More book reviewing

Today we're going to talk about Poul Anderson. Who is Poul Anderson you non-scifi geeks might be asking? Well, only the author of the best YA novel ever, The High Crusade. The premise is that a world-conquering alien race lands a scouting ship outside a medieval English town, interrupting the local lord's preparations to set off for the Holy Land. Lucky for him, the aliens are a little cocky, and soon the English have captured the ship and decided it would give them a nice advantage against the infidels. Through a series of miscalculations on the part of their alien captive, massive bluffing on the part of the English, and just plain accident, they end up conquering the entire alien empire. Amidst all this silliness, it actually gets a large amount of history right, particularly the interplay between the Norman nobility, their clergyman, the English-speaking peasantry, and the (half) Welsh knight no one quite trusts. In other words, it's pretty damn brilliant for its genre.

Sadly, Poul Anderson is quite an inconsistent writer, and you never know what you're going to get when you pick up one of his books. The most recent gamble I tried was People of the Wind, which sadly lacks both good characters and good prose. This example is pulled from the first pages:

Ranchland rolled beneath him. Here around Gray, the mainly Ythrian settlements northward merged with the mainly human south; both ecologies blent with Avalon's own, and the country became a checkerboard. Man's grainfields, ripening as summer waned, lay tawny amidst huge green pastures where Ythrians grazed their maukh and mayaw. Strands of timberwood, oak or pine, windnest or hammerbranch, encroached on nearly treeless reaches of berylline native susin where you might still glimpse an occaissional barysauroid. The rush of his passage blew away fretfulness.

I'm still half-heartedly trying to read it, but in many places (especially a later list of alien plant species) I am forcibly reminded of this comic: