Synopses & Reviews
Poul Anderson, a legend of SF, is the writer whom the mantle of Robert A. Heinlein descended upon. Anderson devoted his career to the visionary enterprise of creating science fiction set in a carefully extrapolated human society of the future in the spirit of Heinlein.
Nowhere does he succeed more powerfully than in the works set in the future history that began in Harvest of Stars, continued in The Stars Are Also Fire, and now leaps into the distant future in Harvest the Fire. This is no less than the tale of the expansion of humanity to the limits of the solar system and beyond. It also chronicles the evolution of machine intelligence, until humans and machines come into conflict in an age when the outward urge and the urge to change are the chief barriers to utopia for many humans--and for their machines.
Harvest the Fire is the story of politics and poetry: of a poet, Jesse Nicol, who aspires to great work in an era when human literary greatness is apparently all in the past, who travels to the Moon and falls in love with a beautiful revolutionary, Falaire--a woman determined to escape from the care of machines. For the machines are now the masters of humanity, and the great work of Falaire is freedom, which must be stolen from the machines.
With the precision and clear focus of a master, Poul Anderson tells a sharp and poignant tale against an epic interplanetary background. Harvest the Fire is hard SF raised to the intensity of poetry.
Review
"Fast, elegant, and visionary....Poul Anderson is one of the pillars of modern science fiction and this is Poul Anderson at his best."--Michael Swanwick
"With Harvest the Fire, Poul Anderson takes us again to the farthest edge of technology and human imagination."--Venor Vinge
"Anderson fuses elegiac prose and a sweeping vision of man's technological future as only he can--brilliantly. Already, at its current three-book length, this is one of the best SF future histories."--Booklist
About the Author
The bestselling author of such classic novels as
Brain Wave and
The Boat of a Million Years,
Poul Anderson won just about every award the science fiction and fantasy field has to offer. He has won multiple Hugos and Nebulas, the John W. Campbell Award, The Locus Poll Award, the Skylark Award, and the SFWA Grandmaster Award for Lifetime Achievement. His recent books include
Harvest of Stars, The Stars are also On Fire, Operation Chaos, Operation Luna, Genesis, Mother of Kings, and
Going for Infinity, a collection and retrospective of his life's work. Poul Anderson lived in Orinda, California where he passed away in 2001.