The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Volume 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson #2

by Poul Anderson, Tom Canty (Illustrator), Rick Katze (Editor)

A collection of nineteen works includes fiction, verse, and essays and features the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning title story and "On Imaginary Science," an essay on science fiction.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Collections, Ebooks, Fiction

503 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Stephan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me put it this way: This book is excellent value for money if you want a random collection of Anderson's short works, especially (for the prose parts) his older works. It is, however, also quite cheap (at EUR 3.49 for the Kindle version).

Buyer beware: The title The Queen of Air and Darkness is overused. This is not (unlike both Amazon, and at the moment, Goodreads, claim) a 144 page book. It's an SF Masterworks re-release of the second volume of the NESFA collected works edition, and the original paper book weights in at a bit over 500 pages. It contains an interesting and somewhat eclectic collection of stories (most seem to be novella length, not typical short stories), poems, essays, and other works.

The extras beyond the collected works are a "publication history" (rather, a list of first publication information), a very short editor's introduction by Rick Katze, and a short bio sketch by Mike Resnik. They really don't add much value. The publication date for the novella that gave the collection its name is wrongly listed as November 1958, but it was really published in spring 1971. It won the 1971 Nebula and both Hugo and Locus awards in 1972.

So what's in it for the reader? I have to say that I'm very insensitive to written poetry, so I cannot comment on the poems. The stories are a mixed bag. Most are from the 1950th and early 1960s, and many reek of old-fashioned gender roles, social mores, and American frontier ethics. Most are also competently written - but often no more than that. Some highlights:
Operation Afreet is hilarious comedy about a Word War 3 (I think) in which magic, djinns, witches and werebeings all play a role. There are "six-broom aircraft", and an army being drenched in rain for weeks by weather sorcery.
Industrial Revolution is quite clever and funny, and deals with the early stages of an independent belter culture.
A World Called Maanerek is quite typical (for Anderson) science fantasy. It's a bit on the moralin-sour side, but the first half is quite intense.
Marque and Reprisal is a real stinker. With its premise it could be brilliantly bad action sf, or a thoughtful comment on interspecies relationships and the value of communication. Instead, it reads like one third of a bad (in the sense of bad) YA sf novel, sold incomplete for fast cash.
Uncleftish Beholding is Anderson showing us how clever he is. It's also good fun for the first few pages, and I can imagine that reading sessions at cons would be an absolute hoot.
The Critique of Impure Reason, on the other hand, is Anderson showing us how clever he thinks he is. It's a bit of a disappointment - there is not much Kant in the story, but a lot of lording it over the modern culture and art scene.

Overall, it was a bit of a slog to finish the book, but, to be fair, I did finish it.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

The weakness of this (and the whole series) is not the stories, but the fact an opportunity has been squandered. This is the collected short works, which currently runs to 5 volumes. However, there is no attempt to provide any kind of of structure. Each volume is a haphazard collection, so the stories are not collected chronologically or thematically, and there are no story notes that put them into any kind of context.
The collected works here just allows the reader to know they have all the available stories, and nothing more.

[Tyler Mackey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear God, this was at times a slog. Definitely worth it for exposure to some interesting thoughts in the possibilities Science Fiction largely abandoned due to a lack of analog constraints, but it's so much a product of its time it's hard for me to genuinely recommend the whole book. You can only have so many variations on "dashing intelligent libertarian man deals with stupid government to win gorgeous woman with spunky attitude and zero interest in thinking" before it gets unbearably tedious. As always, the Anthology Rankings, for people who want to skim:

1. My Object All Sublime
2. The Corkscrew of Space
3. The Pirate

Honorable Mentions: Uncleftish Beholding, The Longest Voyage

PS. That scene in To Build a World where Sevigny is looking around to find a public payphone is going to stay with me for years. Anderson can imagine being advanced enough have the capacity to build an atmosphere for the moon to start a self-sustaining life cycle, but not that we would ever do something as crazy as deny a simple and obvious benefit to the public good as cheaply accessible public communication

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories -- Time Patrol, alternate world fantasy, far-future adventure, nearer future in-solar-system adventure -- and essays on how to write, and on history, and poetry.

Plus of course, "Uncleftish Beholding," which will test your knowledge of the root words of many words in Atomic Theory.

A couple of them are comic -- including the one I like the least -- but the rest have the touch of Northern hardness he was so good at, even though many have happy endings. (Most? I'm not in the mood to count. 0:) I think the best is "A World Called Maanerek" -- a Dystopian government is experimenting along, and as is common when you experiment, you find results you don't expect. And "A Little Knowledge."

