In the second sentence of his INTRODUCTION to Alexei Panshin's Heinlein In Dimension, James Blish describes Robert A. Heinlein as:
"...plainly the best all-around science-fiction writer of the modern (post-1926) era..." (p. vii)
(Post-1926 is "modern" because Hugo Gernsback began to publish the first sf magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Works by Poul Anderson published in Amazing include Ensign Flandry in 1966. Those publication dates alone are sufficient to remind us of the passage of time which is what (I think) sf is about. We are now living in a period that we have previously read fiction about. I remember saying, "In twenty years, it will be 1984," going to 2001 and, before that, reading Blish's Year 2018!)
When I showed a friend Heinlein In Dimension, he glanced at Blish's opening paragraph and immediately commented that "a good all-rounder" is how sports commentators describe a footballer or a cricketer who is not good at anything in particular! But that is clearly not what Blish meant about Heinlein and surely we can say with even more substance that Poul Anderson was a good all-round writer of imaginative fiction and not just of sf. My overwhelming interests in sf are future histories and time travel - both crucially involving time - and, as we know by now, Anderson wrote not just one work but a whole body of work on each of these themes, exhaustively exploring any alternative answers to basic questions like whether there will be a near future nuclear war, whether artificial intelligence will supersede organic intelligence, whether time travellers will find past events malleable etc.
The best all-rounder.
1 comment:
Kaor,. Paul!
My first thought was understanding a "good all-arounder" as meaning a professional in whatever field who can handle everything relating to that field competently and thoroughly. And that certainly applies to Anderson!
I made a point of rereading Orwell's 1984 in that very same year.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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