Much of Poul Anderson's fiction is set in his "Technic Civilization" universe. Nicholas van Rijn and his associates are important characters in many of these stories. One of his contemporaries, and perhaps a competitor, is Martin Schuster, the master trader in "The Three-cornered Wheel" (the first part of The Trouble Twisters). Schuster knows and respects Jewish traditions. He uses his knowledge of the Kabbalah to deal with the theocracy that the protagonists confront.
Centuries later, but in the same universe, we find Admiral Juan Cajal of the Terran Empire. Cajal commands the attack on the Domain of Ythri in The People of the Wind. Cajal is a devout Roman Catholic, and is portrayed very sympathetically in a story that is more a conflict more of good against good than of good against evil.
Anderson's fantasy provides a variety of other interesting examples. The novel Three Hearts and Three Lions is based on the myths of Catholic medieval Europe. The symbols of Catholic Christianity are an important part of the forces of law (the good side, opposed to "chaos") in that story. At the end of the story Holger Carlsen, the Danish hero, is received into the Roman Catholic Church.
Anderson has linked characters from several of his series in the taproom of The Old Phoenix, and there Holger Carlsen meets Prince Rupert of the Rhine, hero of A Midsummer Tempest. This story is set in an alternate world version of the English Civil War. Anderson does not care for the Puritans, but his protrayal of their Anglican opponents, including Rupert, shows that he is not hostile to Christianity as a whole. Also present at The Old Phoenix was Valeria Matuchek from Operation Chaos, a story where the forces of good include a Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest.
The universe of Anderson's hero Dominic Flandry is a science fiction version of the late Roman Empire, with Flandry clearly conscious of the impending fall. Recently Poul and Karen Anderson have written a fantasy tetralogy, The King of Ys, set in the time of the fall of the historical Western Roman Empire. By this time the older pagan beliefs were rapidly losing ground. With the establishment of the church many evil things were done in the name of Christ. It would be easy to write a story set in this period in which the Christians are the villains and the pagans the oppressed heroes.
However this is not what The King of Ys is about. The fall of the pagan city of Ys is the result of conflicts among the pagan Ysans and Irish and the Mithran Gratillonius, who is the hero of the series. It is the Christian Bishop Corentinus who helps the survivors build a new life in Armorica (modern Brittany) and is crucial to the final scenes of the series. Nor is Corentinus an isolated figure who just happens to be a Christian. He is linked to St. Martin of Tours and through him to St. Patrick. His role in the story depends on his position in the Catholic Church.
However, the presence of Christian characters is neither the most important nor the most interesting issue in seeing how Christianity is viewed in a work of fiction. Far more fundamental is the world view implied by the story itself. The work of J.R.R. Tolkien is the most obvious example of this distinction.
The world view of Anderson's fiction was discussed by Sandra Miesel in Against Time's Arrow: The High Crusade of Poul Anderson (San Bernardino, Borgo Press, 1978). Miesel sees the struggle against entropy as the common theme in Anderson's work, fantasy as well as science fiction. This struggle is often depicted in myth and symbolism, as in the struggle between law and chaos in Three Hearts and Three Lions or Operation Chaos. The struggles of the failing Roman or Terran empires can also be easily interpreted in this light.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that the total entropy of any closed, i.e. isolated, system will tend to increase, always making the system more disordered. The Second Law does allow an object to decrease its entropy, but it requires that such a decrease be paid for by increasing the entropy of the object's surroundings. Life can develop on the planet Earth, decreasing the entropy of the living matter. However, that life is completely dependent on solar energy, and the total entropy of the solar system is increasing. The Sun is using up its supply of nuclear energy, ultimately transforming it to disordered energy--heat.
>From this point one can treat the entire Universe as a thermodynamically closed system, and apply the Second law on the largest possible scale. All forms of life, above all human beings, create order in the world, but that order is achieved by decreasing the order of the world around them. Eventually all human institutions must fail, all living things must die, and all matter must decay. All things will come to an end in the "Heat Death" of the universe.
This simple application of the laws of thermodynamics to the universe as a whole is not without controversy, especially when Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is considered. Recently some noted physicists have questioned the view that the Second Law implies the end of all life. Freeman Dyson in "Time without end: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe" and Infinite in All Directions (New York, Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 97-121) has argued that while Carbon-based life as we now know it cannot survive indefinitely in the future, the laws of physics do not forbid intelligent life from existing, and indeed thriving forever, even in an expanding universe. John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 10), also discuss this possibility. They further suggest that intelligent life could under some circumstances be said to exist forever in a closed universe--one that recollapses in a finite time period.
Miesel does not consider these possibilities, and in fact Against Time's Arrow was written before they were widely discussed. She is following the "traditional" view of the Second Law as implying the end of all things, and of all life. This is the view she sees in Anderson's fiction. However, future discussions of the fate of life and the universe must consider them.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics was discovered in middle of the last century. Its cosmological implications were popularized in the 1930's by Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington. Jeans or Eddington could have inspired part of the prologue of Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions:
...a visiting physicist: one of those magnificent types which only Britain seems to produce, scientist, philosopher, poet, social critic, wit, the Renaissance come back in a gentler shape.
Miesel goes on to show that despite this prospect Anderson's characters do not despair. They are free to choose how they will respond to the universe and they can choose to struggle against the chaos around them. However, in that fight it is still possible, indeed necessary, to find love and happiness, and that too is seen throughout his fiction.
Turning from physics to faith, the Heat Death interpretation of the second law implies that any attempt to place ultimate reality in the universe as we know it must lead to despair, since everything in it is doomed. Not only is unending improvement unachievable, it is ultimately not possible to maintain the world even as it is now. This is a very uncomfortable prospect for a purely secular world view. However, William R. Inge, the "gloomy Dean" of St. Paul's cathedral, had a different reaction:
The idea of the end of the world is intolerable only to modernist philosophy, which finds in the idea of unending temporal progress a pitiful substitute for the blessed hope of everlasting life, and in an evolving God a shadowy ghost of the unchanging Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. It is this philosophy which makes Time itself an absolute value, and progress a cosmic principle. ... Modernist philosophy is, as I maintain, wrecked on the Second Law of Thermodynamics; it is no wonder that it finds the situation intolerable, and wriggles piteously to escape from its toils. (William R. Inge, God and the Astronomers, Warburton lectures 1931-1933 (London, Longmans Green, 1934), quoted in Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 168)
For Inge, as for most Christians, God is the creator of the universe, and distinct from it. The universe, as God's creation, may be subject to the Heat Death, but he is beyond its reach. Christianity has also always spoken of an end of the world, a Day of the Lord, a Dies Irae. While the Heat Death is described in mathematics rather than the apocalyptic symbolism of Daniel or Revelation, the conclusion is the same. All things of this world will pass away.
How does this apply to Anderson's fiction? Christianity is an important part of western history, which Anderson's fiction draws on extensively. Whatever Anderson's own views may be (Miesel describes him as an agnostic. Against Time's Arrow, p. 11) his fiction agrees with the traditional Christian view of the ultimate fate of the physical universe. Christians are called upon to show love in the world, which is also the response of Anderson's best characters. For all their failings, Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, and Dominic Flandry do show real compassion for those around them, as do the characters discussed above. Religious believers, especially Christians, are so often treated favorably by Anderson because their response to the world, when true to their beliefs, agrees with his.
Go to Glenn McDavid's home page or to note index or to religion and science fiction or science fiction or religion pages.
©1989, 1998 by Glenn T. McDavid. Much of the above originally appeared in a letter to Radio Free Thulcandra, issue 16, 1989.