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Poul Anderson
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 Poul Anderson is one of the standard hard science fiction writers, in the tradition of Kipling, in
the tradition of Campbell, in the tradition of Heinlein. He financed his honors degree in physics by writing,
and has remained a writer since graduating in 1948. Distinguished as a fantasy writer --
The Broken Sword (1954) was his first adult novel -- and a mystery writer -- his first mystery,
Perish By the Sword (1959), won the Cock Robin prize -- he is nevertheless principally one of the heroic figures of hard science fiction, a Campbell
man whose stories have appeared in Astounding/Analog for five decades.
Anderson has always defended the traditions of military honor in his fiction, and devoted much of
his effort to adventure plots. His many volumes of Dominic Flandry stories and novels are exemplars. But he
has also turned out a number of colorful, powerful hard science fiction stories and novels, from
Brain Wave (1954) to The Boat of a Million
Years (1989), that are generally perceived as his major works -- the most
famous is probably Tau Zero (1970). These are marked by astronomical and physical speculation and
large-scale Stapledonian vistas of time and space. Even in his swashbuckling adventure stories, he is famous for
beginning with calculations of the elements of the orbit of the world to be his setting, and allowing the
physics, chemistry and biology to follow logically. He is an admirer of Hal Clement's work, and himself wrote a
nonfiction book, Is There Life on Other
Worlds? (1963), on the general subject of what kinds of life forms
might inhabit what kinds of planets.
"Kyrie" is among his classic hard sf stories, one of the earliest astronomical sf tales to speculate
about black holes, and the seed of many other sf stories on the topic, including Frederik Pohl's award-winning
novel, Gateway (1977), Larry Niven's "Neutron Star" and "The Hole Man," and Jerry Pournelle's "He Fell into a
Dark Hole." A deep, many-layered blending of conventional sf tropes, told in Anderson's rich prose style,
"Kyrie" juxtaposes the sentimental and the coldly rational more subtly than, say, Godwin's "The Cold Equations,"
but the message is the same. "Kyrie" is also in the lineage of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star," and James Blish's
"A Case of Conscience," of sf stories which use images of astronomy and astronomical distance to address
problems of religion and metaphysics. The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction calls him "sf's most prolific writer
of any consistent quality." If any living sf writer is the heir to Heinlein's mantle as the dean of science fiction, it
is Poul Anderson.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.