Fire Time (Gunnar Heim, book 2) by Poul Anderson

[james_davis_nicoll]

Fire Time (Gunnar Heim, book 2) by Poul Anderson

Comments

[estrevan]

I was going to say how convenient it is that the bits of Ishtar due to become uninhabitable are only ever inhabited by barbarians. But perhaps there’s a worldbuilding explanation?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Civilization survives, to the extent it survives, in the regions not baked clean of life. Once the red giant starts to return, the underpinnings needed to sustain civilization collapse first in the most affected areas.

[estrevan]

That makes sense. Anderson always had sympathy for the “barbarians”, in a Libertarian kind of way.

[ba_munronoe]

Did Anderson ever write any "Conan" stories?

[estrevan]

Not that I know of, and what I’ve read of his fantasy isn’t very Conan. But proudly independent and warlike lost-colonies-gone-feral pop up semi-regularly in his short SF, and there are at least a couple of time travel/alt-hist stories that take a sentimental view of the proudly independent Celts, and there are the proudly independent sky vikings that pop up in a post-collapse story whose title I’ve forgotten... you get the general idea.

[mikeda]

He wrote "Conan the Rebel" originally published by Bantam in 1980.

[dragoness_e]

Has anyone noticed that Pournelle & Andersen's dreaded "welfare state" dystopia somehow transformed into Iain M. Bank's (& others) "post-scarcity economy" utopia? It seems the difference between "socialist welfare state dystopia" and "luxury gay space communism" is the political leanings of the author.

[philrm]

Funny, isn't it.

[philrm]

Oh, and Anderson also believed that automation would result in mass unemployment; the answer to which was either a welfare state or the liquidation of the surplus masses, both of which the author found repugnant.
It's rather depressing how many authors of that era the second part of that statement distinguishes Anderson from, to his credit.

I'm quite fond of The Star Fox, but never read this one. From your review, I can't imagine it's on the same level as Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said or The Inverted World, both of which I'd say gave The Dispossessed a run for its Hugo.

[jreynolds197]

You'd think that a passing star that made all latitudes between (say) 50° north and south too hot to inhabit would also make enough changes to the climate of the polar places so that agriculture would stop working there, too. So even if the civilized polar people kept the barbarians out, their own civilization would collapse into hunter-gatherer as soon as their own food stores ran out.

Still, I haven't read the book, so Anderson might have finessed this objection of mine.

[ndrosen]

Anderson did finesse that objection. As I recall (it’s been a long time), the stellar orbits are such that it's the North polar regions of Ishtar that get much hotter, at least at an earlier stage of the red giant’s approach. Also, the civilized people, IIRC, are ranchers as much as farmers.

[scott_sanford]

This book lost to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but it edged out Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said , Priest’s Inverted World , and Niven & Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye . I’ve not read the Dick or the Priest but I don’t know that I would rate Fire Time higher than The Mote in God’s Eye.

I happened to remember Inverted World just this morning, so I can't argue the world building wasn't imaginative. (Strained, maybe. Questionably plausible, certainly. But imaginative.) The Mote in God's Eye is more familiar to readers now, doubtless by author familiarity.

While I remember that cover I have no recollection of actually reading the book. Maybe it was just on the shelves at used book stores.

[ba_munronoe]

"The Inverted World" was a weird one. I can't really recall if we ever got an explanation of the difference between the people in the moving cities and the backwards peasants who stay put: is it possible that it's not the Earth that's been affected, but the city dwellers, and to the peasants it's the same old spherical world it ever was?

[scott_sanford]

You'd also think that over several generations someone would think to ask if the locals had a map, but no...

[(Anonymous)]

I'm glad I read Fire Time, ~40 years ago, and I enjoyed it and learned things about worldbuilding from it, but like most Anderson now, it's not a book I would reread. As you noted in your review of one of his other books, once you start noticing some of his less appealing stylistic quirks, you can't unsee them.

Riderius