Kathryn Cramer

Back in 2011, a chance encounter between Michael Crow and Neal Stephenson lead to a discussion about who was to blame for the sorry state of our collective imaginations: the best minds of our generation who spend their time design spam filters and social media apps, or science fiction writers who churn out endless dystopias and apocalypses. From this chance encounter was born the Center for Science and Imagination and Project Hieroglyph, with the goal of bringing scientist fiction writers in show more contact with actual scientists with a mandate to imagine a world where problems could be solved, as an inspiration to solving them. Now, three years later this is the book, and trust a guy who has read 117 science fiction books since 2010, it is GOOD.

The stories in this collection cover topics including space exploration, entrepreneurship, drones, civil liberties, education, climate change, and more, book-ended by Stephenson's Tall Tower, a 20 km steel structure that could cut space launch costs in half-for starters. Stephenson opens with a classically Heinleinian engineering epic of how the Tower is built--think "The Roads Must Roll" or "Blowups Happen". Bruce Sterling closes with the same tower 200 years in the future, inhabited by the decadent and wicked religious dreamers of an Earth that is being abandoned by the Ascended Masters, and the quixotic quest of a cowboy to ride his old horse to the very top. My two very favorite stories were "By the time we get to Arizona" by Madeline Ashby, who provides a The Prisoner inspired take on reforming American's Kafkaesque immigration system with a six week panopticon trial period in a model border town, and "Degrees of Freedom" Karl Schroeder, who uses augmented reality to provide a fascinating and inspiration lens on democracy, legitimacy, and collective decision making. Not everyone manages to hit as solidly, but there's no filler here, and very few reused ideas.

I've rarely seen such a creative, energetic, and yet solidly themed collection. The tent-poles are pieces from masters of the genre, names that you should recognize like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin and Cory Doctorow. All these major talents bring their A game, and fans of any of them should check out the collection. This might just be some of the best science fiction you'll read in a long time: Retro without being old-fashioned, optimistic without being panglossian.

Disclosure notice: While I am a grad student at ASU and have been following Hieroglyph's progress eagerly since it's inception, I have no financial or institutional connection to it. I just think it's super cool.

((Addendum: And Lawrence Krauss is a blowhard. Skip the introduction)) 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

The Space Opera Renaissance is the kind of book that deserves to drift in stately orbit around a gas giant while "Also sprach Zarathustra" plays. It's a massive tome of a book, 941 pages, 32 stories, close to 90 years of science fiction history. There are some very good stories in this collection. With this much diversity, you're sure to find something that you love, and the authors read like a who's who's of the field.

Space opera has always been something of an archaism, as science fiction show more tried to carve out a niche as serious literature. While early pioneers like E.E. 'Doc' Smith and Olaf Stapledon could imagine mythologies of cosmological scope, much of the early pulps were filled with poorly written adventurous tripe, the 'horse operas' of cheap western fiction redone on the Red Hills of Mars, rather than the Dakotas. Serious science fiction in the vein of Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction could discuss the engineering challenges of rocketry as a venue for a kind of Heinlein-Clarke 'competent hero', a man handier with a slide rule than a ray blaster. New Wave and cyberpunk turned defiant against outer space, conquering new realms of inner space and cyberspace. Yet the flame remained alive in the hands of M. John Harrison, and then a host of British retro-scifi writers (Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds) who imagined new kinds of post-imperial space opera. As fans, we love space opera, even as we're embarrassed by it.

Yet there's also an unbalanced quality to this collection, editorial choices that I found puzzling. No stories by Doc Smith or M. John Harrison, despite their status as grandmasters of the genre. Cramer and Hartwell use the page count to include complete novellas, but the early stories are some very rough pulps that outstay their welcome. Lois McMaster Bujold is represented by "Weatherman", which is a fantastic character study but entirely planetbound, while David Drake gets a fragment of a story about a Roman legion kidnapped and used as intersteller mercenaries, another mud bound adventure.

Space opera is a big tent of a sub-genre, but if I were to define it, it'd be about a certain grandeur of scope, of clashing planets and galaxies at stake, as well as a larger-than-life quality of its characters. It's a big universe, but with a fast spaceship, they can make it their own. There's lot of room to construct, parody, deconstruct the genre, to generate that necessary sensation of awe. There's a spot for a really great thematic collection, one that links the history of the genre to it's future, and frustratingly this is not that. I doubt anyone knew more about science-fiction than Hartwell, and Cramer was his partner of almost 20 years. So it's not enough for them to pick good stories. I want perfect stories, and this collection is about 500 pages overweight for perfection. show less

A collection of sci-fi stories claiming to portray a "better future." More specifically, according to the forward: no dystopia nor any technology so advanced that the world has little/no relation to our own. I question whether some of the futures presented in these stories are "better," though I generally enjoyed reading all of the tales.

The stories in this collection considered futures with changes in social, environmental, & economic conditions. I found those that tackled the former two to show more be more compelling than those that focused more on the last, though that is likely due to my own personal interests. Even those tales with concepts I found less interesting, I still found entertaining.

At the end of each story, the editors provide URLs to extra content - e.g., discussions & technical papers on the technology in each story. I sure wish these URLs still worked show less