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He was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania . He received a degree in physics from the University Of Minnesota in 1948 . He married the former Karen Kruse in 1953 . They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to the science fiction author Greg Bear . He was the sixth President of Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Of America , taking office in 1972 . He was also a member of the Swordsmen And Sorcerers' Guild Of America (SAGA) , a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's '' Flashing Swords! '' anthologies. In addition, he was a member of the Society For Creative Anachronism . SURVEY Anderson is probably best known for adventure stories in which larger-than-life characters succeed gleefully or fail heroically. He also wrote some quieter works, generally of shorter length, which appeared more during the latter part of his career. However, Anderson was seldom interested in psychological analysis. Much of his science fiction is thoroughly grounded in science (with the addition of dubious but standard speculations such as Faster-than-light travel). A specialty was imagining scientifically plausible non-Earthlike planets. Perhaps the best-known was the planet of ''The Man Who Counts'' — Anderson adjusted its size and composition so that humans could live in the open air but flying intelligent aliens could evolve, and he explored consequences of these adjustments. His stories often depicted a shipwrecked or stranded hero's struggle to survive in the hostile physical environment of an alien world through ingenuity and sheer drive. In many stories, Anderson commented on society and politics. One of his early stories, '' Un-man '', is a kind of future thriller where the Good Guys are agents of the UN Secretary General working to establish a World Government while the Bad Guys are various nationalists (including and especially American ones) who seek to preserve their respective nations' sovereignty at all costs. (The title has a double meaning — the hero is both literally a UN man and has superhuman abilities which make his enemies fear him as an "un-man"). In later years Anderson completely repudiated this idea (a half-humorous remnant is the beginning of '' Tau Zero '' — a future where the nations of the world entrusted Sweden with overseeing disarmament and found themselves living under the rule of the Swedish Empire). In '' Star Fox '', his unfavorable depiction of a future peace group called "World Militants for Peace" indicates quite clearly where he stood with regard to the Vietnam War , raging when the book was published. A more explicit expression of the same appears in the later '' The Shield Of Time '' where a time-travelling young American woman from the 1990s pays a brief visit to a university campus of the 1960s and is not precisely enthusiastic about what she sees there. Anderson often returned to Libertarianism (which accounts for his Prometheus Awards) and to the business leader as hero, most notably his character Nicholas Van Rijn . Van Rijn is, however, far from the modern type of business executive or CEO, and is in fact depicted as a kind of throwback to the merchant venturer of the Dutch Golden Age of the Seventeenth Century - if he spends any time in boardrooms or plotting corporate takeovers, the reader remains ignorant of it - since virtually all his apperances are in the wild space frontier. Beginning in the 1970s, his historically grounded works were influenced by the theories of the historian John K. Hord , who argued that all empires follow the same broad cyclical pattern — in which the Terran Empire of the Dominic Flandry Spy Stories fit neatly. The writer Sandra Miesel (1978) has argued that Anderson's overarching theme is the struggle against Entropy and the Heat Death of the universe, a condition of perfect uniformity where nothing can happen. In the numerous books and stories depicting conflict in science-fictional or fantasy settings, Anderson takes trouble to make both sides' points of view comprehensible. Even where there can be no doubt on whose side the author is, the protagonists on the opposing side are usually not depicted as black villains but as honourable characters on their own terms. The reader is given access to their thoughts, feelings and motivations, and they have often a tragic dignity in defeat. Typical examples are the books '' The Winter Of The World '', and '' The People Of The Wind ''. In '' Star Fox '', a relationship of grudging respect is built up between the hero, space privateer Gunnar Heim, and his enemy Cynbe — an exceptionally gifted member of Alerione trained from a young age to understand his species' human enemies, to the point of being alienated from his own kind. In the final scene, Cynbe challenges Heim to a space battle which only one of them would survive and Heim accepts, whereupon Cynbe says "I thank you, my brother". He set much of his work in the past, often with the addition of magic, or in alternate or future worlds that resemble past eras. A specialty was his ancestral Scandinavia . Frequently he presented such worlds as superior to the dull, over-civilized present. Notable depictions of this superiority are the prehistoric world of "The Long Remembering", the Medieval society of ''The High Crusade'', the quasi-medieval one of "No Truce with Kings", and the untamed, Jupiter of " Call Me Joe " and '' Three Worlds To Conquer ''. He handled the lure and power of atavism satirically in "Pact", critically in "The Queen of Air and Darkness" and ''The Night Face'', and tragically in "Goat Song". He also did a modern retelling of the legend of Hrólf Kraki . A recurring theme in Anderson's writing are situations where the representative of a technologically-advanced society underestimates "primitives" and invariably pays a high price for it. In '' The High Crusade '', aliens who land in Medieval England in the expectation of an easy conquest find the hard way that they are not immune to swords and arrows. In " The Only Game In Town ", a Mongol warrior, while not knowing that the two "magicians" he meets are time travellers from the future, correctly guesses their intentions in his time — and captures them with the help of the "magic" electric flashlight they had given him in an attempt to impress him. In another time-travel tale, '' The Shield Of Time '', a "time policeman" from the Twentieth Century, fully equipped with information and technologies from much further in the future, is outwitted by a Medieval knight and barely escapes with his life. The same story is also an example of a tragic conflict, another common theme in Anderson's writing. The knight is a positive and likeable character in all ways, sincerely trying to do his best in terms of his own society and time. It is entirely not his fault that his actions might change the future for the worse, in ways he has no way of knowing, and cause a very horrible Twentieth Century (even more horrible than the one we know) to become a reality. Therefore, the Time Patrol protagonists, who like the young knight and wish him well (the female protagonist comes close to falling in love with him) have no choice but to fight and ultimately kill him. In "The Pirate", Trevelian Micah of the Cordys (interstellar Coordination Service) is duty-bound to deny a band of people from societies blighted by poverty and squalor the chance for a new start on a new planet — because their settling the planet would forever eradicate the remnants of the highly artistic and articulate beings who lived there before and were destroyed by a supernova. A similar theme but with much higher stakes appears in "Sister Planet" where scientists figure out a way to terraform Venus and provide new hope to starving people on the overcrowded Earth. But terraforming Venus would utterly exterminate its just-discovered aquatic intelligent race — and the hero finds that the only way to avert genocide is to murder his best friends. In " won the Second Punic War and destroyed Rome . As a result, there is a completely different Twentieth Century — "not better or worse, just completely different". The hero can go back, fight the outlaws and change history back, restoring his (and our) familiar history — but only at the price of totally destroying the world which has taken its place, and which is equally deserving of existence. "Risking your neck to in order to negate a world full of people like yourself" is how the hero, Manse Everard, describes what he eventually undertakes. Fitting Anderson's love for olden years, Ander-Saxon , a kind of learnèd writing with Germanic-rooted words only, is named after him. AWARDS
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY (BOOK-LENGTH WORKS ONLY) Series King of Ys
Tomorrow's Children
Psychotechnic League
Hoka
Reissued by Baen as:
Technic History Polesotechnic League period of Nicholas Van Rijn (by internal chronology):
Terran Empire period of Dominic Flandry , a secret agent trying to hold off the inevitable collapse of a decadent galactic empire (by internal chronology):
Time Patrol
History of Rustum
Operation Otherworld
The Last Viking
Maurai
Harvest of Stars
Non-series Novels
Fixup s
Collections
Omnibus
Anthologies
Non-Genre
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