Introduction to
EUTOPIA:

When it came time to write this introduction for Poul Anderson's story, I found—with panic rising—that somehow Poul had not been asked for biographical data to be worked into the piece. Each of the other writers had been asked and had sent in his background, as well as the afterword. I had an afterword for "Eutopia," but nothing on Anderson. For a moment I wondered why Poul and no one else had been overlooked. And then it became obvious to me. You would not have to threaten me with thumbscrews or the iron boot to get me to admit I am a sucker for Poul Anderson's work. Nor would it take pressure for me to confess I have read just about everything the man has written in the field of speculative fiction for the past sixteen years. Therefore, such familiarity bred an unconscious feeling in this editor that an introduction could be written with no facts at all. I would rather believe that than the alternative, which is that I'm a forgetful imbecile. One must cling to the cornerstones of one's personal religion.

I have my favorite Anderson stories, so do you. I have re-read "UnMan" and "Guardians of Time" and the Hoka stories (written with Gordy Dickson) and "The High Crusade" and "Three Hearts and Three Lions" at least three times each, and several of them half a dozen times. When it became clear that I would have to dredge up biographical facts from somewhere, I began scrounging my bookshelves for Anderson volumes: it was slim pickings, I was only able to pull down thirty-two books. The man is incapable of writing a dull word!

But aside from the obvious credentials, such as that he has won two Hugos, he is married and has a daughter named Astrid and lives in Orinda, California; he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in physics; his Perish by the Sword, a mystery novel, won the first Macmillan Cock Robin Award; in 1959 he was Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention; he sold his first stories in 1947 (both were novelettes, "Tomorrow's Children" and "Logic") to Astounding; he was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania; aside from all of these rather mundane facts (and the singular one that Esquire, world-re-nowned for its depth of perceptivity and exhaustive research into anything it prints, cleverly managed—in its January 1966 issue—to label a full-page color photo of Poul with the name A. E. van Vogt, and Van's photo was slug-lined Poul Anderson), there are secrets so deeply buried that only personal acquaintance with the man's work can unearth them. So for the first time anywhere, in its own way a dangerous vision, the veil is ripped aside and the truth about Poul Anderson can be told:

Because of Anderson's extreme height and his penchant for writing stories about mightily thewed heroes, many of them either reincarnations or descendants of Viking conquerors, the rumor has persisted that Anderson is of Norse ancestry. This is sheer flummery. Poul Anderson (pronounced slightly softer than pull) is actually one meter tall in stockinged feet (and he wears those odious clocked lisle socks), tubby and golden-furred, with a round blunt-muzzled head and small black eyes. Except for his stubby-fingered hands, he resembles nothing so much as a giant teddy bear. It is a tribute to his powers of personal persuasion and the kindness of those around him that he is able to pass himself off as a gangling six-footer with a bushy head of hair and a raconteur's manner of speaking with wildly gesticulating hands the size of picnic hams.

Poul Anderson has never written one word of the stories credited to him. They have all been written by F. N. Waldrop, an asthmatic mail clerk in the rural free delivery office of Muscatine, Iowa. Anderson, by dint of threats and personal vilification, has kept Waldrop in thrall for better than twenty years. The fact that Anderson kidnaped Waldrop's three children in 1946 has not helped the situation much, either.

And as a last laughable untruth, Poul Anderson insists the story which follows is not "dangerous" and could have sold to any magazine. Tell that to McCall's or Boy's Life after you've read it. And please address all libel suits to F. N. Waldrop, RFD, Muscatine, Iowa.