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.