Anthology. Famous writers who knew Poul Anderson get to play in his universes. Most are very entertaining and make me wish I had read more of his work. Guess I’ll have to take care of that now! ( )

As Poul Anderson is a favorite of mine, I read this festschrift wherein Anderson's friends and admirers wrote stories set in some of his imagined worlds. This sort of book is a lovely way to honor a departed writer. Anderson died in 2001, the anthology is from 2009.

Most of the stories are sequels happening after the action of Anderson's stories. It's immediately clear that many people's favorites overlap. Of the 13 fictional pieces here, there are three Time Patrol stories, and two each following Three Hearts and Three Lions, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", and the Dominic Flandry stories. This leaves dozens of his worlds completely untouched.

The best is by Nancy Kress. In Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness", human settlers on the planet Roland were haunted by Faerie, or so it seemed, some of their children kidnapped to become changelings. The glorious elves and spirits were revealed to be but telepathic illusions, cast by hidden, indigenous inhabitants, designed to appeal to basic mental archetypes. Kress's sequel, "Outmoded Things", looks at the difficulties attendant on integrating into mundane, human society the children who had been raised as woodland sprites, the companions and worshippers of magical beings. Educating adolescents out of the lovely dream in which they thought they lived is as fraught as any recovery for abused persons. So tempting for some to return to the dream - not just the children, but the aging psychologist who is treating them. Kress is perfect at portraying their dilemmas.

I wouldn't have expected Stephen Baxter to produce a moving story about wishing to escape into a better past, but he does so in "The Lingering Joy", a sequel to "The Long Remembering". In Anderson's story, a modern man's consciousness was cast back into human racial memory, and he experienced the era when Neanderthals were being displaced by homo sapiens. After returning, he found his actual life disappointing. Baxter's story features the estranged daughter of Anderson's protagonist, seeking the past for her own reasons, while extinction looms for modern humans.

David Brin's "Latecomers" concerns the excavation of the wrecks of ancient, sentient starships in the asteroid belt. The story is not set in any of Anderson's worlds, but in one which Anderson, as a mentor, helped Brin think through. That this is one of the better stories suggests a flaw in this sort of project, that writers do better following their own muses, not someone else's.

Most of the remaining stories disappoint along this line. Again following "The Queen of Air and Darkness", Terry Brooks's story jarringly inverts Anderson's theme. Raymond E. Feist turns in an Operation Chaos sequel that deals in a leering sexism that Anderson himself mostly outgrew.

The book also has nonfiction memorial pieces by Anderson's wife Karen Anderson, daughter Astrid Anderson Bear, editor and son-in-law Greg Bear, and friend Jerry Pournelle.

The book is really only for Anderson completists. If you're new to him, I suggest you find a copy of Hugo and Nebula Awards-winning "The Queen of Air and Darkness". ( )

This is a collection of short stories set in the various worlds of Poul Anderson - from Flandry's Terran Empire to the Time Patrol to the fantasy world of Three Hearts and Three Lions. Each story is proceeded by a brief story of how the author is connected to Mr. Anderson, either personally or professionally. The writers are some of the best of today's writers - Kress, Turtledove, Stirling, Cherryh, Baxter, Flint, Brooks, Silverberg, Brin, Feist, Niven, Benford, Tad Williams. What a lineup! Each has written a story in one of their favorite settings, so there are multiple Time Patrol stories, etc. All of them are outstanding, though some of the authors went a bit... wild, shall we say? (I'm talking about you, Mr. Williams). Very definitely worth reading if you've read any of Poul Anderson's works and if you haven't, you should! ( )