 |
| "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 |
Karl Schroeder: Halo
Karl Schroeder (1962- ) was born in Brandon Manitoba and moved to Toronto in 1986 to pursue his writing career. His family is Mennonite, part of a community which has lived in southern Manitoba for over a hundred years. He is the second science fiction writer to come out of this small community -- the first was A.E. van Vogt. His father was the first television technician in Manitoba (quite a distinction at the time) and his mother published two romance novels. ("I grew up with those books on the bookshelf -- I always considered it perfectly natural to see 'Schroeder' on a book cover.") He has been active in Toronto SF circles, has maintained the SF Canada listserve, has won an Aurora Award for short fiction (for "The Toy Mill," in collaboration with David Nickle), and has published a novel, The Claus Effect (1997) with Nickle developed out of the story. His novel Ventus (2000) is hard SF novel that feels like fantasy. His new book, Permanence, is out in 2002.
Schroeder's views on hard SF are unconventional:
|
I write a kind of disciplined fantasy that sticks close to scientific possibility -- but I don't think of myself as a hard SF writer. I am very scientifically literate and follow the progress of most branches of science closely -- but I am not a "believer" in Western Rationalism. If the definition of hard SF is that it is storytelling in which the events that occur don't contradict known science, then I'm not a hard SF writer and never will be, because I simply don't believe in the distinction between "real" and "pseudo" or non-science. I'm a fan of the philosophy of P.K. Feyerabend in this respect, I am a philosophical subversive in the house of Engineering SF, and I expect that will become evident to people with time . . . To me, science is a servant of philosophy, and so my stories are about ideas first, and scientific ideas second; in that regard, I admire authors like Olaf Stapledon and H.G. Wells more than authors of perhaps more technically accurate fiction. Wells in particular showed how you could use science as a gestural language to speak about things that are, in some sense, beyond science. At the moment I admire Greg Egan most of the current generation of writers. Of all of them he appears to understand best how science, philosophy and literary art interact in crafting a literature of the Natural world. |
"Halo," says Schroeder, "is an attempt to be both 'hard SF' and character-driven fiction; to introduce a new kind of interstellar civilization and a new kind of interstellar travel; and to take the most marginal and hostile environment for life, and make it perfectly believable that people would choose to live there." This story is in the same future setting as Permanence.