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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 |
Kim Stanley Robinson: Sexual Dimorphism
Throughout his career, Robinson has been interested in politics, as is evident in his California trilogy of the 1980s (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge.), but it was in his Mars trilogy in the 1990s that Robinson was most overt in injecting large doses of political discussion into the text, but at the same time he was intensifying the overt science and expanding his portrayal of scientists at work, and (perhaps like Arthur C. Clarke) giving extensive descriptions of the natural landscape of his planetary setting in evocative language. Robinson's The Year's of Rice and Salt (2002) is an alternate history novel. The novel explores a history of the world in which the influence of European civilization ended in the 14th century. While not hard SF, it continues Robinson's overt political engagement with his material.
"Sexual Dimorphism" is reprinted from The Martians (see Robinson note, above) While he was still working on the stories, he said in a Locus interview, "I've always called the collection A Martian Romance, which has to do with those early stories exploring fossil canyons, and "Green Mars" the novella of '85. I'll add one more . . . and then I'll have three stories describing a relationship that lasts a really long time. That's the Martian romance, but it's also my romance with the planet, and also the idea of the early Martian Romances. I'm going to do some stories that will be more like folktales or fairytales -- romances in the technical sense."
This story is in that folktale mode, and is as much in the tradition of Brian Aldiss's "A Kind of Artistry" and Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," as it is firmly in the hard SF tradition of stories about the life and thought of working scientists.