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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 |
Paul Levinson: The Mendelian Lamp Case
Paul Levinson (1947- ) writes science fiction, SF/mystery and popular and scholarly non-fiction. His first novel, The Silk Code (1999), concerns an ancient war waged with genetically engineered weapons that has gone on throughout human history. His second novel, Borrowed Tides (2001) is a novel of space travel and Native American spirituality. His new novel, The Consciousness Plague (2002), is an SF medical thriller/police mystery set in New York City, with the same central character (Phil D'Amato, forensic detective, who also appears in several short stories) as The Silk Code. His stories appear frequently in Analog.
Levinson runs an online classroom system, and combines the skills of communications with a philosophical rigor. Until recently, he edited the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. In 1997 he published a science non-fiction book, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. His Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (1999) won the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet, was out in 2002. The book explores the need for real face-to-face interaction in an age of cyberspace, the destiny of humanity off this planet and in outer space, and how these themes play in an age of terrorism.
This story is a Phil D'Amato tale that appeared in Analog, and was later revised and expanded into the opening sections of The Silk Code. It evokes memories of Robert A. Heinlein's "Waldo," but is also in the SF tradition of scientific detective stories, in which both a problem and a crime are solved using scientific knowledge and methods. Although Levinson is a leading member of the "Analog Mafia," and served two years in the 1990s as President of SFWA, there are no overt politics here, just wonder.