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Anson Guthrie is the irascible but lovable founder of Fireball Enterprises, a company that dominates space travel in the solar system. Unlike all other monopolies in history, Fireball is neither inefficient nor corrupt, possibly because Guthrie, who has achieved a kind of immortality as a computer "download" after his body gives out, commands not just loyalty from his staff but a literally feudal devotion in which Fireball employees "plight troth" to their chief as he battles government baddies to win personal freedom and humanity's passage to the stars. |
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If this is Mr. Anderson's attempt to re-create the simple pleasures of the pulp magazines of the 1950's, he has only succeeded in proving that you can't go home again. Harvest of Stars is overwritten, underimagined and fatally flawed with self-satisfied musings of life-according-to-Guthrie that read suspiciously like the author's own self-justifications: "Back then, I too did my share of reading. It wasn't the fashionable stuff, no. Shakespeare, Homer, Cervantes, they might be acceptable, if outmoded, but Kipling, Conrad, MacDonald, Heinlein, that ilk, they were insensitive reactionaries. Or racists or sexists or whatever the current swear word was. You see, they dealt with things that mattered." |
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Gerald Jonas, [Review of Harvest of Stars], New York Times Book Review, 12 September 1993, p. 36 |
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Vault of the Ages. 1952. |
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Brain Wave. 1954. |
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The Broken Sword. 1954, 1971. |
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No World of Their Own (with The 1,000 Year Plan by Isaac Asimov). 1955, 1978 (as The Long Way Home). |
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Star Ways (Peregrine). 1956. |
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Planet of No Return (with Star Guard by Andre Norton). 1957, 1978 (as Question and Answer). |
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Earthman's Burden (with Gordon R. Dickson). 1957. |
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War of the Wing-Men (with The Snows of Ganymede). 1958. |
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Virgin Planet. 1959. |
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The War of Two Worlds. 1959. |
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We Claim These Stars! 1959. |
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