| Article: 365
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews #27: Poul Anderson
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 19 Sep 93 21:37:08 GMT
Belated Reviews #27: Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson's been writing for over four decades, and as books such as
his recent "The Boat of a Million Years" indicate, he's still producing
significant work. His best books, however, appeared between the mid-fifties
and the mid-seventies (IMO, of course, but so's everything I write here), and
there is a good chance that many newer readers will be unaware of them.
It's difficult for me to characterize Anderson's work, largely because
there's so much of it, of so many types. Anderson's no stylist; his
prose is...competent. What his best books seem to have in common is a
combination of imagination and integrity. He typically takes a couple of
of interesting ideas -- however improbable -- and then uses them as a
foundation for honest story-telling. (Too many authors are content with
a stream of clever ideas -- or one idea, tested to destruction -- and don't
bother with the honest story-telling. Others -- and this is also true of
Anderson, in his more pedestrian adventure fiction -- try to do without
that special leap of imagination.) Sometimes the story doesn't work, or
the imaginative foundation is simply not strong enough, but when it does
work, we get books like:
"The High Crusade" (***+). Earth should have easy to terrorize and conquer,
but the Wersgorix ship that landed in England in 1345 got sloppy -- and
unlucky. It was captured by the local baron who loaded his army aboard
(loaded his entire village aboard) with the intention of using the ship to
retake Jerusalem. He thought he was thinking big. When the ship's
navigator locked in a course for the Wersgorix empire instead, Sir Roger
was left with no alternatives but to surrender or to take on an interstellar
empire. But then, Sir Roger had more swords at his command than they did.
"Operation Chaos" (****-) is a fixup novel -- four stories with connective
tissue added to make a coherent novel -- set in a world much like ours,
but based on magic instead of science -- a less-than-common premise in the
fifties. The heroes are Virginia Graylock -- a first-tier witch -- and
Steve Matuchek -- one of the best werewolves in the army. (Lycanthropy
became far more convenient once Polaroid produced an appropriately polarized
flash, and it was no longer necessary to depend on the Moon.) The first
three stories take them from their first meeting, during WWII -- as special
operatives sent to take out the enemy's Afreet -- to eventual marriage,
and constitute less than half the book. In the fourth and longest section,
their baby daughter is kidnapped by a demon from Hell and, with the help
of a possessed cat, they go there to retrieve her.
"Tau Zero" (***+) takes its title from a measure of relativistic
contraction. The Leonora Christina's interstellar mission demands that
its Bussard ramscoop accelerate it close enough to the speed of light for
the contraction to be noticeable. A freak accident, however, prevents the
ship from decelerating as planned. Instead, its only hope of survival
lies in accelerating closer and closer to the speed of light, while more
and more years go by back home -- until so much time has gone by that the
universe itself begins to age visibly. This is one of Anderson's rare
hard-sf novels. Characteristically, the author devotes most of his effort
to the characters who have to deal with the physical reality -- and not to
the novel-length physics lecture to which so much hard sf falls prey.
"Earthman's Burden" (***+), coauthored with Gordon Dickson, is a series
of stories featuring the Hokas -- aliens who look like teddy bears, and
have a tendency to get caught up in a good story. *Really* caught up.
Especially once humans discover them, and they discover human fiction.
Imagine being ambassador to a planet where one of the locals is liable to
take on the role of Sherlock Holmes and insist that you're Watson or, far
worse, take on the role of Elizabeth I and insist that you're Mary of Scots!
Somehow, the natives are able to live their fictional roles and still keep a
civilization running -- but it can be hard on the nerves of the poor
ambassador! "Hoka!" (**) collects the stories -- mostly weaker -- that
didn't make it into "Earthman's Burden".
"Brain Wave" (***+) is one of Anderson's earliest novels. Its premise is
one that is echoed in Vinge's recent "A Fire Upon the Deep": There are
zones in the galaxy within which intelligence doesn't work very well.
