Anderson, Poul
THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND
Poul Anderson
A Signet Book from New American Library, 1973
PB 176 pages
ISBN # none.
This was my first Poul Anderson book. Since he is a reputed master of science fiction, I wanted to see what I had been missing. Now I know why they call him a master: his rendering of science into fiction is excellent. This book did, though, take me awhile to warm up to, because I've little patience with info-dumps and the beginning of the book has several. But if you can get past those (the book IS short) then you will find yourself enamored by a good story.
Titles most generally reveal a good bit about a story's focus. The People of the Wind is about Ythrians, a species of ornithoids living on a group of planets known as the Domain, on the border of Imperial Terran Space. On the planet Avalon, humans and Ythrians (bird-people) have coexisted for hundreds of years, but now the Terran Empire wants to "rectify" their "messy frontier" against "a Merseian flank attack." The reader never finds out what Merseians are, just that they are the catalyst for this story.
Anderson jumps view-points a lot, from leading humans on both sides of this war to Ythrians defending their world against invasion. The key personality, though, is Christopher Holm, an Avalonian human who prefers to be called Arinnian which is his Ythrian name since he "went bird"--a local saying meaning he prefers the company of Ythrians over humans. Christopher is the son of the Marchwarden, the human half of the shared leadership of the planet with the Ythrian, Ferune. Together they make a defense beyond the expectations of a greedy empire, far beyond.
The People of the Wind is about an alien peoples, their biology and culture. It is also, eventually, a good adventure.
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