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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 |
Robert Reed: Marrow
Robert Reed (1956- ) was born and raised and lives in Nebraska. His work is notable for its variety, and for his increasing production. He has been one of the most prolific short story writers of high quality in the SF field past few years, averaging ten published stories a year, 1999-2001.
His first story collection, The Dragons of Springplace, (1999), fine as it is, skims only bit of the cream from his works. And he writes a novel every year or two as well. His first novel, The Leeshore appeared in 1987, followed by The Hormone Jungle (1988), Black Milk (1989), Down the Bright Way (1991), The Remarkables (1992), Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994), An Exaltation of Larks (1995), Beneath the Gated Sky (1997). His most recent novel is Marrow (2000), a distant future large-scale story that is hard SF and seems to be a breakthrough in his career, which The New York Times called "an exhilarating ride, in the hands of an author whose aspiration literally knows no bounds." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction remarks that "the expertness of the writing and its knowing exploitation of current scientific speculations are balanced by an underlying quiet sanity about how to depict and to illumine human beings."
Reed does not characteristically write hard SF. In a Locus interview, he comments:
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I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business. There's this tendency to try to make it all very logical -- Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and the fact that you can predict the future by the present. But these are notions that, for the most part, 20th-century science has made impractical at best. Chaos Theory, Butterfly Effects, those sorts of things . . . . I could never write a 'Foundation Series,' because I just don't believe it's at all possible to predict what's going to happen. I feel I'm very conservative in some ways, so I find myself retreating from Greg Egan's more radical ideas. There are certain things I hold onto, and always will, in science. I am a staunch Darwinist, and won't give that up! Mostly, though, science fiction is still a very logical, cause-and-effect, mechanistic universe -- which I don't believe in. |
"Marrow," which takes place on a hollow planet-sized space ship, was later expanded into Reed's novel of the same name. Alastair Reynolds mentions it as an influence (see Reynolds note). It concerns people trapped on a world within this hollow world, merging a hard SF sensibility with the 19th century image of the hollow Earth. Reed said, in Locus, "Marrow takes place on a giant starship taking a luxury cruise around the galaxy. It's an artifact-type ship; nobody knows who built it. It now has immortals on board, and it's like a 100,000-year voyage. It's the core of a Jupiter-class world that has been expanded and is traveling along at sub-light speed. It's a world unto itself." The story combines a Clarkean fascination with huge technological artifacts with a powerful vision of increasingly huge scale.