The Hard SF Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

The Hard SF Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
lovely book cover

"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 Langford: Different Kinds of Darkness


David Langford (1953- ) is the most famous writer in SF fandom today, and is another ex-physicist (see David Brin, above). He is an occasional reviewer for SFX and for New Scientist, and The New York Review of Science Fiction, and is well known for his critical acumen. He publishes the fanzine Ansible, the tabloid newspaper of SF and fandom (which wins Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a monthly column in Interzone, and online: www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible). He also keeps winning best fan writer Hugo Awards (he is the most famous humorous writer in fandom today). His fan writings have been collected in Let's Hear it for the Deaf Man (Langford is deaf). He is in addition the author of several books of non-fiction and four novels, The Space Eater (1982), a hard SF novel, The Leaky Establishment (1984), a satire on a nuclear weapons lab, Earthdoom! with John Grant, and Guts: A Comedy of Manners (2001) with John Grant, a funny horror novel reputedly requiring much readerly intestinal fortitude. In recent years, he has been publishing a steady string of impressive SF short stories, most of them hard SF.

A few sentences from his CV are relevant to this story, which has weapons research deeply embedded in its background: "Brasenose College, Oxford. BA (Hons) in Physics 1974, MA 1978. Weapons physicist at Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, Berkshire, from 1975 to 1980. Freelance author, editor and consultant ever since."

"Different Kinds of Darkness," a recent winner of the Hugo Award for best short story, is hard SF about kids, mathematics and new kinds of weapons, their use and misuse. It implies a whole future society. It is wonderful and scary, eerily plausible.