Shortly after Poul Anderson's birth, his father, an engineer, moved the family to Texas, where they lived for over ten years. Following Anton Anderson's death his widow took her children to Denmark but returned with them to the United States after the outbreak of World War II, settling eventually on a Minnesota farm. Although he earned his baccalaureate degree with honors, Anderson seems to have made no serious attempt to work as a physicist; his first story was published in 1947 while he was still an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, and he has been a free-lance writer since 1948. After his marriage to Karen Kruse in 1953 he moved with her to the San Francisco Bay area. A daughter, Astrid, was born in 1954. For over twenty years the Andersons have lived in Orinda, California, near Berkeley.

Until the publication of Tau Zero in 1970, "The Queen of Air and Darkness...