Creator / Christopher Anvil

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Chrisopher Anvil was the Pen Name of Harry Christopher Crosby, an American military pilot turned science fiction author whose writing career spanned from 1952 until his death in 2009 and consisted almost entirely of short stories. His works are mainly science fiction stories and often combine comedic or fantastical scenarios with high-stakes or game-changing scientific, societal or warfare upheavals or clever action sequences.

Anvil's series and recurring characters include:

• The Interstellar Patrol universe, also known as the Colonization series or The Federation of Humanity. A group of stranded spacers pretend to be members of an intergalactic peacekeeping force to restore order on a planet, then end up becoming recruited into a real such organization and act as Cowboy Cops helping restore order to feuding human provinces, fight off alien invasions, stop terrorist groups, and more. This fictional universe expanded far beyond the Interstellar Patrol, featuring various civilian freight haulers, militaries, and colonies who have their own exploits and adventures against enemies such as the ominous Stath Confederacy or more mundane difficulties caused by conflicts of personality, bad luck, or the mysteries of the galaxy.
• Pandora's Legions: After an invasion of Earth goes poorly for the Integral Union, the alien government decides to extend an olive branch and offer humanity authority and opportunities on some of their own planets, while watching the results with different sets of motives and expectations.
• The War With The Outs: Humanity comes under attack by an alien race that can cause illusions that alter their perception of reality (and engages in other misdirection and manipulations), only to begin to lose the advantage once their trick is exposed.
• "The Problem Solver" stories follow Richard Verner, an Expert Consultant for the government and occasional detective who gets called in to analyze baffling setbacks and difficulties, which he always manages to understand and resolve.
• Industrialist James Cardan finds himself an unlikely hero in three radically different stories. First, when he becomes an alien abductee who has the opportunity to mislead the aliens about humanity's defensive capabilities. Next, his company ends up in the right place to trigger nuclear disarmament. Then, in The Day The Machines Stopped, he becomes the biggest hope of preserving and rallying everyone and everything necessary to rebuild society after the eponymous event.
• The Drug Factory stories follow a pharmaceutical firm that makes outstanding medical breakthroughs that spread across society before showing unwanted side effects that put America into a hilarious tailspin that the scientists must scramble to try and fix with new experiments.
• General Lyell Berenger, The Brigadier and a surprisingly Reasonable Authority Figure involved in the developments of new technology and picking the right people to use that technology.
• Nelson Ravagger, a wily "robber baron" who finances the occasional world-changing invention.

His most notable standalone short stories are probably the Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion tale "The Gentle Earth" and "Gadget Vs Trend"; a Scrapbook Story where a super strong soundproof privacy bubble device ends up being abused for selfish and increasingly anarchistic purposes.

Anvil's complete works have been collected in the following anthologies.

• 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)

Anvil stories with their own pages (as of 2024) are:

• Pandora's Legions
• Interstellar Patrol
• "Behind the Sandrat Hoax"
• "The Troublemaker" (which has loose ties to the Interstellar Patrol books)

Tropes in Other Anvil stories:

