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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 |
Alastair Reynolds: Great Wall of Mars
Alastair Reynolds (1966- ) was born in Barry, South Wales, raised in Cornwall, educated in Newcastle and St. Andrews, Scotland, and now lives in Holland. He holds a Ph.D in astronomy and works for the European Space Agency. He is one of the British space opera writers to emerge in the mid and late 1990s, and the most hard SF of them. To date his stories have been published almost exclusively in Interzone and in Spectrum SF, the ambitious new SF magazine from Scotland. His first novel was Revelation Space (2000) and his second, Chasm City was published in 2001. His new novel, Redemption Ark, was published in the UK in 2002
Reynolds provides a log of notes on his stories and comments on hard SF on his web site, members.tripod.com/~voxish/sf_hard_intro.html.
First we quote from "On Hard SF" by Alastair Reynolds
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. . . the term [hard SF] is ugly and misleading, but it seems we're stuck with it. It doesn't mean that hard SF is any more demanding on the reader than the rest of the genre, nor is it any more radical in outlook (although there is such a beast as Radical Hard SF). Actually, far too much of what passes for hard SF is pretty limp and unimaginative stuff; tired re-hashings of ideas which might have been new and shiny in Heinlein's day, but which now read as being deeply rooted in established conventions of the genre, and politically conservative to boot. . . . and it's probably not too far from the truth to say that hard SF is that branch of SF in which the writer goes to some trouble to ensure that the events in the tale could, plausibly, happen in the universe as we know it. Hard SF‹which as a subgenre is almost as old as SF itself‹has very frequently tended to be set in the future (although there are some excellent exceptions) and there has been a strong tendency for it to be set in locales other than our own planet, a trend which continues to date and is a direct consequence of the types of story which predominate in hard SF. What exactly do I mean when I say hard SF aims at plausibility? By this I mean that good hard SF stories should try to not contain glaring errors of fact, and by fact I mean the kind of detail which is easily checked using standard reference material‹popular science books, for instance. Take the case of the atmosphere of an alien planet, for instance. Current thinking is that a breathable atmosphere simply can't exist in the absence of life, which would mean that a desert planet could not sustain explorers unless they brought air with them. These days, however, most self-respecting SF writers who set their stories in exotic venues are aware of the more obvious pitfalls, and if they feel the need to have their characters travel around in faster-than-light spaceships, it's generally taken for granted that this is an acceptable violation of the laws of physics for plot purposes, and not evidence of the author's ignorance of special relativity. . . . At the other extreme of the hard SF spectrum, the science is strongly foregrounded, to the extent that the stories can sometimes seem little more than physics problems fleshed out with characters, and in which the reader may be required to get their head round sometimes difficult new concepts. Perhaps the best current exponent of this "ultra-hard" SF is Greg Egan, whose stories . . . can be as intellectually challenging as a review article in Nature, and sometimes require about the same level of attention from the reader. . . Other writers who also specialize in genuinely far-out hard SF include Gregory Benford and Geoffrey Landis. Somewhere in the middle, forming a spectrum, is the bulk of what we think of as hard SF. There are writers like scientist David Brin who will cheerfully trash the laws of physics in the interests of plot and exuberance (see, for instance, Startide Rising), but who embeds genuine scientific puzzles (often of an ecological nature) into his tales. And there are writers like Greg Bear, who had no formal scientific education, yet whose work is as convincing in detail and grand vision as any of the scientist-writers of his generation and which occasionally reaches the extremes of hardness typified by Egan and a few others |
And in reference to the context of "Great Wall of Mars:"
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"Galactic North" appeared in Interzone 145, July 1999. It started out as an idea I'd had a few years earlier, which was to do a story in the same vein as a few others that are particular favorites of mine: Larry Niven's "The Ethics of Madness," Joe Haldeman's "Tricentennial," Gregory Benford's "Relativistic Effects" and Poul Anderson's novel Tau Zero. In all of these space-based stories, the action jumps forward by ever-increasing chunks of time, leading to a dizzying sense of dislocation and sense of wonder as the centuries slam by. (Three later stories which achieve a similar effect, and which I read while writing this one, are Stephen Baxter's dazzling "Pilot" (part of his Xeelee sequence), Robert Reed's "Marrow" (which has now been expanded into a novel) and Ian McDonald's "The Days of Solomon Gursky"). "Great Wall of Mars" appeared in Spectrum SF 1, February 2000. I started this one in 1999, almost immediately after completing "Galactic North," and it's another story set in the same future history. This time it's a more claustrophobic, relatively near-future story about a military standoff on Mars between augmented and non-augmented human factions. It was with this story that I decided to start making a conscious effort to simplify my storylines (some of them had got a bit too complex for their own good) and thereby free up space for some‹ahem‹character development" |