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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 |
Geoffrey A. Landis: A Walk in the Sun
Geoffrey A. Landis (1955- ) is a physicist who works as a civil-service scientist in the Photovoltaics and Space Environmental Effects branch at NASA Glenn. He has won a number of science prizes. He is married to the writer Mary Turzillo; and they live near Cleveland, Ohio. He is characteristically an hard SF writer, widely published in the magazines and often seen on award nomination ballots. Landis says,
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Hard science fiction is science fiction that tries to be correct about science, or at least as correct as we can be with what we know. More than that, hard SF is science fiction that's fascinated by science and technology, science fiction in which a scientific fact or speculation is integral to the plot. If you take out the science, the story vanishes. |
He has published over fifty short stories. His first published story, "Elemental" (1984) was nominated for a Hugo Award. He won a Nebula for "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" (1988). "A Walk in the Sun" (1991) won the Hugo for Best Short Story. Editor Gardner Dozois says of Landis's fiction, "While there's hard science content, there's also a rich emotionalism. Lots of science fiction is bright clever ideas. In Geoff's case, the bright clever idea is supported by the emotional life of the story. He writes about science and the scientific world from a humanistic slant."
His first novel, Mars Crossing (2000) which concerns a joint NASA-private venture to go to Mars and back, was nominated for a Nebula. He hopes that the novel will help people understand why planetary exploration is important and will get them excited about exploration of Mars. His short fiction is collected in Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (2001).
Here, Landis takes on the tale of the dying astronaut -- a favorite theme of the New Wave period, used by J. G. Ballard, Barry Malzberg and others. About the origins of this story, Landis says in a Locus interview:
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When I wrote that, I was working on the question, can you make a lunar base with a solar array? They're very light and cheap, compared to most other reactors, so if we could do that, it would be a great thing for a lunar base. The problem is, the moon has 14 days of darkness, and that's an awful long time to run on a battery. Even the Energizer Bunny gets tired! One concept we had is that maybe your moonbase is not stationary. The moon doesn't rotate very fast -- about ten miles an hour -- so I thought, "Well, you put wheels on your moonbase and you just keep it in the sun all the time." (You could also do that on Mercury, which also rotates very slowly.) I wrote that up in a little piece presented at the Conference on Space Manufacturing, then as an article published in the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, then decided to turn it into a story. |
Arthur C. Clarke's "Transit of Earth" is one of the themes more optimistic treatments: If the protagonist is going to die anyway, he may as well have a look around first. Landis's treatment of the theme is more optimistic still, a good old-fashioned problem-solving story in which the protagonist's secret weapon is . . . her emotional inner resources. Although she goes for a look all the way around, the focus of this story is not on the glories of the lunar landscape, but on the balance between her interior and exterior worlds. This is a woman-against-the-universe story.