The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (Tor, 1994) is a delightful volume collecting almost 70 hard sci-fi short stories. The authors represented range from the father figures of science fiction (Poe, Wells, Verne) to the classics (Asimov, Clarke) to more modern figures like Niven, Brin, and Gibson.I'm having scads of fun jumping around this thousand page tome, reading whatever catches my eye as I flip through. The editors do a good job introducing each author, trying hard in a few paragraphs to give some personal history and to attempt to fit the author's work into the overall dialog of the genre.
I'm no expert on science fiction and my tastes generally run more towards trashy space operatics and sword & planet stuff, but I give Ascent of Wonder a hearty recommendation.
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I hope they got "The Cold Equations" in there; it's like every coolness in hard-SF, ever, rolled into one chunk of pure-diamoned awesome.
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah. It's in there.
ReplyDeleteok just read the first two Cinder posts. I am so stealing the 5-D thing. Wow. A distant age, neither forward nor backward in time, parallel to the "real" timeline. The possibilities!
ReplyDeleteI had a hard evolution this morning.
ReplyDeleteS. John: well, I'd rather read a Stanisław Lem story in there - preferably from the Pirx stories or the Cyberiad. 'Cold Equations' struck me as an excercise in sacrificing any pretense of reality to arouse pity.
ReplyDeleteMelan
There's a very good criticism of "The Cold Equations" available here:
ReplyDeletehttp://home.tiac.net/~cri_d/cri/1999/coldeq.html
'Cold Equations' struck me as an excercise in sacrificing any pretense of reality to arouse pity.
ReplyDeleteA common response in some corners of fandom, alas.
I wouldn't know about fandom. I read the story in an anthology back when people in Hungary didn't even know there was, or would be, an Internet, and the story itself was not discussed in any way in SF publications. It just struck me as exploitative pity-porn.
ReplyDeleteIt just struck me as exploitative pity-porn.
ReplyDeleteA common response in some corners of fandom, alas.
I believe we have entered a time loop here. I'll escape while I can.
ReplyDeleteI'll escape while I can.
ReplyDeleteA wise tactic in virtually every corner of fandom ;)