1.THE CONTRIBUTION AND THE UNIQUENESS OF HISTORICAL GENRE WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON TO THE WORLD LITERATURE.
Poul Anderson was born on November 25, 1926, in Bristol, Pennsylvania to Scandinavian parents. Shortly after his birth, his father, Anton Anderson moved the family to Texas, where they lived for over ten years. Following Anton Anderson's death, his widow took the children to Denmark. The family returned to the United States after the outbreak of World War II, settling eventually on a Minnesota farm. While he was an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, Anderson's first stories were published by John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction: "Tomorrow's Children" by Anderson and F. N. Waldrop in March 1947 and a sequel, "Chain of Logic" by Anderson alone, in July. He earned his B.A. in physics with honors but became a freelance writer after he graduated in 1948. He placed his third story in the December Astounding. Anderson married Karen Kruse in 1953 and moved with her to the San Francisco Bay area. Their daughter Astrid (now married to science fiction author Greg Bear) was born in 1954. They made their home in Orinda, California. Over the years Poul gave many readings at The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore in Berkeley; his widow later donated his typewriter and desk to the store.
In 1965, Algis Budrys said that Anderson "has for some time been science fiction's best storyteller". He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) in 1966 and of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), also in the mid-1960s. The latter was a loosely-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors led by Lin Carter, originally eight in number, with entry by credentials as a fantasy writer alone. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy. The Science Fiction Writers of America made Anderson its 16th SFWA Grand Master in 1998 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2000, its fifth class of two deceased and two living writers. He died of prostate cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. A few of his novels were first published posthumously.
Poul Anderson will be remembered as the supreme SCI-FI master of his time. He wrote more than 100 novels and short stories during the sci-fi golden age. As a physics graduate, his book plot always leaned towards scientific ideas. Poul Anderson became a published novelist in 1952 with the novel Vault of the Ages. Over the course of his career, he would win the Hugo Award seven times, the Nebula Award three times, the Prometheus Award four times and also receive the Gandalf and SFWA Grand Master awards.
From hard science fiction to space opera to alternate history to historical fantasy to high fantasy, Poul Anderson wrote across the full extent of the genre. He won the Gandalf Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in fantasy in 1978, as well as, exactly twenty years later, SFWA’s own ollege degree was in physics, which provided a solid grounding for his scienGrand Master Award.
His cce fiction, but he was equally at home in the world of myth and magic. He took pride in his Danish parentage and the literary and cultural heritage of Denmark; his writings often drew from these sources, as from the works of Shakespeare (notably in A Midsummer Tempest) and the history and the legend cycles of the European Middle Ages. He was both the author of the hard-sfclassics Brain Wave and Tau Zero and a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America.
His first short stories were published in the late 1940s, but in 1950, with the publication of seven stories and his first novel (a Young Adult postapocalyptic adventure, Vault of the Ages), his career settled into a pace that kept up for the next fifty years. He won seven Hugos and three Nebulas, all for short works, and was nominated for many more; he received his one major award for a novel, the John Campbell Memorial Award, for Genesis in 2000.
In a genre that often splinters along ideological lines—hard versus “fuzzy” fantasy, science versus magic, rigorous research versus let it happen as you go along—Anderson found a way to have it all. He brought the rigor of scientific thinking into the world of Faerie, sometimes literally as in the modern protagonist of the magical parallel-worlds time-travel adventure Three Hearts and Three Lions, sometimes figuratively or metaphorically as with the dream-weaving aliens in “The Queen of Air and Darkness.” He loved to play with the clash and contrast of cultures, such as the abortive alien invasion of medieval England in The High Crusade, which turned on its head the trope of spacefaring aliens (or humans) conquering a less advanced culture.
Along with a considerable number of standalone novels and shorter works, he constructed sprawling series in the grand SF tradition, including the two linked cycles of the Technic History, the Nicholas van Rijn sequence and the tales of Dominic Flandry; a shorter series revolving around the Psychotechnic League; as well as the Time Patrol, the History of Rustum, and the Last Viking, plus two collaborative series: the tales of the Hoka, with Gordon R. Dickson, and historical-fantasy cycle, The King of Ys, with his wife Karen Anderson. All of these series ranged across the spectrum of genres, and featured complex characters, extensive worldbuilding, and a range of tone and emphasis from humorous to deadly serious.
Anderson’s work, for all its breadth and sheer quantity (and quality), revolved around a number of consistent themes. The pride of his Danish heritage combined with a strong belief in the individual’s right to freedom. In an interview in Locus in 1997 he said, “As for the value of the individual, I’m quite consciously in the Heinleinian tradition there. It’s partly an emotional matter–a libertarian predilection, a prejudice in favour of individual freedom–and partly an intellectual distrust based on looking at the historical record…a distrust of large, encompassing systems.” It came as a corollary that for Anderson the exploration of space was not a luxury; it was not optional. It was a necessity.
