POUL ANDERSON: AN APPRECIATION.

SALMAN RUSHDIE has claimed that young authors in Britain can talk about nothing but contemporary English lifestyles. As a comment on the literary establishment this is only too sadly true. But that is not the whole of the story. There are other traditions.

The writings of Poul Anderson, one of America's best and most original and successful as well as most prolific fantasy and science-fiction authors, provide some good examples of triumphantly Western themes, set in a vast sweep of contexts and atmospheres, and recounted with great if unobtrusive intelligence and literary skill.

A well as science and poetry, Anderson, who was born in 1926, can at times provide something which seems to have quite disappeared from conventional mainstream literature: a sense of magnificence. Having referred to him as "prolific" I must add that I can only refer to a small selection of his stories. There are indeed many I have not read--the pleasures of anticipation here are large.

Sandra Miesel, in Against Time's Arrow: The High Crusade of Poul Anderson (1978) sees the common theme of Anderson's fantasy and science-fiction as the struggle against the universe's entropy, or to put it another way, the struggle between cosmos and encroaching chaos. This is certainly true of some--probably a majority--of the stories but it is difficult to say that it is an invariable rule. Anderson is so prolific and versatile a writer that there can hardly be said to be a single universal theme, but his work is fairly constantly on the side of the positive aspects of Western civilisation.

In many of these stories the positive aspect of the concept of "power" tends to give humans freedom: that is, power in the physical, utilitarian sense of more energy, not "power" in the sense of political control.

This is not the "power" of political enslavement but the "power" to liberate humans from the stony cruelty and darkness of subsistence labour. (Some Roman emperors actually banned labour-saving inventions on the benevolent and humanitarian grounds that they would do slaves out of a job. The Roman empire manufactured tiny, smelly, inefficient oil-lamps by the million for centuries and sat in reeking semi-darkness without trying to improve them.) The words of science and science-fiction writer S.M. Stirling in an anthology, Power, to which Anderson contributed, are an eloquent answer to excessive anti-industrial or anti-technological enthusiasms:

 
   By the High Middle Ages tens of thousands of water and wind mills were 
   scattered all over Europe. Grinding grain, eliminating the killing labour 
   that Homer's heroes blithely assigned to their slave-women, fulling cloth, 
   sawing wood and stone; every groaning wooden wheel represented one less 
   whip-mark laid on a human back.