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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 |
Joe Haldeman: For White Hill
Joe Haldeman (1943- ) was in Canada when his draft notice arrived in his mailbox in 1967. When he arrived home to find the envelope from the Selective Service, despite thoughts of getting back in the car and heading back across the border, he opened the envelope and ultimately went to Viet Nam. Thought he was a pacifist and had tried to apply for conscientious objector status, he went because he wanted to become an astronaut. His first novel was a distinguished young adult book, War Year (1972), and his novel 1968 (1995) is an ambitious attempt to represent and confront a year spent as a soldier in Vietnam. His experiences as a soldier have informed much of his most important work.
When he was drafted, he had already written the first two science fiction stories he would sell. And before going into the Army, Haldeman had earned an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. After his return he earned an MFA in writing. He lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife Gay.
Although there were always political divides in SF, it has been said that the famous magazine ads taken out by groups of SF writers listing their names in Galaxy magazine in 1968, one to express opposition and the other to express support for the Vietnam War, would serve as well as anything to mark the beginning of an overt divide of hard SF from the rest of the field. From that perspective, Haldeman's work, in particular The Forever War, is an interesting precursor to the political changes in hard SF over the past decade of so. It may be read in different ways from the left (anti-military and anti-imperialist) and the right (patriotic military adventure about the suffering of the ordinary soldier).
Haldeman is now one of the great living science fiction writers, known world-wide particularly for his hard SF adventure stories. His SF novels include The Forever War (1974), which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, Mindbridge (1976), Buying Time (1989) and The Hemingway Hoax (1990). His most recent novel is The Coming (2001), a first contact novel set in Gainsville, Florida in 2054. In 1999, he published a sequel to The Forever War, and to The Forever Peace (1997), which won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, entitled Forever Free. His short fiction ranges from humor to horror, but most often has a darkness deep within it. Such is "For White Hill": a romance set against the staggering background of the approaching doom of Earth about the role of art in the face of apocalypse. This was one of five fine novellas (by Haldeman, Greg Bear, Donald M. Kingsbury, Charles Sheffield and Poul Anderson) in Far Futures.
"For White Hill" is an unusual example of hard SF as an experimental literary exercise. Judith Clute and Ellen Weil published an essay on the story (excerpted here from The New York Review of Science Fiction) explaining that
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Haldeman's novella . . . is his most deliberate use yet of the arts as a structuring device for his fiction. Set in a far future earth devastated by an apparently hopeless war with superior aliens, "For White Hill" is a very sensual and romantic love story, and is also one of Haldeman's most thorough explorations of the artist's mind to date. Furthermore, it is a rarity among science fiction stories in that it achieves its effects by using, in almost equal measure, the resources of the literary and visual arts. "For White Hill" describes, in fourteen segments of varying lengths, a meeting in the distant future between two artists, brought to a burnt-out and nearly abandoned Earth as part of a context in which artists from many planets are asked to create memorial works inspired by the ruins. Two important clues point toward the key to this story's main literary source. One is the dedicatory title, "For White Hill," which subtly echoes Shakespeare's famous dedication of his sonnets to "Mr. W.H." . . . The other is the story's fourteen-part structure. In the published versions of the text, these numbered sections (marked only by mathematical symbols in the manuscript) suggest that the story itself follows the movement of a sonnet. And in fact the story is an expansion of not only the theme but of the precise images of Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" With few exceptions, each segment of the story takes the corresponding line from the sonnet and transforms it into a literal part of the narrative. Haldeman's story (almost) ends with the words, "After the sun is a cinder, and the ship is a frozen block enclosing a thousand bits of frozen flesh, she will live on in this small way" (279). Shakespeare's sonnet ends with the line "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." |