A lot can and ought to be written about Poul Anderson’s 1989 masterpiece and recent Hugo Award nominee. Several reviews have appeared but most seemed to miss the following (obvious to me) salient points.

First, the book is a tribute and homage to Robert A. Heinlein. The concept is Anderson’s reworking of Heinlein’s most obsessive themes: what would immortal humans be like? Methuselah’s Children, Time Enough for Love, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset are all developments of that theme.

Besides ambitiously covering the history of mankind from Phoenician ancestors to centuries in the future (quick: which of the most famous SF series of the 1940s does the same thing? — see end of paragraph for answer), sprinkling the absolute minimum of immortals throughout the globe, allowing a workable storyline, and then showing nearly every possible reaction by them and to them. Anderson pulls off the most brilliant coup of all, surpassing Heinlein’s starting vision: the “mortal” humans develop their own “artificial,” immortality and thus freely abandon their humanity—leaving the outsider immortals as the remaining upholders of human values such as colonization of space! (The answer is Doc Smith’s Lensman series, of course. If you remembered, Clear Ether! to you!

Anderson’s lead immortal, Hanno the Phoenician, is a walking, talking Heinlein, as his last mortal mistress points out explicitly. His chief rival here is a Russian freedom-fighter (whose very name is Liberty — Svoboda) and a Syrian counter-economist (in the world’s oldest “black” profession) — how libertarian can you get? Yet no other reviewers mention these obvious facts.

Perhaps the reviewers were blind to the Heinlein homage because it was too intimately connected to the libertarian viewpoint. These days I need to qualify such a statement with emphasizers: The author has no need of preaching characters because the entire universe of the novel works on libertarian assumptions. Furthermore, I am talking full-blooded, free-market, Romantic libertarianism, not coalition/lowest common denominator style. Many, if not all, other possible views are presented, debated, and exhausted — nor does the most libertarian character always win the debate. But the circumstances always verify the libertarian understanding of the nature of Man and his Universe.

In short, Poul Anderson qua ideologue may be the most subtle libertarian activist of all. Much like his well-read entrepreneurial hero, Nicholas van Rijn (see, for example, Trader to the Stars), he is content to let the skeptical or resistant reader think he is winning all the small stuff, while the Big Sale goes through.

Anderson can give away too much, though. His next-most libertarian novel, Winter of the World, was superbly individualist and anarchofeminist. But the libertarianism was badly undercut by the revelation that the exemplar of these virtues was herself no longer human.

The Boat of a Million Years comes perilously close to this final cop-out. In fact, the lead characters are not human in that they have a greatly diminished fear of death and none of old age, but a greater fear of their neighbors. Yet Anderson’s final twist makes up for this by not only having them acquire human values (i.e., universal libertarian ethics and Romantic goals) but having them end up as the sole repository of these values since the rest of mankind abandons external objective life for ever-inward-spiraling, pure, subjective consciousness.

And if it is a fair comparison: the rest of homo sapiens has acquired immortality synthetically, so it is now immortals vs immortals. (About the only thing Anderson could have done to make it more equal was to have a synthetic immortal or two join the Natural ones. This would have increased complexity considerably near the end.) Furthermore, the Naturals' offspring are overwhelmingly mortal — that is, the natural immortals are carriers of humanity and they carry it to the stars.

Poul Anderson’s Boat of a Million Years deserves the Best Novel Hugo. One may argue for other libertarian-SF novels from 1989, such as Solomon’s Knife or Henry Martyn, but they weren’t nominated. And while Victor Koman, Neil Smith and their (our) gang are our literary young warriors, Anderson has smoothly taken up Heinlein’s mantle as our Wise Old Man. Let us wish him some of that natural immortality for I see no one close to catching that mantle when Poul Anderson finally lets it fall.