Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.

I bought the Astounding (it was in the process of changing its name to Analog, so both names are on the cover) with the first installment of The High Crusade on the newsstand. I didn’t have a subscription to the magazine; I’d read a couple issues, but nothing in them had really blown me away.

I was a working-class fourteen-year-old. I loved SF, but cost was a real factor in my decisions.

The cover of a knight standing in front of a forest of spaceships got my initial fifty cents. I read the installment and immediately subscribed to the magazine. I didn’t care whether it was called Astounding or Analog: if it occasionally ran stories like The High Crusade, it was worth my money.

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Even in John W. Campbell’s last decade as editor, Analog ran very good stories more than occasionally. Many of them were written by Poul Anderson.

The High Crusade was a typical Poul Anderson story in that it combined action and characterization into something both readable and memorable—note that it’s fifty years later and I remember this novel. It’s also typical that these exceptional story values overlaid a very thoughtful core. In this particular case, that core is: technology is not intelligence.

I referred to this as the core, not the theme, because “theme” would make The High Crusade sound as though it were a candy-coated lesson plan; which would be utter nonsense. Not everything Poul wrote was funny (I don’t recall cracking a smile when I read The Pugilist), but humor is generally there, and this novel is one of his absolutely deadpan funniest. The scene of the old executioner/torturer’s delight at finally getting a chance to put his skills to work makes me giggle every time I think of it.

And that leads me to a final point, something that I didn’t notice until I reread the novel before writing this essay. Besides the third installment of The High Crusade, the September, 1960 issue of Astounding/Analog has a Poul Anderson novelette, Barnacle Bull. It was rare for a magazine to run two stories under the same author’s name in an issue: the novelette was credited to Winston P. Sanders, a pseudonym that Poul used a number of times.

The name is a joke. If you’ve read Winnie-the-Pooh, you may recall that Winnie is living “under the name of Sanders.” (The Ernest Shepherd illustration shows him sitting on a log porch; the sign over the door behind him reads Mr. Sanders.) Poul was crediting Barnacle Bull to Winnie-the-Pooh.

How is this important to The High Crusade? Notice the name of the monk telling the story: Brother Parvus, a church name which he tells us he took from his nickname as a layman. So: his nickname was Little. He also tells us that he was a younger son of Wat Brown.

Very coyly Poul has told us that the novel is by Little Brown, a very upmarket Boston publisher who most certainly did not publish The High Crusade or anything else by Poul Anderson until quite late in his life. I wish I’d noticed this a long time ago, when I could have asked Poul about it. Now it’s just one more piece of whimsy and invention and sheer delight to savor in The High Crusade.

Bestselling author David Drake can be found online at david-drake.com; his newest novel, What Distant Deeps, will be released by Baen Books on September 7^th.

Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.

At the age of eleven or twelve, I picked up a book by Poul Anderson called The High Crusade. I was already a fan, having worked my way through a shelf-full of science fiction anthologies, best-of-the-year compilations from the 1950s at my local Navy base library in Kodiak, Alaska. Nearly all the anthologies contained stories by Poul.

But “The High Crusade” was something else again—a lively, sharp-witted reversal of science fiction stereotypes, as well as a magnificent adventure, full of larger-than-life characters.

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This novel remains one of my favorites, not just of Poul’s work, but of science fiction in general. It demonstrates all of Poul’s great strengths as a writer. His sympathy with period personalities and historical events is manifest on every page. His full-bore mastery of science fiction elements meshes perfectly with the historical details. His prose style is elegant, simple, clear—and punchy. As in wickedly funny.

In short, The High Crusade practically defines the word “rollicking.”

One of Poul’s great strengths is that despite his superior skill and knowledge, one never gets the impression he looks down upon his readers. We are all partners, friends, invited to an interstellar jousting match, just to while away a few good hours and enjoy the fun.

In celebration of this new edition, and of fifty years of grand adventure, I suggest we all pick up the book, turn to the first page, read until we laugh, then stick in a bookmark and go to the refrigerator for a beer. Preferably a Carlsberg, one of Poul’s favorite brews.

Don’t drink a beer for every laugh. That would be excessive. But a swig per chuckle, and you’re on your way to a fine evening spent in the company of a great writer, a man whose highest calling was to thoughtfully entertain.

