Admiralty the collected.., p.1
Admiralty: The Collected Short Stories Volume 4, page 1
Admiralty
Volume Four
The Collected Short Works of
Poul Anderson
Edited by Rick Katze
www.sfgateway.com
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The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
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Contents
TITLE PAGE
GATEWAY INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS
PUBLICATION HISTORY
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
“POUL ANDERSON” BY DAVID G. HARTWELL
ADMIRALTY
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISPLACED HOUND
DELENDA EST
THE PUGILIST
INSIDE STRAIGHT
LODESTAR
THE BITTER BREAD
GYPSY
MARIUS
HOME
QUIXOTE AND THE WINDMILL
BLACK BODIES
KYRIE
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
HOLMGANG
GOAT SONG
THE BARRIER MOMENT
THE STAR BEAST
EUTOPIA
EUTOPIA (AFTERWORD)
HORSE TRADER
MURPHY’S HALL
SISTER PLANET
AMONG THIEVES
OPERATION CHANGELING
WEBSITE
ALSO BY POUL ANDERSON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Publication History
“Poul Anderson” by David G. Hartwell is original to this volume.
“Admiralty” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1963.
“The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound” by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson first appeared in Universe Science Fiction, December 1953.
“Delenda Est” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1955.
“The Pugilist” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1973.
“Inside Straight” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1955.
“Lodestar” first appeared in The John W Campbell Memorial Anthology, Random House, 1973.
“The Bitter Bread” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, December 1975.
“Gypsy” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1950.
“Marius” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1957.
“Home”, originally published under the title of “The Disinherited”, first appeared in Orbit 1, Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1966.
“Quixote and the Windmill” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1950.
“Black Bodies”, a revised version of “Physicist’s Lament”, first published in 1992.
“Kyrie” first appeared in The Farthest Reaches, Pocket Books, 1968.
“The Problem of Pain” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1973.
“Holmgang”, originally published until the title of “Out of the Iron Womb”, first appeared in Planet Stories, Summer 1955.
“Goat Song” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1972.
“The Barrier Moment” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (Analog Science Fact & Fiction), March 1960.
“The Star Beast” first appeared in Super Science Stories, September 1950.
“Eutopia” first appeared in Dangerous Visions, Doubleday and Co. 1967.
“Eutopia (afterword) first appeared in Past Times TOR Books, 1984.
“Horse Trader” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1953.
“Murphy’s Hall” first appeared in Infinity Two, Lancer Books 1971.
“Sister Planet” first appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, May 1959.
“Among Thieves” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1957.
“Operation Changeling” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June 1969.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
This is volume 4 in a series collecting Poul Anderson’s short fiction. I had originally planned for 6 volumes encompassing about 1.5 million words. I already have a list of stories for volume 5 with a significant additional number of stories which will form the basis for volume 6. Since Anderson’s short fiction totals over 4 million words, I now expect that the series will be at least 7 volumes.
Some stories are a piece of a larger history. Some are stand-alone. These volumes are not intended to include complete series in a single volume. Nor are they published in any internal chronological order. For the most part, except for a few changes in the words used by Poul Anderson in later versions of the stories, I have tried to use the original magazine version.
As such, you will find stories of time travel, fantasy, the near future, and the far future which showcase Anderson’s talent.
Manse Everard, David Falkyn, and Nicholas van Rijn are represented in this volume. In addition to the characters previously listed, Volume 5 is planned to include a Dominic Flandry story.
At the time that some of these stories were written, the events described in them were still possible. “The Pugilist” is a story about the future which will not happen. It is well-written and quite logical assuming that certain things happened in the 20th Century which, fortunately, did not happen.
While we now know that the physical attributes of the Venus as described in “Sister Planet” are not possible, this should not interfere with the reading of the story.
Poul Anderson was a devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes. Previous volumes have included a Sherlockian story. This volume is no different. See “The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound”, cowritten with Gordon R. Dickson.
Sit back, open the book and read. And enjoy reading stories by a master craftsman who gave us so many good stories.
