3.DESCRIBING HISTORY FOR CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCES BY THE WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON.
Paul Anderson focuses intently on audience. That is, he wants you to dictate your writing styles, strategies, methods, processes, etc. predicated on who your reader is going to be. The key is to focus on your audience’s needs in relation to your purposes.rson's first future history, comprised (2018).
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.
Poul Anderson's contribution to OSS literature is of primary importance for its Jovian coverage.
In other words - hey, man, this guy's good on Jupiter.More qualified in science than are most sf authors, Anderson also is happily possessed of the soul of a romantic
The combination is a fortunate one, for anyone trying to write convincingly yet colourfully about life on a high-gravity world.
His Jovian forays are as follows:
The novella Call Me Joe; the novel Three Worlds to Conquer; and the passage which tells of a visit to Jupiter's Great Red Spotin the Flandry series interstellar adventure, Hunters of the Sky Cave.
Poul Anderson has also contributed to the literature of Mars with the pleasant, mellow The Martian Crown Jewels and with his powerful pursuit-tale Duel on Syrtis.
Duel on Syrtis makes you feel what it's like to be an intelligent Martian hunted like an animal by a ruthless Earthman.
Kreega shuddered in a sudden blast of wind. The night was enormous around him, above him, from the iron bitterness of the hills to the wheeling, glittering constellations light-years over his head. He reached out with his trembling perceptions, tuning himself to the brush and the wind and the small burrowing things underfoot, letting the night speak to him.
Alone, alone. There was not another Martian for a hundred miles of emptiness. There were only the tiny animals and the shivering brush and the thin, sad blowing of the wind.
And yet it turns out that Kreega is far from alone. While the Earthman pursues him with the aid of domesticated Martian "hound" and "hawk", the entire native biosphere awakes to the need to help the fugitive. This is not a figure of speech; something out-of-this-world really does happen.
The desert fought for him; the plants with their queer blind life that no Earthling would ever understand were on his side. Their thorny branches twisted away as he darted through and then came back to rake the flanks of the hound, slow him -
It is a very near thing. The helmeted Earthman with his thermal airsuit and rifle is far stronger than the puny Kreega who has only bow and arrow and spear. Kreega almost despairs; but...
The desert, the planet and its wind and sand under the high cold stars, the clean open land of silence and loneliness and a destiny which was not man's, spoke to him. The enormous oneness of life on Mars, drawn together against the cruel environment, stirred in his blood. As the sun went down and the stars blossomed forth in awesome frosty glory, Kreega began to think again.
He did not hate his persecutor, but the grimness of Mars was in him. He fought the war of all which was old and primitive and lost in its own dreams against the alien and the desecrator. It was as ancient and pitiless as life, that war, and each battle won or lost meant something even if no one ever heard of it.
You do not fight alone, whispered the desert. You fight for all Mars, and we are with you.
Anderson's Martian coverage ranges from the richly cultured inhabited Mars of The Martian Crown Jewels, through the bleaker but still inhabited Mars of Duel on Syrtis, to the thoroughly worn-out Mars of Twilight World. In the last fifty-or-so pages of this novel we are taken on the first expedition to a Mars where there is no native intelligent life, but where vegetation and small animal life still exist. (See the extract, Setting up a base on a worn-out Mars.)
Anderson also gives us fascinating visions of medium-future and far-future Earth, in The Corridors of Time, The Winter of the World and Epilogue.
The Corridors of Time (1965), "Duel on Syrtis" (Planet Stories, March 1951); "Call Me Joe" (Astounding, April 1957, and much anthologized since, e.g. in A Century of Science Fiction ed. Damon Knight, 1962); "The Martian Crown Jewels" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1959); Hunters of the Sky Cave (1959); Three Worlds to Conquer (1964); "Epilogue" (Analog, March 1962); Twilight World (1961); The Winter of the World (1975)
For the "Martian-influence" novel Shield, see the OSS Diary for 16th January 2017.
For a dawn scene on Anderson's Jupiter see the OSS Diary for 22nd February 2017. For the Jovian rainstorm, and authorial comment, seeThe Author's Voice-Over.
