7 Conquests

by Poul Anderson

7 harrowing stories of men caught up in tomorrow's age of ultraviolence

Kings Who Die evokes the special terrors that confront spacemen captured in interpla-netary war.

Wildcat chronicles a desperate attempt to send a team of men through a time machine back into the age of brontosaurs—there to prospect for oil and pump it back into the present.

Cold Victory depicts the holocaust of an interplanetary civil war fought to prevent Earth's secession from the Solar Union.

Inside Straight spins the tale of a peaceful planet that employs the superstrategies of gambling tipsters to foil its archenemies.

Details unfolds a suspenseful drama of international events influenced by unseen visitors.

License probes the fate of man living in a world where violence is legalized by state licenses.

Strange Bedfellows describes the mind-boggling intricacies of corporate political battles in tomorrow's world.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Collections, Speculative Fiction, Fiction

278 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1984

About the author

Pseudonym A. A. Craig, Michael Karageorge, Winston P. Sanders, P. A. Kingsley.

Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.[2][3]

Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously.


Series:
* Time Patrol
* Psychotechnic League
* Trygve Yamamura
* Harvest of Stars
* King of Ys
* Last Viking
* Hoka
* Future history of the Polesotechnic League
* Flandry

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of stories on the same theme -- the theme of war, and well, obviously, conquest. That can get a bit samey, reading them in one sitting, but it's an interesting collection (each with a short introduction by the author explaining the germ of the story idea).

Some of them are pretty well written -- they've got an emotional punch, the narrative tricks are very good: I'm thinking particularly of 'Kings Who Die' and 'Cold Victory'. Some are less impressive, just fun because of the idea -- putting men in the Jurassic period to escape nuclear war ('Wildcats'), licences to kill/kidnap/etc with a vaguely Old Norse tinge (weregild being a thing, in 'Licence').

Overall, interesting, but not exactly a must-read, I think.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very enjoyable collection of Anderson's short stories. This is one of the earliest books I read by him.

[Jäger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah, well. I loved Poul Anderson back in the day...Three Hearts and Three Lions, Tau Zero and others. But this little collection has not worn well. Writing style, plots, and so on are all pretty archaic. The way women are written is old fashioned at best, sexist and mysoginistic at worst.

There are other works that have held up far better than this one.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seven short sf stories. A Science Fiction Book Club selection.

[Larry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite an average collection of early-ish military sf stories.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

…we shall be looking at the same thing several times, through the same pair of eyes but from different angles. Thus we may begin to understand how complex and mysterious the thing must be.

The “thing” is “human conflict leading to institutionalized violence”.

The key word is “institutionalized.” Societies have generally found ways to keep murder, battery, rape, and riot within some bounds. When they fail to do so, throughout history it has been a symptom of their breakdown… But no government thus far has established a similar protection from war: for this is a proceeding of society itself.

By “society”, he clearly means any group of people. And by “the same thing several times… at different angles”, he is not talking about the same story from different angles, but different stories angling in to war, institutionalized violence, and the interaction between the two.

These are all fascinating stories. One of the strangest is “License” in which the society has chosen wide bounds for keeping crime in check: anyone can apply for a license to, at the least, assassinate or kidnap another person. The system includes weregild, and the people within the story believe in the system, even when they argue its flaws. This is one of the hardest things for an author to do, create a crazy world that its denizens reasonably believe is sane.

The highlights were “Kings Who Die”, “Details”, and “Strange Bedfellows”. “Kings Who Die” postulates that war is necessary for human psychological survival, but that in the age of nuclear weapons war means no human physical survival. So the society pushes war off into space, makes heroes of those who take part. But this is also a rousing high-tech adventure story with amazing twists throughout.

“Details” postulates, like many old science fiction stories (and this is from 1956) that there is a great cosmic civilization guiding lesser civilizations to maturity. But it also postulates, much more realistically, that any such gigantic civilization is going to be a cesspool of bureaucracy and nepotism. So what happens to an obscure planet at the edge of the galaxy, when a cosmic bureaucrat tries to guide it away from self-destruction?

Finally, in “Strange Bedfellows”, a Lunar terraforming project is both the cause of world peace and the cause of world dissension. There’s a big explosion in the project, and it turns out that the cause was almost certainly sabotage. The main character—from the already terraformed Venus—must deliver the damaged parts to the appropriate authorities on Earth for examination—and there are a lot of people who don’t want him to get there.

This, like “Kings Who Die”, is High Adventure with Big Questions.

These stories date from 1955 through 1969, but, except for minor anachronisms, could be set in modern futures.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice collection of a handful of short stories by my favorite author. All have the theme of conquest and war, and why man fights. I get the impression that some of the stories in this collection are kind of obscure; I certainly had not read any of them in any of the other Anderson anthologies I have.

[Kenneth Flusche · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting short stories. A little dated the ones from the 50's smoke, use slide rules, and earth viewed from space is white with grey shadows much like we view the moon, The final story copyright 1964. has the character think has the smoking girl had her anti-cancer shot.

[Matti Kujala · Rating 4 out of 5]

7 stories most of which are pretty good ones.