Rick Katze
Framingham, MA
October 2010
POUL ANDERSON
BY DAVID G. HARTWELL
Poul Anderson’s “The Saturn Game” won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novella in 1982, a choice therefore of both readers and writers. It is a story of men and women who have traveled far, some of whom out of boredom and lack of useful work have allowed themselves too much involvement in fantasy role-playing—they have turned away from real nature into the realms of the imagination. Then the natural universe confronts them with great beauty and great danger. And, enchanted by the beauty, they blind themselves to the danger. Time and again they fail to hear the voice of reason and so their flaw is sad and frustrating, if not tragic. Certainly it is deadly. And it is not theirs alone, for there are other groups of gamers exploring elsewhere perhaps in similar danger.
This is an allegory for our time as well as theirs, I think, calling out for psychological strength and balance in the face of the seduction of beguiling entertainments, in order that we might survive and achieve our goals. It is a sad story, in a way, but a wonderful story too, and filled with strange and compelling landscapes that have the virtue of reality. In it, Anderson uses both a fantasy style, a poetic language of allusion and metric rhythms, and a science fiction style, colloquial and clear, perhaps a bit hard-boiled in this case for contrast. The voice of reason is, in the end more powerful, but only just. There are many moments throughout the story when we feel, with the characters, that fantasy will get us through the worst moments, and this is perhaps Anderson’s greatest achievement, and the root source of the story’s emotional impact: that it does not, though often we want it to, and that SF triumphs over fantasy.
Poul Anderson, one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction who lent particular honor to that title, died at the end of July 2001. He was a gentleman, a gentle wit, and a professional writer of astonishing competence, varied talents and interests, and a thoughtful and underappreciated stylist.
Poul Anderson’s first published SF story was in Astounding, 194
I thought so highly of his writings and his authorial persona that I was initially surprised, and I admit a little disappointed upon first meeting him to find he mostly wanted to talk about contracts and the mechanics of publishing. This was 1972 and I was a young consulting editor who had bought, or participated in buying, a five-book package of new novels from him. I remember him sitting there on the sofa at LACon 3 in the SFWA suite calmly talking business while Philip K. Dick convinced a young woman in a belly-dancing outfit to lie down on the carpet to demonstrate how she could move a quarter from her tummy into her navel by muscular control. I has mistakenly assumed that he would be personally flamboyant and dominate the room, as he so often dominated the issues of magazines in which his stories appeared.
Poul Anderson spent his early years as a writer in Minnesota, with his friends Gordon R. Dickson and Clifford D. Simak; later in the 1950s, he moved to California (the Bay Area, where he lived for the rest of his life) and become friends with Frank Herbert and Jack Vance as well. The three of them and their families all lived together on a houseboat one summer. I have heard stories about that summer from all of them. He was married to the poet and writer Karen Anderson, a famous beauty in her day—with whom he has also collaborated—and their daughter, Astrid, is married to Greg Bear. To the readers and writers who grew up reading his work he was something of a heroic figure, a living giant of the SF field.
And he was a big man, a sailor of small boats in his day (Jerry Pournelle used Poul the sailor as the model for the central character of one of his Wade Curtis paperback thrillers), stronger even than he looked, but also a talented poet. There was something of the Melancholy Dane about him, but also something of the Viking adventurer out for fun and profit. He used to go out and fight as a swordsman in mock battles put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism. I never saw it, but I heard he was a formidable opponent.
He never let his math skills from his undergraduate degree in physics rust, and was known to do appropriate calculations in designing the planetary and other settings of his fictions. I was pleased and somewhat awestruck to see that side of him in person, over dinner, as he enumerated—as he was calculating them in his head—many details of the nature of a world he might consider writing about, derived on the spot from the nature of its orbit and sun. First the science, then the fiction.
He was a popular guest at science fiction conventions around the world and an enthusiastic attendee. You might not have recognized him at first, because he was just as likely to be sitting in a corner drinking a beer and talking to someone about contractual terms, or politics, in later years as he moved somewhat to the right (somewhat in the manner of Robert A. Heinlein, who was his model early on). He didn’t want to be taken to dinner in Berkeley, which he referred to as The People’s Republic of Berkeley. But ask him a question and you would recognize in the response as wise and sharp a mind behind the answer as was behind the writing.
