By Michael Grossberg
Looking for an imaginative and allusive novel to add to your summer reading list?
Consider reading Poul Anderson, the first writer to receive a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. Anderson (1926-2001) has won seven Prometheus Awards, several posthumously. Yet the freedom-themed novels and stories that have received such recognition are only a small fraction of Anderson’s rich and wide-ranging ouevre.
A seven-time Hugo winner, three-time Nebula award winner and Grand Master (a title bestowed in 1998 by his peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1998), Anderson wrote first-rate fantasy as well as science fiction.
A Midsummer Tempest, one of his best fantasy novels, recently has received a tribute in File 770, a leading online publication covering the SF/fantasy field.
“This is one of the lighter, funnier and confectionary of Anderson’s oeuvre. Some of his work can be fraught with doom, dark destiny and a vision of fighting against fate bravely but in vain. A Midsummer Tempest is the exception that proves the rule,” Paul Weimer writes in a highly appreciative review of Anderson’s 1974 novel for File 770’s occasional Memory Lane column.
The “conceit” of Anderson’s novel, Weimer writes, is that everything Shakespeare wrote in his fantastical plays is true.
“Shakespeare, no surprise, is extremely popular and common to reference, allude and outright steal from by science fiction and fantasy authors. And why not? The Bard’s work is immortal, after all, and while most of his work is not genre as we understand it, plenty of it touches upon or outright waltzes into fantasy,” Weimer writes.
“But what if everything that Shakespeare wrote was true, especially the fantastic bits. What if Shakespeare’s work were history, not fantasy and quasi-history? Faeries, wizards, ghosts and more were all established facts in the world?”
Set in an alternate-history 17-century during the English Civil War, with Charles the First on the edge of defeat and the Roundheads and the Cavaliers in violent conflict, the novel centers on the fantastical adventures of Prince Rupert.
“In our timeline, (Rupert) is one of the most interesting characters of the period with a varied career ranging from cavalry officer to colonial governor, and cousin to several English Monarchs,” Weimer writes.
“In this world and timeline, in the course of the book, he teams up with the ward of his captor (love, true love, friends) and together they go through a whirlwind set of plots involving Titania and Oberon, the books of Prospero, and a lot more in their efforts to try and preserve Charles I as king of England. Chases, escapes, magic, romance and much more.”
Anderson’s novel incorporates characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and other Shakespeare plays into the same fantasy universe – one where all the characters speak in blank verse “and sometimes outright poetry,” Weimer notes.
As if that wasn’t enough of an impressive feat, Weimer explains that Anderson also mixes in various characters and setting from his own fantasy novels.
“If you like cinematic universes and multiverses, this novel is also for you. This novel features The Old Phoenix, an inn that connects to multiple worlds in Anderson’s verse, and Rupert meets characters from other Anderson universes in the process. A decade before Heinlein tried it in Number of the Beast, the appearance of the Old Phoenix in A Midsummer Tempest helps knit together a lot of the fantastic verses and worlds of Anderson’s worlds.”
AN ANDERSON SUGGESTED READING LIST
Certainly, Libertarian Futurist Society members and other freedom-loving science fiction fans unfamiliar with Anderson’s writings might well begin by checking out some of his Prometheus-winning works.
That includes his 1995 Best Novel winner The Stars Are Also Fire and four works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame: Anderson’s novel Trader to the Stars (in 1985), his novel The Star Fox (in 1995), his story “No Truce with Kings” (in 2010) and his story “Sam Hall” (in 2020.)
But Weimer’s unexpected and insightful review sparks my interest in reading more of his fantasy. And after my own half century career as a theater critic, seeing and reviewing dozens of the Bard’s plays, I’m adding A Midsummer Tempest to the top of my summer reading list.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer international association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of the 106 works that have won a Prometheus since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
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