Tuesday 14 May 2013

Short Stories

I listed fourteen Poul Anderson collections in the previous post. These are only approximate calculations but, if we count the stories in each collection, then the total is well over one hundred but, if we then subtract for duplications, the total must be reduced by more than thirty. That is still a lot of stories.

When I have finished rereading and posting about Anderson's novels, then I might reread, or read for the first time, some short stories. Somewhere in one of those fourteen volumes, where I can find it later, is "Son of the Sword" which looks as if, with a handful of stories discussed earlier, it belongs in a collection of short works set in various periods of history or prehistory.

All of Poul Anderson's short stories need to be collected without duplication in several volumes of a Complete Works edition. Anderson experimented with different kinds of fiction so that, even more than the novels, the short stories vary and will not all appeal to all tastes but they definitely remain worthy of investigation.

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