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Three Hearts and Three Lions | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Poul Anderson | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Holger Carlsen was more concerned with the Nazis who were overrunning his homeland back in Europe than he was with fairy tales. Stories of fantastic creatures, knights in shining armor, and magic were the last thing on his mind when he set off to join the underground resistance. Which made his surprise all the greater when a close call in a firefight somehow transported him into a land where all that and more were the law of the land. But it's a bad time there, too. Chaos is threatening to overrun the land, and only a hero can stand in their way. Unfortunately Holger has no idea how to do it, and one question keeps nagging at him: why was everybody expecting him? More importantly, why were they expecting him?
I generally dislike science fiction books written earlier than 1980 or so. They they were published in the early days of the genre is almost always readily apparent in the authors' word choice, approaches to matters, and, simply put, the their skill levels in writing.
But this isn't science fiction, it's fantasy. And it seems to have held up to the test of time a bit better. The past, which most fantasy (and certainly this one) draws upon, is a solid reference. It doesn't matter much whether a story was written yesterday or a century ago if it is based on the technology, customs, and morals of a millenium ago. The result is a certain timelessness to the tale. Were it not for references to World War Two and the Nazis at the book's very start, this could take place at almost any time. Even with them, this will be as enjoyable a generation from now as it was a generation ago.
Three Hearts and Three Lions follows a common theme of early fantasy, especially cross-world stories, of trying to analyze myths and magic logically and scientifically. Lycanthropy isn't a curse, it's genetics. A dagger with a magical flame that can even burn underwater must use magnesium. And so on. Sometimes this tack works, and sometimes it fails utterly.
This time, unfortunately, is one of the latter. Most of the time, anyway. The need to explain everything with logic severely hurt the story. At the very least it ruins the flow, as everything comes to a screeching halt so Holger can explain this or that to his companions. To me, it also damaged my simple enjoyment of the world. Let magic be magic! It can follow logic, of course — it really almost as to, or else simply anything could happen at any time, and it could be declared magical — but it shouldn't really follow this world's logic or physics. Trying to make such things as trolls turning into rock at the light of dawn follow real physics leeched a lot of the fun out of the book.
Anderson's wording also made the story somewhat annoying. Accents and overly formal language fill its pages, archaic even when the book was written. It makes the story marginally more accurate to how things were in the real Middle Ages upon which the setting is based, but it also made the story a positive pain to read. I felt it was a poor bargain.
These days, this story would have been written very differently. While I can't promise I'd like such a version, I can say I didn't much like this one. In the end, I stand by my opinion that the golden age of science fiction was better for its explosion of wild ideas than in how they were actually told.
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