It's a sampler and gives only one of a given type, such as his Time Patrol stories, or the ones that went to make up Operation Chaos. A good sampling.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seemed to me that two recurring themes in Volume 1 of this 3-part anthology were characters with mental powers, and the aftermath of nuclear war. If I had to pick two themes for this volume, I would say they are resistance to, or defiance of, authority and hard-science explorations of alien worlds and alien races. One of the stories has both.

I don't know if the editors of the various volumes are consciously organizing the stories along these lines--their prefatory remarks, at least in these first two volumes, don't contain any indication of that. But the patterns are certainly clear.

In this volume, the stories that have elements of resisting authority in order to do what's right, or what's needed, are "Industrial Revolution," "Say It With Flowers" (probably my favorite story in this entire collection, and one that would make a splendid basis for a feature film treatment), and "Marque and Reprisal," all of which have characters who really know how to think outside the box.

Anderson was known for his creation of alien worlds and races that conformed to known physical and scientific rules, and his penchant is on full display in this volume with stories like "Queen of Air and Darkness," "The Longest Voyage," "The Pirate," "To Build a World," "The Corkscrew of Space" (a fun story set on Mars that shows how necessity can be the mother of invention), "A Little Knowledge" (which has a great plot twist), and the fittingly-named "Epilogue," which is both the last story in the volume and also a haunting farewell to Earth in the far future, that made me feel like I understood how the dinosaurs would feel if they were to see how we exist in the world they ruled for so many eons.

"A World Called Maanerek" falls into both categories, taking place on an alien planet colonized by humans and requiring the protagonists to resolve a clash of loyalties and cultures.

Of course, there are lots of other stories in the mix as well--Anderson was too full of ideas to get pigeon-holed into a couple of story patterns. "Operation Afreet" is a very fun mixture of magic and technology, and you'll have fun reading about the weird combinations he has come up with. There are a couple of time travel stories, "Brave to Be a King" and "My Object All Sublime," which give Anderson an opportunity to show off his masterful knowledge of history.

"Brake" puts its characters in a tight spot after a terrorist incident and they have to think their way out if they are to survive; warning that this one includes some pretty egregious stereotyping of females which was still pretty normal in 1957, when it was written. "The Burning Bridge" features a similar dilemma, though it is a moral one and not an astrophysical one. It has a great line, "No one in his right mind wants to be a colonist." "Innocent at Large" is a light-hearted story that reminds us not to judge books by their covers, while the very clever "Uncleftish Beholding" sees Anderson playing with his knowledge of the English language's Anglo-Saxon progenitors by describing atomic physics in language that a Viking could understand. "The Critique of Impure Reason" was my least favorite work in this collection. It reminded me of some of the stories in Asimov's "Robots" milieu, but I just couldn't identify with the characters, particularly the robot. It did have eerie overtones of today's AIs though, and how they can go off the rails if they are not trained on the right material--very prescient for something written in 1962.

Finally, the volume also contains three essays by Anderson: "Science Fiction and History," which dovetails nicely with his two time-travel stories; "Science and Creation" which gets a little into cosmology and religion, and which I feel didn't need to be written; and my favorite, "The Hardness of Hard Science Fiction," which explains his philosophy of creating alien worlds and races, which many years ago inspired me in the creation of my Traveller campaign, which I wanted to be as detailed and as consistent with known science as possible. Anderson was the master of hard sci-fi and that's why he's my favorite SF author.

EDIT: I never read others' reviews until after I've written my own. Now that I have, it appears that there are actually five volumes in this collection, not three, so it looks like I have some shopping to do. I also don't understand why so many reviewers say this (and volume 1) are "haphazard collections" of stories when the themes seem so clear to me.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book contains several memorable stories. But the percentage of routine overlong stuff is so high that it drags the entire volume down. While the editors deserve serious sort of appreciation and kudos for bringing the works back, a "best of" collection containing classics like "The Queen of Air and Darkness", " The Longest Voyage", and "Industrial Revolution" would have been much more preferable.
I'm not sure if the third volume of his collected works would appeal to me. I can only hope that there I would find a greater concentration of Sherlockian works in space, which obviously was the author's forte.

[Anthony Faber · Rating 3 out of 5]

This series is intended to keep his short fiction available, so it's kind of the opposite of a "best of" collection. Typical Anderson.