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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 |
Ben Bova: Mount Olympus
Ben Bova (1932- ), a journalist and technical writer as a young man, published his first SF novel in 1959. He was technical editor on Project Vanguard, the first American artificial satellite program, wrote scripts for teaching films with the Physical Sciences Study Committee, and was manager of marketing for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, in Massachusetts. In 1971, he became editor of Analog, where he stayed until 1978. He moved on to edit Omni from 1978-1982, and has been a full-time writer ever since leaving Omni, although he went back to school in the '80s, and earned a Ph.D. in Communications in 1996.
He was the immediate heir to John W. Campbell's job, and has always stood for science and for hard SF, and has been particularly influential in promoting each, both as editor of Analog and Omni in the 1970s and '80s, and as a public figure since. He said in a recent interview:
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There's a basic optimism to science fiction -- maybe I should confine that to hard science fiction. I think the field shares the basic optimism of science itself. If there is a credo in this business, it should be a quote from Albert Einstein: "The most mysterious thing about the universe is its understandability." We can understand the way the universe works; hard science fiction that deals with real science and technology is about people learning how the universe works, whether that universe is the solar system, the whole cosmic wonder of it, or the universe within our own body. But you can learn, and knowledge makes us better. It makes us wiser, more capable, it improves our lives. And knowledge is always to be preferred over ignorance. |
Bova's SF books include The Kinsman Saga (1976-1979, the forerunner of his current planetary books), the "Voyagers" sequence (1981-1990). His recent string of interrelated novels began with Mars in 1992, and now includes Moonrise (1996), Moonwar (1998), Return to Mars (1999), Venus (2000), Jupiter (2001), The Precipice (2001), and The Rock Rats (2002).
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I think of them as historical novels that haven't happened yet. My audience consists partly of science fiction fans, but mostly of people in technical fields. It's a technically educated audience, people who are interested in realistic stories about how you get there from here. |
When writing Mars, his choice of setting led him to certain choices about character. He says,
| . . . when I first started plotting out the original novel Mars, the central character was a white-bread American geologist, and it just didn't work out. So finally I came to a realization that this guy is part Navajo. So we went out to New Mexico for a month or so and absorbed the area and that's when I started writing the novel. |
"Mount Olympus" is a Martian adventure story about two men who fly to the highest mountain on Mars, and in the process learn more about Mars and about themselves. Bova's work is permeated by the idea of space as a new frontier, and of SF settings as opportunities for explorers and entrepreneurs, the classic Heinlein thematics of American SF.