One of the things Poul Anderson was known for throughout his literary career was world-building. Much of this was planetary design, based on the natural sciences, in which he started out with stellar type, planetary mass, orbital radius, and elemental abundances and worked out the geology, meteorology, and biology of a world.
Anderson was certainly one of the masters of this, up there with Hal Clement and Vernor Vinge. But he put equal effort into social scientific worldbuilding, creating economies, polities, and cultures, and developing plots for his stories from the conflicts they gave rise to. Orion Shall Rise, winner of the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, is a nearly pure example of social scientific world-building, set not in a distant solar system but on a future Earth.
A WAR OF JUDGMENT
In its backstory, the great powers of the twentieth century annihilated each other with nuclear weapons, in a conflict called the War of Judgment, leaving a world empty enough to give room for new cultures to emerge. One of these cultures, the Maurai, derived from the Polynesians societies of our world, from New Zealand to Hawaii, appeared in a number of previous stories as the new dominant power, a great sea power with the advantage of inherited scientific knowledge, but held back from industrialization both by the exhaustion of resources such as fossil fuels and metals, and by a philosophy of environmentalism. They appeared as a mostly benign and humane empire.
But in Orion Shall Rise, Anderson puts their philosophy into the crucible.
A DIFFERENCE OF CULTURES
His future Earth has at least four great powers, each embodying a different set of central values:
* The Maurai are a constitutional monarchy with a powerful navy and a deep commitment to protecting the natural environment.
* The Mong, descended from Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese refugees who conquered much of North America, are a society of lords and serfs, with ethical beliefs that combine military duty, a pursuit of enlightenment similar to Buddhism, and a more radical environmentalism that has grown into a religion.
* The Northwest Union, extending roughly from Oregon to Alaska, is a decentralized society with strong tendencies to libertarianism, one of Anderson’s more attractive portrayals of this idea, and is also strongly technophilic.
* Skyholm, dominated by a lighter-than-air structure as large as a small city, with directed energy systems that can alter the weather or repel invaders, maintains a domain of lawfulness centered on France, with an aristocratic political system and regard for folkways.
Most of these, it’s worth noting, are ideas for which Anderson had expressed sympathy in some of his previous fiction. And the one of which this is least true, the Mong, still has its own distinctive virtues.
Each culture is represented by one central character in Anderson’s story: Terai Lohannaso, a middle-aged Maurai agent; Vanna Uangovna Kim, a Mong librarian and mystic; Ronica Birken, a Northwest Union engineer and covert operative; and Talence Iern Ferlay, a Skyholm pilot and heir to its captaincy.
A RECURRING CONFLICT
The conflict emerges from earlier clashes between the Maurai and the Northwest Union: The Whale War, fought to stop the Norrmen from whaling, followed five years later by the Power War, in which the Maurai responded to their plans for a nuclear power plant by subjugating them and imposing a protectorate.
In the Power War, Birken’s father, held on Lohannaso’s ship as a prisoner of war, was killed, and when he personally brought the news to his family, Ronica, then five years old, shouted at him, ending with “Orion shall rise!” — leaving Lohannaso to wonder what it meant, though many of Anderson’s readers may have guessed at a reference to Freeman Dyson’s proposal for the Orion drive, a spacecraft propelled by nuclear explosions. In fact, that project is central to Anderson’s plot.
Various forms of environmentalism provide the opposing values. The Gaean religion of the Mong views the Earth itself as sacred; it’s utterly opposed to nuclear energy, and in a secondary plot, increasing numbers of the Skyholmers are being converted to it (including, notably Iern’s estranged wife.)
The Maurai aren’t Gaeans, but their own ecological conservatism is sufficiently opposed to the Norrmen’s projects to draw them into a war of conquest. Anderson presents them sympathetically, but he also gives Ronica’s father a telling criticism of their motives, their self-image, and their historical role.
(The Maurai in fact are much like what J.R.R. Tolkien, another environmentalist, said of the elves in his The Lord of the Rings (the 2009 inductee into the Prometheus Hall of Fame) in a letter to Milton Waldman: That in wanting to preserve the earth they also wanted to preserve their own privileged place in it, and to embalm it, so that it wouldn’t change.)
A FASCINATING INVENTION
The Northwest Union itself is a fascinating invention: A culture founded in resistance to the Mong invasion, made up of people ready to fight for what belongs to them, and one with a minimal central government not far from anarchy, territorial governments with still limited powers, and much more power exercised by voluntary Lodges, including the Wolf Lodge, prime mover of resistance to the Maurai. Part of its appeal is that it isn’t a purely rationalist construction, like some imagined libertarian societies; more in the spirit of Tolkien’s Shire, it has its own complex history and its own idiosyncratic customs, which realize a great deal of liberty without turning it into an intellectual straight jacket.
Many of these details are shown through Ferlay’s eyes, when he’s in exile from Skyholm. The Norrmen are fiercely independent, abhor slavery, and maintain equality between men and women; and they have a largely unregulated economy with comparatively rich material resources, and a desire for more — for a recovery of lost technologies, and for access to energy that will lift them up from poverty. That desire ultimately involves them in war with all three of the other major powers.
It’s characteristic of Anderson that, even though his story clearly puts one side in this war in the right, he doesn’t make it a straightforward clash of good people with evil. At least one of the Norrmen, Mikli Karst, is deceitful and often malevolent. In contrast, Vanna Uangovna Kim, who is on the other side, has perhaps the purest motives of any of the central characters, and her fate is a deeply moving one in which she appears in an admirable role. (I have to say that though I believe she was wrong, I find it impossible not to love her integrity.) That’s one of the points where Anderson excelled, and especially so in this novel.
Anderson had a long record of memorable fiction, but I think Orion Shall Rise may end up being remembered as one of the high points of his career.
Note: Poul 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.
Other Anderson works previously 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.)
WATCH THE 45TH PROMETHEUS AWARDS CEREMONY
* Watch the full 45-minute video of the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony, which was recorded, posted on YouTube and available to see here.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* 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 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 more than 100 past winners 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.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* 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 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 more than 100 past winners 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.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
