Geoffrey A. Landis

...The Long Chase is a very well written tale. I liked the style and non-linear way the story unfolds in particular. There is something strange about a story dealing with deeply human desires, expressed by a sentient machine in the hostile environment of interstellar space. It leads the reader to wonder how human the main character is, and what makes her human or machine....

Full Random Comments review.

After a war, one of the vanquished struggles to live separately from the victors. The main character’s brain has been uploaded into a microscopic computer. Perhaps owing to her past as a married and hating it woman, she really wants to remain independent. The winners of the war are other computer mediated minds that joined together to form a cooperative group mind. Why they fought a war over joining the group mind, I don’t know. Landis made that intentionally nebulous, if you read the show more interview that follows. Now she’s attempting to escape on her ship by heading out of the solar system, but the winners pursue her to get her to join. Most interesting of the issue’s stories because it has the most personality involved. Some of the piece is even about editing one’s personality. What pieces would you consider indispensable? show less

I am recently back from Balticon 48. Geoffrey Landis was there to receive the 2014 Heinlein Award, given for 'outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space." As the convention was winding down, at a kaffeeklatsch, Dr. Landis fielded questions which were mostly science rather than SF- fair enough; not only has he won a Nebula, two Hugos, a Locus, and two Rhysling Awards for his poetry, but he's also a NASA scientist, an show more electrical engineer, a PhD in solid state physics, holds eight patents, and has published over 300 scientific and technical papers. He's worked on Mars missions (prompting Joe Haldeman to remark in the introduction to this book that Landis is the only SF writer to have actually been to Mars), solar energy, solar sail propulsion, and is currently working on technology to allow a vehicle to land, survive, and perform experiments on Venus.

Geoffrey Landis is the kind of hero Heinlein would admire: a scientist and an engineer, at home in theory and practice, widely read and expert in many fields, and also a poet and philosopher. Someone wrote of RAH that 'he wore imagination as his private suit of clothes.' That's true of Geoffrey Landis as well; the clothes in this case are overalls, working clothes, as he spins stories of hard science fiction that are based on a no-nonsense view of what science is. His stories, no matter how imaginative (and Ecopiesis, for instance, is very imaginative), are steeped in plausibility. When Dr. Landis gives you an explosion, you can be sure that the blast could have, would have, occurred that way.

Of the stories, the first, "A Walk in the Sun", is my favorite; it has the warm glow of a Heinlein juvenile. I had the sense that RAH was looking over my shoulder and nodding approval. Winter Fire was also excellent, and you'd do well to read the Afterward for a glimpse into the mind of a working writer of hard science fiction. There are 16 stories here, and I guarantee you'll find something to your liking. show less

I particularly enjoyed the manner in which this book was written. Lots of short chapters, some only 2-3 pages long. You might think it wouldn't hold together well with that structure. But it did.