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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 |
Stephen Baxter: On the Orion Line
Stephen Baxter (1957- ), emerged in the late '80s and in the '90s as one of Interzone's new breed of hard SF writer. He has written an abundance of fine hard SF, both in short story and novel form. He has relatively speaking burst into prominence overnight. Asked how he would explain the recent renaissance of hard SF of which he is a key figure, he replied:
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With great difficulty. For one thing, I'm pretty certain there is no conscious "movement." Paul McAuley and I, for instance, emerged in parallel, both working off our personal influences. I greatly admire Paul's work but I don't think I'd say I'm influenced by it. I think it's also possible the shock and disappointment that the real space program delivered to our collective systems has now worked through. The Moon turned out to be dead and dull, space flight there was difficult and a bore, Mars is almost inaccessible to us right now and sterilized by ultraviolet anyhow, Venus is a hellhole . . . we've learned all this in the last couple of decades, and it shattered a lot of fond illusions. . . . Now we've worked through all that, to some extent. You have works like Robinson's and Sargent's which deal with the solar system as it is, not how we'd like it to be -- and it still turns out to be an interesting place. |
In 1995 and 1996 he became a major figure internationally in hard SF when his work was published outside the UK. Not only were his earlier novels reprinted in the U.S., but his 1995 The Time Ships was a leading contender in 1996 for the Hugo Award for best novel. In the mid and late 1990s he produced nearly ten short stories a year. He appeared in most of the major magazines, sometimes twice. A new novel, Voyager, was released in England and in the U.S. in early 1997. Baxter is now one of the big names in hard SF, the author of a number of highly-regarded novels (he has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and others for his novels) and many short stories. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction summarizes his early career thusly:
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He began publishing SF with 'The Xeelee Flower' for Interzone in 1987, which with most of his other short work fits into his Xeelee Sequence, an ambitious attempt at creating a Future History; novels included in the sequence are Raft (1989), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993) and Rind (1994). The sequence -- as centrally narrated in the second and fourth volume -- follows humanity into interstellar space, where it encounters a complex of alien races; the long epic ends (being typical in this of UK SF) darkly, many aeons hence. |
He published four books in 2000 alone, including a collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days; Longtusk (Mammoth, book two); Reality Dust; and Space: Manifold 2 (titled Manifold: Space in the US); and won the Philip K. Dick Award again for his collection, Vacuum Diagrams (1999). In 2001, he had five new books out: three novels, Manifold: Space, Manifold: Origin, and Icebones, the non-fiction book Deep Future, and the collection Omegatropic: Non-Fiction & Fiction. He is notably prolific. His 1995 novel, The Time Ships, is a sequel to H.G. Wells's 1895 The Time Machine published on its hundredth anniversary of publication. Then came Voyage (1996), Titan (1997), and Moonseed (1998). In 2002, he had several new books out: Deep Future, a non-fiction book which David Langford describes as "a lively though often chilling tour of possible futures," and a new novel, Phase Space.
"On the Orion Line" explores both the space opera theme of the short-lived individual caught in a long-lived galactic war and the hard SF theme of good old-fashioned bootstrapping. It is told from the point of view of a not-very-bright 15-year-old, an unusual choice in recent hard SF. In this story his ignorance is a pretext for the better-informed characters to explain the physics (the role severed in older SF by the professor's beautiful daughter). Also, his ignorance serves to highlight, though only gently, the moral issues raised by the story.