"Although I was born in the USA, my parents were from Scandinavia, and named me for a grandfather; hence the spelling. This was in 1926." "In grade school the teachers kept telling me I wasn't spelling my own name right, and I got my back up about it....
Shortly after Poul Anderson's birth, his father, an engineer, moved the family to Texas, where they lived for over ten years. Following Anton Anderson's death his widow took her children to Denmark but returned with them to the United States after the...
The winner of several Nebula and Hugo awards, Poul Anderson is a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy with well over one hundred novels and short story collections to his credit. Known for writing science fiction that is well-grounded in...
Poul William Anderson (November 25, 1926–July 31, 2001) was an American science fiction author who wrote during a Golden Age of the genre. Poul Anderson also authored several works of fantasy. He received a degree in physics from the University of...
News and Journals
summary from source:
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Poul Anderson 08/03/2001: 321 words, approx. 1 pages
Poul Anderson, award-winning sci-fi author Associated Press Friday, August 3, 2001 San Francisco -- Master science fiction writer Poul Anderson, author of futuristic tales of human courage, died of complications related to prostate cancer. He was 74. Anderson died Tuesday...
AFTER MORE than half a century in the public eye, the American science fiction writer Poul Anderson still seemed on the verge of writing his greatest novel. His vision had darkened over that half-century, a natural consequence perhaps of the failure of the...
Poul Anderson liked to keep his work simple. That way, he said, he could devote more time to pleasing his readers. In his stories, Anderson created technologically advanced worlds. Yet the world Anderson worked in was technologically modest for its time. He was simply too...
It is not enough for [Anderson] to merely state the problem of mortal man in a finite universe. His concern lies with the effects of the problem: how should mortal man in a finite universe act? Rejecting passivity, he asserts that free action is both possible and necessary…. Mortals must resist entropy in both its guises, tyrannical stasis or anarchic chaos. The fight is all the more valiant for its utter hopelessness. (p. 6)
[There] is a basic attitude, I suppose, which underlies my writing—namely, that this is a wonderful universe in which to live, that it's great to be alive, and that all it takes is the willingness to give ourselves a chance to experience what life has to offer. If I preach at all, it's probably in the direction of individual liberty, which is a theme that looms large in my work…. [But my main job is to entertain the reader and] to hold his interest as best I can. I do this, prima...
For the science-fiction or fantasy writer, the rules governing the genre serve as a reminder of the importance of discipline; without discipline, imaginative literature tends toward a hermetic expression more akin to madness than to art. And finally, without labels like science fiction and fantasy, we could not have the salutary experience of seeing our expectations confounded by writers who know that, in the long run, it is the business of the imagination to break all rules. Poul Anderson's "...
