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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 |
James P. Hogan: Madame Butterfly
James P. Hogan (1941- ), with Robert L. Forward and Charles Sheffield, was a leader in the new generation of hard SF writers in the early 1980s. At the same moment when Gregory Benford (and slightly later, Greg Bear) raised the literary standards of hard SF with their novels and stories, Hogan entered the field as if it were 1939 or 1949 and he had just discovered Heinlein and Asimov, Campbell and Astounding. Generally uninterested in reading in the contemporary field, Hogan in particular set about reinventing it from the forties onward, in novels filled with ideas and technology -- such as Inherit the Stars (1977), The Genesis Machine (1978), The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979), Thrice in Time (1980), and Code of the Lifemaker (1983) -- that made him one of the more popular writers of that decade.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls him "a writer pugnaciously associated with the hard SF wing," compares him to Eric Frank Russell, and comments: "His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the SF imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment sequence, being followed by The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (1978) and Giants' Star (1981). . . . The sequence is in fact a hard SF fable of humanity's origins -- we are the direct descendants of the highly aggressive inhabitants of the destroyed fifth planet, who would have conquered the Galaxy had they not blown themselves up -- and espouses a vision of the Universe in which other species must learn to cope with the knowledge that we will, some day, come into our inheritance."
Two of his novels won the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel: Voyage from Yesteryear (1982) and The Multiplex Man (1992). His new novel, Martian Knightlife (2001) is a SF mystery set on Mars.
"Madame Butterfly" was first published in Free Space, edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward Kramer, the only politically-engaged Libertarian SF anthology of the decade. The book also included stories by Gregory Benford, Robert J. Sawyer, and John Barnes. It is a light-hearted Libertarian hard SF tale supposedly about "The Butterfly Effect," or the sensitive dependence on initial conditions of chaotic systems.