ANVIL, Christopher

   Pseudonym of US writer Harry C.Crosby Jr (?-), whose two earliest stories were published under his own name in Imagination in 1952 and 1953, the first being Cinderella, Inc. CA has been popularly identified with ASF since his initial appearance in that magazine with The Prisoner in 1956. He soon followed with the first of the stories making up the Centra series: Pandora's Planet (1956 ASF; exp 1972), Pandora's Envoy (1961), The Toughest Opponent (1962), Sweet Reason (1966) and Trap (1969). His prolific fiction has been noted from the beginning for its vein of comic ethnocentricity, a vein much in keeping with the expressed feelings of John W.CAMPBELL Jr who, in his later years at least, felt it philosophically necessary for humans to win in any significant encounter with ALIENS. CA supplied this sort of story effortlessly, though his first novel, The Day the Machines Stopped (1964), is a DISASTER story in which a Soviet experiment permanently cuts off all electrical impulses in the world. Chaos results, but Americans are soon making do again with steam engines and reconstructing a more rural civilization. Most of CA's stories take place in a consistent future galactic federation (GALACTIC EMPIRES), and quite a number deal with COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. Within this larger pattern are a number of lesser series, most of whose individual stories were published (usually in ASF) in magazine form only. Archaic, simplistic, insistently readable, Warlord's World (1975) and Strangers in Paradise (fixup 1969) are representative of this material; The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun (1980), which depicts a Soviet-US war 200 years hence, is similar. Only the occasional non-ASF story, like Mind Partners (1960) from Gal, hints at the supple author who remained content within the cage of Campbell's expectations. Since Campbell's death, CA has been less active as a writer. What he might have offered has long been missed. See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; WAR.