One of the writing problems peculiar to science fiction is that science has a way of catching up with your imagining. Just as you finish writing a book about the poor folks who live on the perpetually dark side of Mercury, the damned Mariner flyby shows that there’s no such thing as a dark side. Out the window with the manuscript (maybe followed by the typewriter and even the writer).
Poul Anderson was one of the dozen or so science fiction writers invited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories to witness the first Saturn flyby at their headquarters in Pasadena. Most of us adjourned to the company cafeteria, getting out of the way of the working press and overworked scientists, watching the marvelous pictures come in as we sipped coffee and swapped tales. There was quite a feeling of suspense, since very little was known about any of the planet’s satellites, so in effect we had a brand-new world being presented to us every few hours. Poul was the only one actually on the edge of his seat, though; he said he had just finished a story set on Iapetus. The background was perforce 95 percent imagination, since very little could be deduced about the satellite from earthbound observation. One clear picture could blow him out of the water. Fortunately for all of us, the Pioneer cooperated with Poul’s imaginings. The story was “The Saturn Game,” and it won the Nebula for best novella of the year.
No one but Poul Anderson could have written this story. That’s true in a literal sense of any story, any author, because even a tired, trite rehash of boy-meets-girl will show some evidence of having been written by a particular boy or girl. But “The Saturn Game, ” besides being startlingly original in structure and plot, reveals a combination of special knowledge and special feeling that amounts to oblique autobiography. Poul is a consummate “hard science” writer, who not only sports a degree in physics (with honors) but, more important, reveals in books like Tau Zero that he keeps up with the fast-changing science. He is also a swashbuckling romantic, with such titles as Hrolf Kraki’s Saga and The Last Viking to his credit. The association with sword-and-sorcery derring-do percolates over into “real” life: Poul was one of the founders of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an outfit dedicated to the recreation and celebration of medieval life through costumed fairs and tourneys, usually livened up with a certain amount of barely controlled mayhem as the participants duel with somewhat blunted weapons.
In the man, these two worlds are well integrated, apparently Poul is a soft-spoken charmer who wouldn’t smite a fly. In the story, well, it’s another story.
If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we are to avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on
their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it` crossed a threshold of human experience.
-Francis L. Minamoto, Death:
Under Saturn: A Dissenting View
(Apollo University Communications, Leyburg, Luna, 2057)
I
“The City of Ice is now on my horizon,” Kendrick says. Its. towers gleam blue. “My griffin spreads his wings to glide.” Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions ‘ His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air strikes through’. his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. “I lean over and pee after you.” The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. It head flickers palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith; hammered into the steel.
“Yes, I see the griffin,” Ricia tells him, “high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the: portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my; sleeve, but I tear the spider silk apart and dash forth into the. open.” The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, “Is it in truth you, my darling?”