Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson
Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during the Golden Age of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 November 1926
CityBristol, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.
I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.
Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.
Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery
It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense-there may be totally different cultures using identical tools-but the tools settle the possibilities; you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to a single planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with its basic machines of industry and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.
Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.
In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
Why do most people think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?
At each stage...entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one.
My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.
If we knew exactly what to expect throughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it.
What five books would I like to be remembered for? Well... Tau Zero, I like that one especially. It was somewhat of a tour de force, and I think it got across what I was trying for.