American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson / Way Station by Clifford D. Simak / Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes / ...And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal] by Roger Zelazny
edited by Gary K. Wolfe
I read the Hugo Award for Best Novel winner for 1964, Clifford Simak's Way Station, in a Library of America collection of "four classic novels" of American sf. One of the other books in the volume was also a Hugo winner, This Immortal by Roger Zelazny, so I'll get around to that in a couple more years. If I was reading half of the book, I might as well go all the way, so I decided to follow Way Station up with Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (1960). The High Crusade was a Hugo finalist itself in 1961, but lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (This I did not read and review as part of this project, because I had read it already.)
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Collection published: 2019 Novel originally published: 1960 Acquired: February 2022 Read: September 2022 |
Poul Anderson isn't an author I have much experience with, but I did love his time travel fantasy There Will Be Time (1972), which I read many times as a kid. But on the other hand, my copy was part of a Signet double with The Dancer from Atlantis (1971), which I never even got through the first chapter of despite several attempts! LibraryThing tells me I own many anthologies with his stories in them, but most of the time I don't mention his contributions in my reviews, so I must not have found them notably good or bad. Thus, I was very curious how I would take this book.
It turns out that I took it very well! The High Crusade opens in medieval England, where an alien spaceship lands in a country village, ready to frighten the locals. However, guile, brutality, and sheer luck lead to an upset when the villagers manage to slaughter all of the aliens bar one and take over the ship. The local baron loads most of his village's population onto the massive ship. He intends to fly the ship to the Holy Land and "liberate" it, but the surviving alien tricks him and engages the autopilot, taking the ship back to the alien colony from whence it came, with no reference coordinates to enable a return to Earth.
It's hilarious and charming. The humans are outclassed and outgunned, but keep going anyway. The baron doesn't even know how to use a napkin, but manages to outwit aliens who have hand-held nuclear weapons through superior strategy and a propensity to bluff outrageously. The novel is narrated by a monk named Brother Parvus. Would the novel's plausibility hold up to strict scrutiny? Perhaps not, but it's such a joy to read that you won't want to hold it up to strict scrutiny. It zips along (only 140 pages long in this edition) and doesn't outwear its welcome, as it continuously escalates. Soon the baron is organizing an interstellar alliance against the invading aliens and converting other aliens to Christianity! Jo Walton has a great tribute to the novel here, and says it better than I can.
It is a bit funny that this lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz, also a science fiction novel about a Catholic monk (or monks) recording information for posterity. Must have been something in the air in 1960! I think it would be pretty difficult to argue that Canticle wasn't the right choice—it's certainly the one of the finalists I would have voted for—but this is a worthy finalist for sure, and well worth reading, and I'm glad editor Gary K. Wolfe included it in this Library of America anthology of 1960s sf. Poul Anderson was a finalist for Best Novel seven times, but never won, which means I won't read much more of his work as part of my Hugo journey, but I do feel it would be nice to seek it out otherwise. (He did win many times in the various short fiction categories, however: twice in Best Novella, thrice in Best Novelette, and twice in Best Short Story.)
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus
other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: City by Clifford D. Simak
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