Poul Anderson (1926–2001)

‘In olden time,’ said Hugi, ‘richt after the Fall, nigh everything were Chaos, see ye. But step by step ’tis been driven back. The longest step was when the Saviour lived on earth, for then naught o’ darkness could stand...'

Three Hearts and Three Lions is one of those classic heroic fantasy novels that satisfies on almost every level. Published originally in 1953 and expanded in 1961, it tells the story of Holger Carlsen, an engineer from Denmark who is suddenly transported from a show more World War II battlefield to a world of magic, myths, and monsters. He awakens in a forest without his clothes, where a fully equipped warhorse named Papillion grazes peacefully. Taking the armor, weapons and clothing from the horse's back, Holger notices the shield that hangs from the saddle. Something familiar about the design stirs his memory: three hearts and three lions. But nothing more comes. And yet he can ride the horse and wield the sword skillfully.

As he struggles to make sense of why he is there and how to return, Holger finds himself deeply involved in the battle between Chaos and Law. He gains the friendship of Hugi the dwarf and Alianor the swan maiden, but he find himself at odds with the Elf-lord Duke Alfric and the sorceress Morgan Le Fey.

For fans of heroic fantasy, Three Hearts and Three Lions has nearly everything one could wish: dragons, magic swords, werewolves, the land of Faerie, quests, tragedy, romance, humor, adventure--all held together by an underlying theme and a fairytale atmosphere. While it does not have the sophistication or breadth of The Lord of the Rings, it has an unexpected depth and heart, especially for such a short work.

Three Heart and Three Lions is a true classic from the golden age of fantasy and is listed in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books. show less

“The Last Viking” Series

One does not need to familiarize oneself very much with Poul Anderson’s works before learning that he had – and sometimes freely and indulged – a serious “Viking obsession”. For those who like slight old-fashioned fantasy or historical fiction set in the Viking Age, this is a good thing.

“The Last Viking” series was published as a trilogy of three separate paperbacks in 1980. In fact, these were co-written with Poul’s wife, Karen Anderson, though show more her name does not usually appear in the credits on published versions. No individual book exceeds 300 pages, making the series as a whole still shorter than a modern fantasy or historical fiction novel.

Together, “The Last Viking” series recounts in fictionalized form the life and times of Harald “Hardrada” (i.e., the “hard-ruler”) Sigurdarson (Old Norse: Haraldr harðráða Sigurðarson), king of Norway in the early/mid-11th century AD. The Andersons were not the first modern authors to tackle this subject nor were they to be the last.

Harald himself was a colorful, complicated figure whose eventful career took him from Scandinavia to Byzantium before it ended in England. The main source for his life is his saga within the Heimskringla compendium of sagas of Norwegian kings (where it is perhaps the most readable for a modern audience), though the Andersons make a point of having dug into other medieval Danish, Byzantine, German, and English sources to round out their own take on Harald’s tale. This is, overall, not a bad thing, though they sometimes seem a little too beholden to their sources, cramming anecdotes or references to anecdotes – not to mention a fair bit of historical background into expository dialogue or plain info-dumps. One sometimes feels that there is perhaps more than enough detail for books of these lengths; or, alternatively, the books needed to be longer to provide adequate scope to the material. These are, moreover, mid-20th-century (more than even late-20th-century) novels, but with deep roots in the historical novels of previous generations. Though not going “full William Morris”, the Andersons use archaic or archaizing terms freely (many modern readers may need to reach for a well-stocked dictionary) and cleave system for Anglicizing Old Norse names that may occasionally cause even the silent reader to stumble.

On the other hand, at their best, the narrative and descriptions are rich with evocative prose, and there’s little doubt that the authors (presumably Poul, especially) have a deep feeling for their subject and setting. If one has a taste for Viking-Age adventure helmed by a driven, somewhat flawed, but always compelling protagonist in somewhat stentorian but often vibrant language, then the Andersons will deliver for you in “The Last Viking” series.