He was, as he often said, keenly aware that his books were contending for your beer money. As far as I’m concerned, it’s no contest.

This Crusade is its very own high.

Greg Bear is an American science fiction writer, perhaps best known for the novels Blood Music, Eon, and The Forge of God. He has published over thirty novels and received two Hugos and five Nebulas. His latest work, Hull Zero Three, is scheduled to be released on November 22^nd.

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What Happens

Sam and Frodo flee from Cirith Ungol and head as best they can for Mount Doom. They overhear two Orcs, one tracker and one soldier, quarreling about their orders to search for Gollum (which ends in the tracker murdering the soldier), and later Sam sees Gollum coming near a resting Frodo. Orc camps and fortifications leave Sam and Frodo no choice but to take a road cut down the side of a cliff, on which they are overtaken by Orcs and thought to be deserters. They come down to the plain and manage to escape before they are forced into a gated camp, when several companies of Orcs collide and create a great deal of confusion.

Comments

Maybe it’s this chapter I think of when I think how long the journey across Mordor is, when it’s really only three chapters of this book? Because this feels like a pretty long chapter and yet the actual events, as you can see, do not take much summarizing, when you leave out the “they walked and rested and were miserable.” I also had a rotten time visualizing the geography of Udûn, the Isenmouthe, and so on, though that say more about my attention level than anything else. I’d like to find something more enjoyable in these chapters than I remember, truly I would, because it’s been so lovely when I’ve found things elsewhere, but they are still just not doing very much for me.

* * *

I had a bit of carryover from last time’s noticing how everything was set up to help them escape, when in the second paragraph of this chapter, they “escape() for the moment” by getting “out of sight (of) the Tower.” Except as the end of that paragraph says, there is a Nazgûl “(p)erching now on the wall beside the ruined gate”—or, to be precise about it, the winged creature that the Nazgûl is riding is perching on the wall, and therefore temporarily being “out of sight” really ought not constitute safety. Especially since the Nazgûl are stronger now that they are in Mordor. No aerial searches? No sensing the Ring that’s only “fifty paces” away? Really?

I didn’t have the same reaction to their escape from the Orcs at the end of the chapter, on the other hand. Perhaps that’s a sign I was getting into the story a bit more by then, or maybe it was just more intrinsically plausible.

* * *

Frodo. The effects of the Ring seem to be affecting more and more of his mind. He tells Sam that while in prison, he tried to remember various Shire landscapes (and I find it telling that he specifically mentions landscapes, not people) but “can’t see them now,” because “this blind dark seems to be getting into my heart.” Shortly after that, the wind changes, they get a bit of light [*], and they hear a Nazgûl bringing bad news (which they don’t know is the Witch-king’s death), but even that doesn’t help Frodo. Sam asks him if he has some hope now, and Frodo says no: he is beginning to see the Ring in his mind all the time, “like a great wheel of fire.” But he’s still maintaining the attitude he had in last chapter, that he doesn’t expect or even hope to succeed, but must do his best anyway.

[*] With an orientation paragraph that rips out my heart in its matter-of-factness:

It was the morning of the fifteenth of March, and over the Vale of Anduin the Sun was rising above the eastern shadow, and the south-west wind was blowing. Théoden lay dying on the Pelennor Fields.

We also get a look at another change in him, when he gives Sting to Sam, telling him, “I do not think it will be my part to strike any blow again.” He also casts aside his armor earlier, which is framed as reducing the weight he must carry, but gains new significance in light of giving up his weapon. And then they’re forced to pretend to be Orcs, put back in the role of soldiers that Frodo’s just tried to give up; I think it’s not just the physical exertion that weighs so heavily on Frodo as a result of this episode.

Sam is mostly being Sam here, loyal and practical and self-sacrificing. He is, however, the one who maybe-sorta-possibly has a wish granted. He tells Frodo that if only Galadriel could hear or see them, he’d tell her that all they want is light and water. And then they find both and he credits her: “If ever I see the Lady again, I will tell her!” Of course Galadriel could perfectly well see or hear them (did he forget the Mirror, do you think, or was his comment not actually rhetorical as I initially read it?), and perhaps she was able to guide them subtly to the stream. Or not—there’s no way to tell.

