<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

American science fiction writer Poul William Anderson (November 25, 1926 – July 31, 2002) began his career writing short stories during the 1950s and soon established himself as a reliable source of action-based hard science delivered with sophisticated literary sensibilities. Although he is primarily known for his SF, Anderson also wrote a considerable body of fantasy, including at least one genre classic, Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961), and others based on Norse legends, as well as straight historical fiction and even detective stories.

Much of Anderson's fiction falls into one or another of several series. The Dominic Flandry novels follow the career of a military spy in service to a corrupt and faltering human interstellar empire. Flandry recognizes the faults of the government he serves but considers them preferable to the alternative, chaos and disorder, and repeatedly outwits his counterparts serving the alien Merseians. The most impressive of the Flandry books is A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (1974). A second and less pessimistic space opera series involves an organization of interplanetary merchants known as the Polesotechnic League, and is split between two main characters, Nicholas Van Rijn and David Falkayn. The best of these is The Man Who Counts (1958), also published as War of the Wingmen).

Anderson's third major sequence involved the Time Patrol, and consists primarily of short stories about Manse Everard and other agents of an organization that acts to prevent unauthorized changes to the course of history. His adventures were first collected in Guardians of Time (1960), and more comprehensively in Time Patrol (1991). The "Maurai" stories, Maurai and Kith (1972) and Orion Shall Rise (1983), in which Polynesia becomes the dominant world power following a nuclear war, is also noteworthy. The "Anson Guthrie" novels, published late in his career, tend to be more polemical. In collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson, Anderson produced several "Hoka" stories, about a teddy bear shaped alien race who become obsessed with Terran culture and attempt to mimic it, with mixed and generally humorous results. Also numbered among his best novels are Brain Wave (1954), in which a fundamental change in intelligence alters the Earth, The High Crusade (1960), wherein medieval humans outsmart alien star travelers, The Star Fox (1965), Tau Zero (1970), People of the Wind (1973), and Fire Time (1974).

Anderson remained a prolific short story writer throughout his career. He won the Nebula Award for " Queen of Air and Darkness" (1971) and "The Saturn Game" (1981), both of which also won Hugo Awards and additional Hugos for "The Longest Voyage" (1961), "No Truce with Kings " (1964), "The Sharing of Flesh" (1969), "Goat Song" (1973), and "Hunter's Moon" (1979). There is a strong strain of libertarianism in Anderson's fiction, but he rarely lectured his readers. Anderson's daughter Astrid is married to writer Greg Bear.