the sareh...," a native instrument (p. 31). He finds and sells secrets like "'...how to make bombs...'" (p. 25). Does he steal them from his employer?

When the central character, Simon de Kuyl, reveals himself to Da-Ud as the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth, Da-Ud responds:

"'I have nothing to sell but the Rood-Prince...and a poor stick he is.'" (p. 32)

In what way precisely would Da-Ud sell the Prince? And is this what he is employed to do as soon as the opportunity arises? And, meanwhile, do his duties include anything more serious than playing the sareh? The text raises more questions than it answers.

Lord Gro explains in one of his Discourses that, despite political separation of extrasolar colonies from High Earth, "...a roughly uniform interstellar economy..." enforces "...a more thorough rule..." (p. 27). OK so far. He then addresses, not entirely satisfactorily, the central puzzle of the story:

"In this [economic] connection, one often hears laymen ask, Why do the various worlds and nations employ professional traitors when it is known that they are traitors? Why would they confide to the traitors any secret valuable enough to be sold to a third party? The answer is the same, and the weapon is the same: money. The traitors act as brokers in a continuous interstellar bourse on which each planet seeks to gain a financial advantage over the other. Thus the novice should not imagine that any secret put into his hands is exactly what it is said to be, particularly when its primary value purports to be military." (p. 27)

Brokers buy and sell shares but how does this relate to the traitors? A government might buy disinformation from a novice but real intelligence from an adept? I will continue to analyze the story.

Some Details

Three ship's surgeons, opposite numbers of Dr McCoy:

in "Nor Iron Bars," Dr Hoyle on the Flyaway II to Alpha Centauri;

in "A Dusk of Idols," Dr Rosenbaum on an unnamed ship returning from the Heart stars;

in "And Some Were Savages," Dr Clyde Bixby on the UNSS Brock Chisholm.

Three references to Canes Venatici:

in "This Earth of Hours," the planet Calle orbits a star in the Canes Venatici cluster which, in this context, has to mean a star cluster in the Canes Venatici constellation, not a cluster of galaxies;

in "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time, the planet Hathshepa orbits a star on the rim of the eleven light year distant galaxy NGC 4725 in the constellation of Canes Venatici;

in "A Style in Treason," there is an Emperor of Canes Venatici.

In its timeline, Calle is an outpost of the Central Empire of the galaxy, thus is not part of any cluster empire such as the one in "A Style in Treason." The galaxy of "A Style in Treason" is rich in empires since the Green Exarch "...drew tithes from six fallen empires older than man..." (Anywhen, New York, 1970, p. 19).

Dirac

In "Nor Iron Bars" by James Blish (Galactic Cluster, London, 1963), a new faster than light drive:

"...involved giving the whole ship negative mass...Only a physicist who knew Dirac holes well enough to call them 'Pam' would have thought of the notion...'" (p. 63)

It took me a long time to learn that Paul Dirac's initials were PAM.

The physicist, Gordon Arpe, who thought of the negative mass drive did not know Dirac holes as well as he thought. His idea was that the ship, no longer a material object, would accelerate away from Earth, surpassing the speed of light. Instead, unable to exist in the positive mass macrocosm, it collapses into the microcosm where, having some of the properties of a Dirac hole, it is echoed by an electron elsewhere in the universe so that, when it is returned to positive mass and thus to the macrocosm, it re-enters the macrocosm at its other location much further away from Earth than intended, so far away that locating the Sun is problematic.

The ship can cross interstellar distances by jumping in and out of the microcosm but expands and loses air with each jump so that it soon becomes unreuseable. Another means of interstellar travel has to be found. This story could easily have been written as a comedy.

The ship's passengers include the planetary explorer Hammersmith so the story "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time, referring to a planet called Hammersmith, can be regarded as a sequel. In "Beep"/Quincunx, electrons echoing each other are used not for interstellar travel but for instantaneous communication by means of the Dirac transmitter which is found to receive all such messages transmitted from any point in the four dimensional continuum, past, present or future.

Thus, Blish fully explores every possible fictional application of Dirac holes.

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.