The Road of the Sea Horse (The Last Viking, #2)

The second book in the series, The Road of the Sea Horse, covers the life of Harald Harðráða from c. 1046 to c. 1061. Having returned to Norway after a formative career as a mercenary commander in the Byzantine Empire, Harald finds his nephew Magnus (illegitimate son of Harald’s half-brother St. Óláf) on the throne. Harald essentially strongarms Magnus into an agreement to share the rulership of Norway, but also throws his weight into the ongoing conflict between Magnus and Svein Estridsson (despite a brief political dalliance with Svein before joining with Magnus) over the rulership of Denmark. Historically, Magnus then died the very next year, and the convenience of this to Harald has long raised questions for scholars about the extent to which Harald had a hand in the matter. In the Andersons’ novel, Harald might be said to have indeed worked to have brought about Magnus’s death, if not perhaps having been directly responsible – and one has the sense that this is exactly what the Anderson’s Harald (and perhaps the historical Harald) wanted people to think: “I have not technically done anything wrong – but you ought to understand that you shouldn’t get in my way”.

That said, much of the narrative in this book deals precisely with things that get in Harald’s way. Harald has been fired by his experiences with the Byzantine Empire to bring what he sees as a stronger, more stable, and more modern style of kingship to Norway, ideally Denmark – and, indeed, beyond. He muses over the hope of restoring (perhaps bettering) the “North Sea Empire” of King Knut, which (during Harald’s childhood and exile) had included Denmark, Norway, and English (as well as, at least briefly, parts of Sweden). To this end, Harald seeks to consolidate power in Norway by crushing local enemies or binding local allies to him. He also, somewhat obsessively, campaigns year after year in Denmark, winning considerable plunder, though without ever decisively defeating Svein – and his Norwegian levies eventually begin to tire of this interminable foreign adventurer.

Harald’s political and military frustrations are mirrored by his personal ones. Having left his “one true love”, the Byzantine noblewoman Maria, behind when he fled Byzantium, Harald has married Elizabeth (daughter of Yaroslav of the Kyivan Rus') largely out of expedience. But his and Elizabeth’s personalities are not terribly well matched, and Harald formally installs the fiery Thora (daughter of one of Harald’s nobles) as an official concubine. Unsurprisingly, there is little love lost between Elizabeth and Thora; both bear Harald children, though Harald mostly struggles to understand or get on with any of them. Yet with time, Thora’s own strong personality contributes to plenty of conflict between her and Harald, and Harald’s semi-(un)officially bigamous domestic situation sputters along with Harald never quite being able to achieve what he wants – largely contingent on his failure to get everyone around him to do what he wants.

If there is a theme to this second book in The Last Viking series, it is that of Harald’s frustration that no one understands or cooperates with his glorious purpose – without understanding (or at least caring) that his purpose is more annoying than glorious those around him. Harald’s single-minded vision and ambition are also his flaw and his tragedy. The Andersons do fine work in allowing the reader to simultaneously sympathize with Harald even as we see his problems more clearly than he ever will.

The novel ends with a brief episode (based on passages from Adam of Bremen’s History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen) in which Harald leads an exploratory fleet into the Arctic seas, hoping to find a fabled and marvelously clement land of Hyperborea. In the event, they find only mists and ice. At last bowing to the grumblings of his followers, Harald turns back from this venture – though one would be right to expect he’s not yet done trying to make a mark on his world. show less

The 'Psychotechnic League' sequence is didactic science fiction that is very much of its time (1950s). It has not lasted well and is, frankly, rather boring and simplistic, a reflection of a relatively young man's naive political and adventuresome fantasies.

It seems that Anderson's attempt to create an entire future history based on a rather creepy idea of Nietzschean supermen operating somewhat Schmittian techniques of manipulation and subversion under the banner of the United Nations show more collapsed later under his own disillusionment with the UN.

He stopped writing these stories in 1968, not uncoincidentally with the era of the Vietnam War which he supported. The United Nations, once the vehicle for the unification of humanity (in his view) in its expansion to the stars, now looked flaccid and weak.

The conspiracy of ruthless liberal elites which Anderson wanted was not on the cards in the 1960s although some would argue that it has very much returned with a vengeance in the decades since then and is now playing its last card with weapons supply to Kiev.

