The Hard SF Renaissance

This is a very solid and often thrilling anthology, a veritable cube of a book featuring "hard" science fiction stories from a wide range of authors and sources.

It's not perfect, but what is? Some of the stories seem decidedly less "hard" than others, the Poul Anderson offering is long, and uncharacteristically dull, the near absence of women is depressing but not surprising ... but this is all forgotten when one comes across a story like "Into the Miranda Rift," which swallowed me whole as (nearly) only great science fiction can.

Hard SF has often been associated with an equally hard Libertarian right wing political bent. Although some writers from that crew are here, this anthology is refreshingly free of stridency, the kind of "this show more is the way things ARE, and you will listen to ME" thing that Robert A. Heinlein was increasingly prone to as he got older.

Very good to great stuff. show less

Having not read any science fiction in years and years I recently decided to find out what’s been going on while I’ve been away. I’m a big fan of SF on the big and small screens and will probably be buried with my Babylon 5 DVDs (NOT the fifth season!) but I felt cut off from the source due to my ignorance of the current literature. All my books from the old days were gone, gone, gone: no more Heinlein, Dick, Herbert, Bradbury, Zelazny, Asimov, Sturgeon, etc. So it was into the Wikipedia I went to look up Hugo Award and Nebula Award to get me started working up a list of names I could take to the library and bookstore. Some of the fruit of that ongoing labor can be seen in my library… some already got the Deep 6 (Jonathan show more Strange & Mr Norrell, anything by Neal Stephenson. I’ve never been tempted by Harry Potter).

Then there’s this book. I LOVE “massive tomes” and this is one of the massiveist! I had no idea what “hard” science fiction was when I bought it but as soon as I read a few of the stories I knew this was for me... big time! I want to feel that the SF I’m reading could happen. I want to find the concepts I read about in journals like Science and Nature expanded into wild possibilities. I want a story so convincing that I will suspend my disbelief that the "gee-whiz" stuff of today could be tomorrow's mundane reality. I’ll be reading for some time to come on the leads provided by this book. show less

960 small-print pages with 41 short stories, mostly by front-rank SF (never say "sci-fi") authors.