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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 |
Allen Steele: The Good Rat
Allen Steele's (1958- ) fiction often addresses the influence of science fiction on science and technology. (Gregory Benford is a minor character in his new novel, Chronospace [2001].) He came on the scene as a hard SF writer with his first novel in 1989, Orbital Decay. It was followed by Clarke County, Space (1990) and Lunar Descent (1991), which are also set between Earth and the Moon and belong in the same Future History, which Steele calls the NearSpace series.
His short fiction is collected in three volumes, Rude Astronauts (1993), All-American Alien Boy (1996), and Sex and Violence in Zero G (1999) which collects the short fiction in the Near Space series and provides a list of the series, "all be arranged in chronological order," he says on his web site. ". . . and for the first time I'm actually putting in the timeline, so somebody can flip to the appendix and look and see when these stories all occur. It's sort of my answer to Niven's Tales of Known Space, or even Heinlein's Past through Tomorrow." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says that although Steele "tends to export unchanged into space, decades hence, the tastes and habits of 1970s humanity, he manages to convey a verisimilitudinous sense of the daily round of those men and women who will be patching together the ferries, ships and space habitats necessary for the next steps into space." He has gone on to become one of the leading young hard SF writers of the 1990s, with a talent for realism and a penchant for portraying the daily, gritty problems of living and working in space in the future. His background is professional newspaper journalism and his fiction has been called "working class hard SF," because of his regular choice of ordinary people as characters (see also earlier Brin note), and because of his generally left-leaning politics. In an essay, "Hard Again" (The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1992), he said,
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I find it fascinating to work in this environment. This is one of the reasons I continue to write short fiction: I feel like I'm writing for Astounding in the '40s under Campbell! We're right in the middle of a second Golden Age. In 20 years or so, there are going to be historians and fans looking back at the 1990s and saying, "My god, there were giants walking the earth then! Take a look at what was going on in Asimov's! Jesus, there were classic stories in every issue! That's when all these great new writers were out there!" |
"The Good Rat" is hard SF from Analog (though Steele most often published in Asimov's in the 1990s). In the future there will be no more experimental animal subjects, only human volunteers. It's a living.