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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 |
Steven Baxter: Gossamer
Stephen Baxter is known as one of the '90s' best new hard SF writers, the author of a number of highly-regarded novels and many short stories (See earlier Baxter note). He said in a Locus interview, "Moonseed is, in part, another response to Red Mars, and the terraforming debate, because they try to terraform the moon."
Baxter said in another Locus interview:
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Looking back, things do change, in terms of influences. When I was young, I was influenced by the greats of the past, Wells and Clarke. When I was kind of cutting my teeth, writing a lot of stories and finally selling stories in the '80s, it was the people who were around at the time, the dominant figures: Benford and Bear in hard SF. And now, my contemporaries, roughly: Paul McAuley, Peter Hamilton, Greg Egan. And I've met everybody else who's still alive, probably -- not Egan, but Clarke and Benford, and Bear I've become quite friendly with. With people like Bear and Benford, McAuley and Robinson, who are working off the same material as I'm working from -- the new understanding of the planets, and so forth, the new understanding of cosmology (which is maybe more philosophy than science, because it's untestable), we're all coming from the same place. And you do have this dialogue, really, a conversation." |
And it is worth remarking that regardless of politics, the British and American hard SF writers know and talk to one another, argue with one another, and as Baxter points out, are all coming from the same place.
Baxter here writes in the hard science mode of Hal Clement and Robert L. Forward. This kind of SF is particularly valued by hard SF readers because it is comparatively scarce, requires intense effort by the writer to be accurate to known science, and produces the innovative imagery that is peculiar to hard SF, that sparks that good old wow of wonderment. In "Gossamer" his visions based on science are astonishingly precise and clear and that is what his fiction offers as foregrounded for our entertainment.