"Anderson fuses elegiac prose and a sweeping vision of man's technological future..."
-Booklist
I couldn't have put it better myself.
This edition has a new two-page Preface by David Afsharirad:
"...it is not really the job of science fiction to accurately predict the future." (p. 2)
Obviously not. Continuing:
"In truth, science fiction is always about the time in which it was written..." (ibid.)
Not strictly true. Science fiction cannot help but reflect the time in which it was written but it can also predict and warn:
Wells on the future of warfare;
Larry Niven on the future of organ transplanting;
Heinlein got it right that space travel would start, then be abandoned for a while;
we have seen that James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time is genuinely about the future.
Afsharirad continues:
"...and great science fiction is about the always changing yet eternally constant human condition." (ibid.)
And that is a good summary of Poul Anderson.
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