Sam also receives an insight that has “significant message” written all over it:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

A footnote in the Appendices identifies the star as Eärendil, which links this to the entire mythic history of Middle-earth and makes it more likely, as far as I’m concerned, that the thought was sent to Sam. I wonder if this is the thought that could bring help to him from the prior chapter?

* * *

I suppose I ought to say something about the setting besides that I found the geography difficult, but, ugh. Okay, to be fair, part of the ugh is that the description of the bugs made the skin on the back of my neck and shoulders try and crawl off my muscles (buzzing around with “red eye-shaped blotch(es)” on them, arrrrgh arrrrgh arrrrgh).

There is a mention of how everyone in Mordor gets fed: there are “great slave-worked fields away south,” and “tributary lands” to the south and east that send “long waggon-trains of goods and booty and fresh slaves” along “great roads.” The little I once knew about historical agricultural societies has fallen away, so I’m not sure how far a separation between fields and cities there’s historical precedent for given this level of transportation technology, but hey, at least it’s mentioned.

While we’re talking logistics, I should note that I was surprised that a Nazgûl could make it to Frodo and Sam’s vicinity from the Pelennor Fields as quickly as it apparently did (we’re told that “Théoden lay dying,” and in the very next sentence that “(a)s Frodo and Sam stood and gazed, . . . they saw a shape, moving at a great speed out of the West,” which eventually turns out to be the Nazgûl). I don’t know if there’s any straight-line calculations of that distance anywhere, but the Éowyn Challenge makes it about 100 miles on the ground from Minas Tirith to the Black Gate, and if the internet can be believed, a normal flight speed for bald eagles is around 40 miles an hour. For whatever all that’s worth.

By the end of the chapter, Frodo thinks they are about sixty miles from Mount Doom and that it will take them at least a week to get there. Looking at Appendix B, he was spot-on about the time, at least.

* * *

Miscellany:

The omniscient narrator tells us that Aragorn’s distraction attempt with the palantír was successful: “The Dark Power was deep in thought, and the Eye turned inward, pondering tidings of doubt and danger: a bright sword, and a stern and kingly face it saw, and for a while it gave little thought to other things.”

The tracker Orc is described as “black-skinned.”

Word looked up: “ghyll,” which the internet claims is either a ravine or a stream, and since water is so hard to come by here I’m going with ravine as the intended meaning.

Mount Doom next time, guys!

« Return of the King VI.1 | Index

Kate Nepveu was born in South Korea and grew up in New England. She now lives in upstate New York where she is practicing law, raising a family, and (in her copious free time) writing at her LiveJournal and booklog.

Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.

Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade may have had a greater impact on my development as a writer than any other book I ever read. I first ran across the novel as a teenager. By then, I’d already developed an interest in history and had become a science fiction fan—but I hadn’t seen any connection between the two. It was The High Crusade that first showed me how mixing history and speculative fiction could produce a fascinating result. Not long thereafter, I read L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, and my education was complete. (I’m sure my high school teachers would have disputed that conclusion, but what did they know?)

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Within a year or two, I was starting to write my own science fiction stories. The results were about what you’d expect from a newbie writer who was all of sixteen years old—in a word, bad; in a phrase, truly wretched—but the process had begun.

By the time I was twenty-three, I’d given up any thought of becoming a fiction writer, and I didn’t return to the craft for over two decades. But, at the age of forty-five, return I did.

At which point…

Well, let’s put it this way. My first published novel was Mother of Demons, which is simply The High Crusade standing on its head. Poul Anderson placed his medieval human heroes in a futuristic alien setting; I placed my futuristic human heroes in a bronze age alien setting. The resulting story is quite different, but the underlying method is the same.

And so it continued. My most popular series is the 1632 series, which uses the same technique of jumbling history and science fiction. The Boundary series mixes science fiction and paleontology. The Jao series is essentially a science fiction retelling of the Roman conquest of the Greeks and the subsequent subversion of the Roman empire by those same Greeks—with the one difference of adding a truly maniacal alien enemy in place of the quite civilized and generally reasonable Persians. The Heirs of Alexandria series mixes the Renaissance with magic and demons, based on a changed theological history.

I could go on, but I figure that’s enough to make the point. I owe a lot to The High Crusade, I really do.

Eric Flint is a science fiction and fantasy author and editor of the Baen Free Library. His latest book, the alternate history story 1635: The Dreeson Incident, co-authored with Virginia DeMarce, was just released in paperback.