Search Results for: poul anderson

Earthmen and Aleriona have met in space and neither side can afford to let the other get too strong. The Aleriona have captured the human outpost, New Europe, and claim that all the inhabitants were killed. The World Federation on Earth seems committed to peace at any price, but there are those, and ex-navy Captain Gunnar Heim is one of them, who know that appeasement will only lead to further Alerion encroachment, and he passionately believes that there must be a showdown now, before it is too late.

Heim and his crew of volunteers take off from Earth in the Star Fox and start to fit out for their hit-and-run battle.

A dozen years had passed since Mark Fraser and his family had fled to Ganymede, hoping to find the peace and freedom which had eluded them on Earth. Now violence and terror had pursued them to their new-found home: Captain Swayne and his battleship Vega had made landfall on Ganymede and were using its resources to build missiles with which to hold Planet Earth to ransom. For the second time, Mark Fraser was a marked man, running for his life. His only chance of escape was to a third planet: Jupiter. But as Fraser knew only too well, Jupiter itself was the scene of conflict and carnage. And so far no human being had ever breathed its atmosphere and lived to tell the tale!

Knud Axel Syrup, chief engineer of the spaceship Mercury Girl, sat and drank his favourite beer and thought about the coming war he was so anxious to avoid. For Grendel – the planetoid on which he was stranded – had been occupied by a band of fiery Irish revolutionaries. And once the rival Anglians discovered this, there response would be speedy and violent.

Then, as Herr Syrup shook up a bottle of brew and let the foam shoot out of its top, he realised suddenly what could be done to get him off Grendel.

And so came about a marvellous spaceship – built of beer kegs, bound by gunk, upholstered with pretzel boxes, and powered by the mighty reaction forces of malted brew!

Earth is dead – murdered from the depths of space. But how? And by whom? Poul Anderson, as versatile and ingenious as ever, admirably confirms with this tale of interplanetary terror that he possesses one of the most awe-inspiring talents in the whole field of science fiction.

Another war, the most terrible nuclear disaster in the history of man has scorched and crippled all life on the surface of earth. In a few isolated zones human survival has occurred. Among these groups the birth rate is said to be phenomenal. There are reports of strange mutations of the human species appearing as frequently as fifty or sixty in a hundred births. Only a few of these strange mutations have been strong enough to survive, but some are reported to be reproducing their kind. A physical and mental examination of these freaks is being undertaken at the present time.

They built a ship called the Southern Cross and launched her to Alpha Crucis. Centuries passed, civilisations rose and fell, the very races of mankind changed, and still the ship fell on her headlong journey toward the distant star.

After ten generations the Southern Cross was the farthest thing from Earth of any human work – but she was still not halfway to her goal.

Here is an absolutely absorbingly exciting tale of the far future from one of the giants in the field of Science Fiction writing.

The twenty-year Earth-Mars war was finally over. What was left of Earth – its crumbled cities, its ruined farmlands – were firmly and completely under the rule of the Martian Archon. And this powerful planetary ruler was taking no chances: he intended to reduce the Terrans to a society of primitive agricultural tribes in less than a generation!

But for David Arnfeld, ex-spaceman and Earth Base Commander, there was something in the whole set-up which did not ring true. Why had both sides muffed countless chances to end that awful war in the first year or two? And why had the two planets gone to war in the first place?

In the back of Arnfeld’s mind an idea was growing…perhaps there was yet a chance to save the doomed population of Earth. But if his idea was true, and proof was available, he had to work fast. Too many people were involved in this War of the Two Worlds to let one man upset their plans.

You can’t go home again. For home is not merely a place, but a situation and when that situation changes, home is no more. Captain Edward Langely of the experimental starship Explorer was to learn this the hard way…

For many years the starships of earth searched the heavens for places where men could live. Many planets were found, but always something was wrong: too hot; too cold; atmospheric contaminants; poisonous biochemistry; intelligent natives – something. At last a deep-space survey vessel has reported a planet that seems perfect, an uninhabited paradise where people can roam free. But the first Troas Expedition never returns. And now the crew of the De Gama must find out why or mankind will lose the stars forever.

‘Imagine that tomorrow neurotic response is so accelerated on this earth that an I.Q. of 500 is commonplace, a moron has the thinking capacity of yesterday’s intellectual. Poul Anderson’s detailedly plausible exploration of his theme makes for an unusually satisfying and stimulating book.’

Archaeologists, studying the past, are handicapped by the fact that relics are usually few and in poor condition. Often, one is not even sure where to look for them. Out of such finds, from tombs, ruined cities, swamps, deserts, and any other place where men of the past have left some trace of themselves, the archaeologist tries to build up a picture of these men’s lives and civilizations. but there are great gaps in our knowledge and probably always will be. For Instance, we cannot yet read the inscriptions left by the ancient Cretans, and so are in the dark about many features of their high civilization…

The Fleet of Stars sees the return of Anson Guthrie, Poul Anderson’s iconoclastic hero from Harvest of Stars. Suspecting a conspiracy to suppress humankind’s freedom, Guthrie begins a dangerous journey across the realm of comets…

The third volume in Anderson’s saga about humanity’s strife-ridden future among the stars. The complex rivalry between human and machine has continued for years. Events come to a head on Prospina, where the human poet Jesse Nicol finds his fate intertwined with that of the android Venator.

It is the dawn of a new era of space exploration and colonisation. Dagny Beynac, descendant of the legendary Anson Guthrie, becomes a heroine of a new Lunarian civilisation that struggles to break free of the influence of Earth.

