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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 |
Paul McAuley: Gene Wars
Paul McAuley (1955- ) is a British writer who often writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the UK part of the hard SF/space opera renaissance of the 1990s. With degrees in botany and zoology, McAuley did scientific research in Britain and in Los Angeles before becoming a professor in the UK. A few years ago, he gave up teaching to become a full-time writer. "I’m a science junkie–always have been," he says. "If I’d been a writer before becoming a scientist I think I’d still be writing about science and I’m certainly still excited by the rich strangeness of the universe. . . As a scientist, I hope I’ve acquired a certain meticulousness about thinking things through, the ability to see things from the bottom up, and to not be afraid of research. I’m definitely writing more and more about biology and the culture of science now that I’m no longer a scientist–it’s something I know a little bit about."
His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was co-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988 (with Rudy Rucker’s Wetware). He has since published a number of SF novels, of which Fairyland (1994) won the Arthur C. Clarke and the John W. Campbell Award for best novel, and Pasquale’s Angel (1994) won the Sidewise Award for alternate history fiction. He completed a trilogy of SF novels, The Book of Confluence (Child of the River, 1997; Ancient of Days, 1998; Shrine of Stars, 1999). In 2001, he published two new novels, The Secret of Life, an hard SF near-future thriller about life on Mars, and Whole Wide World, a novel of high-tech intrigue was out in 2002. He has two collections of short fiction, The King of the Hill and Other Stories (1991) and The Invisible Country (1996). He also writes reviews for Interzone.
In Nick Gevers’ interview with McAuley for Infinity Plus in 1999, when asked what it meant that he referred to himself as a writer of "radical hard SF," McAuley replied:
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Radical hard SF was a term coined by David Pringle and Colin Greenland in an Interzone editorial some years ago. [Interzone #8, Summer 1984 –eds.] They suggested that there was room in SF for new fictions that would be "critical and investigative, facing up to the science and technology of the present and future . . . using the hard-edged language and imagery of technology for imaginative interpretations of reality." More recently, Gardner Dozois has appropriated it to describe the subgenre of revisionist widescreen baroque space opera–which is only partly what I think radical hard SF can do. I use the definition very loosely: SF rooted in the core traditions of SF but also surfing the wave of the present, with rounded characters, bleeding edge science, an attempt to convey the complexity of a world or worlds. It’s a reaction to the trad SF approach of filtering the future through One Big Change–nanotechnology, immortality, biotech. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the twentieth century, it’s that change is continuous and is advancing on a thousand different fronts. |
The influence of this notion of a radical hard SF, which has meant different things to different writers, is one of the central concerns of this anthology.
"Gene Wars," with its themes of a biotech growing out of control, the politics of technology, and the emergence of a posthumanity, is certainly a story about change continuous and advancing. It is hard-edged future history of the alterations wrought by genetic engineering upon society and, as in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, McAuley’s characters are transformed almost beyond recognition. Another element of newer breeds of hard SF is that they are often engaged with the politics of the post-Cold War era and the new millennium. This story shows the strong influence of the political movements against globalization and genetically engineered crops, a far cry from the techno-libertarian and/or pro-militarist stance (still epitomized by many writers associated with Baen Books) that increasingly characterized a significant amount of hard SF in the early and middle 1980s.