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The sense of tragedy is (. . .) extremely rare in science fiction. To Poul Anderson it is a living entity. For him, it does not inhere in such commonplaces as the losses of old age, the deaths of lovers, the slaughters of war or Nature; as a physicist, he knows that the entropy gradient goes inexorably in only one direction, and he wastes no time sniveling about it. For Anderson, the tragic hero is a man (. . .) who is driven partly by circumstance, but mostly by his own conscience, to do the wrong thing for the right reasonand then has to live with the consequences. A fully fleshed-out example is "Sister Planet," in which the hero, foreseeing that a friendly alien race whom he loves are going to be ruthlessly exploited by man, bombs their Holy Place to teach them eternal suspicion. His exit line is: Oh God, please exist. Please make a hell for me. And in a way, the prayer is answered, for when the man's body is found much later, he is carrying a Bible in which Ezekiel 7:3, 4 are marked. Look it up. |
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I have never reread that story; it tore me to pieces the first time, and that was enough. But I am richer for it. And I can only stand in awe of a man who could not only entertain the insight, but write it out. It is utterly pitiless, as genuine tragedy must be; very few writers, and almost no sf writers, know the difference. |
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James Blish, "Poul Anderson: The Enduring Explosion" (1971), The Tale That Wags the God, ed. Cy Chauvin (Chicago: Advent, 1987), pp. 90-91 |
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The Enemy Stars is far richer in conscious symbolism than most of Anderson's work. Throughout this novel, the material represents the immaterial. Specific technical problems stand for universal human concernssolving the former illuminates the latter. The awfulness of their beauty makes the cosmos womanly and a woman cosmic. Crossing the trackless gulfs between suns bridges the lonely gaps between men. Emptiness within and without has seldom been so starkly rendered as in this book, yet Anderson makes the eternal silence of the infinite spaces ring with shouts of human victory. |
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Alpha Crucis is the lodestar of the expedition, object of a generation spanning quest that has outlasted the rise and fall of empires. The target constellation Crux Australis gives its name to the explorers' starship Southern Cross, a gibbet upon which three men are crucified for the sake of their race. For centuries the craft has fallen toward its goal by the force of its |
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