Author Anderson Poul William

icy.[2][3] His fantasy fiction writings are similar to those of Isaac Asimov, Stephen Baxter and Ray Bradbury. He died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Anderson is probably best known for adventure stories in which larger-than-life characters succeed gleefully or fail heroically. He also wrote some quieter works, generally of shorter length, which appeared more during the latter part of his career. However, Anderson was seldom interested in psychological analysis. Much of his science fiction is thoroughly grounded in science (with the addition of unscientific but standard speculations such as faster-than-light travel). A specialty was imagining scientifically plausible non-Earthlike planets. Perhaps the best known was the planet of The Man Who Counts — Anderson adjusted its size and composition so that humans could live in the open air but flying intelligent aliens could evolve, and he explored consequences of these adjustments. His stories often depicted a shipwrecked or stranded hero's existential struggle to survive in the hostile environment of an alien world through ingenuity and sheer drive. In many stories, Anderson commented on society and politics. Whatever other vicissitudes his views went through, he firmly retained his belief in the direct and inextricable connection between human liberty and expansion into space — for which reason he strongly cried out against any idea of space exploration being "a waste of money" or "unnecessary luxury". The connection between space flight and freedom is clearly (as is stated explicitly in some of the stories) an extension of the nineteenth-century American concept of the Frontier, where malcontents can advance further and claim some new land, and pioneers either bring life to barren asteroids (as in Tales of the Flying Mountains) or settle on Earth-like planets teeming with life, but not intelligent forms (such as New Europe in Star Fox). As he repeatedly expressed in his nonfiction essays, Anderson firmly held that going into space was not an unnecessary luxury but an existential need, and that abandoning space would doom humanity to "a society of brigands ruling over peasants". This is graphically expressed in the chilling short story "Welcome". In it, humanity has abandoned space and is left with an overcrowded Earth where a small elite not only treats all the rest as chattel slaves, but also regularly practices cannibalism, its members getting their chefs to prepare "roast suckling coolie" for their banquets. Conversely, in the bleak Orwellian world of "The High Ones" — where the Soviets have won the Third World War and gained control of the whole world — the dissidents still have some hope, precisely because space flight has not been abandoned. By the end of the story, rebels have established themselves at another stellar system — where their descendants, the reader is told, would eventually build a liberating fleet and set out back to Earth. While horrified by the prospect of the Soviets winning complete rule over the Earth, Anderson was not enthusiastic about having Americans in that role, either. In fact, several stories and books describing the aftermath of a total American victory in the Third World War — such as "Sam Hall" and its loose sequel "Three Worlds to Conquer" as well as "Shield" — are scarcely less bleak than the above-mentioned depictions of a Soviet victory. Like Heinlein in "Solution Unsatisfactory", Anderson assumed that the imposition of an American military rule over the rest of the world would necessarily entail the destruction of American democracy and the imposition of a harsh tyrannical rule over the United States' own citizens. Both Anderson's depiction of a Soviet-dominated world and that of an American-dominated one mention a rebellion breaking out in Brazil in the early 21st century, which is in both cases brutally put down by the dominant world power — the Brazilian rebels being characterized as "Counter-Revolutionaries" in the one case and as "Communists" in the other. In the early years of the Cold War — when he had been, as described by his later, more conservative self, a "flaming liberal" — Anderson pinned his hopes on the United Nations developing into a true world government. This is especially manifest in "Un-man", a future thriller where the Good Guys are agents of the UN Secretary General working to establish a world government while the Bad Guys are nationalists (especially American nationalists) who seek to preserve their respective nations' sovereignty at all costs. (The title has a double meaning — the hero is literally a UN man and has superhuman abilities which make his enemies fear him as an "un-man"). In later years Anderson completely repudiated this idea (a half-humorous remnant is the beginning of Tau Zero — a future where the nations of the world entrusted Sweden with overseeing disarmament and found themselves living under the rule of the Swedish Empire). In Star Fox, his unfavorable depiction of a future peace group called "World Militants for Peace" indicates clearly where he stood with regard to the Vietnam War, raging when the book was published. A more explicit expression of the same appears in the later The Shield of Time where a time-traveling young American woman from the 1990s pays a brief visit to a university campus of the 1960s and is not enthusiastic about what she sees there. Instead of a world government, the above-mentioned "Shield" resolves the problem of an American-dominated world dictatorship in a truly libertarian manner: The protagonist, who is hunted by various power groups for the secret of a personal impregnable force field which he brought from Mars, finally decides to simply reveal it to the entire world, so that every individual could thumb his or her nose at each and every Authority. Anderson often returned to libertarianism (which accounts for his Prometheus Awards) and to the business leader as hero, most notably his character Nicholas van Rijn. Van Rijn is, however, far from the modern type of business executive, being a kind of throwback to the merchant venturer of the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century. If he spends any time in boardrooms or plotting corporate takeovers, the reader remains ignorant of it, since virtually all his appearances are in the wilds of a space frontier. Beginning in the 1970s, Anderson's historically grounded works were influenced by the theories of the historian John K. Hord, who argued that all empires follow the same broad cyclical pattern — in which the Terran Empire of the Dominic Flandry spy stories fit neatly. The writer Sandra Miesel (1978) has argued that Anderson's overarching theme is the struggle against entropy and the heat death of the universe, a condition of perfect uniformity where nothing can happen. A nonfiction essay that is embedded in There Will Be Time and attributed to the book's fictional protagonist, but seems to reflect Anderson's own views, sharply criticizes the American Left of 1972 (when it was written) for two instances of a double standard: for neglecting to address human rights violations in the Soviet Union and for failing to notice Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. References to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict crop up quite frequently in Anderson's fiction, through various analogues and the conflict's past, future, and alternate permutations. Significantly, Anderson's position on the Middle East conflict was considerably more dovish than his stance towards the United States' own wars, such as his the aforementioned support for the military involvement in Vietnam. Consistently, he regarded the conflict as one in which both Israelis and Palestinians have some measure of justice on their side, and Israeli characters often express criticism of their country's policies. Thus, in the story "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," the Time Patrol's resident agents in the Tyre of King Hiram are a twentieth century Israeli couple, who express their wish to help the ancient Tyrians "in order to compensate a bit for what our country is going to do here." (The story was written during the Lebanon War of 1982, when Israeli planes bombed the modern Tyre and caused heavy civilian casualties). The aggressive mutants of Dromm in "Inside Straight," who totally subdued their own planet and embarked on interstellar conquest, had started as a persecuted minority. The Dromman character in the story — who is clearly the villain but is nevertheless depicted with considerable empathy — thinks of his people's history of having been the target of "whipped up xenophobia, pogroms and concentration camps," in one of which his own grandfather died. He also thinks of how angry his people were when an off-world philosopher told them: "Unjust treatment is apt to produce paranoia in the victim. Your race has outlived its oppressors, but not the reflexes they built into your society. Your canalised nervous system make you incapable of regarding anyone else as anything but a dangerous enemy." "Fire Time" gives the detailed history of a prolonged escalating conflict on a planet colonized simultaneously by humans who call it Mundomar and the nonhuman Naqsans who call it Tseyakka: The historical film of the human leader Sigurdsson declaring the independent republic of Eleutheria in the midst of war is clearly reminiscent of Ben Gurion declaring Israel's independence in 1948; in a later war, the Eleutherians conquer the Naqsan continent of G'yaaru, rename it Sigurdssonia and establish settlements in it.