Poul Anderson (1926 – 2001)
Prominent American science fiction author who wrote during a Golden Age of the genre.
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I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
We're mortal - which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful - but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?
Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.
A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.
We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?
Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing.
Rainfall sows itself, it grows down through soil to the secret places where stones abide; it brings the strength of them up rootward.
Lie still, molder away, then be again grass.
Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.
I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.
"I've heard assorted rhapsodies about humankind going to the stars, of course. Who hasn't? Each of them founders on the practical problems."
"The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems."
You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen.
In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program...
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