Teaser

Earth languishes under the thumb of totalitarian rule. The few remaining rebels are scattered and all but powerless. The only hope for the future is young Kyra, a rebel who dares take risks none other will accept. Her search for a brighter future will take her far from everything she has ever known, but surely the risk is worth the reward . . .

Review

It feels like a long time since I read Poul Anderson’s short story collection Conquests. I don’t actually remember any of the individual stories from it, only a few snatches. What I do know is that the short stories were good enough to make me look for more of his work. Look, and find, is exactly what I did. Hoping to get a sense of his broad output, I bought three books. For Love and Glory was fun but very messy. The Imperial Stars was a curious mix of light storytelling and heavy writing. Now there is Harvest of Stars, a book so infuriatingly dull that it will be my last Anderson read for the foreseeable future.

Part of the problem stems from length. It’s clear now that the less Anderson I read in a single sitting, the more I enjoy it. Makes sense to me. Not every short fiction writer is equally adept at longform storytelling. I would put the magnificent Ken Liu in this category also. His short stories are phenomenal. His Dandelion Dynasty series was a meandering sprawl that I eventually walked away from. With Anderson, I enjoy his style in brief snatches, but over the course of a full novel, that same style drags. Especially when said novel is over five hundred pages long. I don’t mind long books, but not when they’re written so lifelessly. Not when every page feels like a chore.

The thing is, I’ve seen and read so much of what’s in these pages before. The crushing totalitarian regime is the same kind you’ll have seen in a hundred dystopias, and the book has nothing new to add to the conversation. The caveat being that Harvest of Stars is thirty years old, but from this reader’s perspective, it’s order of encounter that matters. We’ve even got a plucky female rebel of the YA variety. Not a knock on YA, of course, but that sense of familiarity does the book no favours. There are a few scattered moments of potential throughout the book – the epilogue at the start being the rarest of innovations – but these are few and far between.

I suppose the question in your minds right now is something along the lines of ‘why buy so many books by an author you’re unsure of?’ Well, because I needed that many to decide. I don’t think it’s possible to judge an author by a single book. Sure, if it’s absolutely dreadful, I’m not going to pick up the sequel. But when an author consistently puts out average-to-good releases, then I’m the kind of fool who gets suckered in for the long haul. And hey, even my favourite authors have bad books with their name on the cover. As for buying so many Poul Anderson books at once. Well, what else can I say? I do find it hard to say no to cheap books.

Book Stats

• Harvest of Stars (#1)
• Published by Tor
• First published in 1993
• 531 pages