The Star Fox by Poul Anderson
Review by Michelle
The Star Fox follows Heim and his ship through a politically turbulent time for future Earth. An alien race, the Alerionia, have taken over a far off human outpost. While Earth debates endlessly over the situation, Heim takes action and a delightful Space Opera ensues.
What most impressed me about The Star Fox is that it balances development at the macro and micro levels of the story. On the macro level are political happenings that inspire and influence our protagonists’ actions. On the micro level is the dvelopment of Heim through his choices and interactions with other characters. The Star Fox accomplishes this balance by focusing on the parts of the tale where the macro and micro intersect. That way the reader does not feel as if they are taking a political science class, but neither do they feel as if the characters exist in a self-serving void of adventurism.
I can’t talk about Heim without spoling everything, and the novel is only a couple of hundred pages long, so I’ll leave on a note about the political tone, which ranges somewhere between conservative, with a healthy dose of individual liberties. None of the politics bothered me, but your politics might be different than mine, so this is your fair warning. In particular, in the book there is an extremist pacifist group that uses kidnapping as a tactic, and it’s clear that Poul Anderson was not on the side of the pacifists. The novel was published at about the same time that US combat units were first deployed in Vietnam, so I suspect that the war may have influenced the writing, though I doubt that the book is meant as a direct political commentary. I’m not a historian or a political scientist, so that’s as far as I’ll speculate on the matter.
As a final note, this book has space pirates. Need I say more?
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Posted in Reviews by deareditor on February 8th, 2010 
