James Nicoll Reviews

Poul Anderson’s 1965 Agent of the Terran Empire is a collection of Dominic Flandry stories. Agent can be designated the first Flandry collection¹. That is at least open to question and might well be wrong.

Dominic Flandry! A man as skilled with a blaster as he is with subterfuge, a man as profoundly depressed at the state of the decadent Terran Empire as he is unable to imagine better alternatives. A man who can therefore be depended upon to do the necessary thing, even when it is the wrong thing, because the only other options are worse.

Read more ➤

Poul Anderson’s 1980 The Devil’s Game is a stand-alone speculative fiction thriller.

Elderly Sunderland Haverner owes his fantastic wealth in small part to good luck in choosing ancestors, but in far greater proportion to the infallible advice of his unseen and seemingly immaterial advisor, Samael.

Sunderland gained wealth and status. Samael gained the means by which the entity could affect Sunderland’s material world. The partnership has served Sunderland well. The old man will not hesitate to carry out Samael’s latest task: a curious psychological experiment.

Read more ➤

Poul Anderson’s 1971 The Byworlder is a stand-alone near-future science fiction novel.

Earth is inching toward global peace and prosperity. Military-industrial complexes are hobbled by governmental fears of thermonuclear doom. Automation accelerates production of necessities and luxuries. These conditions are sufficient to allow the formation of what might have, in another decade, been called a counter-culture. So-called Byworlders are rejecting buttoned-down social conformity (which they dub Ortho) in favor of less conventional lifestyles.

Enter a visitor from Sigma Draconis.

Read more ➤

Poul Anderson’s 1974 A Midsummer Tempest is an alternate-history fantasy novel.

Lights up on a familiar scene. The Royalists are trounced by the Roundheads at the Battle of Marston Moor. Royalist commander Prince Rupert flees the debacle but is captured by Shelgrave’s forces. While capture does set-up a meet-cute between Rupert and his captor’s niece Jennifer Alayne, it seems the end of Rupert’s career is at hand.

Despite similarities, there is a crucial difference between this Battle of Marston Moor and the one we know. In this world, William Shakespeare is not the great playwright. He is the Great Historian, whose works record events that actually happened.

Read more ➤

Poul Anderson’s 1958 The Man Who Counts is a science fiction novel. It’s one of the Nicolas van Rijn novels, which are set in Anderson’s Polesotechnic League timeline, which itself is part of the much larger Technic setting. 

Master star-trader Nicolas van Rijn is one part Falstaff, one part merciless trader, entirely Dutch Indonesian. Not everyone likes the merciless trader part. One such enemy must have planted the bomb on van Rjin’s starship. While the bomb failed to kill van Rijn, it did maroon van Rijn, Lady Sandra Tamarin, and engineer Eric Wace on the giant world Diomedes. If they stay there, they will die slowly. A quick death due to bomb might have been preferable.

Read more ➤

1974’s Fire Time is the second book in Poul Anderson’s Gunnar Heim sequence. Be it noted that Heim makes an extremely brief appearance in this novel.

Three hundred parsecs from Sol, the Anubelea multiple star system offers humans a fascinating illustration of the impact of stellar evolution on planetary ecosystems. For the inhabitants of Ishtar, the peculiarities of their home system doom them to endless cycles of rise, fall, and recovery. 

But first! A lecture on stellar evolution.

Read more ➤

Poul Anderson’s 1966 The Trouble Twisters is a collection of three stories, all set in Anderson’s Polesotechnic League, all featuring young David Falkayn. 

Read more ➤

Poul Anderson’s 1962 After Doomsday is a standalone science fiction novel. 

Twenty years after first contact with galactic civilization, humanity has assimilated much off-world technology. The Americans send a mission of exploration, the USS Benjamin Franklin, to the core of the galaxy and back. The Franklin returns to an Earth scoured clean of life, orbited by alien missiles. 

At least three hundred humans have survived the apocalypse: the three hundred on board the Franklin. Thanks to American views on staffing potentially dangerous missions, all three hundred are men. 

Read more ➤

1959’s Virgin Planet is a novel-length expansion of Poul Anderson’s 1957 novella of the same name. It takes place in Anderson’s Psychotechnic League, a future history he developed from the 1940s to the late 1950s (it is in fact very nearly the final work in that setting.).

Davis Bertram, the young, proud owner of a splendid starship, is determined to make a name for himself. He sets out on a voyage of exploration to the Delta Capitis Lupi system. The system has only recently emerged from a fifty light-year-wide trepidation vortex; the system may or may not be home to an Earth-like world. What is certain is that Davis will be the first man to visit the system.

But not, as he discovers, the first human.

Read more ➤

1962’s standalone comic SF novel The Makeshift Rocket is an expansion of Poul Anderson’s 1958 A Bicycle Built for Brew.

The gyrogravitic generator gave humans and Martians cheap space flight and the ability to transform any dead rock in space into an acceptable facsimile of a habitable world, one with Earth-like gravity and an atmosphere. Any gang of idiots with enough money could create their own pocket nation out in the Asteroid belt. Many idiots did.

Captain Dhan Gopal Radhakrishnan and Engineer Knud Axel Syrup of Mercury Girl sense that something is wrong on the worldlette Lois. Clue: the flags.

Read more ➤