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| "This colossal anthology covers the return of sf to themes based in the hard sciences. . . . A very satisfactory overview of a major portion of contemporary sf and a sterling achievement by Tor and the Hartwell-Cramer team."
Booklist
From Paul McAuley's tale of runaway technology ("Gene Wars") to Gregory Benford's story of evolution and murder ("Immersion"), the 41 stories in this annotated anthology provide a strong argument for the revival of hard sf as a major force in the genre in the 1990s. Library Journal |
Brian Stableford: A Career in Sexual Chemistry
Brian Stableford (1948- ) is a prolific and opinionated British writer and critic. He has a degree in biology and a Ph.D. in Sociology. He has written 75 books, including 50 novels. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship, completing his set of the four major awards available in that field-the others being the SFRA's Pioneer Award (1996), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987). His recent non-fiction includes Yesterday's Bestsellers and Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence, both published by Borgo Press in 1998. He also works in the field of the popularization of science, in which he is currently producing a series of "LabNotes" pamphlets on recent developments in medical biotechnology for the Education Division of the Wellcome Trust. He is among the top rank of today's short story writers, producing a wide variety of excellent science fiction and fantasy stories at a rate of several a year. One of the principal writers of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy during the 1990s, Stableford's formidable knowledge and skill, and the impact of his learned writings, made him a central figure in SF.
In recent years, he has published a number of essays on "practical theory," of which "The Last Chocolate Bar and the Majesty of Truth: Reflections on the Concept of 'Hardness in Science Fiction,'" in The New York Review of Science Fiction, is particularly relevant to our discussion of hard SF. In it, he pins down the probable first use of the term, and through the example some of its conservative implications:
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Use of the term "hard science fiction" dates back at least as far as November 1957, when P. Schuyler Miller used it in the introductory essay leading off one of his "Reference Library" columns in Astounding Science Fiction. The essay in question cites three books‹John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands in Space, Murray Leinster's Colonial Survey, and Hal Clement's Cycle of Fire‹as widely different but nevertheless cardinal examples of "what some readers mean when they say they want 'real' science fiction." |
His most recent novels The Cassandra Complex (2001) and Dark Ararat (2002) continue his future history series begun in Inherit the Earth (1998), Architects of Emortality (1999), and The Fountains of Youth (2000). This series will be completed in a sixth novel, The Omega Expedition. The series as a whole is one of the major hard SF achievements of the field at the turn of the century.
His most recent book is Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan Collection (2002), an omnibus edition of Stableford's Hooded Swan space opera series, first published in the early 1970s. His short fiction is collected in The Cosmic Perspective/Custer's Last Stand (1985), Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution (1991), and Fables and Fantasies (1996). Stableford has pursued his own course in hard SF in the last decade, writing in the classic apolitical tradition, and has ironically published little hard SF in the UK. His distinguished short fiction was often nominated for awards in the 1990s, and included in Year's Best volumes, but his hard SF novels appeared only in the US. He is positioned somewhere between Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement, and Paul McAuley, but closer to McAuley in affect. The ironies in a Stableford story are often dark and sometimes crushing.
In response to our hard SF anthology, The Ascent of Wonder, in the essay quoted above he expressed his hopes for the future of hard SF:
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Personally, I hope that there will in future be more readers of hard SF who are interested in biotechnologies as well as‹or even instead of‹inorganic technologies. I hope, too, that there will in future be more readers of hard SF who do not require that they be soothed by conventional happy endings, and who are prepared to take a greater interest in the many kinds of idiosyncratic foreplay which could in principle support Eurekaesque climaxes. In particular, I hope that there will in future be more readers of hard SF who appreciate the peculiar aesthetics of irony and downright quirkiness. My reasons for entertaining these particular hopes are not entirely devoid of mere idiosyncrasy and a measure of self-interest, but there's no cause for surprise in that. "Few are those who have sought to know the future out of pure curiosity, and without moral intention or optimistic designs," as Anatole France observed. We ought, however, to be versatile enough to try, at least occasionally, if only for fun. |
This story, the title story of one of his collections, appeared in Interzone in 1987. It is a sardonic tale of the commercial side of scientific research, a topic rarely addressed in hard SF.