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All One Universe [Secure eReader (recommended)]
eBook by Poul Anderson
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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description:  Poul Anderson himself has put together a retrospective collection of his recent writings, fiction and nonfiction, under the title All One Universe. This is the first major Poul Anderson collection in a decade. It encompasses all his strengths as a teller of tales and, in addition, provides a running commentary in the story notes and in the essays on other literary figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Johannes B. Jensen, and John W. Campbell, Jr., commentary that illuminates the fiction, gives personal insight into the mind of this fine writer, and provides a unifying personality for All One Universe. All One Universe, then, represents the new best of Poul Anderson. It is a rich, varied selection of quintessential science fiction as well as four essays, mostly from recent years, by one of the great science fiction writers of the century. His stories are filled with roaring energy, the soul of poetry, and dark imaginings.
eBook Publisher: St. Martin's Press/St. Martin's Press, Published: 1999
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2002
5 Reader Ratings:
Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended) - What's this?]: SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [307 KB]
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
eReader ISBN: 9780312870652
 
IT'S ALL ONE UNIVERSE.
Maybe others exist. There could even be infinitely many, some more or less like ours, some where the very laws of nature are alien. They wouldn't really be like bubbles in a vast sea or pages in a space-time book. The concepts are both more precise and more unearthly than that. For such ideas these days do not come from dreamers, mystics, or science fiction writers. They are the speculations of sober, well-regarded physicists and cosmologists. Speculations only, of course. Probably most scientific opinion still denies them, or at least thinks they must be forever unprovable. Maybe someday -- and the someday is perhaps not so distant -- we will learn otherwise; maybe not. What is certain and wonderful is that they can no longer be ruled out of court. The cosmos we live in has proven to be so rich and strange, so full of mysteries and paradoxes, that the presence of others would be just one more surprise. Besides, it would simply expand a whole that we already know is greater than we can imagine. We would see the total universe as having many different facets, aspects, avatars, however we name them. But the one immediately around us does by itself! We are among them. Together with the comets, planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and dark matter and every enigma, space to the uttermost wave front of the oldest light and time from whatever the beginning was to whatever the end will be -- if words like that mean anything at all -- we belong here. The atoms of our bodies were born of the primordial fireball and later great suns. Our race is a twig, our spirit a leaf on Yggdrasil, the tree of life that has grown, ever-changing, through billions of years to overshadow its world. Einstein said once that the least understandable thing about the universe is that we can understand it as well as we do. This hints at some tremendous oneness in the foundations of reality. The findings of science do likewise, seeming ever more the misty outlines of a single, though endlessly and miraculously diverse, creation. Through science fiction we do not explore it; that is the work of science. I'll have a few remarks to make about the relationship of the two, as I see it -- at any rate, as far as the kind of science fiction that tries to deal with authentic science is concerned. For now I merely propose that such stories help us feel our kinship to the rest of the universe, past, present, and future, close to home or abyssally remote, grim or grand, bleak or bright, always fascinating. The tales and occasional essays in your hand put into human terms, as well as I am able, a little of that variety in unity. They differ from each other, often wildly, because things and events throughout space-time do. Nevertheless I'll try to show how the matters they touch on are parts of a singleness. At the end we'll see if we can bring them together. Lest this look too solemn, let me add that the purpose is to entertain and I hope you'll enjoy.
Copyright © 1996 by Trigonier Trust
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