• After the End:
  • The Steel The Mist And The Burning Sun is set in the aftermath of a devastating American-Soviet nuclear war.
  • The Day The Machines Stopped has society descend into chaos and resourceful people struggling to make it an Apocalypse Not after electric devices are rendered useless.
• Ambadassador: The Earth diplomats in "Brains Isnt Everything" give a Curb-Stomp Battle beating to some aliens who try to take them prisoner.
• Canon Welding: At the end of the War With The Outs series, humanity learns that beyond the Outs' territory, space is controlled by two previously-unknown alien races, the Stath and the Ursoids. Both of these had previously made appearances in the "Colonization" series, suggesting that the "War With The Outs" stories take place earlier in the same universe.
• Dramatic Irony: Much of the humor in "The Gentle Earth" (and a few other alien invasion tales from the perspectives of the aliens to lesser extents) comes from how thoroughly the aliens fail to decipher information about Earth that is obvious to the readers. A white substance that scouts claim is agonizing to touch but keeps disappearing into a puddle before they can show anyone is snow. They think that seasonal cyclones and hurricanes are myths similar to the Santa Claus legend until they are hit hard by those weather phenomena. Krakatoa, the "pleasant little island conveniently located in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra" that the aliens set up a base on is over a powerful volcano (although they read about that in time to get away from it).
• Easily Forgiven: No matter how much an alien race may hammer Earth during an invasion, humanity is always willing to make an armistice or alliance in good faith once the war is over.
• Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion:
  • In "Compensation", the alien scouts decide to beat a hasty retreat and recommend against invading in the first place after they find out about missiles.
  • "The Gentle Earth" covers a long campaign in which the invaders are slowly worn down, but they're defeated in such a thorough and humiliating fashion that it goes under this trope anyway. Their errors and catastrophes include but are not limited to failing to prepare appropriately for Earth's much colder winters, dismissing tornadoes as a legend (having landed in Tornado Alley), and drastically underestimating Russia's missile supply.
  • In "The Underhandler", the aliens suffer a major setback (giving the rest of the world time to reorganize) when they start off by trying to capture all of the oil in the Middle East, not expecting such an underdeveloped region to have as many guns as they end up having. Then, after a hard-fought war, they decide to fake a treaty offer, invite the human they see as the linchpin of the military efforts against them to be an ambassador, then fly off and return in a couple generations when hopefully the humans will have gotten softer and more complacent. This attempted second invasion never even gets off the ground, because instead they find the humans more heavily armed than before and suspicious because they didn't think to turn off their transmitter while they were coming up with that plan to trick the Earthlings between screen-sharing negotiation efforts.
  • In "We From Arcturus", the aliens plotting to kidnap and eat the humans turn out to have keen enough senses they were overwhelmed by the smell of all the human pollutants.
• Everyone Is Armed: In "The Underhandler," everyone in the massive crowd gathered to welcome James Hardesty, who fought off an alien invasion and then agreed to be an ambassador back to Earth is armed with smoke grenades (and likely other weapons) to separate Hardesty from the aliens on his first trip back and shuffle him to safety while forming protective parameters. Given how groups in the crowd are carrying signs like "Weekend Parafun Jump Club," "Friendly Order of Berets," Queensbury Legal Fellows", "Recreational Marksmen Club," Sweet Pea Karate Fellowship," Judo Aikido Chum Club," "Ladies Auxilary of the Hunt Club," "Royal Marine Bathing Society," and "Sisterhood of Nurses," this isn't too surprising.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: In "The Kindly Invasion", the officers of an alien invasion fleet wonder how a decent percentage of humans avoided being poisoned by some "gifts" they bestowed on humanity, then realize that if those people never took the "gifts" in the first place then they have just wiped out all of humanity except the people who are the smartest, most anti-alien, and toughest of humanity, who have access to all of the surplus food and weapons of the people the aliens killed and therefore have enough of a supply line to hold out.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: The New Member, set in the Cold War era, has the head of a small African island recently admitted to the United Nations demanding reparations from all European nations (plus the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand) in the equivalent of hundreds of billions of US dollars for crimes evil colonialists inflicted upon his people ^note  the story pauses to note that the island's government is requesting the reparations in their brand new currency, kittagotigs, which is valued at twice the value of the US dollar, and also demanding interest compounded annually at twelve per cent since the year 1300. He does this in spite of the fact that no surviving records say which nations those evil traders actually came from and that all of this happened 400 years before North America was even discovered by the Europeans. The man's argument rests on how America is a melting pot of nations, and therefore the logic is that some of the people who settled it early on might have come from the unknown nations which looted his country all those centuries ago. In a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome rearing its head (with hilarity not far behind), the demands by that island cause it to become a pariah of the international community and no one else at the U.N. gives the lawsuit any credence or respect, leading to further geopolitical headaches when the country won't take that lying down.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In each of The Drug Factory stories, Banner Value Drug and Vitamin Laboraties, Inc. invent a drug that will benefit humanity on paper (an anti-intoxicant, an allergy cure that increases happiness as a side effect, and intelligence boosters), but these side effects are so appealing that people start taking bigger doses than recommended and having their mental and emotional states suffer as a result and impact society as a whole due to the number of people doing so. In the third such story, this trope gets a double hitter when the antidote for the original intelligence drug condition is itself too strong, making people dumber than they used to be and requiring "an antidote for the antidote."
