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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 |
James Patrick Kelly: Think Like a Dinosaur
James Patrick Kelly (1951- ) was told as a young writer by his teachers at the Clarion workshop that science fiction stories should be well thought out and well researched and so he set out to write that way. Only later did he learn that many writers in the field don't bother to work that hard. But by then, his habits were in place. He is not one of hard SF's politically committed true believers, but rather is intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of hard SF situations. He has a clear graceful style and a willingness to do the work of making the science in his stories count. His stories are tight and polished and his narrators tend to have a strong voice and point of view that allow Kelly to play out the drama of the situation he has chosen.
Although a writer identified with the Sycamore Hill workshop in the 1980s, the hotbed of Humanist opposition to the cyberpunks, he was also chosen as representative of the original Movement (along with Greg Bear, another surprise) by Bruce Sterling for inclusion in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Much of his fiction has a serious hard SF side that appeals broadly to all readers in the field.
Though he is primarily a short story writer (publishing mainly in Asimov's) he has published four novels: Planet of Whispers (1984), Freedom Beach (1985) with John Kessel, Look into the Sun (1989), and Wildlife (1994). Two collections of his stories have been published -- Heroines (1990), and Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997) -- his new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger, was out in 2002. He writes a monthly column about the web for Asimov's. His story "Undone" (2001) was selected for all three best of the year volumes and was a Nebula nominee. For some time now, Kelly has, as John Clute put it, "stood on the verge of recognition as a major writer."
Recently, he has used his talents in a new way. He says, "To celebrate my mid-life crisis several years ago, I decided to try something completely different: playwriting. I've had pretty good luck with this. . . . I've written five radio plays for Seeing Ear Theater. Three were adapted from stories, 'Think Like A Dinosaur,' 'Breakaway, Backdown' and 'The Propagation of Light in a Vacuum.' Two were originals 'Carrion Death' and 'Feel the Zaz' although I subsequently emitted a story version of 'Zaz.'"
"Think Like a Dinosaur" won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. It is in the classic hard SF mode and is in fact in dialog with the touchstone of hard SF reading protocols, Tom Godwin's controversial "The Cold Equations." It is an act of literary politics, a genuine hard SF story that undermines, by calling into question, the sexual politics in the subtext of the classic original. But it does not establish a position on the right or left, but in the center. If there is a new literary political synthesis in 1990s American SF, it is at the point where the hard SF stories of Benford, Kelly, and Sterling meet.