"Brain Wave" begins when, after millions of years, the galaxy's rotation
takes the Earth *out* of such a zone. At first the effects are subtle.
People are more insightful, animals are harder to control. As intelligence
continues to ramp up, the world experiences growing pains, as a society
and economy designed for people of 'normal' intelligence has to be made to
work for a population that is, literally, too smart for it. Once the
technical questions are settled, the hard ones still remain: What does a
world of IQ-400 people do with itself? And what becomes of the now-
intelligent animals that share that world?
That this review isn't much longer is due mainly to my preference for
pointing people to a manageably short reading list. Certainly there are
other books that could stand with the ones I've named. "The Star Fox"
(***+) doesn't hang on a gimmick. This space adventure -- of a man who
turns privateer to aid an occupied world abandoned by politicians -- is
an instance of an Anderson novel that stands up purely on the strength of
good story-telling. Another such instance is "The Corridors of Time" (***+),
about a man recruited into a war being fought through time. Nor did I
review "A Midsummer's Tempest" (***), which takes place in a world where
all of Shakespeare's plays are historical truth, rather than fiction. (I
mention it here just for the record: I didn't forget it, and I know that
many people think it deserves five stars. I'm just not one of them.)
Perhaps the most noticeable gap is my omission of the future history which
takes up the largest portion of Anderson's work. This history has three
particularly identifiable periods. There is the post-WWIII period, in
which the world pulls itself back together in an ultimately unsuccessful
attempt to build a rational society and leave its suicidal hatreds behind.
"Un-Man" (***), a powerful but dated novella about a special corps of UN
super-agents, belongs to this period. (More correctly, the stories set
in this period represent a different future history than those set in the
later periods, and one which Anderson abandoned.)
There is the period of unrestricted interstellar expansion, of merchant
adventurers, and of merchant princes like the colorful Nicholas van Rijn.
The early stories set in this period glorify it somewhat, but the tone of
the story "Lodestar" (***) (still later expanded to the novel "Mirkheim"),
which closes this period out, is one of disillusionment. And there is the
time of galactic empire. The numerous Dominic Flandry novels come at the
end of this period, when the empire is corrupt, tired, and on the verge of
collapse. Flandry himself is a cynical agent working to postpone that
collapse just a few more years. "The Rebel Worlds" (***) is one of the
better Flandry books -- not least for its tri-species composite aliens.
It's a large history and a large vision, but the novels and stories that
compose it are often unimpressive.
As I said, Poul Anderson's writing doesn't lend itself easily to
characterization. There is no 'typical' Anderson story or novel, just
honest writing that is often good and occasionally very good.
%A Anderson, Poul
%T The High Crusade
%T Operation Chaos
%T Tau Zero
%T Earthman's Burden
%O coauthored with Gordon R. Dickson
%T Brain Wave
Standard introduction and disclaimer for Belated Reviews follows.
Belated Reviews cover science fiction and fantasy of earlier decades.
They're for newer readers who have wondered about the older titles on the
shelves, or who are interested in what sf/f was like in its younger days.
The emphasis is on helping interested readers identify books to try first,
not on discussing the books in depth.
A general caveat is in order: Most of the classics of yesteryear have not
aged well. If you didn't encounter them back when, or in your early teens,
they will probably not give you the unforced pleasure they gave their
original audiences. You may find yourself having to make allowances for
writing you consider shallow or politics you consider regressive. When I
name specific titles, I'll often rate them using the following scale:
**** Recommended.
*** An old favorite that hasn't aged well, and wouldn't get a good
reception if it were written today. Enjoyable on its own terms.
** A solid book, worth reading if you like the author's works.
* Nothing special.
Additional disclaimers: Authors are not chosen for review in any particular
order. The reviews don't attempt to be comprehensive. No distinction is
made between books which are still in print and books which are not.
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." -- W.B. Yeats
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