Centuries later, the entire solar system is dominated by a vast network of machine intelligences. On Earth and Luna, splintered fragments of humanity search for some way to survive in a system that no longer seems to hold a place for flesh and blood.

And the only solution lies in the distant past, in the life of Dagny Beynac.

Earth lies crushed in the grip of totalitarianism. To save her planet, Kyra Davis is sent on a mission to liberate the last bastion of freedom and to rescue its legendary leader. Her bold adventure will sweep her from Earth’s rebel enclaves, to the decadent court of an exotic lunar colony, from the virtual realities of biotech and artificial intelligence to a brave new world menaced by a dying star.

Starfarers is the story of an expedition into the far reaches of the galaxy, where answers to mankind’s greatest questions await.

The saga begins when evidence of an advanced civilization is discovered by SETI astronomers. “Trails” observed in the sky are thought to be from starships travelling at the speed of light, an enigma that spurs scientific minds until this breakthrough is achieved by mankind as well. An expedition is then mounted and an eclectic team of scientists chosen to journey into the sector where the intelligent life is allegedly located.

But because the destination of the starship, Envoy, and her crew is 60,000 light-years away, the time required to reach the point of origin of the signals and return is 120,000 years – longer than Homo sapiens has been on Earth. And though the crew is ready to face the ramifications of such a trek, no one is prepared for what awaits them at the outer edge of the cosmos – or back at the planet they once called home.

Starfarers is a story of patience and immediacy, but most of all of courage. It is a saga for anyone who has ever felt the emptiness of life on Earth and found the missing substance in the spaces between the stars.

Centuries after a worldwide nuclear war has decimated Earth’s population and devastated the land, four opposing pockets of civilisation vie for control of the planet – and of the precious resources that survived the destruction.

Nothing less than the future of Mankind is at stake . . .

A novel of politics and people, adventure and passion, of worlds real and imagined, ORION SHALL RISE is a powerful and utterly enthralling speculation on our global destiny – and a gripping story as only Poul Anderson could write it.

After Armageddon the People of the Sea created a new kind of civilisation, on based on the integrity of Life and the moral as well as pragmatic necessity of conservation. But the Sky People live by a different vision, and they have come to enforce it…

The benevolent, paternalistic World State regarded the freedom-minded Jeffersonians as a minor embarrassment whose violent elimination would cause more disruption than their demise would merit. So both sides were happy when the chance came for voluntary exile to a distant planet. But two hundred years later the less benevolent descendant of the World State that had let them go was to decide that the cosmos was not big enough to hold both it and a free people.

Earth had changed since the days when her proud space fleets spanned the void of Space. Now her people were packed and packaged tight on Earth, their freedoms exchanged for a promise of stability by a multi-armed autocratic government. Then one small band of people led by a fanatic saw there was one last chance for Man to make his place in the Universe. But to take that chance they had to fight, not only the mighty grip of the government, but the terrible, generation-long voyage fraught with risk. And then, the new planet – strange, challenging, alien…

Forget minor hazards such as the H-Bomb. The discovery of time travel means that everything we know, anyone we know, might not only vanish, but never even have existed. Against that possibility stand the men and women of the Time Patrol, dedicated to preserving the history they know and protecting the future from fanatics, terrorists, and would-be dictators who would remold the shape of reality to suit their own purposes.

Manse Everard, the Patrol’s finest temporal trouble-shooter, bears a heavy burden. The fabric of history is stained with human blood and suffering which he cannot, must not do anything to alleviate, lest his tampering bring disastrous alterations in future time. Everard must leave the horrors of the past in place, lest his tampering – or that of the Patrol’s opponents, the Exaltationists – erase all hope of a better future, and instead bring about a future filled with greater horrors than any recorded by past history at its darkest and most foul.

Mase Everard is a man with a mission. As an Unattached Agent of the Time Patrol, he’s to go anyplace – and anytime! – where humanity’s transcendent future is threatened by the alteration of the past. This is Manse’s profession, and his burden: for how much suffering, throughout human history, can he bear to “preserve”?

Wanda Tamberley is a Patrol member in search of her mission. Recruited from sunny California in the late 20th century, she’d rather serve as a scientist in the research branch, exploring Earth’s flora and fauna in epochs long past. But as hints accumulate from the Patrol’s mysterious leaders uptime, it’s beginning to look as if a lot of human history depends on her personal decisions – and Manse’s.

Meanwhile, the Exaltationists are on the loose, determined to revise human history and rule Time forever and Manse Everard is sworn to stop them, no matter what the heartbreaking cost!

To the men of the starship Quetzal their task seemed routine: to establish diplomatic relations and enter into trade negotiations with the people of a newly discovered planet. Since to all appearances the folk of Gwydion were the most thoroughly amiable in all the galaxy – words for such concepts as war, theft, anger, murder and jealousy did not even exist in their language – there could hardly be a problem. But as the season changed on Gwydion, so did the people…

The legendary Nicholas van Rijn had, of course, been right all along. Just as he had foreseen, the Polesotechnic League – that great empire of merchant princes – had flowered and then crumbled into the vastness of space.

The same fate would befall the Terran Empire that succeeded it. Even heroes like Dominic Flandry lived under the shadow of their eventual extinction – the ever-hungry darkness that would take him and his world in the end.

But for those who came after, those wretched heirs of Terran civilisation, the darkness was no impending tragedy. This time they were facing the reality of…

THE LONG NIGHT