Author

Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson
  • Eleven essential classics in one volume

    This volume is the definitive collection of the best science fiction novellas published between 1929 and 1964, containing eleven great classics. No anthology better captures the birth of science fiction as a literary field.

    Published in 1973 to honor stories that had appeared before the institution of the Nebula Awards, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame introduced tens of thousands of young readers to the wonders of science fiction and was a favorite of libraries across the country.

    This volume contains the following:

    Introduction by Ben Bova

    Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

    Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. (as Don A. Stuart)

    Nerves by Lester del Rey

    Universe by Robert A. Heinlein

    The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth

    Vintage Season by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (as Lawrence O’Donnell)

    … And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russell

    The Ballad of Lost C’Mell by Cordwainer Smith

    Baby Is Three by Theodore Sturgeon

    The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

    With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson

  • This science fiction novel describes the epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine, which will take a fifty-strong crew to a planet some thirty light years distant.

    From practically the very first page, Tau Zero sets scientific realities in dramatic tension with the very real emotional and psychological states of the travelers, exploring the effect of time contraction due to traveling at near-light speed on the human psyche. This tension is a dynamic that Anderson explores with great success over the course of the novel as fifty crewmembers settle in for the long journey together. While they are a highly trained team of scientists and researchers and therefore professionals, they are also a community of individuals, each of them trying to create for him or herself a life in a whole new space—or, literally, in space.

    It isn’t long, however, before the voyage takes a turn for the worse. The ship passes through a small, uncharted nebula that makes it impossible to decelerate the ship. Their only hope is to do the opposite and speed up. But acceleration towards and within the speed of light means that time outside the spaceship passes even more rapidly, sending the crew deeper into space and further into an unknown future.

  • Five novellas of hard science fiction by five modern masters of the form

    From Nebula Award winner Gregory Benford comes this ambitious hard SF anthology that collects five original novellas. Each one takes the very long view—all are set at least ten thousand years in the future. The authors take a rigorously scientific view of such grand panoramas, confronting the largest issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.

    The last moments of a universe beseiged occupy Greg Bear's Judgment Engine. Can something human matter at the very end of creation, as contorted matter ceases to have meaning and time itself stutters to an eerie halt?

    Genesis by Poul Anderson is set a billion years ahead, when humanity has become extinct. Earth is threatened by the slowly warming sun, and vast machine intelligences decide to recreate humans.

    Donald Kingsbury contributes Historical Crisis, a starting work on the prediction of the human future that challenges the foundations of psychohistory, as developed in Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation Trilogy.

    Joe Haldeman's For White Hill confronts humanity with hostile aliens who remorselessly grind down every defense against them. A lone artist struggles to find a place in this distant, wondrous future when humanity seems doomed.

    In At the Eschaton by Charles Sheffield, a man tries to rescue his dying wife from oblivion by hurling himself forward, in both space and time, to the very end of the universe itself.