Re: Nebula Finalists 1990

In article <slrnv86apu.1d6k.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>,
Christian Weisgerber  <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

On 2024-07-01, James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
>

Welllll, there's a set of SF authors with whose flaws I am intimately
familiar because I read and reread and reread so much of their stuff
because their virtues outweighed their flaws. Poul Anderson might be
the example whose works I own the most of, because he was so prolific.

>
Now I'm curious: What are Anderson's characteristic flaws?

A huge blind spot where women were concerned that manifested in a
variety of ways. An excessive love of infodumps. A certain unsubtleness
weaving his politics into the narrative. An overfondness of certain
stylistic mannerisms I won't mention as they are hard to unsee.
Increasingly unrelenting fatalism. A tendency to trust his conclusions
more than he probably should have, my go-to example being his exchange
with Freeman Dyson where he jumps from "shell collecting all of the
Sun's light" to "Obs totalitarian" with fewer intervening steps
than I would have cared for.

But! His planets were huge and they were all different from each other.
He worked hard on his fiction and while I don't think he had his
masterpiece, he was always reliable.

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