Poul Anderson — Harvest the Fire

Tor Paperback, 190pp. Poul Anderson, a legend of SF, is the writer whom the mantle of Robert A. Heinlein descended upon. Anderson devoted his career to the visionary enterprise of creating science fiction set in a carefully extrapolated human society of the future in the spirit of Heinlein.Nowhere does he succeed more powerfully than in the works set in the future history that began in Harvest of Stars, continued in The Stars Are Also Fire, and now leaps into the distant future in Harvest the Fire. This is no less than the tale of the expansion of humanity to the limits of the solar system and beyond. It also chronicles the evolution of machine intelligence, until humans and machines come into conflict in an age when the outward urge and the urge to change are the chief barriers to utopia for many humans--and for their machines.Harvest the Fire is the story of politics and poetry: of a poet, Jesse Nicol, who aspires to great work in an era when human literary greatness is apparently all in the past, who travels to the Moon and falls in love with a beautiful revolutionary, Falaire--a woman determined to escape from the care of machines. For the machines are now the masters of humanity, and the great work of Falaire is freedom, which must be stolen from the machines.With the precision and clear focus of a master, Poul Anderson tells a sharp and poignant tale against an epic interplanetary background. Harvest the Fire is hard SF raised to the intensity of poetry. Some tanning. (ISBN: 9780812553758). Good.