Poul Anderson (1926–2001)

This novel takes a common sci-fi premise – an alien race’s first contact with Earth – and adds an unusual twist: what if this contact took place in the year 1345? In the small English village of Ansby, Sir Roger de Tourneville and his vassals are about to join King Edward III on crusade when a giant alien ship suddenly lands among them. Despite being terrified at the appearance of what they believe to be demons, Sir Roger and his men fight the aliens and manage to gain control of the show more ship. Then, due to one alien’s cunning, the spaceship returns to its home planet – with Sir Roger and his Englishmen aboard!

This was my first experience with Poul Anderson, but it certainly won’t be my last! The description of this book just tickled me; how could I resist a book about aliens who land on Earth during the Middle Ages? I was expecting it to read almost like a parody and be extremely funny, but this novel actually has a lot of depth to it. I was surprised by how much I ended up caring for the characters, like Sir Roger, his chronicler Brother Parvus, and his wife Lady Catherine. I also think the book is well plotted, and the ending was a surprise in a very good way! I really, really enjoyed this book and will definitely be seeking out Anderson’s other work. show less

Another disappointment ... hack work that starts out as something with real promise and then plods into a variant of Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo only more puerile if that were possible. It was apparently knocked out in 1961 though this edition has a 1981 copyright attached.

There are two distinct halves that makes it look like a mash-up between two novellas - one with considerable potential and the second not worth reading and which we can summarise as standard rocket to Mars adventure and show more a Cold War battle with evil post-apocalyptic Soviet-like rivals. Yawn!

This is a shame because the initial core idea is interesting and the writing is often evocative of landscape and character. Anderson postulates that the genetic damage to humanity of a nuclear war is far greater to all earthly life than had been envisaged. Mutation becomes normal.

There was a point when I thought I would not be able to put the book down as this idea is developed not only as a story of post-apocalyptic survival but of how a remaining system of governance (a benign military temporary dictatorship) might deal with the problem both practically and ethically.

There appears at one point to be an opportunity for a 'Herrenvolk' to emerge. This is enables a brief and even courageous moral discussion of this option which would still have been touchy only fifteen years after the defeat of the national socialist regime. It is rejected as impractical and wrong.

This could have led to a precursor of Marvel's X-Men series which first appeared in 1963 or, much later, of Darwin's Radio (1999) and Darwin's Children (2002) by Greg Bear but Anderson bottles it. He abandons development for some quick thrills.

The mutant young people might find themselves briefly in a version of the Xavier Institute but their transition is to a simplistic story about building a new world for mutated humanity on Mars. It is crass and poorly thought out. Credible (for 1961) hard genetic science collapses into the incredible.

This is a shame. I can only recommend that you read up to the decision to go to Mars about half way through the book and then just stop unless you like wasting your life as I do on 'completism'. You may get something out of the first half that you will definitely lose in the second.

For Poul Anderson completists this story might have the virtue of being another working out of his frequent obsession with the best forms of governance for human conquest of space. There is a rather touching and well written postscript that 'justifies' his preferred progressive strategy.

His view of earth-based humanity is nevertheless depressingly negative with the attitudes that led to apocalypse leading to the same type of conflict post-apocalypse. One suspects a negative view of the human ability not to resort to violence is in-built somewhere in the American psyche.

The irony of it is that this pessimism is matched to another American trait - a complete inability not to see any other system of human thought as something that can be compromised with to common ends. The 'Siberians' are regarded as simply wrong and so free to be killed.

The 'optimism' in the postscript is essentially based on humanity ceasing to be human as we understand it and to have 'mutated' into something 'better', adapted to new weird environments much as we were supposed to have been mutated from apes. 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

The Terran Empire is "old and fat," and in terminal decline. Nonetheless, despite its many problems, its fall would be worse - heralding a dark age, the "long night." One of the few who would attempt the Sisyphean task of forestalling the Empire's demise is Dominic Flandry - Ensign Flandry serves as a sort of prequel, establishing some of the foundational events and relationships which would forge him into the "Agent of Terra" in future novels.

Without betraying too much of the plot, the bulk show more of the story takes place on a planet on the border between the Terran Empire and the Merseians, a peer-power which is in something of a cold war with Terra. The planet is divided between two sentient species - the land-dwelling-sea-sailing Tigeries, a cat-people which are supported by the Terrans, and Seatrolls, and aquatic species supported by the Merseians. The two Iron-age species are at intermittent war over coastal resources, and are used as proxies as the two space-faring empires vie for control of the planet without resorting to open warfare.

While the story is principally one of adventure, what I appreciate about Anderson is that he does not shy away, or hand-wave the human cost . . . or should I say sentient cost? When powers play the Great Game, people get hurt, and those who get hurt the most are the pawns, the proxies who fight it out while the Great Powers largely avoid bloodshed of their own. By not ignoring this aspect, the actions in the story have serious stakes and consequences, which are not always acknowledged in Adventure Science-Fiction. The way Anderson delves into the cultures of the various species blends a mix of humanity and otherness, giving them depth and a sympathetic perspective - the Merseians even have a few viewpoint chapters which help flesh out their attitudes and reveal how they approach situations in a different manner from that of humanity.

There's a review on this page which states "Space opera that's showing its age." - and I could not feel more differently. Given the attitudes and actions we see on the world stage today, in some ways it feels more relevant than ever. show less