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CONCLUTION
No single volume can encompass the "best of" an author like Poul Anderson, whose career spanned the history of, and set many of the benchmarks for the mixed genres of fantasy and hard science fiction. This volume is, rather, a collection of milestones that he, looking back, has identified along the way. Some are dated in their concepts and language (which he tells you up front, and they come by it honestly), but each presents you with a glittering gem of science fiction / fantasy history whose underlying ideas are as fresh today as when they first appeared. Above all, Poul Anderson understands and exalts the language. When you read a given verbal structure in an Anderson story, it is immediately clear to you, even if the verbiage is not commonplace, why it is worded the way it is and what it means. His prose often evokes the same exalted, multireferential effect that one receives from good poetry. As icing on this entirely edible cake, each story is placed in context with a brief preface provided by the author. This is a treasure.
Not one grabbed me, some were good but none of them made me lean back and say to my self, “that was a great read.” Poul Anderson died on this day back in 2001. Anderson’s career spanned over sixty years, from the 1940s to the early 2000s. He wrote fiction and non-fiction. He published in many genres: fantasy, science fiction, historicals, and mysteries. He wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of shorter pieces, all of a level of quality that was never less than competent—and sometimes better. The often acerbic Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls Anderson “his generation’s most prolific sf writer of any consistent quality[…].” (He was the anti-Lionel Fanthorpe.)
Two aspects of his work drew me to Anderson’s work as a teenager. One was his commitment to verisimilitude, which went beyond the usual hard-SF author’s focus on straightforward physics. Anderson’s interests were broad; as a result we got whimsy like “Uncleftish Beholding,” written in an alternate form of English lacking many common loan words, and essays like “On Thud and Blunder,” an attempt to facilitate greater realism in sword and sorcery.
The other element that guaranteed that teen me would be reading a lot of Anderson was that, as with Andre Norton, there were a lot of Anderson works to read (if Anderson’s books were the sort of thing you like to read). I’ve never seen an exact figure for the number of short works and novels Anderson wrote that I entirely trusted, but I do know two things: That number is not small and I’ve read a large fraction of it.
Here are five of my favourites, selected according to pure whim and also a desire not to recapitulate Anderson-related essays previously published on Tor.com. So, no World Without Stars, The High Crusade, The Broken Sword, or Trader to the Stars, because other essayists have already written about them. No Tau Zero or The Enemy Stars because I wrote about them. Happily, the pool of potential candidates is not small. In fact, it is large enough if I had to do this again in another year, I could come up with an entirely different list of five favourites.
Many SF novels start with One Big Change. Brain Wave‘s OBC is very big indeed: The Earth emerges from an intelligence-suppressing field. Every creature that can think suddenly finds itself five times smarter. All humans of normal intelligence wake to find themselves geniuses. Animals discover that they can now think around the barriers used to control them. Human institutions crumble because humans are too bright to believe in them, while the agricultural systems on which we depend are themselves threatened by animals no longer willing to be stock or prey.
This could very easily have been an apocalyptic tale (superhuman humans shrug and carry on eating creatures that now fully understand what’s going on)—but that’s not the direction in which a comparatively young Anderson took his novel. Instead, the various viewpoint characters do their best to find new, better ways to live.
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