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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 |
Michael Swanwick: Griffin's Egg
Michael Swanwick (1950- ) is a very serious player of today's grand game of science fiction. His first two published stories, both appearing in 1980, were "Ginungagap," which appeared in a special SF issue of the distinguished literary magazine, Triquarterly -- the title refers to the primordial chaos out of which the universe was born of Norse mythology, and metaphorically to astrophysics, specifically to a black hole -- and "The Feast of St. Janis," an homage to Gene Wolfe, which appeared in New Dimensions 11, edited by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg. His first novel, In the Drift (1984), an alternate history novel in which the Three Mile Island reactor exploded, was one of Terry Carr's Ace Specials in the same series as William Gibson's Neuromancer and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Wild Shore. Since then he has published his fine novels at a rate of one every three or four years: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Stations of the Tide (1991), a winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), what he called "hard fantasy," the sharply-satiric Jack Faust (1997), and his new novel, Bones of the Earth (2002), expanded from his Hugo Award-winning story "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur."
His short fiction is collected in Gravity's Angels (1991), Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000), Tales of Old Earth (2000), and Puck Aleshire's Abecedary (2000). Swanwick is also the author of two influential critical essays, one on SF, "User's Guide to the Postmoderns" (1985), and one on fantasy, "In The Tradition . . . ." (1994). He is also the field's best currently practicing reviewer of short fiction.
Regarding the changing role of the hard SF writer, he says "A lot of SF's world-building of the future was borrowed from people like Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson, hundreds of them, in a very free and generous and allowed borrowing. But now it looks like it is not going to be like that, we're back to where they were when they were making this stuff up, where the future wasn't at all obvious or easy to see. They invented a good, hard, convincing future. It's our job to do it again, and it's a tough job."
He wrote about "Griffin's Egg" in "Growing Up in the Future," published in The New York Review of Science Fiction:
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My father was an engineer. He worked for General Electric. . . I remember a picture my father brought home from work, an artist's rendering of a lunar colony based on General Electric technology. It showed stiff, 50s-type people strolling within a domed crater, the sides of which had been contoured in a series of gardened terraces. A quarter century later, I used that image as a starting point for my own lunar colony in a novella called "Griffin's Egg." And though I worked some radical changes on that vision, it still had the core power of being a real place that I could believe in existing. It was something I had been promised as a child. |
This story was originally published in the UK in 1991 as a stand-alone book, one of the Legend Books series of novellas. Swanwick recalls some things about the hard SF writing process:
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I wrote GE (note the initials) at the tail end of the 1980s. I knew that as soon as I finished it, I would be starting The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and as a result would be away from science fiction for a couple of years. I didn't want to come back and find myself writing Eighties SF in the Nineties, so I very deliberately set out to use up all the hard-SF ideation I'd done over the previous decade, but never found a story for. That's why there's a solar flare and a nuclear meltdown and a war and so on and so on. The only way to keep ideas from getting stale is to use them while they're fresh. I put in an enormous amount of research that doesn't show in the story . . . hours poring over specialized texts, establishing concentrations of elements in the lunar regolith, drawing maps and working out distances between industrial sites, the mechanics of heating and cooling a crater-city . . . far more than was needed simply to achieve internal consistency. Because in order to write with authority about an extraordinary locale, time, and enterprise none of which exist anywhere save in the story itself I first had to convince myself of their reality. |