David G. Hartwell (1941–2016)

A proper doorstop-sized anthology, based on the contention that science fiction is the characteristic literary form of the Twentieth Century, this book collects together some 45 stories. The earliest is Another World by J.H. Rosny ainé (1895) and the latest is The Angel of Violence by Stanislaw Wisniewski (1996). (It is a notable feature of the collection that it includes stories from outside the Anglosphere, though it pre-dates the era of Afro-Futurism.)

Some notable highlights (and show more low-lights) for me were:

James Tiptree Jnr. - Beam us Home: surprised to see this was written in 1969! Of course, it now inhabits an alternate universe where there was no continuation of the Trek universe.
C.S. Lewis - Ministering Angels: "uproariously politically incorrect" says Hartwell in his intro. I found little to justify any sort of enthusiasm for this.
Edgar Pangborn - The Music Master of Babylon: elegiac.
H.G. Wells - A Story of the Days to Come: 1897 future history. Has a description of a smart speaker-like device that would have meant little when the anthology was first published in 1997. Otherwise projects Victorian values forward into the 22nd century.
Hal Clement - Hot Planet: this 1963 story is a series of info-dumps about Mercury, now known to be incorrect. Mixed-sex spaceship crew but otherwise pedestrian and unremarkable.
James Blish - A Work of Art: the composer Richard Strauss is brought back to life, seemingly. Not an AI story, but this 1956 story has certain resonances with such a theme, and writes about the business of creatives in fairly resonant terms.
E.M. Forster - The Machine Stops: prescient, perhaps more so now than when it was written in 1908, when Forster merely meant it as a counterblast to Wells' A Modern Utopia. Should be required reading for everyone.
Charles Harness - The Rose: some years since I read this. Comes over now as unduly complex, with dubious psychological themes. The pov character moonlights as a composer and choreographer, which is unlikely. Yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, an undoubtedly powerful piece of writing.
Philip José Farmer - Mother: more psychodrama, this time overtly Freudian.
Rudyard Kipling - As easy as ABC: Libertarianism vs. corporatism in Kipling's future history where the Aerial Board of Control governs world transit.
Michael Swanwick - Ginungagap: more political scheming, this time with arachnoid aliens.
William Tenn - Time in advance: Precrime without precognition.
Wolfgang Jeschke - The King and the Dollmaker: a slightly Brothers Grimm-flavoured story, but with time travel. Hartwell's introduction to this story holds Jeschke up as the epitome of German sf whilst managing to avoid mention of Perry Rhodan.
Connie Willis - Fire Watch: again, a while since I've read this. Now struck by how similar it is to Blackout/All Clear (apart from being set in the same universe), in terms of how much Willis gets wrong about London in WW2, and how little history her history students seem to know. Hartwell incorrectly cites her later novel Doomsday Book as a sequel to this story, whereas it seems very much to be a prequel, explaining why the character Kivrin seems so reticent about her experience on her research trip.
Poul Anderson - Goat Song: Baroque far-future adventure with one man against a planet-wide controlling computer. Reads surprisingly well to say it was written in 1972.
Jack London - The Scarlet Plague: How the modern civilised world of 2012 ended, told by a survivor in the 2070s. Except the world of 2012 was 1912 with added airships and telephones.
Cordwainer Smith - Drunkboat: It's a while since I've read any Cordwainer Smith, and I'd forgotten just how strange and exotic his writing could be, which was his strength.
J.H. Rosny aîné - Another World: Odd narrative about what later writers would call a mutant, except his mutations give him a violet skin colour and the ability to see a co-existent world and its inhabitants that occupies the same space as ours but doesn't interact with it. And that's about it; the story actually goes nowhere further.
Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford - If the Stars are Gods: Compared with the novel this became, the writing credits are oddly reversed here. Excellent story, even if the story takes place in a future that never quite happened that way.
George Turner - I still call Australia home: Also excellent. He also used the theme of a returning relativistic starship returning to a changed Earth in his novel Beloved Son.
Alexander Kuprin - Liquid Sunshine: A Russian tale of an eccentric English inventor reversing Dean Swift's trick from Gulliver's Travels of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Too much nuts and bolts detail of imaginary technology and casual racism. And a massive explosion resets the world to its default position - i.e. without the weird science - at the end. Why anyone thought this was worth reprinting is beyond me.
John Crowley - Great Work of Time: alternate reality shenanigans and well written too.
Frank Herbert - Greenslaves: bio-engineering in a Brazilian setting.
Jack Vance - Rumfuddle: reminded me of Julian May's The Many-Colored Land, in that people are able to locate themselves in any time or place, though the 'cognate' worlds suggest quantum divergence. I found myself getting quite irritated with a couple of the characters in this, but the story resolved itself to my satisfaction, partly because of the identity of one of the players.
John Wyndham - Consider her Ways: interesting take on an all-female society, but severely marred by 1952 attitudes, and not just in the feminism. Because eugenics.
Roger Zelazny - He Who Shapes: the science in this science fiction is psychiatry. Except that it dates from 1967, and I have the feeling that psychiatry has moved on a long way since then. Plus the protagonist is a therapist who uses mind-melding technology to create scenarios in the patient's mind that he can manipulate, and lives a trendy 1960s psychiatrist lifestyle to boot. I lost patience with this and bailed out at about 25%, which is unusual for me.
Bruce Sterling - Swarm: Tale from Sterling's 'Shaper/Mechanist' universe with very alien aliens, and almost as alien humans.
Nancy Kress - Beggars in Spain: This story, about genetically-engineered children who have no need for sleep, I found very engaging. I got the feeling that this might be the sort of story Elon Musk would find very relevant, but one he didn't finish and so never saw the flaws in the plan.
William Gibson - Johnny Mnemonic: I'd forgotten just how persuasive and immediate Gibson's early cyberpunk work was.
Harlan Ellison - “Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman: And I was amazed to see this story dated from 1965. It still comes up as fresh.
Chad Oliver - Blood's a rover: this time, the science is anthropology. A good story for 1952 (despite the main character smoking a pipe, as so many protagonists in 1950s SF stories do), marred only by a huge expository lump about two thirds of the way through, when I thought the story was winding down; and then we have a long coda with the main character returning to the story.
Richard A. Lupoff - Sail the tide of mourning: a remarkable tale of Australian indigenes and their role in sailing vast starships. Apparently forms part of the novel Space War Blues, which I haven't read in a very long time.

