The Best of Poul Anderson (Book Review)

     Malzberg, Barry ed. The Best of Poul Anderson (1976) Anderson (1926-2001) was a gifted and prolific SF writer, whose need to make a living made much of his work formulaic. But he was a master at playing with formula and cliche, and his stories range from satire to tragedy. He was a pioneer in the development of "future history", a concept that morphed into something like a movement in the 1950s-70s (see Asimov's Foundation series, or Herbert's Dune) and is now an SF cliche. He liked to set stories in the past as well, finding great inspiration in the medieval romance (which he both parodied and emulated). He tried, and succeeded at, every SF form and genre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson provides a well-done overview.
     Anderson was an economic libertarian, but with an acute sense of the paradoxes and contradictions of the free-market economics he espoused. He disliked hypocrisy, and many of his stories have political or moral/ethical themes. He liked swashbuckling, too, and had a rather ambivalent attitude towards women, whom he often presents as sex objects, albeit usually as tough, intelligent, and resourceful as the men. His books and stories are fun to read when you are in the mood for fantasy or hard SF. He's very good at plotting a story around a technical problem, and making us care that the protagonists get it right. Like a surprising number of his contemporaries, his most common mood is elegiac, even in the tales of the Polysotechnic League, which are essentially space-operas. Technology cannot protect us from the loss of friends and lovers, nor can it make freedom and justice any more likely. Freedom must be taken and defended. Justice depends on individual choice and action, not on systems and protocols.
     In essence, Anderson sees the future pretty much as a variation on the present: people are people, and none of us is perfect. Many of his tales are thinly veiled satires on the present, which he saw as lacking in honour, generosity, scholarship, courage, and various other of the masculine and chivalric virtues.
     A common motif in his stories is the under-estimated underdog. Sometimes a rascal, sometimes an uncouth peon, sometimes an apparently primitive alien, sometimes an apparently weak human on an alien world, but always someone whom the antagonist sees as less than what he is, the underdog wins by means of his wit and insight into his superiors' weaknesses. Anderson likes to show that a presumed superiority based on social status, academic learning, political power, bureaucratic process, or other social constructs, is in the long run a guarantee of failure. It's your character, your virtues, and your skills that ensure your success.
     I 've actually started re-reading this book, which will explain why I rate it at **1/2 to ****.