At the same time he believed that there was more to the past and future than some in the genre might conceive of. In the same Locus interview, he said, “So much American science fiction is parochial–not as true now as it was years ago–but the assumption is of one culture in the future, more or less like ours, with the same ideals and the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn’t work that way.” His worldbuilding might be informed by his particular cultural background and beliefs (and it tended to be heavy on the side of the straight-white-male), but he made what was, for a male writer of his generation, an unusual effort to open up the cultures and assumptions of his characters and worlds.
The scope of Anderson’s worldbuilding, wherever on the genre spectrum the work might fall, was huge—and it was a multiverse rather than a single universe. He pushed the limits of genre to the utmost, paving the way for the genre-bending and genre-busting writers and works that followed. In Tau Zero (which James Blish called “the ultimate science fiction novel”), a starship, as it approaches the speed of light, accelerates right out of this universe and into a new one. He questioned generally unquestioned science-fictional assumptions, such as that humans could live on any planet they landed on: in The Man Who Counts, part of the Van Rijn cycle, for example, the protagonist is stranded on a world where a human can’t eat the food—the biochemistry is too different.
Anderson’s body of work alone would have secured his place as one of the most versatile and consistently excellent, not to mention influential, writers in the genre, but he put in his time as fan and pro, as well. He served as President of SFWA; he helped to found the Society for Creative Anachronism; and he was a regular at conventions all over the science-fictional world. For that service, combined with the range and depth and scope of his work, he amply deserves the title of Grand Master.
Going for infinity pays homage to one of the speculative fiction's greatest authors of the twentieth century by providing a taste of Poul Anderson's works as well as his retrospective thoughts over the six decades he wrote. The tales run the gamut of science fiction and fantasy with mystery thrown in showing how diverse a writer Mr. Anderson was. Some of the science fiction seems obsolete, but when looked from a historiographic perspective provides insight into the times the stories were written and into the mind of a creative individual. The fantasies and detective contributions hold up better as they clearly show Mr. Anderson's real talent of turning the obviously impossible into something that feels real and genuine; thus leaving the awed audience celebrating the classic works of a noteworthy renaissance writer.
Poul William Anderson was an American writer of Speculative Fiction, mainly science fiction, and occasional Historical Fiction and Fantasy, who was also involved in the founding of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Though much of his work was dramatic, he also wrote a fair amount of humor. He was known for combining the nuts-and-bolts of hard science fiction with interesting and unusual characters. His novel Tau Zero was one of the first to consider the extreme implications of relativity, and he was one of the first authors to create a biologically plausible Winged Humanoid alien species. On the more humorous side, he was the first to postulate a spaceship powered by beer. His penchant for doing the research also extended to his fantasy and historical works. He has been cited as a major source for Dungeons & Dragons. But he was best known for his sweeping Technic History space opera series, which was formed by Canon Welding his early Polysotechnic League stories with his later Dominic Flandry/Terran Empire stories.
The Other Wiki lists recurring themes in his work as (among others) "larger-than-life characters who succeed gleefully or fail heroically," the folly of underestimating "primitive" cultures, and "tragic conflict... with no villains at all." His famous essay, "On Thud and Blunder," where he takes potshots at those who fail to use basic research, or at least common sense when writing Heroic Fantasy, is the Trope Namer for Thud and Blunder, though the term has acquired a meaning he never intended.
Oh, and it really is "Poul Anderson", not "Paul Anderson". So let's not mistake one for the others
His other works provides examples of:
The Beautiful Elite: The aliens in Sargasso of Lost Starships.
BettyandVeronica:
Played Up to Eleven in Sargasso of Lost Starships, where Helena is attractive and military, and Valduma is inhuman, possessed of great powers, superhumanly beautiful, sadistic, and completely mad.
Auri and Storm in Corridors of Time, the first a simple and gentle Neolithic girl, the second a time-traveler with superhuman technology, ruthlessly working to prevent her culture from losing in a temporal war.
BittersweetEnding: Lots.
Blithe Spirit: CaitlínMulryan, the eponymous character of The Avatar.
The Captain: Mostly in space.
Charles Atlas Superpower: "The Sensitive Man" is revealed, in the end, to have learned how to invoke hysterical strength and other abilities normally found only in psychotics.
Combat Pragmatist: Poul Anderson is fond of these characters. In his Wing Alek series of short stories the main character is forbidden from ever using killing to win a conflict (luckily the villains don't know that) so he uses underhanded methods to get the villains to defeat themselves.
Crush Blush: In "Virgin Planet", the hero blushes when the heroines dice to decide who gets him.