On the whole, a valuable collection with some really good stories and a few not so good. Fortunately, the former outweigh the latter. I'd say that this is worth acquiring if you see a copy. show less

This is an anthology of post-2000 sf written by authors who "came to prominence" after 2000. That is to say, they may have published something prior to 2000, but they didn't break through into wider consciousness until after; see for example Charles Stross, whose first publication is all the way back in 1985, but achieved wider acclaim with his 2001 novel The Atrocity Archive. I got the book as a gift back when it came out in 2013, but as is usual for me, did not get around to reading it for show more another decade. In a way, this was helpful for evaluating the book's "argument."

It's been my thesis that large anthologies (and this one clocks in at 572 pages, with over thirty stories) are arguments. In this case, the argument seems to be: "These writers are the future of science fiction." In that case, reading it ten years late lets me estimate how right the editors got it. Did these talents pan out?

Overall, I have to say yes, but sort of with reservations. There's no denying that, say, Mary Robinette Kowal has gone on to be a juggernaut of twenty-first century science fiction. But enjoy as I might her "Lady Astronaut" books, the story included here ("Evil Robot Monkey") didn't grab me—this isn't the reason. (Though given the story was a Hugo finalist, it must have grabbed other people.) Similarly, some of the stories feel like stretches, in that they're sf tales from writers much better known for publishing fantasy or even horror, like Jo Walton's "Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction" or Daryl Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense"; these were two stories I enjoyed a lot, actually, but I wouldn't put either Walton or Gregory in the pantheon of great twenty-first century sf writers, based on what I've read of them at least.

And of course, there are a couple stories I found outright bad... but they're by writers whose work in general I struggled to enjoy yet I cannot deny that those writers are generally popular. I speak here of John Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked," which requires all of its main characters to be idiots, and Catherynne M. Valente's "How to Become a Mars Overlord" which at eight pages still had me skimming to get to the end. So I guess the anthology is right to include them: both works read as fairly typical for their writers even if I did not like them. They are a key part of twenty-first century sf. I just wish they weren't.

But of course there are areas where the editors totally get it right. I always like a bit of Vandana Singh, and her story "Infinities" (one of only three rereads for me in the book) is a typically excellent piece of work. I don't think Rachel Swirsky has ever published a novel, but her story "Eros, Philia, Agape" is astounding, a masterful tale of what might it mean for an android to love, and she's an acclaimed writer of short science fiction and fantasy, with two Nebula wins and a number of Hugo and Nebula finalists. Madeleine Ashby is someone I haven't read much of, but I really enjoyed her story "The Education of Junior Number 12" here (another story of androids in love, actually, but very different from the Swirsky) and everything else I have read by her I have enjoyed; she's an incisive writer on the cutting edge of current technology, and now I want to seek our her related novel, vN. Ken Liu is an acclaimed writer of short sf, and though I've personally found his stuff hit or miss, "The Algorithm of Love" is probably the best thing I've read by him, a dark meditation on the implications AI might have for human consciousness.