During the fifties and the following four decades he produced a long string of fine SF and fantasy adventure stories and novels. “He is perhaps sf’s most prolific writer of any consistent quality,” said The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. I concur. The extraordinary thing is that he continued to write so well, given that he wrote so much. James Blish, in the 1950s, called him “the continuing explosion.” I can’t think of an Anderson book or story I couldn’t recommend for reading pleasure.
His devotion both to science and to fiction made him one of the most admired and popular living SF writers. He continued the hard SF mode of Robert A. Heinlein and John W. Campbell, the Golden Age tradition that has yielded a high proportion of the classics of the field. It is also the tradition of Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells, of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. His best SF novels include Brain Wave, The Enemy Stars, The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and The Boat of a Million Years, and recently Genesis—and perhaps a dozen more. He won the Hugo Award for short fiction seven times. Of his many excellent collections, All One Universe is perhaps most revealing of the man, since it contains not only first class SF stories but also several fine essays and extensive story notes by Anderson, who has been notably reticent in his other books.
He also wrote an impressive body of fantasy fiction, most notably The Broken Sword, Three Hearts and Three Lions, A Midsummer Tempest, the novels of Ys, in collaboration with Karen, and the stories that make up Operation Chaos. He wrote mysteries for a while in the late fifties and early sixties, good ones, and was a Baker Street Irregular.
Anderson was a Romantic and a rugged individualist, with an affection for pastoral landscapes worthy of Wordsworth or Shelley, unusual in one who writes with such devotion about science, technology, and space travel. The only comparison that comes to mind is Arthur C. Clarke, for instance Clarke’s poetic description of earthrise as seen on the moon, in Earthlight. Look, for instance, at the opening paragraphs of his famous story, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” for as lovely and precise a description of a field of flowers as you could find in SF—but they are alien flowers and the description serves to establish differences from our world as well as to give sensuous details and establish a mood. Not enough has been said about his command of technique and stylistic excellences as a writer, but I regard him as one of the premier masters of setting ever in the SF field. Whether he is being vivid and imaginative, as in the example above, or vivid and realistically true to known scientific facts and images, as in his depictions of distant astronomical vistas in Tau Zero or “Kyrie,” Anderson is precise and sensitive to sensuous detail.
His heroes are heroic and strong in the slightly tragic vein of 19th century Romanticism—often they have suffered some earlier emotional wound—but blended in is a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge that is a hallmark of hard science fiction characters, that Heinlein and Campbell tradition referred to above. You know a fair amount about what they are feeling, but what really matters is what they do, regardless of how they feel.
Anderson respects the military virtues of courage, loyalty, honor and sacrifice, and often subjects his characters to situations of extreme hardship, allowing them to show these virtues. But he usually doesn’t write about battle. In fact, his characters are businessmen (such as series of books and stories about the wily trader Nicholas van Rijn) as often as soldiers (such as the Dominic Flandry series). In “The Saturn Game,” as in Tau Zero, they are scientists, multiple specialists. In The Boat of a Million Years, they are immortals living throughout human history, from the distant past into the far future, not necessarily above average in intelligence or emotional maturity—though the necessities of survival through the calamities of history have weeded out the weaker ones, and even some of the stronger.
Instead, again in the hard SF tradition, he most often wrote about strong men and women pitted against the challenge of survival in the face of the natural universe. Some of them die. But Anderson was optimist enough to see beyond the dark times into both a landscape, sometimes a starscape, and a future of wonders—for the survivors. Anderson’s future is not for the lazy or the stay-at-homes. He was fairly gloomy about current social trends, big government, repression of the individual, so he catapulted his characters into a future of new frontiers, making them face love and death in vividly imagined and depicted environments far from home. I recall the power and beauty and pathos of his fine black hole story, “Kyrie,” the wit of The Man Who Counts (The War of the Wing Men) the good humor of “A Bicycle Built for Brew,” the enormous scope and amazing compression of “Memorial.” His range was impressive.
