It’s great to see one widely respected sf/fantasy author in praise of another. Especially when such praise reminds us of the talents and achievements of a truly grand master of sf/fantasy who has passed but is far from forgotten.
Jo Walton tips her hat to the late great Poul Anderson in her monthly book-review column for Reactor magazine.
Walton, who won her own Prometheus Award for Ha’penny, singled out the multiple-Prometheus-winning Anderson on her recommended-reading shortlist for All One Universe, his 1996 short-story anthology.
“This collection of stories and essays is just delightful—great thought-provoking stories, and mostly interesting essays, and I loved it,” Walton writes.
Bucking the common tendency to focus on new and newer works, Walton’s salutary column for Reactor (formerly tor.com) offers a pithy recommended-reading shortlist that often highlights older novels worth reading or rereading by SF/fantasy and other genre authors.
ANDERSON’S ALL ONE UNIVERSE
“Sometimes I have said that all of SF can be seen as variations on a theme by Poul Anderson, because he wrote so many now-standard things for the first time. Also he threw out ideas as minor pegs in stories that other people would have made into whole trilogies. This is the stuff I grew up on,” Walton writes.
All One Universe is described on Amazon as “a richly varied assortment of stories by a master of the science fiction genre.” Besides his stories, Anderson offers “illuminating essays that provide commentary on his own stories and on the works of other literary figures, including Rudyard Kipling and John W. Campbell, Jr.”
Anderson’s anthology is currently available on Amazon for $2.99 (as a Kindle ebook) and $13.60 in hardcover.
Walton recommends the anthology in part because of its great range of subjects.
“Being at NASA as the Voyager pictures came in! Uncleftish Beholding! And the stories are SF or alternate history and they’re terrific…. If you like science fiction stories, if you like Anderson or if you want to try Anderson, you can’t go wrong with this,” she writes.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF POUL ANDERSON
Anderson (1926-2001), the first author to be honored with a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement, has won seven Prometheus Awards, including for Best Novel in 1995 for The Stars Are Also Fire.
Most recently, Anderson’s 1983 novel Orion Shall Rise was inducted in 2025 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Other Anderson works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame include his 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.)
Anderson won the Hugo Award seven times and the Nebula Award three times. In 1998, the Science Fiction Writers of America made Anderson its 16th SFWA Grand Master. In 2000, he was inducted into the fifth class of the the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame as one of two deceased and two living writers.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF JO WALTON
Walton, meanwhile, has earned her own similarly lengthy list of awards and achievements – well beyond the Prometheus award.
The Welsh-Canadian sf author won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012 for her fantasy novel Among Others.
She’s also won the 2004 World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw, the 2015 Mythopoeic Award for her fantasy novel Lifelode and the 2015 Tiptree Award for her alternate history My Real Children.
Ha’penny, a 2008 Prometheus Best Novel winner (along with Harry Turtledove’s The Gladiator), is the sequel to Farthing, Walton’s first science fiction novel after establishing herself as a fantasy writer.
Along with Farthing and Half a Crown, the sequel to Ha’penny, the three novels are part of Walton’s Small Change series bending alternate history with the cozy mystery genre. The dystopian setting is an alternate history in which a now-fascist and corrupt United Kingdom made peace with Adolf Hitler before the involvement of the United States in World War II.
For more about what makes Ha’penny so rewarding and how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Awards on literary quality and liberty, read LFS President William H. Stoddard’s review-essay Appreciation.
Besides her Prometheus-winning Ha’Penny, Walton has been nominated for a Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Half a Crown (in 2008), The Just City (in 2016) and Necessity (in 2017).
A personal note: I’m a fan and regular reader of Walton’s book-review column, always fascinating to pore over to discover novels and authors worth reading – including quite a few I’d overlooked or had never heard about before.
But I am constantly amazed each month by how much Walton is able to read and review – easily over a dozen books, sometimes much more – and still somehow manages to maintain the momentum of her prolific career as a writer.
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.
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