"A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" is a pretty typical piece by Yoon Ha Lee: told in the form of a series of encyclopedia entries, so purely exposition, it nonetheless manages to say interesting things about how societies interact, especially with a really strong last line, and it's no wonder he went on to do acclaimed work like Machineries of Empire. Peter Watts is a highly acclaimed writer of hard sf about consciousness, and his story "The Island" here is great on many levels, examining how people think, how machines think, and how something we don't even understand thinks, and how different that might or might not be; dark but highly effective. There's a Cory Doctorow story here, too: "Chicken Little," about a lot of stuff, including immortality, marketing, and rational calculations of risk. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Doctorow story before, but I thought this was great. So you have a lot of great stuff here by acclaimed writers.

Beyond that, though, you have great stuff from writers I actually had never heard of... but if Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden are making an argument, it's that I should have heard of them, and so I'm prepared to accept that it's not the anthology that's at fault but the universe—or, perhaps, me. I'd never heard of David Moles, but I loved his story "Finisterra" about a gas giant with an Earth-like atmosphere where people build communities on the backs of giant floating life-forms. Similarly, I didn't know Karl Schroeder but found his "To Hie from Far Cilenia" very intriguing, a story about digital communities overlapping with the physical world that we might not even notice unless we learn how to see differently. "The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka was fascinating, set in a world where the Earth really was created in 4,000 B.C. but otherwise science is the same, and exploring what implications the discovery of the so-called hobbits of Flores would have. It was expanded into a novel, which I'll have to seek out. These people ought to be the face of twenty-first century sf if they're not.

It's not all great, of course; I've mentioned a couple I didn't like already, and there were some more that I bounced off of, including Stross's "Rogue Farm" (too clever for me, maybe), Marissa Lingen's "The Calculus Plague" (some improbably bad research ethics; where's the IRB?), Paul Cornell's "One of Our Bastards Is Missing" (I love Cornell but have never gotten much out of his Hamilton shorts), Oliver Morton's "The Albian Message" (less a story, more a thought experiment), and Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Third Day Lights" (I just could not be bothered to work out what was actually happening). But most of what was left was usually good, if not great, or among the best short stories I've read in the past year.

One story is a bit tragic: Kage Baker's "Plotters and Shooters" was good fun, a take on Ender's Game where the protagonists are all thirty-year-olds who are stuck in their mothers' basements. But Kage Baker can't be the future of sf, because she unfortunately died at the age of 57 in 2010. It reminded me I really must get around to finishing her Company series, though.

There's a lot of great stuff here; I think this probably has one of the best hit rates for an anthology I've read outside of something like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes. Perhaps the real argument here is that "Twenty-first century science fiction is in rude health." If that's the case, then the editors have assembled evidence that demonstrates their conclusions thirty times over. show less

Many of the chapter titles of David Hartwell’s “Age of Wonders” are typical panel topics at various science fiction conventions: “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve,” “Let’s Get SF Back in the Gutter Where it Belongs,” etc. These panels are discussions between SF professionals and fans, seeking to understand both SF and fandom itself, and touching back to them typifies what role Hartwell’s book may play.

This isn’t a rigorous academic study of SF. There’s some show more history here, some literary criticism, some fun anecdotes and myths of Fandom. It’s all presented with a light tone and a breezy voice. Hartwell claims that it is aimed at people not already members of Fandom:

“This is an outsider’s guidebook and road map through the world of science fiction, pointing out the historical monuments, backyard follies, highways, and back streets of the SF community – a tour of main events and sideshows, and a running commentary on why the SF world is the way it is.”

However, I think that it will have the strongest appeal to those who are already into SF, perhaps are even already part of the subculture, but are trying to find their bearings. From my own perspective I found the chapter on the New Wave controversies particularly interesting, as it is a period of the history of SF I’m only just now learning about. Likewise the chapters on the subculture of Fandom were fascinating, telling the story of the early days in a particularly user-friendly way.

