Saturday, June 12, 2021

I'm Just Thinking About Poul Anderson

I'm still working my way through Foundation's Friends...and not really enjoying it a whole hell of a lot, so if you'd like some Reasons Not To Be Cheerful about that anthology, go HERE. But the story I'm currently reading, "Plato's Cave" by Poul Anderson, is set on...well, near...Jupiter, which got me to thinking about "Call Me Joe," which of course, always makes me hate Avatar even more than I would otherwise hate it (HERE)...and THAT got me to thinking about the Poul Anderson collection that I bought many a year ago, Beyond the Beyond. I bought it from the Science Fiction Book Club sometime after July 1970 (when The SFBC first released their edition...which was also the first U.S. hardcover, by the way). *


I'm not sure if the copy I have is that copy or a replacement I found along the way, but it's been sitting on one of my bookshelves for quite a few years, and now I'm thinking that it's probably about time for me to open it up (possibly "again"). For one thing, I'm interested to see if any memory of these stories...which I certainly haven't read in fifty years...remains clinging to my brittle neurons. For another thing, it makes my heart ache a bit to think that here was a man who had a fifty+ year writing career, wrote a shit ton of books, and won 7 Hugo  & 3 Nebula Awards, yet I'll bet you 💵 to 🍩 that very few people would recognize his name today...and that you'd be hard put to find any of his books in a bookstore today.

Sad.

So, yeah. I think I'm going to read Beyond the Beyond again.



* Whilst searching for that information, I found out that The SFBC had released several other Poul Anderson books, one of which was entitled The Avatar (April 1979). Kind of a funny coincidence, given the whole James Cameron Rip-Off thing.

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