Christopher Anvil

• Name — Harry Christopher Crosby, Jr. • Pen Name — Christopher Anvil • Born — 11 March 1925 • Birthplace — Norwich, Connecticut, U.S. • Died — 30 November 2009 • Place of death — Cayuta, New York, U.S. • Occupation — Novelist, short story author • Genre — Science fiction

Crosby was born in Norwich, Connecticut, the only child of Harry Clifton Crosby and Rose Glasbrenner. After serving as a pilot with the U.S. military, he began publishing science fiction with the story "Cinderella, Inc." in the December 1952 issue of the magazine Imagination. By 1956, he had adopted his pseudonym Christopher Anvil and his science-fiction work was being published in Astounding. He went on to a long and successful career in the field. His stories usually about characters in different human government organizations, gadgetry, and subterfuge both internal and external while on an adventure. His military background enabled him to bring a certain realism to his portrayal of action and intrigue, which counterpointed the more fantastical elements of his stories. Anvil appeared in Astounding/Analog throughout the 1950s and '60s. This was due his ability to write stories aimed at one of Astounding editor John W. Campbell's preferred concepts: alien opponents with superior firepower losing out to the superior intelligence or indomitable will of humans. Anvil also used humor in his characterization of story crafting, where his protagonists slid from disaster to disaster with the best of intentions, and through exercise of fast thinking, managed to snatch victory somehow from the jaws of defeat. According to David Weber, who acknowledges being influenced by Anvil: His stories became a favorite with readers, and then... "he hit a winning streak in the late 1960s in a series which seemed straight out of Star Trek... The Interstellar Patrol". Many of his nonseries stories are almost purely idea-driven science fiction. Some of the most striking of these, for example "Gadget vs. Trend", entirely lack dialogue and almost entirely lack characters; these stories consist of a series of newspaper reports or other similar materials. In these and other stories, Anvil's technique is to put forth a gadget, invention, or social trend and logically develop the consequences.

Sources: • The Day the Machines Stopped (1964) • Strangers in Paradise (1969) • Pandora's Planet (1972/1984) • Warlords World (1975) • The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun (1980) • Pandora's Legions (2002) • Interstellar Patrol (2003) • Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity (2005) • The Trouble with Aliens (2006) • The Trouble with Humans (2007) • War Games (2008) • RX for Chaos (2009) • The Power of Illusion (2010)

As with other 20th century science fiction writers, Anvil's work became available through print-on-demand and ebooks. One of Anvil's best-known short stories is "Pandora's Planet", which appeared first in Astounding in September 1956. It has since been reprinted several times, and also combined with the other stories in his Pandora series into a full-length "fixed-up" novel, Pandora's Legions. Anvil also published a number of stories which he and John Campbell referred to as the Colonization Series: