Poul Anderson: Genesis

Poul Anderson (1926-2001), along with Arthur C. Clarke, is one of the most important literary ancestors of, as well as a participant in, the '90s resurgence of hard SF. It was not his very American politics, but his tone and approach (as in such stories as "Kyrie") that are evident in the works of such writers as Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, and Greg Egan. One of the Grand Masters who lent particular honor to that title, he died at the end of July 2001. He was married to the poet and writer Karen Anderson, a famous beauty in her day with whom he also collaborated. His daughter, Astrid, is married to Greg Bear. To the readers and writers who grew up reading his work he was an heroic figure, a living giant of the SF field. And because of the sheer size of his output, his influence is in the water, in the air, and in the soil of SF. He was a professional writer of astonishing competence, varied talents and interests, and a thoughtful stylist. He financed his honors degree in physics by writing, and remained a writer after graduating in 1948. His first novel, Vault of the Ages, was published in 1952. Distinguished as a fantasy writer -- The Broken Sword (1954) was his first adult novel -- and a mystery writer -- his first mystery, Perish By the Sword (1959), won the Cock Robin prize -- he is nevertheless principally one of the heroes of hard science fiction, a John W. Campbell man whose stories appeared in Astounding/Analog for five decades. Of his many excellent collections, All One Universe is perhaps the best, 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.

During the fifties and the following four decades he produced a long string of fine SF and fantasy adventure stories and novels continuing to the present. "He is perhaps SF's most prolific writer of any consistent quality," says The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 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." He was active and prolific in hard SF in the 1990s, and his major work was this novella, and the novel of the same title expanded from it.

Anderson has always defended the traditions of military honor in his fiction, and devoted much of his effort to adventure plots. His many volumes of Dominic Flandry stories and novels are exemplars. Anderson respected the military virtues of courage, loyalty, honor and sacrifice, and often subjected his characters to situations of extreme hardship, allowing them to show these virtues. But he usually doesn't write about war. In fact, his characters are businessmen (such as in a 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," or 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. 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.

But he has also turned out a number of colorful, powerful hard science fiction stories and novels, from Brain Wave (1954) to The Boat of a Million Years (1989), to the four novel sequence in the 1990s beginning with Heritage of Stars (1993), and Genesis (2000), that are generally perceived as his major works -- the most famous is probably Tau Zero (1970). These are marked by astronomical and physical speculation and large-scale Stapledonian vistas of time and space. Even in his swashbuckling adventure stories, he is famous for beginning with calculations of the elements of the orbit of the world to be his setting, and allowing the physics, chemistry and biology to follow logically. He is an admirer of Hal Clement's fiction, and himself wrote a nonfiction book, Is There Life on Other Worlds?(1963), on the general subject of what kinds of life forms might inhabit what kinds of planets.

Politically, Anderson represented the hard SF mainstream tradition of the 20th century. ". . . As for the value of the individual, I'm quite consciously in the Heinleinian tradition there. . . . It's partly an emotional matter, a Libertarian predilection, a prejudice in favor of individual freedom, and partly an intellectual distrust based on looking at the historical record and considering the theory of it, including matters like chaos theory. A distrust of large, encompassing systems . . ." he said in an interview in Locus. He is given to making his stories vehicles for philosophical and social commentary, in the Heinlein manner. In much of his fiction of the 1990s, especially in Heritage of Stars and its sequels, his political bent is evident.

But not here. Far into the post-human era, AIs responsible for whole planets are the dominant civilization. Gaia, the Earth AI, has been reporting unreliably the progress of Earth's ecosystem. A ship is sent to investigate. Like Egan in Wang's Carpets, in this story, Anderson takes on some of the grand SF themes of the 1990s -- uploaded minds, virtual life, virtual civilizations -- and integrates them with some of the grand themes of space opera -- interplanetary civilizations, all-powerful computers, and human survival over vast expanses of time. It first appeared in Far Futures, the aforementioned original anthology of specifically hard SF novellas, and then was expanded into the novel Genesis.