The ancient rivalry between humans and elves bursts into flame in this compelling tale from the dramatic imagination of Poul Anderson. Queen of Air and Darkness, first published in 1971, is the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Queen of Air and Darkness is a poetic tale of small telepathic creatures whose defense against Earthmen colonizing their beloved planet, Roland, is to create a realm of myth, illusion, suggestion and psychic phenomena. Roland is a place of magic. The warm misty twilight of Roland's arctic wilderness glows with auroral banners, moonbeams, and phosphorescent flowers. Species names like firethorn and crownbuck and place names like Cloudmoor and Troll Scarp reinforce the fairy tale mood of this science fiction masterpiece. As we see and experience through the eyes of isolated Earthborn pioneers in the darklands of Roland, Anderson conjures up a world as compelling to our imagination as Faerie was to the medieval peasants looking out at the woods beyond their narrow fields. Will the humans overrun this beautiful, wild world? The second story on this tape, The Man Who Came Early, reflects Anderson's interest in Old Norse history and literature. A U.S. Army sergeant stationed in Iceland, Gerald Robbins, is accidentally blasted back in time to tenth-century Reykjavik. Grappling to understand the local customs, bewildered by a society in which personal feats of hand-to-hand combat count for more than long-range firepower, he runs a tragic race between learning the skills to survive, and being overwhelmed by his own ignorance.