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serialized in Astounding as "We Have Fed Our Sea," follows a familiar pattern: spacemen go out, wreck their ship, undergo prodigious hardships to repair it and get back to Earth.
Anderson's version is chiefly notable for its painstaking scientific background. Almost alone among active s. f. writers today, Anderson is a man with graduate training in science, and this novel, like some of the stories of James Blish and Hal Clement, fairly bristles with accurate and abstruse technical reasoning. (. . .)
The story does not always break free of its pulp origins. Anderson's prose is sometimes graceless, occasionally drops into pulp jargon. But at his best he is poetically penetrating: in one swift image he can show you the heart of a character, or spread a landscape before your eyes.
Damon Knight, [Review of The Enemy Stars], Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 16, No. 5 (May 1959): 75-76
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Anthony Boucher
Poul Anderson is a prolific young man who has long been recognized as one of the most literate and inventive of science fiction writers and who has recently become almost equally successful with mysteries and historicals. Now he passes the bounds of such specialized fields with a splendid story of imaginative adventure calculated to appeal to any but the most crusty and inhibited reader of fiction.
Three Hearts and Three Lions tells of a young Dane, an underground worker in World War Two, who finds himself pulled from this world's conflict into that of another and even stranger world, where the eternal battle between Law and Chaos is fought with forces including, on the side of Chaos, werewolves and trolls and firedrakes and Morgan le Fay herself and, on the side of law, a swanmay, a valiant dwarf and a baptized Saracen.
It is, in short, the world of Carolingian romance, operating under its own magical rules as strict as the physical rules of our own universe. Holger Carlson must learn those rules and more: he must learn to know himself and the vital role that he is to play (in both universes) in the eternal war.
This novel of the world of the romances is itself a perfect modern romance: an exciting adventure story which is also rich in humor and poetry, in allusive wit and fantastic invention. (It is, incidentally, twice as long and twice as good as a magazine version which appeared 8 years ago.) The publishers label it "science fiction" and perhaps, by the broadest possible

 
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