This weekend, I was poking around a thrift shop (as I’m wont to do) and picked up a handful of cheap paperbacks. They were all books I have read before, but since they are so good and so cheap, I decided to reread and then pass them on to some deserving friends.
One of them is a 1979 novel by Poul Anderson called “The Avatar”. It has been a long time since I’ve read any of Anderson’s work and this is a pleasant surprise. So much so, that I want to share a few sample paragraphs.
“…How could a bird get born?”
He hoisted himself to sit cross-legged beside her. “The same way an idea gets hatched,” he suggested.
“Aye,” she responded quickly. “see, Einstein brooded long over his – they had to bring him food and tobacco where he sat – until one fine day the egg went crack and a little principle of special relativity peeped forth, all wet and naked, and then the poor man must scurry to and fro fetching long wiggly equations to stuff down its beak, but at last it was grown to be a grand big cock of a general relativity theory and the quantum mechanics came to build a proper perch for it.”
Isn’t that just lovely?
There will be more to come of this review when I finish the tale.
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