Since 1956

Poul Anderson has been with me personally since some time in the 1960's. I remember reading Twilight World while at boarding school in the Republic of Ireland, 1960-'67. In 1956, when the first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," was published, I started to attend a boarding school in Scotland and knew nothing of Anderson as yet although I did read Robert Heinlein's Starman Jones while in Scotland. Over a much longer period, I have become very conscious of connections between Heinlein's Future History, Heinlein's juveniles, including Starman Jones, and Anderson's works.

When we reread such works, especially after very long intervals, they are not the same because we are not. I used to be satisfied if the characters had travelled in spaceships through the Solar System or to other planetary systems. Now considerably more than that is necessary. Anderson conveys some sense of what it is like to be an Ythrian or a Merseian or to be a human being in regular contact with other intelligent species. Merseians, who began as space opera villains, became a credible species with diverse cultures and languages and not every single one of them a villain - obviously.

The People Of The Wind about human beings and Ythrians seems to be inexhaustible in descriptive details and characterization although we approach its climax yet again.