Poul Anderson would have been 100 on 25 November, and the celebrations have started early. Humble Bundle has teamed up with Open Road Media for a “100 Years of Poul Anderson” ebook bundle, with 42 items on offer on the usual pay-what-you-choose basis. The charity share of the money goes to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, which seems fitting for a writer who was once its president. According to File 770, the bundle runs for roughly three more weeks, which means it should close somewhere near the man’s actual birthday. Somebody at Humble has a sense of occasion.
The bundle includes The Broken Sword, his 1954 Norse fantasy, and The Boat of a Million Years, his 1989 novel about a handful of immortals drifting through human history. Those two alone make the point about Anderson’s range. The Broken Sword came out in the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring and is about as different from Tolkien as it’s possible to get while still having elves in it: a bleak, bloody tale of changelings, trolls and a cursed blade, with none of the Shire’s second breakfasts. Michael Moorcock has long been one of its admirers, and you can see the debt in every tormented albino who ever wielded a soul-drinking sword.
Anderson was ridiculously prolific, and it’s easy to forget how much of the furniture of modern SF he built. He wrote one of the great hard SF novels in Tau Zero (1970), in which a starship with a broken deceleration system accelerates closer and closer to the speed of light until its crew outlive the universe. That is the definitive answer to anyone who has ever complained about a delayed train. He gave us the Time Patrol, the trader-prince Nicholas van Rijn, the Hoka stories with Gordon R. Dickson, and seven Hugos and three Nebulas along the way. SFWA made him a Grand Master in 1997, four years before his death in 2001.
SFcrowsnest has been working through a fair bit of the Anderson back catalogue lately, including Tau Zero, War of the Wing-Men and After Doomsday, and it’s striking how well much of it holds up. He wrote quickly and often, but he rarely wrote carelessly, and he had a historian’s eye for how ordinary people behave when the world ends around them.
If you have never read him, a bundle that lets you name your own price is about the lowest-risk introduction to a Grand Master you’ll find. If you have, it’s a chance to fill the gaps on the shelf, and send a few quid to the writers who came after him. A hundred years on, Anderson is still accelerating. We just hope he’s remembered to fix the brakes.
The bundle is at Humble Bundle. Via File 770.
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