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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 |
David Brin: Reality Check
David Brin (see earlier Brin note) lives in Encinitas, California. He is one of the most popular SF writers today, and is usually associated with hard SF, and specifically with his friends and peers, Gregory Benford and Greg Bear, all of whom lived and worked in Southern California in the 1980s. William Gibson in the 1980s named them the "Killer Bs." Brin began publishing SF with his first novel, Sundiver (1980), which is also the first volume in the ongoing Uplift series, which includes his famous, award-winning works Startide Rising (1983) and The Uplift War (1987). The continuing series follows the great SF tradition established by John W. Campbell in Astounding in the 1940s, that the human race is superior to aliens, is young and fast-moving and street-wise. He also published other books and collections, including The Postman (1985), basis for the film. He recently published a trilogy of new Uplift novels, and an authorized sequel to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. His longer stories are often a blend of hard SF and space opera, his shorter pieces often hard SF and humorous.
"Reality Check" is SF humor for scientists, in the inimitable Brin tone. It was published in the great science journal Nature, which during 2000 published a one-page piece of SF in each issue to celebrate the millennium. It addresses that august journal's readers in the scientific community, and tells them to wake up from their reality into a truer one.