For Love and Glory

For Love and Glory; Poul Anderson (Tor Books, 2003).

For Love and Glory is based on a couple of stories that Anderson wrote for the so-called Isaac’s Universe series that Avon and DAW published between 1990 and 1995. Isaac Asimov created the overall background and authors such as David Brin, Robert Silverberg, Hal Clement and others contributed stories to the four collections and two novels (The Diplomacy Guild, Phases in Chaos, Unnatural Diplomacy, Fossil by Hal Clement and Murder at the Galactic Writers’ Society by Janet Asimov). The series varied in quality (the novel by Janet Asimov, for example, is pretty poor). Anderson took his stories, changed some names, changed some settings, but kept the overall plots. This is, it appears, his last novel. It is a good novel, not one of his best, but certainly better than most of the drivel out there (heck, any novel with colliding black holes is worth a read!). It kept me going (I read it in three days) with several plot threads and two very interesting main characters.