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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 |
G. David Nordley: Into the Miranda Rift
G. David Nordley (1947- ) lives in Sunnyvale, California. He is retired from the Air Force and has been publishing well-thought-out hard SF since the early '90s. His primary venue is Analog, where he is a regular contributor, and where this story appeared. Tangent Online calls Nordley, "one of the better Analog discoveries of this past decade." He has written, but not yet published, three SF novels, and is working on more. His first collection, After the Vikings: Stories of a Future Mars, was published in 2002 as an electronic book.
He majored in physics as an undergraduate with the intention of becoming an astronomer, but in 1969 joined the US Air Force to avoid the draft. He worked mainly as an astronautical engineer, managing satellite operations, spacecraft engineering, and advanced propulsion research, picking up a master's degree in systems management along the way. While working in advanced propulsion, he met and became inspired to write by physicist and author Robert L. Forward. He retired as a major at the end of 1989 and began submitting stories in 1990, using the "G. David" form of his name for fiction. Describing Nordley's fiction, J. K. Klein says, "As a writer, his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focuses on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future."
We asked Nordley for comments and he sent a long piece from which we have extracted the following remarks:
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I was asked to provide some brief thoughts on hard science fiction. The term "hard," I think, is meant to indicate "accurate" as opposed to the use of "soft," or "rubber" science, but it has some unfortunate steelish connotations that might lead some to see use of real science as being in some way contrary to intuitive, character-driven, or humanistic fiction. At any rate, I've taken to using the term "scientific realism," meaning simply keeping the events of the story within the laws of nature as well as one can. Yes, new laws of nature might be invented, but take care! Everything that happens under such new laws of nature must be consistent with the mountains of data on which the known laws of nature rest. Many a well-informed physicist has trembled at such a task. I'm not worried about classifying works; words are labels for fuzzy sets and apply in degree. Some stories are more scientifically realistic than others, but even stories in which magic plays a role (by magic, I mean the deliberate setting aside of natural laws) may have scientifically realistic aspects. A few honest mistakes are par for the course, but the kind of wholesale carnage of science displayed in some unmentionable media-related efforts, I think, damages whatever reputation remains of science fiction's relevance to the human future. I think it is this reputation, established by Verne, Orwell, and Clarke and the like, which keeps people thinking "maybe . . ." We are concerned not with prediction but with illuminating possibilities and people's reaction to them. The more possible, I think, the more interesting. In summary, I see science in scientific realism as playing the same role as history in historical fiction or law in detective fiction. I am not impressed by the argument that science may be disregarded "for the sake of the story." Rather, I think that realism adds to the relevance and long term value of a work. All else being equal, I think that stories that can happen teach us more than stories that can't. So, "for the sake of the story," I do, and heed, the research. |
This story is a planetary exploration story in the same sense as Bova's "Mount Olympus," a space frontier story, and also a man-against-the-universe story of the Hal Clement hard SF type (see Clement note). One of the pleasures of this type is perceiving how the physics of the environment alters the rules of behavior, especially the rules of human survival.