（外文电子版资料）Anderson, Poul - Saturn Game.pdfVIP

Anderson, Poul - Saturn Game Version 1.0 dtd 040300 The Saturn Game Poul Anderson One of the writing problems peculiar to science fiction is that science has a way of catching up with your imagining. Just as you finish writing a book about the poor folks who live on the perpetually dark side of Mercury, the damned Mariner flyby shows that theres no such thing as a dark side. Out the window with the manuscript (maybe followed by the typewriter and even the writer). Poul Anderson was one of the dozen or so science fiction writers invited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories to witness the first Saturn flyby at their headquarters in Pasadena. Most of us adjourned to the company cafeteria, getting out of the way of the working press and overworked scientists, watching the marvelous pictures come in as we si ed coffee and swa ed tales. There was quite a feeling of suspense, since very little was known about any of the planets satellites, so in effect we had a brand-new world being presented to us every few hours. Poul was the only one actually on the edge of his seat, though; he said he had just finished a story set on Iapetus. The background was perforce 95 percent imagination, since very little could be deduced about the satellite from earthbound observation. One clear picture could blow him out of the water. Fortunately for all of us, the Pioneer cooperated with Pouls imaginings. The story was The Saturn Game, and it won the Nebula for best novella of the year. No one but Poul Anderson could have written this story. Thats true in a literal sense of any story, any author, because even a tired, trite rehash of boy-meets-girl will show some evidence of having been written by a particular boy or girl. But The Saturn Game, besides being startlingly original in structure and plot, reveals a combination of special knowledge and special feeling that amounts to oblique autobiography. Poul is