This isn’t an authoritative, carved-in-stone survey of the field. Hartwell has been and continues to be one of the field’s foremost editors and anthologists and this seems like a tribute to a literature and a way of life that he clearly loves. Sometimes there is even a hint of nostalgia in the tone, perhaps wistfully noting that there just isn’t as much female nudity at Cons anymore, not like there was in the 70s. Certainly reading this 20 years after it was written though, one has justification in saying: “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s good to know that as much as fans may scream at each other, argue, burn out, and come back – they’ve been doing the same thing since 1930. show less

A thousand-page anthology devoted to a subgenre feels like an argument to me. A shorter book would claim to be nothing more than a sampling, while even a thousand-page book devoted to whole genre of science fiction couldn't rightly claim comprehensiveness. But with one thousand pages and over sixty stories from a single subgenre, The Ascent of Wonder can claim to be defining that subgenre's entire form and purpose. Unfortunately, it gets off to a rough start: I found the introductions (there show more are three!) by Gregory Benford and Kathryn Cramer more befuddling than illuminating, but I keyed in on a passage from David Hartwell's introduction: "Hard sf is about the beauty of truth. It is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of the wonder at the perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery" (30). I don't know that I entirely agree, but it's an intriguing formulation that explains why Hartwell and Cramer picked the stories they did for this anthology.

Judging by the stories included here, Hartwell and Cramer's definition of hard sf is a lot more capacious than my own. I love Cordwainer Smith, and "No, No, Not Rogov!" is indeed about the "perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery," but the inclusion of stories like this make me think that definition isn't specific enough-- I don't think Smith cares about science except as a source of beautiful imagery and fantastic ideas, and if sf is to be "hard" I feel like it needs something more than that. It's not that Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" or Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" are bad stories, or even stories uninterested in science, but it's that they're not invested in following the implications of actual science in a way that, say, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is-- a story that despite its flaws (or maybe because of them) epitomized the hard sf ethos of logic over all else. There are times I found myself wishing Hartwell and Cramer had included some kind of counterpoint story: if "Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin (a story that has clones in it, but no science behind them) or "The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson (which has a neat concept at its heart, but not as far as I can tell, one from actual science) or "The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told" by Arthur C. Clarke (which is an unfunny joke about unfunny jokes) are all hard sf, then what isn't? Show me the other side of the subgenre so I can see its edges more clearly.

That said, with over 150 years of stories to pick from, Cramer and Hartwell assembled an excellent collection of stories, and despite some dubious enclosures, I do feel I understand the parameters and possibilities of hard sf more than I did before reading. Some were by authors I knew and loved already: James Blish's "Beep" has a clever and interesting conceit that would make Steven Moffat's head spin. Donald Kingsbury's "To Bring in the Steel" was a surprising tale of a Paris Hilton-esque media floozy discovering a new side of herself on an asteroid mine; after enjoying Psychohistorical Crisis so much, I ought to seek out more of his work. "Waterclap" was an interesting Isaac Asimov story I hadn't read before, but let down by the fact that Asimov can imagine a moon colony and an underwater colony, but can't imagine a woman having any role in either outside of childbearing... in 1970! Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" wasn't a story, but had neat enough ideas (about ant language!) to succeed regardless. And I'm always happy to reread James Blish's "Surface Tension," which is in my sci-fi top five. David Brin's "What Continues, What Fails..." shows science fiction at its best as well, combining future reproduction with black hole physics to deliver a testimony for the human need to reproduce and leave a mark on the universe. (I did appreciate that unlike most anthologists, they included the contextual material with Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail," though I wish they hadn't dumped it all at the end, after the actual story.)

There was the occasional outright bad one: Rudy Rucker's "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" was sort of a non-story, not doing anything that Flatland itself didn't do; I got the feeling that it was in the book because being a novel, Flatland itself couldn't be. And James P. Hogan's "Making Light" is an unfunny joke stretched out way too long with dubious claims to be science fiction, much less hard sf. I think it's only in here because Hogan didn't write much short fiction, so Cramer and Hartwell had limited options (his novel Inherit the Stars is probably one of the best examples of the subgenre).

I was kind of a sucker for stories involving academia, I guess for obvious reasons. "Davy Jones' Ambassador" by Raymond Z. Gallun was surprisingly interesting, a tale of a professor (who's married to a dean) chasing a giant leviathan. I particularly loved Katherine Maclean's "The Snowball Effect," a rare sociological hard sf tale about a sociology department head defending his program against budget cuts by an overeager administrator by accidentally transforming a local knitting club into a global power. Michael F. Flynn's "Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum" was surprisingly moving tale of a physics professor hunting ghosts as he destroys his academic career.

This review just scratches the surface of the good stuff contained within. (I want to read more Bob Shaw and Gordon R. Dickson now, for example, and I was very glad to see H. G. Wells's "The Land Ironclads" in this context.) Presumably no anthology is perfect, but I suspect this one comes closer than most: it's probably a better sf anthology than any I've read outside of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series. I discovered a lot of new stories, developed a new appreciation for a subgenre I've thought little about, and have some new authors to look up. show less