  • In "The Trojan Bombardment," a new method of warfare of showering care packages on enemy troops as part of a complicated but impactful To Win Without Fighting method (weakening the enemy's hatred for them and diverting them from being in a state of readiness so they are easy to surround and put in hopeless situations. At the end of the story, no one has any response to the Armor-Piercing Question "What do we do if we make it so pleasant that everyone wants to fight us?"
• Holding in Laughter: In "The Gentle Earth," the aliens realize the U.S.S.R. is secretly supplying missiles to America for an Enemy Mine alliance due to the way that captured American officers start oddly sputtering and gasping with "suppressed mirth" when the aliens boast about having the Soviets as allies.
• Honest Corporate Executive:
  • ''Beware Of Greeks Bearing Gifts" has Mr. Peabody, the owner of an armament company who insists on his revolutionary new rifle being sold for barely a third of the price that he could charge for it due to his (correct) belief that the Benevolent Alien Invasion is trying to lull humanity into a false sense of security and wanting more people to feel inclined to buy his armor-piercing rifle for when it comes time to fight back.
  • Financier Jacob Arnow in "Top Line" freely admits that he's out to make money, but he's also the backer of a new car that surpasses regular science fiction territory with how fuel efficient it is and selling the cars remarkably cheap partially out of confidence they'll become more profitable in the long run, but partially in order to end a severe financial crisis, with him and his partner specifically not giving much consideration to the bottom line that so many of their rivals keep an eye on.
  • In "Gadget Vs Trend" J. Paul Hughes, a scientist and company director who develops a nearly indestructible substance initially put to use in cars unsuccessfully pleads with his fellow businessmen to stop selling it after seeing its use cause international chaos, such as being used by criminals to build unstoppable getaway cars or people losing their land to eminent domain to keep out the government.
  • Recurring character Sam Banner owns a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs that increase people's intelligence, prevent hangovers, cure the common cold, and make people friendlier. Banner also works to make antidotes to his various drugs in case they have any unwelcome side effects (e.g. the friendliness drug makes a bank guard let two robbers take all of the money in the vault) and distributes them in a way that decreases his profit margin whenever any side effects manifest and are harming society as a whole.
  • Recurring character James Cardan, the founder of a technology company, hires people who he knows will speak plainly to him and is reluctant to fire his employees for the sake of the bottom line. In his three appearances (each in a different genre) he bluffs a fleet of alien invaders into leaving Earth alone, figures out a way to encourage nuclear disarmament, and becomes a leader of society after nearly all machines stop working.
• Hope Spot: In Torch, a Soviet missile test accidentally sets their oil fields on fire and much of the story involves a desperate fight to put out a blaze unlike anyone has ever seen. Eventually, the inferno is put out after the Western Bloc overcomes their temptation to leave the Soviets to suffer and contributes their own workers and machinery upon realizing the amount of smog that will spread across the entire globe if the fire is allowed to keep burning. Then, as things settle back to normal, it turns out that all the ash particles in the air are blocking out the sun to the point of Endless Winter (or at least years of nonstop winter), requiring evacuations of whole countries and massive resource rationing and stockpiling. On the bright side, this does at least bring an early end to The Cold War when the former enemy nations make peace in the face of the upcoming freeze.
• Humans Are Special: Various alien races that encounter humanity marvel at their ingenuity and resourcefulness. Sometimes this goes into Humanity Is Superior territory.
• Invented Individual: In "Two Way Communication," Nelson Ravagger and Cyrus Cartwright II make and sell a device which lets people hack into live television communications and shout directly out the cameras so the people making those programs can hear any complaints they have. When they are Hauled Before a Senate Subcommittee, they claim that they only handled the financing and manufacturing, respectively, and the person actually responsible for the sale and distribution of the devices is their (presumably nonexistent) partner Skybo Halante, who proves mysteriously elusive during a police manhunt for him and when he is later offered a Distinguished Service Plaque in absentia by the Better Radio and TV Association after American society decides that the devices are a good thing due to making broadcasters more careful about what they put on the airwaves.
• Japan Takes Over the World: In "Top Line," Japan is overtaking Detroit in making and selling cars, and their richest tycoon is buying up American owned overseas resorts and gloats about the "receding American financial sea." This state of affairs and the impending collapse of the dollar motivate an American businessman and a scientist he knows to create a new, affordable, eco-friendly car to reclaim the market.
• Lovable Coward: In "Brains Isnt Everything," one of the two alien races to visit Earth is technologically advanced, shows no racism or ill will to humanity but also lacks courage on a species level, causing them to become a Slave Race willing to offer their technology to humanity if it will liberate them from their oppressors.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: In The Problem Solver and the Defector, a would-be Defector from Commie Land is killed while plans for a missile system are in his possession, but a search of his car turns up no plans. It turns out he glued them into his car repair manual, where the searchers couldn't tell them apart from the diagrams of the engine parts.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: In "The New Member," Bongolia may seem like a Small Name, Big Ego Banana Republic launching a Frivolous Lawsuit and getting petulant when no one will support them with it. Then their ambassador to the U.N. starts hanging severed heads from his suit and their army launches an attack against the four hundred Chinese military and government people on their island, killing most of them.
