I was prompted to buy this omnibus edition of two of his fantasy novels by reading an extract of Three Hearts & Three Lions in his retrospective collection, Going For Infinity. His novella “The Sorrow of Odin the Goth” is, in my opinion, the single best time-travel story ever written. I like hard science, I like puzzles, I like words and language, I like the outdoors … I was a reader made for Poul Anderson’s writing.įor big, roomy, high-concept SF, we have Tau Zero and The Avatar for rollicking adventure, well-constructed puzzles and superior world-building, there are his stories of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry and for carefully crafted time-travel stories combined with compelling evocations of past times, there’s his Time Patrol series. And he was given to lyrical descriptions of the outdoors-the smells, the sounds, the sights, the feeling of being out in a big, wide, complicated world (not necessarily our own world). I’ve come late to his fantasy work, since I don’t generally have much taste for that genre.įrom his earliest work, Anderson was a stylist-he cultivated a slightly archaic vocabulary and sentence structure, such that his work can often be recognized from just a few paragraphs. He wrote hard science fiction adventures and puzzle stories, which is how I came to start reading his work. His name is Danish (pronounce it “pole”).
Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was a prolific American science fiction and fantasy writer.
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