Cultured Badass: In "A Little Knowledge".
Dangerous Forbidden Technique: "The Sensitive Man" concludes with the main character's observation that he's about to have a nervous breakdown.
"Dear John" Letter: In the Back Story of "The Corkscrew Of Space".
Did Not Get the Girl: Common. In "Star Fog" for instance, Laure learns that the ship's crew are no longer able to interbreed with standard humanity, and their compulsive need to have children means he can not marry the one of them he has fallen in love with. Ditto for Rachaela, where the titular she-demon and her human lover have to sadly part ways.
Dirty Business: The aliens' view, in "No Truce with Kings".
Divided States of America: In "No Truce With Kings".
Duel to the Death: In "Holmgang" the plot rises to this.
Dumb Dinos: The dinosaurs in "Wildcat" are so stupid that they are incredibly difficult to kill, staying active enough to fight even after one is literally gutted by gunfire. The carnivores also do not recognize carrion as food, only attacking live prey.
Extremophile Lifeforms: "Call Me Joe", a 1957 novellete, features a paraplegic who explores the frigid surface of Jupiter via a remote-controlled, centaur-like artificial body that's designed to drink methane and craft tools out of water ice. He encounters hostile wildlife which evolved there, hence is also adapted to such conditions.
The Fair Folk: They appear in many Anderson stories, often with some kind of twist. ExamplesincludeTheQueenofAirandDarkness.
FeminineWomenCanCook: In "Brake", a woman, the sole surviving passenger, helps by cooking the meals while the men of the crew frantically work at saving the ship.
FeudalFuture: Many.
In Corridors of Time, the hero realizes that the futuristic society that recruited him to fight a dystopia is rather dystopian itself when he is dropped in it and learns that the queen has high tech medical treatment while the poor woman he meets looks ancient at forty because of her lack of it.
In Sargasso of Lost Starships, Donovan still has local authority despite the conquest because of their feudal loyalties.
FirstContact: The novelette The Enemy Stars deals with an accidental First Contact between a human and the aliens that save his life, and the sequel The Ways of Love deals with how humans handle the first alien beings on Earth (not well, in some cases).
FlowerMotifs: The aliens loved this in "The Pirate".
GodsNeedPrayerBadly: Averted in the short story The Food of the Gods. A being or concept needs some initial worship to achieve Godhood, but after that are relatively self-sustaining. (If a bithungry . . . )
Grey-and-GrayMorality
HistoricalFantasy:Mother of Kings is based on the Norsesagas with a low-fantastic element.
HomeSweetHome: Why they stopped looking for Earth in "Gypsy".
HornyDevils: The main character, an AlchoholicWriter, falls in love with the title demon in Rachaela, who insists she's only after his soul. Ultimately she falls for his charms, and they can't stay together because she refuses to allow him to sell his soul for her hand in marriage.
Humanoid Aliens
HumanityIs Advanced
HumanPopsicle: Used in "The Burning Bridge" for interstellar colonization.
I DidWhat I HadtoDo: In "The Burning Bridge", the captain fakes a message to persuade them to go on.
I'm a Humanitarian: Central to all of a planet's cultures in "Sharing of Flesh".
Immortal Procreation Clause: A Boat of Million Years has fertile immortals. Unfortunately, thechildrenaremortal.
Improbably High I.Q.: In "Turning Point," invoked to be averted; it's meaningless to talk of how high an average IQ the planet of geniuses has, because the scale really doesn't work past 180.
Inn Between the Worlds: The Old Phoenix Tavern, which appears in several works.
It Was a Gift: Invoked as an excuse in "A Little Knowledge".
King in the Mountain: In Orion Shall Rise, the line "Orion shall rise" is used by many citizens of a subjugated land.
Lady Land: An all-female Lost Colony is discovered in the novel Virgin Planet.
Lonely Together: In "Losers' Night", the Old Phoenix, the Inn Between the Worlds, has a night where all the guests are failures. Unusually for the inn, this night allows people to magically understand each other — so they can commiserate.
Master of Your Domain: A lot of his books, e.g. Boat of A Million Years.
Matter of Life and Death: In "Marque and Reprisal".
Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane The Devil's Game.:
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: In The Man Who Counts.
The Men First: In "Arsenal Port".
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: "Journey's End".
Mind over Matter: In Sargasso of Lost Starships.
Morally Bankrupt Banker is parodied in passing in The Makeshift Rocket:
"Oh, oh," said Herr Syrup, sympathetically, for not even the owners of the Black Sphere Line could be as ruthless as any and all Martian bankers. They positively enjoyed foreclosing. They made a ceremony of it, at which dancing clerks strewed cancelled checks while a chorus of vice presidents sang a litany. "Andnow business sisnot so good, vat?"
