When I saw Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions on an ebook sale recently, I knew I had a paper copy on my SF&F keeper shelf, a very old copy with tiny print and slightly yellowed pages. So I downloaded the digital copy and set out to find out why I’d held on to the book for so long, decades in fact. I read a lot of Poul Anderson’s novels back in the day, and enjoyed them, but only kept a few.
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And having reread Three Hearts and Three Lions, I’m not entirely sure why I kept this one. All I remembered was the basic premise, a Danish engineer swept from a World War II battle to an alternate Faery/Carolingian world. His adventures there weren’t nearly as interesting now as I apparently found them forty years ago. Making allowances for the fact that the novel was published in the early 60s (and expanded from a novella written in the 50s), it’s no surprise that the writing seemed dated. The hero’s occasional bursts of humor were a welcome relief from the heavy lifting of working through the thick dialect of some of the characters, but the plot was rather episodic and confusing.
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Another old paperback still on my shelf is Anderson’s Midsummer Night’s Tempest, and I downloaded a copy of that to my Kindle. I love the premise: a world in which Will Shakespeare is a respected historian, writing about true events. But I couldn’t get past the thick dialect on the third page.
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Anderson was a giant in the science fiction and fantasy world, and undoubtedly a major influence on many authors who came after him, but the books I’ve reread haven’t held up for me. (I made a stab at the David Falkayn series a while back and wasn’t swept away by those novels, either, although I loved them long ago.)
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Perhaps some literary memories are best left undisturbed.
Kay Hudson 