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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 |
David Brin: An Ever-Reddening Glow
David Brin (1950- ) is a physicist whose first novel, Sundiver, was published in 1980, the year before he finished his Ph.D. thesis. His novel Startide Rising (1983) won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, and his novel Uplift War (1987) was also a Hugo Award winner. His most recent novel, Kiln People (2002), is an SF detective novel about a world in which people can make disposable copies of themselves to take care of mundane tasks. His stories are collected in The River of Time (1986) and Otherness (1994). In recent years, he has lead an effort to get younger readers interested in SF. With Analog, he is sponsoring Webs of Wonder, a contest to foster internet sites that combine teaching with good science fiction. An optimist and a futurist, he is outspoken about the political and social implications of science technology. He recently published a non-fiction book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (1998).
Although he is a hard SF writer, he doesn't let that get in the way of a good story. As John Clute put it, "he writes tales in which the physical constraints governing the knowable Universe are flouted with high-handed panache." His optimism, showmanship, and unornamented prose place him in the tradition of John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein. In contrast to many of the writers in this book, Brin tends to choose ordinary people as his characters. In a 1997 Locus interview, he remarked,
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One of the rules I try to follow is that normal people are going to be involved even in heroic events. Even if you have superior protagonists, I hate to make them slans. I hate the whole Ubermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of twenty really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing . . . |
A certain element of clever scientific puzzles and games has always been present in hard science fiction, the legacy perhaps of Lewis Carroll, or of math classes and their word problems. Hard SF humor, invented in its modern form by L. Sprague DeCamp, Anthony Boucher, Henry Kuttner, and Fredric Brown in the late 1930s and early 1940s, flourished in the 1950s. And logic problems of all sorts are the meat of hard science fiction. They can make such lovely, surprising plot twists.
In this story, which appeared in Analog in 1996, interstellar travel is responsible for the expansion of the universe; ecologically minded aliens ask us to behave better. There is of course a political subtext.