Poul Anderson

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Poul William Anderson was born on the 25th of November 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, to Danish parents who would soon uproot the family and carry it across half a continent. By the time he died on the 31st of July 2001, he had won seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards, and had written science fiction continuously for more than five decades. Algis Budrys said in 1965 that Anderson had "for some time been science fiction's best storyteller." That claim is worth examining. How does a boy from Bristol, Pennsylvania end up shaping the genre that imagines humanity's future? And what drove a physicist by training to spend his life at a typewriter rather than a laboratory bench? The answers run through Denmark, Minnesota, a San Francisco Bay Area bookshop, and a medieval re-enactment society whose founding Anderson helped to organize.

• 2. Roots and Migrations

  ›

  Anton Anderson moved his family from Bristol to Texas shortly after Poul was born, and they remained there for more than ten years. When Anton died, his widow gathered the children and crossed the Atlantic to Denmark. That journey gave Poul Anderson a dual inheritance: the pragmatic, scientific culture of American postwar optimism and the older mythological traditions of Scandinavia. The family returned to the United States after World War II began, eventually settling on a farm in Minnesota. That farm life on the northern plains, after years of Texas sun and Danish winters, left Anderson at home in landscapes that felt large and elemental, the kind of terrain that runs through a great deal of his fiction.

• 3. Physics, Campbell, and the First Stories

  ›

  While still an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Anderson placed his first two stories with editor John W. Campbell in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The first, "Tomorrow's Children," co-written with F. N. Waldrop, appeared in March 1947. A sequel, "Chain of Logic," which Anderson wrote alone, followed in July. A third story appeared in the December issue of the same year. He earned his BA in physics with honors in 1948, but the laboratory never claimed him. He became a freelance writer immediately after graduation, a decision that placed him inside the small, hungry world of postwar science fiction at almost exactly the moment the genre was consolidating around the magazines that Campbell edited.

• 4. A Life in the Bay Area

  ›

  Anderson married Karen Kruse in 1953 and moved with her to the San Francisco Bay Area. Their daughter Astrid was born in 1954; she later married science fiction author Greg Bear. The family made their home in Orinda, California. Anderson gave many readings over the years at The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore in Berkeley, a gathering place for the Bay Area science fiction community. After his death, his widow donated his typewriter and desk to that store. The typewriter that produced seven Hugo-winning books now sits in a shop that sells the kind of fiction he spent his life writing.

• 5. Fantasy, Swords, and Medieval Societies

  ›

  Also in 1954, Anderson published The Broken Sword, a fantasy novel that became one of his best-known works. Its Norse-inflected mythology drew on the same Scandinavian roots he had absorbed during the family's years in Denmark. That commitment to heroic fantasy led him to help found two organizations in the 1960s. In 1966, he was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. He also co-founded the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, organized by Lin Carter. SAGA began with eight members and required credentials as a fantasy writer for entry. Anderson was the sixth member accepted into the group. The dual founding suggests how seriously he took the imaginative and practical reconstruction of pre-modern traditions.

• 6. Honours and Legacy

  ›

  Anderson served as the sixth President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy. The Science Fiction Writers of America named Anderson its 16th SFWA Grand Master in 1997. In 2000, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame as part of a class that included two deceased and two living writers. He received the Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy award in 1978, the Inkpot Award in 1986, and the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 1996. He also earned a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001. Asteroid 7758 Poulanderson, discovered by Eleanor Helin at Palomar in 1990, was officially named in his honor by the Minor Planet Center on the 2nd of September 2001, one month after his death. A few of his novels reached readers only after he was gone.