• Properly Paranoid: Mr. Peabody spends most of "The Kindly Invasion" refusing the gifts of the aliens uplifting humanity (even when he gets the flu while everyone else is perfectly healthy) due to being convinced they are Too Good to Be True, while also cutting into his profit line by making sure as many people as possible can afford the guns his company makes in case of an invasion. His suspicions turn out to be absolutely right, as most of not all of the other people who survive the aliens showing their true colors and poisoning those who trusted them find themselves are helped out by the new super-penetrating rifles they bought from Peabody.
• Railroad Plot: In "Gadget Vs Trend," landowners them by highway and dam projects forcing turn off their land or cutting their land in half purchase QuietWall privacy devices and reconfigure them to block outside access onto their properties after seeing that a regular court fight is unlikely to succeed.
• Resign in Protest: "The New Member," Bongolia pulls an unsympathetic version when it resigns from the U.N. because their demands for inflated reparations they have no evidence to justify awarding and attempts to rope other countries into their wars are being coldly ignored. As soon as they do so, their U.N. ambassador is immediately arrested for the various war crimes and other suspected murders he's implicated in because he has just forfeited his diplomatic immunity.
• Right-Hand Cat: A borrowed version occurs in "Compensation" when a disguised alien invasion scout pets his landlady's cat in the middle of a conversation about how Earth beings are such pushovers. The cat digging all eighteen of its claws into his arm when he won't let it go is one of the things that makes him rethink that label.
• Sabotage to Discredit: In "Uncalculated Risk", this is downplayed when General Berenger doesn't as much sabotage a perfectly good chemical project as much as arrange for the "accidental" release of a bad one (a chemical that is meant to help farming efforts but was discovered at the last minute to make soil dangerously unstable) after evacuating the area first. The widely publicized event and the ensuring property damage of buildings sinking into the ground motivates hesitant bureaucrats to immediately cancel the distribution of the chemical.
• Scrapbook Story: "Gadget Vs Trend," Behind the Sandrat Hoax," "In The Light Of Further Data," "Torch," "The New Member," "Facts To Fit Theory," and various other stories have no direct dialogue and are told entirely through newspaper stories, letters, teleprompter exchanges, television announcement transcripts, meeting transcripts, and the like.
• Secret Test of Character: In Problem Of Command, General Berenger picks a candidate for a sensitive project by presenting a flawed plan that he acts proud of and sees if the candidate will point out the flaw and stick to his objections even when Berenger threatens his career.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: In "We From Arcturus", alien invasion force scouts shapeshift into humans for espionage but find themselves unable to turn back to their true forms (which they need to do to fly home) as a side effect of how their bodies react to all of the pollution on Earth.
• Tactical Withdrawal: In "Ghost Fleet," Colonel Beller pulled his fleet out of a star cluster, Little Orion, due to detecting an enemy weapon that could destroy ships from long-range and has become a Hero with Bad Publicity and The So-Called Coward as a result until he manages to prove his claims that he made the right decision by going up against that weapon under circumstances where he is able to beat it and can prove that it would have been impossible for him to beat it with what he had at Little Orion.
• The Tooth Hurts: "In The Light Of Further Data" features a Cloning Body Parts invention that is primarily used by dentists to make new teeth. It's only years later (after twenty-five million people have gotten the procedure) that scientists discover that the procedure eventually causes a second cloned limb or tooth to grow. This forces the dentists to pull out both sets of teeth grown by the procedure, but because the teeth are still perfectly healthy and firmly embedded in the mouth, pulling them is far more difficult and painful than a regular tooth extraction. The hydraulic extraction devices necessary to pull out the healthy teeth are compared to medieval torture devices and often yank out a piece of the jaw along with the tooth. Eventually, it becomes preferable (although not by much) to induce artificial abscesses to multiple teeth at a time to loosen them for the procedure. By the end of the story, dentists are the most hated profession in the world.
• Torches and Pitchforks: "In The Light Of Further Data" has a medical facility whose invention for regrowing missing teeth accidentally made additional cloned teeth grow (requiring millions of especially painful tooth pullings across the world) end the story being protected by National Guardsmen after vengeful patients have tried to kill the scientists with strategies like a mortar attack, rifle fire, and driving up in a homemade tank.
• Weaponized Teleportation: In "Truce By Boomerang," some entrepreneurs invent a teleportation transmitter device and seek to use it to eliminate shipping expenses and delays, but there are currently too many bugs to handle it effectively: items have to go through at fast velocities or they will drop back to the receiving end, and anything that goes through it (from watches, to food, to bombs) has its matter altered in often unsatisfying ways. But shooting a bullet through the transmitter is fast enough and it matters little how much a piece of lethal lead will change before hitting its target (although the inventor and the soldiers he offers it to prefer to use this, after sending warning shots through the portal, to merely as a threatening deterrent against Armchair Military dictators to keep them from starting wars).
• Ungrateful Bastard: "Torch" sees America giving massive aid to Russia to put out an oil field fire threatening the entire continent, if not the world, after which the Soviets take credit for the effort while making a passing mention of help they got from other countries supposedly wanting to participate in their effort. The Western Bloc is unsurprised by this reaction. This is then subverted after an Endless Winter makes the Russians evacuate their country, and they do express proper gratitude for the help received then and agree to an end of the Cold War.