Poul Anderson's Martians: Owlies, Hordes And Conquerors

Searching the blog for physical descriptions of Poul Anderson's Martians, I found this post that compares two of Anderson's Martian races. I remarked somewhere that, like ERB's green Martians, the Martians of the Technic History have social units called "hordes." However, I cannot find that post now so let me merely repeat the remark here.

That leaves only the Martians of The War Of Two Worlds, the most humanoid of Anderson's Martian races. Again, I am sure that I would have listed their physical characteristics in an earlier post but cannot easily find it so:

long straight legs;
lean waist and arms;
very broad chest and shoulders;
hairless brown skin;
high cheekbones;
domed forehead;
narrow chin;
long pointed ears;
small flat nose;
mobile, human-like mouth;
large slanted golden eyes;
small antennae.

An sf cliche? Sounding more like a man adapted to Mars than an independently evolved organism? Nevertheless, these particular Martians serve their purpose in this early novel.

The Sequel To Duel On Syrtis

"War-Maid of Mars" is a very misleading title. Incredibly, this ERBian-sounding story is a direct sequel to "Duel on Syrtis," (see here) which I had thought was a one-shot with a nasty ending. Kreega, the "owlie" (Martian) who defeated a human hunter and looked forward to Martian liberation in "Duel...," is alive and well, still based in Syrtis, and leading the struggle for liberation in "War-Maid..." although, of course, he is not the title character!

Thus, among Poul Anderson's many short series, these two Martian stories could be published as a single volume. What would make a good title?

I do not buy feathered, owl-like Martians, although Anderson would probably have been able to rationalize such organisms inhabiting the Martian environment as it was understood at the time he wrote the story. They sound like the Martians of the first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," which, when that story was rewritten to fit into the Technic History, were reconceptualized as extra-solar colonists of Mars.

I say yet again: Anderson either systematically examines every possible answer to a question and implication of a concept or at least generates a very good impression of doing so!

Duel On Syrtis

I had resisted rereading Poul Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis" (Strangers From Earth, London, 1965) because of its horrific ending. Paralyzed but unsleeping, Riordan is hidden in a cave for a thousand years of hell and insanity.

Riordan had seemed to win his fight with Kreega, the Martian that he had hunted, but Kreega survived and we had been told how he would do it on the third page of the story.

I have lost count of Anderson's fictitious Martian races. Feathered and owl-like, Kreega sounds a bit like the "Martians" of Anderson's Technic Civilization History but the latter are extra-Solar colonists of Mars, not native Martians.

"Duel on Syrtis" was published in Planet Stories in 1951 yet a base on Mars is called Port Armstrong.

Riordan has hunted throughout the Solar System:

Mercurian firedrakes;
Plutonian ice crawlers;
Terrestrial lion, tiger, elephant, buffalo and sheep;
many-legged swamp monsters in Venerian rain forests (another "Fantastic Venus");
a huge blind thing in a Neptunian liquid-gas swamp.

Thus, an old-style much-inhabited Solar System.