For a far-future Moon see the Diary for 17th May 2017.
For Anderson's views of Mars and Jupiter in The Byworlder, in which an alien from Sigma Draconis explores the Solar System, see Anderson on Tour - Lyrical but Compressed.
For the view of Jupiter from its innermost satellite in Call Me Joe, see Amalthea.
For a comparison with Bradbury see Venus - The Long Rain and the Big Rain.
For The Corridors of Time see Save Jupiter.
Extracts: see Jovian ground-dweller among sky folk and Heavy weather on Jupiter. For the Red Planet see Setting up a base on worn-out Mars.
Poul Anderson, who has died aged 74 from prostate cancer, published his first short story in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1947, and went on to produce more than 100 books, most of them novels. One of the last writers from science fiction's golden age, he was in the generation that followed authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl.
The late SF author James Blish, who called Anderson "the enduring explosion" because of his seemingly endless productivity, described his novel Tau Zero (1970) as "the ultimate hard science-fiction novel". Recently reissued in Britain as a classic Gollancz yellow jacket, it follows the ramifications of relativity theory to a startling conclusion, when a spaceship accelerates to the speed of light, causing an ever-widening disparity between external, and on-board, time.
Anderson's first novel, Brain Wave (1954), is regarded as one of his greatest; the solar system moves out of a force field which, for millennia, has been suppressing intelligence, and suddenly mankind and all animals become hyper-intelligent. The Boat Million Years (1989) deals with a different change to a much smaller group of people: eight immortals who are dissatisfied with the way history is moving.
In the great tradition of SF, many of Anderson's tales are linked in a loose "future history" in three main sequences, featuring the fat and boisterous interstellar merchant prince Nicholas van Rijn, the sophisticated and tough agent of the Terran empire, Dominic Flandry, and the Psychotechnic League stories about man's expansion out from the solar system into the galaxy.
Born to Danish parents in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Anderson graduated in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. His Scandinavian heritage and scientific training are evident throughout his work.
In a 1997 interview with the SF magazine Locus, Anderson 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." Indeed, his descriptive writing was often poetic, sometimes lush.
For Sir Arthur Clarke, Anderson was one of science fiction's giants, though he was as well known for his fantasy novels and his rewritings of myth as for his sometimes outrageous humour. The best example of this is his delightful short novel The Makeshift Rocket (1962), about an engineer who escapes a hostile planet in a spaceship made of beer kegs and powered by "hot agitated beer".
With Gordon R Dickson, who died in January, Anderson wrote several novels about the Hoka, teddy bear-like aliens who imitate human pop-culture, but who are unable to understand metaphor and allusion, taking it as factual - thus providing the authors with endless opportunities for puns and farce.
As a creative fantasy writer, his classics included The Broken Sword (1954), Three Hearts And Three Lions (1961) and A Midsummer Tempest (1974). The first is a dark tale based on Norse mythology, with two changeling half-brothers, one chivalrous and one cruel, who battle to a mutually destructive end.
The second is a splendid story of a man flung back in time to a world of Carolingian myth, of knights, damsels and dragons. The third is set in an alternate world where Shakespeare plays, particularly A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, really happen - the first chapter heading reads "Thunder and lightning. A heath about to be blasted." The war between the Cavaliers and Cromwell's Puritans includes observation balloons and steam trains, with Oberon and Titania joining King Arthur to fight against the industrial revolution.
In some later works, particularly the King historical fantasies of the late 1980s, Anderson collaborated with his wife Karen, whom he married in 1953. He also used a number of pseudonyms.
Sometimes criticised as rightwing, he described himself as "an 18th-century liberal", in the American libertarian sense. "As for the value of the individual, I'm quite consciously in the Heinleinian tradition there," he said in the Locus interview. "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."
His many science fiction awards included seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. President of the Science Fiction Writers of America (1972-73), he won the SFWA's Grandmaster Award in 1997, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame last year. Last month, he won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Genesis (2000).
He is survived by his wife and daughter.
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