Poul Anderson

Poul William Anderson, writer: born Bristol, Pennsylvania 25 November 1926; married 1953 Karen Kruse (one daughter); died Orinda, California 31 July 2001.

After more than half a century in the public eye, the American science fiction writer Poul Anderson still seemed on the verge of writing his greatest novel.

His vision had darkened over that half-century, a natural consequence perhaps of the failure of the world to grow and flourish along the lines he had argued for; but, after 90 or so books, and hundreds of stories, he continued to sound young. He continued to write as though his next book might make all the difference.

Poul William Anderson was born in 1926, in Bristol, Pennsylvania. As a child, he lived briefly in Denmark; the whole of his writing career was coloured by the content and tone of the Scandinavian sagas. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1948. At university, he had already met his fellow writer Gordon R. Dickson – their intermittent collaborations continued almost until Dickson's death earlier this year – and had already published his first professional story in 1947.

From this point, Anderson's life story was one whose main events, as far as the world is concerned, were books. Immediately upon graduation, he became a professional freelance writer, serving a short apprenticeship in the pulp magazines of the late 1940s. In 1953 he married Karen Kruse, who also collaborated on several of his works. Their daughter, Astrid, is married to the science fiction writer Greg Bear.

Anderson published his first novel, Vault of the Ages, in 1952. Between then and the publication of the ambitious Genesis in 2000, he released an average of two books a year. He gained seven Hugo Awards and three Nebulas for individual stories. For his life's work, he was given a Hugo Grand Master Award in 1978, and a Nebula Grand Master Award in 1997.

It may, however, be a clue to the underlying oddity of Anderson's career that he never received a Hugo or Nebula for any of his novels, though several of them have become classics in the field. For readers of science fiction and fantasy, he was a constant presence in their literary sights. He was an eminence, a name to be reckoned with, a seemingly safe read; but he never gained a name as one of the central shapers of a genre whose transformations, over the half-century of his career, have been profound.

There are reasons for this abiding lack of a strong central image. Though his work was never less than professional, and was very frequently inspired, he wrote too much to be easily grasped either by readers or by science fiction scholars. He wrote lots of space operas, decades before that despised form began, in the 1990s, to intrigue younger writers of ambition.

His political views – the kind of surly but compassionate libertarianism that may be unique to mid-century America – decreasingly matched the temper of our increasingly interconnected times. He expounded these views in two or three long series of connected novels, and many readers felt he played with a stacked deck in making his arguments win out. Occasionally, he descended to a somewhat stilted poetic manner, which consorted uneasily with the hard scientific thought that underlaid almost all his work. And finally, his four or five best novels defiantly refused to resemble one another.

In Anderson's first significant tale, Brain Wave (1954), our local solar system passes (after thousands of years of imprisonment) out of a galactic cloud which had been muffling brain activity; as soon as we escape, we begin to be as bright as we need to be in order to glory in the universe. The High Crusade (1960) transports a medieval knight and his liegemen to another planet, where they establish a boisterous feudalism. Tau Zero (1970) is a brilliant essay on the life and death of the entire universe, thinly coated with story. The Boat of a Million Years (1989) intricately chronicles the lives of a cadre of immortals whose lives intersect, over centuries, with our own mayfly spans; eventually, the immortals become impatient with us.

And there were dozens more, mostly science fiction; but fantasy novels of strong interest included Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961), A Midsummer Tempest (1974), which takes a kaleiodoscopic view of Shakespeare, and The Merman's Children (1979).

It was all perhaps too much, too various, too grumpy, too moody; at the same time, his whole huge corpus, in the end, seemed celebratory. He celebrated the world, the flesh, the devil, and story itself.

John Clute