This volume only collects the first four stories, not chronologically in terms of writing but in terms of telling the tale of the psychotechnic universe. In this order, the book only gets up to the point where Earth has to crush an alternative world view that emerges on Venus.

The one point when I thought I might go on to read the rest of the series came with Anderson's evocative and 'realistic' (we now know Venus is uninhabitable for humans) evocation of a sturdy collectivist regime and ideology and its logic in relation to its planet.

Unfortunately even this last story (which originally appeared in Astounding in 1954) collapses half way through into another dull one man and his girl fighting for the future in a tiresome battle and a last minute rescue - things have not moved on very far from Flash Gordon.

I shall not be bothering with the rest of the sequence not because Anderson cannot write well when an idea is up to scratch but because the good writing is placed at the service of such political hogwash and conventional story telling that life is too short to hope he does better later.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the case is ideological. Anderson was on the right and backed the Vietnam War. Here we have the ruthless elite mind-set of the sort of men who could undertake saturation bombing to save villagers by destroying the village.

From that perspective, though actually very bad literature, the stories capture something of the psychopathy of American liberalism at its most expansive. Anderson's vision is supra-national and universal but entirely along expected American ideological lines.

At one point, he seems to predict the rise of national populism as (in his view) an evil based on the central evil of the book - nationalism and war derived from human contestation rather than unification under a manipulative guardian class capable of ruthless action to define the future.

Well, one man's evil is another man's good. I found, reading these tales, a welling up of awareness of what I would think of as evil emerging in the attempt to fight what was merely bad. The future, it would seem, is to be built primarily on lies and murder.

The future, of course, is to be a future of liberal democratic values and 'freedom'. The few can be sacrificed for the sake of the many, expressed most brutally in 'The Big Rain' (the story based on Venus) where our hero knowingly sacrifices his comrades in the greater cause.

This ideology of sacrifice for values is clearly, in later stories, to be spread throughout the solar system and galaxy. Personally, I find it as thoroughly obnoxious as I do its current day iteration which is sacrificing millions of Ukrainians on the altar of liberal expansion.

Yet it is good to see books like this still available. The mentality of Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay, of Robert McNamara in his Vietnam days, of a self-referential intellectual-professional guardian elite who will die to the last worker for an idea, has to be understood in order for it to be defeated.

I think I would have been quite happy to have seen the villains, unpleasant though they are, wipe the floor with the Psychotechnic League by the time I had finished all four stories, not because they were right but because the League is so very very wrong. show less

In the far future, humans only inhabit the stars as personality simulations, subroutines in vast, powerful artificial intelligencies that form a "galactic brain". One such uploaded mind is Christian Brannock. As an engineer, he helped build the first great works in space and was one of the first to work in intimate symbiosis with the AIs who, rather than man, colonized the stars. On Earth, the reigning intelligence is Gaia, a computer that rules human affairs and also posseses, in its show more libraries, presevered human minds it uses to ruin elaborate simulations of real and alternate histories.

Millions of years pass in this novel's almost Stapledonian sweep, and the galactic brain becomes concerned about the seeming obsession of Gaia with Earth history, her secretiveness, and her unresponsiveness to their proposal on whether the now geologically ancient Earth should be saved from a bloated sun, a test run for greater galactic engineering to come. A version of the Brannock mind is copied and sent on his way to Earth.

There he, and a slightly different copy, attempt to figure out what Gaia's up to. One version, inhabiting a robot's body, explores the dying Earth. The other engages in talk and travel with Lucinda Ashcroft, a personality inhabiting Gaia.

This novel puts together, in a surprisingly successful way, just about all the strains of Anderson's previous works from the epic sweep of Tau Zero (SF Collector's Edition) (Gollancz SF collector's edition)to his heroic fantasy to the uploaded minds of some of his most recent science fiction to alternate histories and time travel. The novel's sense of true tragedy is not new to Anderson, but, as the title hints, there is an unexpected theological flavor that is rare, but not unknown, in his work.

This novel should not only satisfy any fan of Anderson's but also serve as a good introduction to the rest of his work. show less