Satan's World

"Satan's World" by Poul Anderson, ©1968, ©1969 Mr. Anderson is an old science fiction writer. This is a good story, more adventure than science, about his Polesotechnic League people. It is quite an adventure. David Falkayn gets thrown into the story and is saved by his boss and cohorts from an ignomious fate. The characters are pretty much stereotypes from mythology and history. I was surprised to realize that Nicholas van Rijn was based on Baron Von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, of Germany. There are aspects that are not appropiate to the Baron, but a lot of Mr. van Rijn's character is similar to what I read the Baron would have felt and done. There is a lot of daring do well in this story and some rather farfetched incidents that come out well. It is just amazing. Like Prof. Asimov and his pschohistoric saga, "Foundation", this is always peaceful to a fault. Quite a bit far from reality, but it is all science fiction.

from the back cover of the April 1977 Berkley Medallion edition A ROGUE PLANET frozen for a billion years by the cold of interstellar space, now boiling with titanic energies. Mysterious beings had kidnapped David Falkhayn, the celebrated explorer of new worlds. Why were they trying to prevent him, at all costs, from exploiting the devil planet's resources? The stakes are nothing less than the survival of the human race, and the sentient beings allied with it.

Vital part of Anderson's future history (early on, before the empire that Dominic Flandry defended even existed), when Nick van Rijn's traders discovered a rogue world that was approaching a sun close enough to get warmed up. The notion of brown bodies was new in the 1960's when this was written, and the human battles over this freak of nature was as good as anything Anderson has ever written. His desciption of what was going on as the planet warmed up were great as well.