Biography
Christopher Anvil was born in 1922 under the name of Harry C. Crosby. His first publication as a science fiction author seems to have been the short story Cinderella, Inc. published in a 1952 edition of the science fiction magazine Imagination. By 1956 he had switched to Astounding Magazine and had adopted his pseudonym. At time of writing, 2004, Anvil was still alive and functioning though no longer actively writing for a living.
Anvil's repeated appearances in Astounding/Analog are due not only to the excellence of his writing but to his ability to write to one of Campbell's preferred plots: alien opponents with superior firepower lose out to the superior intelligence or indomitable will of humans.
While it's questionable if the humans actually win in this one, probably the cannonical Anvil short story is Pandora's Planet which appeared first in Astounding Magazine in September 1956 but can be more easily found in the collection Prologue to Analog, 1965 edited by John W. Campbell.
Favourite Anvil quotes (from different stories)
- "The natives showed considerable low cunning in using the brute force at their disposal."
- "Go squat in a thorny tree !"
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