Harvest The Fire II

Harvest The Fire (New York, 1995) is an excellent addition to Poul Anderson's "Harvest of Stars" series which otherwise would have comprised just three long novels. By contrast, Harvest The Fire is short, a quick read, evocatively illustrated by Vincent Di Fate (so that consequently the text is even shorter than we expect), poetic and elegaic. It is about a poet, frustrated but possibly finding fulfillment. At the very end, he appropriately comments that:

Homer celebrated a bygone age;
Shakespeare dramatised Cleopatra and Macbeth;
Fitzgerald drew on Khayyam;
Kipling told of India;
he, an Earthman, might become a bard of the colony world Proserpina, inspired by stars, comets and the cosmic vastness that is indifferent to humanity although humanly inhabited.

This short novel is about a crime, or a military action, that would be possible only in a high tech future, the hijacking of a consignment of antimatter. I share Anderson's consistent value judgement that, in human affairs, unpredictable, even dangerous, diversity and self-determination are preferable to unadventurous, even if comfortable, conformity and social control. So it is a good thing that the Proserpinans appropriate the anti-matter energy source that would have been denied to them by the World Federation.

Proserpina was discovered in Volume II and colonised between Volumes. Now, in Volume III, its future prosperity and expansion are ensured. A line quoted by Anderson in Trader To The Stars is again appropriate:

"The world's great age begins anew..."

Our poet reflects:

"Contentment...peace, prosperity, but also adventure and achievement. For most people. Their doings may be old in history, but to each generation they are new, a dawn, a boat, a mountain, an ancient monument, a young sweetheart, enough.
"Not for me, with my irrational, inchoate yearnings. For me, the passions will be in wild sports and wilder carousals..." (p. 147)

Earth is peaceful but a few want danger and should be able to find it.

More on metamorphs:

On the lunar surface, someone in a spacesuit (of course) leads an expensive vacuum-adapted "...moonwolf on a leash." (p. 46) An animal naked on the Moon: it made me feel cold to read about it and still seems wrong somehow...