Tag Archives: Poul Anderson

Galactic Empires: Volume One

Hermetic Library Anthology Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Galactic Empires: Volume One [Amazon, Local Library] ed Brian W Aldiss.

Aldiss Galactic Empires Volume One

This anthology volume is made up of science fiction stories mostly from the third quarter of the 20th century (1951-1975). It is constructed around themes within the general space opera subgenre. Its four subsections are titled “A Sense of Perspective,” “Wider Still and Wider …,” “Horses in the Starship Hold,” and “The Health Service in the Skies.” The themes were not as coherently demonstrated as I would have liked, and the book got off to a shaky start with two weaker stories from authors I like: R. A. Lafferty and Arthur C. Clarke.

It was interesting to me to read the original Asimov “Foundation” story in the text first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942. Although it has been decades since I read the Foundation novel, one difference was obvious: Hari Seldon was not the pioneer of psychohistory, but simply “the greatest psychologist of our time” (96). I suspect some actual psychologists set Asimov straight regarding the aims and limitations of their discipline. The cliffhanger ending made this piece an odd inclusion here, though.

It had been a long while since I had read anything by Clifford Simak, and I found his longish story “Immigrant” to be one of the more enjoyable ones in the book. I also appreciated the rather naïve romp of Coppel’s “The Rebel of Valkyr,” even though its plot twist was telegraphed quite obviously. It offered better star wars than Star Wars. With some exceptions, I found the longer stories more deserving of my attention, and the shorter ones tended toward negligibility.

Representations of gender in these selections are often painfully dated, if not downright reactionary by today’s standards. There is only one female author included, and her story “Brightness Falls from the Air” is a mournful one about interracial exploitation.

I have a copy of Volume Two of this collection. The first volume was good enough that I expect to read the second, but not so cohesive that I feel any special urgency to do so.

A Circus of Hells

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews A Circus of Hells [Amazon] by Poul Anderson.

Anderson A Circus of Hells

I had read some of author Anderson’s fantasy novels before, but never his science fiction, and I note that A Circus of Hells is the second of a series of something like ten Terran Empire novels with the protagonist Dominic Flandry. I was motivated to pick it up by the jacket copy, which described an “infernal chess game on a forsaken moon” with pieces that were “strange, inhuman creatures…controlled by a deranged and brilliant computer brain.” I was hoping for a further spin on the living chess trope that is central to ERB’s Chessmen of Mars, and stems originally from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Unfortunately, the chess adventure was over by the end of the eighth chapter out of twenty. 

Far more important than the AI-driven robot chess game were the various intrigues with the human-rivalling Merseian race, and the exotic climate and native intelligences of the far-flung planet Talwin. The scenario and various emphases of the narrative reminded me of the SF role-playing game Traveller, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Anderson’s Terran Empire books were inspirational for the game authors. 

While a lot of the astronomical information seemed pretty up-to-date for science fiction written circa 1970, and the xenobiological ideas were fairly inventive, the galactic imperial setting was much like many written twenty years earlier. I was especially disappointed to find Anderson assuming the survival of Roman Catholicism basically unchanged into humanity’s interstellar far future. The conventional Christian piety of the prostitute Djana was an element I found difficult to credit, and it was quite integral to her character and her role in the progress of the story. 

In any case, I found the book as a whole short and quick-moving, but insufficiently interesting for me to seek out any further volumes.