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the public's loose change, elevated ideas about the artist's role and responsibility are a presumptuous intellectual fad.
In the recent novels of Poul Anderson these views lead to a number of bad habits and technical shortcuts. To send your characters careering around the Universe for a hundred pages may provide entertainment but it is several hundred years since it passed for satisfactory plotting. Anderson has also become content with a sort of stock-company characterisationcheer the hero, hiss the bureaucratin which complex differences of nationality or species are indicated by different varieties of broken English. A further deterioration has been caused by the singleminded preaching of a bizarre and inconsistent set of political viewsa "libertarian" horror of governments and an idealisation of feudalism that owes a lot to the rancher-hands relationship in old Westerns; Anderson's singleminded preparedness to be boring almost indicates that he is aware of the essential shoddiness of his thought.
For there is more to him than this. There is a poetic fascination with words and sensations that can at times turn into a routine appeal to each sense in turn or into the cutesy-pie whimsy of A Midsummer Tempest but informs a routine tale like "We Have Fed Our Sea" with tragic grandeur. His silly political solutions, and the narcissistically unscrupulous way that his heroes defend them, go along with a capacity to convey movingly the importance of social obligation and of freedom, though the latter tends to be seen exclusively in terms of the wild emptiness of forests, mountains and deep space. It is not enough to dismiss Anderson unread; he is terribly flawed by overproduction but his real gifts often shine through.
Andrew Kaveney, [Review of The Avatar], Foundation No. 16 (May 1979): 7172
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Roald D. Tweet
Dominic Flandry is the subject of seven novels and seven shorter pieces set about 600 years after van Rijn's time. A Naval Intelligence agent sworn to support the Terran Empire, he is Anderson's best example of the hero who is forced to discover the meaning and responsibility of the individualist placed in situations where he must choose between what is good for himself, for a small group of friends or lovers, and for the civilization he serves. How does one serve oneself and others?
In The Rebel Worlds, for example, Flandry falls in love with Kathryn McCormac, wife of an admiral who is in revolt against the Empire. In the end it is she who makes the choice when she permits her husband's rebellion

 
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