More Hero Than Thou: "Sunjammer" — they argue about who will do the dangerous part, based on two of them being young but unmarried, and one being married but old.
TheMutiny: In "Brake".
My Grandson, Myself: n The Boat of a Million Years I several characters do this.
Nice to the Waiter: Ganch is repulsed by this in "Inside Straight".
Non-Human Sidekick: "To Build A World".
Not a Game: Inverted in "The Un-Man" — a two-year-old needs to think it's a game to avoid being traumatized.
Old Retainer: Basil's slave in Sargasso of Lost Starships
Portal Network: In The Enemy Stars (1958), mankind has maintained a program to deploy a portal network for centuries — while civilizations rose and fell on Earth — using STL ships to deliver portals to other solar systems. Alienshave been doingthe samething.
... But still the ships fell upward through the night, and always there were men to stand watch upon them. Sometimes the men wore peaked caps and comets, sometimes steel helmets, sometimes decorous gray cowls, eventually blue berets with winged stars; but always they watched the ships, and more and more often as the decades passed they brought their craft to new harbors.
After ten generations, the Southern Cross was not quite halfway to her own goal, though she was the farthest from Earth of any human work.
Privateer: TheStarFox.
Sacred Hospitality: Iason invokes it by name in "Eutopia."
Second Love: Proposed but not feasible in "Arsenal Port." In "Admirality" heappear stohave recovere denough.
Sherlock Scan: In "Queen of Air and Darkness."
Shrouded in Myth: In Virgin Planet, a planet of women, isolated by accident, has legends of these marvelous beings, men. A real, flesh-and-blood man appears, and they initially conclude he's not marvelous enough and must be an alien.
Somewhere, an Equestrian Is Crying: While his essay "On Thud and Blunder" is extremely detailed on how to treat horses as living creatures, instead of the usual Automaton Horses in fiction, he does state the outdated pitfall of how stallions are dangerous around menstruating women.
Settle for Sibling: Or for your dead husband's clone-brother.
Starfish Aliens: In Starfarers, one of the sentient species is an intelligent layer of star. Notthewholestar, justpartofitsskin.
Stockholm Syndrome: Wanda reminds herself of this in Year of the Ransom.
Taking the Veil: The end of "Kyrie", and a plot twist in "The Live Coward".
TornApartbytheMobTalking in Your Sleep: A danger in "The Burning Bridge" — the man must become a Human Popsicle so he will not reveal all.
TalkingtotheDead: Evalyn in "Sharing of the Flesh" — she fears it shows how disturbed she is.
Temporal Duplication: In "There Will Be Time", Jack Havig is a natural time traveler who defends himself against a bully by getting a bunch of temporal doubles to gang up on him.
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: In "A Little Knowledge".
ThickerThanWater:
In "Say It With Flowers", the main character pleads for news on the grounds that he had a relative on a ship.
Telepathy: Sargasso of Lost Starships — used for psychic attacks.
TimeTravel: Lots of uses, beside the "Time Patrol" series.
"My Object All Sublime" features far future people who use it for punishment.
"Flight to Forever" revolves about a time machine in a universe where you can only move forward.
"The Man Who CameEarly": The titular man was sent back in time after a lightning strike:
In The Big Rain, Lucifer is a uranium mine on Venus which is used by the planet's dictatorial government as a political prison; all convicted "enemies of the state" are left in the pit to dig (without radiation gear) until the horrific working conditions kill them. When the nascent resistance movement storms the mine and liberates the prisoners, the leader attempts to have the captured Guardians running the place locked up in its holding cells, but is later awoken to learn that they were literally torn to pieces by the freed convicts guarding them. Having seen for himself the kindo ftreatment they hadinflictedon the convicts, he can't bring himself to give them more than a dressing-down.
Trappedin the Past: "The Man Who CameEarly": In this novelette, an American soldier stationed in Iceland is sent back to the Viking Era after being hit by lightning.
Twice-ToldTale: "Goat Song" is Orpheus.
UnabletoSupport a Wife: In "A Critique of Impure Reason", he rejects the notion of living off his wife's salary.
Ungovernable Galaxy: His SF stories frequently discuss how difficult it is to govern a planet, let alone more than one.
Venus Is Wet: In "Sister Planet", Venus is an ocean world with no landmasses. In a variation from the norm, it doesn't have a human-breathable atmosphere.
When Trees Attack: An alien forest in The Star Fox.
Write What You Know: Anderson was Danish-American and often made reference to Scandinavia in his work. His late novel War of the Gods was a modern rendition of one of the stories from the 12th century Danish work Gesta Danorum ("Deeds of the Danes").
Would Not Hit a Girl: "To Build A World".
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