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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 |
Gregory Benford: Matter's End
Gregory Benford (1941- ) was the first among the hard science fiction writers to have mastered and integrated Modernist techniques of characterization and use of metaphor. He, more than anyone, has become the chief rhetorician for hard SF. He coined the phrase "playing with the net up," which he uses to describe the game of hard science fiction.
He is the son of a career military officer, a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, working in both astrophysics and plasma physics, and is an intensely competitive man of ideas who enjoys conversational fencing, both as a scientist and as a science fiction writer. He is an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. In addition to the many awards he has won within the SF field, he is also a winner of the Lord Prize for Contributions to Science and the United Nations Medal in Literature. In 1999, he published Deep Time, a popular science book subtitled, How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. His most recent novel is Eater (2000), concerns an intelligent and voracious black hole headed for Earth. Like many of his earlier novels, Eater features close-focus rounded characterization of working scientists, showing how science is central to their psychological lives.
His ideas tend to be provocative, intended to stir debate (and perhaps even to offend the dogmatic and complacent), and to be very well researched and argued. Here is an example from a recent interview:
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. . . the idea I want to push next, and in fact I may use in a novel, is that the United States should make Siberia a Protectorate. Pay the Russians off -- a hundred, two hundred billion dollars -- and simply run Siberia in an ecologically responsible way. It's a frontier as large as the continental US, should be opened, will be opened, either responsibly or not, and we could use this to put the stamp of liberal western democracy on the ground in Asia. |
This idea is certain to have some readers sputtering about American imperialism, and yet it is quintessential Benford: audacious, large scale, and something he would be delighted to argue for hours on end. It is also perfectly consistent with the frontier tradition in American SF.
One of the primary features of American hard SF in the 1990s is the many fine novels about human exploration and settlement of Mars. Benford's entry in this competition is his novel Martian Race (1999), in which the US government has set a thirty billion dollar prize for the first human expedition to make it to Mars and back again, inspiring space travel by private enterprise. It was nominated for the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF novel.
"Matter's End," a story in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke's "Nine Hundred Billion Names of God," portrays a convergence of spirituality and quantum mechanics, and shows what it would mean if certain religious interpretations of quantum mechanics were correct.