From the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog last month:
For
months, I have been reading, mainly rereading, Poul Anderson's novels
and posting about them while reading them. This means that I read the
books more slowly than usual but also that I get more out of them. It
also means that I read less other stuff. However, I must occasionally
read something else.
Having received the Smallville TV series First Season DVD's as a present, I have been watching the early episodes and have also started to reread a Smallville novel, Dragon by Alan Grant.
Grant's
description of a small spacecraft surrounded by a meteor swarm entering
the Solar System and falling towards Earth while the Luthors and Kents
go about their business in Smallville, Kansas, is worthy of Anderson.
Many different authors have written Superman. Isobel Allende wrote a
Zorro novel - called Zorro. Poul Anderson contributed to many
other authors' sf series. (In fact, "Anderson in Asimov's, Niven's and
others' universes" could be a topic in itself.)
What if
Anderson had written a Superman novel, scientifically rationalising all
the absurdities of a humanoid alien with impossible powers and
presenting the character as interacting not with even greater
absurdities but with the real world of economic crisis, climate change
and US military interventions - Clark Kent reporting from Iraq and
investigating Lexcorp? The twentieth century myth of Superman deserves
such treatment in the three related media of prose fiction, graphic
fiction and film. Graphic story-telling is intermediate between prose
and film. Each of the three can do what the others can't. Poul Anderson
would have been able to write a memorable novel.
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