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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 |
Joan Slonczewski: Microbe
Joan Slonczewski (1956- ) is a Professor of Biology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and a writer of hard science fiction. She currently has her third NSF grant to investigate e coli. She is best known for her second novel, A Door into Ocean (1987), the first of her Elysium novels -- others to date include Daughter of Elysium (1993), The Children Star (1998), and Brain Plague (2000). The latter two books feature sentient bacteria. In an interview by James Schellenberg and David M. Switzer, she remarks:
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I realize this perspective may startle some people, but remember, I've spent a lifetime studying bacteria, and I tend to identify with their point of view. Look at this from historical perspective. Why do people have machines? For the same reason people across history have had animals, slaves, and women: To do things people could not do, or wished to have done more efficiently, as extensions of their own bodies. Cows gave milk, slaves gave labor, women gave babies (future workers). But the trouble was, the better the animal/slave/woman, the higher quality of output, the more it/he/she tended to approach the nature of their master. Animals could only go so far, but slaves and women finally made their break. (In Western societies, in the past century, that is.) Is it a coincidence that slaves and women broke free during the age of machines? |
Her novels, from her first book Still Forms on Foxfield (1980), are informed by Quaker ideals and feminism. They are in both respects far from the traditional politics of hard SF. They are characterized as well as by the loving scientific details underpinning the story. There are ways in which she sometimes seems closest in attitude to Greg Egan: She says, in the same interview quoted above, "I am most interested in the tension between philosophy and physiology of the brain. What does it mean to have a brain that consists of a molecular mechanism, yet contains a spirit of a thinking, feeling human being? . . . Other machines will become sentient, sooner or later. It's the inevitable result of evolution. I read somewhere that our largest AI machines approach the brainpower of a cockroach; from the standpoint of evolution, only a small fraction of Earth's lifetime separates us."
This story, which appeared in Analog, is set in the same future universe as the Eylsium novels, in the setting of The Children Star. Like Baxter's "Gossamer," it harks back to the fiction of Hal Clement and, in this case, the James Blish of "Surface Tension," inventing and solving a clever SF problem posed by a precisely imagined world of wonders. Here, Slonczewsi takes an existing form of DNA, the toroidal chromosomes of prokaryotes, and extrapolates a whole world in which all niches are filled by organisms of that type.