As it happens, yesterday Your Humble Blogger was browsing through Pandemonium Books & Games, looking for a little light reading (it's not all Spinoza here, you know), and it occurred to me that there was very little old-fashioned science-fiction. The store appeared to be three-quarters swords-and-sorcery books, with the remaining stuff split between Sherri S. Tepper/David Brin/James Morrow sort of fairly-literary examinations of cultural questions, leftover unsellable 70s used paperbacks with once-naughty free-sex subplots, paperback media tie-ins, and a handful of space-opera Bujold wannabes.
I exaggerate.
Anyway, it led me to think that one of the frequent storylines in the science fiction I read as a callow youth (and it was pretty callow science-fiction, looking back on it) was A Scientist Invents/Discovers a Thing, which has Repercussions. I haven't read one of those in years. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of 'em published all the time, short stories and novels, and I'm sure my Gentle Readers can (and I hope will) tell me who is currently putting out that stuff. I'm just saying, yesterday I was scanning the shelves, and I didn't see a lot of Scientists Inventing Things.
Shortly after leaving the store, I was trying to think of the name of the hard-science guy. The one that I use as the epitome of hard-science; the one that (tho' I'm not a huge fan) I was in the mood to read yesterday. The closest I could come to the name was Hal Chase, which I knew wasn't right.
Anyway, Hal Clement is dead.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Yeah, there’s still a lot of hard sf being published (but yeah, Hal Clement was the epitome of it). But most of it these days is what some people call Radical Hard SF—most of it takes place in the far future, in space, rather than in the present day. For hard-sf short fiction, Analog is the place to look; Asimov’s also publishes some, though the latter tends to have more Literary Values and publishes some fantasy. For novels, see (for example) Mike Brotherton‘s new (first) novel, Star Dragon (a human crew gets on a starship run by an AI imprinted with Hemingway’s personality, to go investigate a weird black hole), or Ken Wharton‘s first novel Divine Intervention. Oh, actually, Ken’s story “Flight Correction,” reprinted in the latest Hartwell/Kramer Year’s Best SF, is a story about a scientist on Earth in the relatively near future.
Going further afield, names to look for include Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, and maybe Robert Reed. And Charles Stross, but that’s in a very different vein. A good place to start might be any of Gardner Dozois’s recent Year’s Best Science Fiction volumes; in fact, a couple years ago Gardner reprinted a very long Hal Clement story about scientists on an alien world under very adverse conditions.
There was also a recent reprint volume showcasing a lot of hard sf, but I don’t remember what it’s called and I don’t have time to look it up at the moment.
There was also a recent reprint volume showcasing a lot of hard sf, but I don’t remember what it’s called and I don’t have time to look it up at the moment.
It’s called The Hard SF Renaissance, published by Tor books and edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. You can find a review of it by Greg Beatty here at Strange Horizons. Hope I did the linky thing right . . .
Thanks for your promptness, and your help. Was I just having a bad day at the bookshelf, or is this stuff not getting much shelf space these days? Or is it something the owner here knows about his customers (and he really shouldn’t stock stuff to my taste, as I wound up buying a used copy of utter trash for a buck and a half)?
Thanks,
-V.
I think fantasy tends to outsell science fiction by a fair bit in bookstores (though Analog is the highest-circulation speculative fiction magazine in English), and I suspect that Pandemonium’s customers tend by and large more toward the fantasy (and character-oriented science fiction) side. (As an extremely tenuous bit of supporting data, look at the amount of shelf space they devote to RPGs; I hadn’t thought of this before, but I suspect that by and large, RPGers tend not to be the sort who are interested in pages of technical exposition. On the other hand, many of them might like the puzzle-solving aspect of such stories, so I may be totally offbase here.)
I hear there’ve been mumblings about major bookstores moving the fantasy out of the genre ghetto and into the general-fiction section, leaving science fiction to languish on the back shelves….
Just noting that all the writers Jed mentioned are (apparently) male. Forward and Niven are also hard-sf, I would say.
Further, about moving fantasy: there’s some really interesting stuff that is one some weird borderline, heck, Tepper is on that borderline, in my mind (for all her stuff makes me want to shake her. All. Each. Bother).
Yeah, almost all the people writing techy hard SF are male. Literally 90% of the authors in The Hard SF Renaissance are male. The female hard SF authors who people generally mention are Nancy Kress (who doesn’t tend to focus on the techy details as much as some of the men) and Catherine Asaro (who’s a physicist, so even though her stuff (I’m told) tends to read more like romance than science fiction, it also tends to be based on ultra-techy physics principles). The other two female writers in The Hard SF Renaissance are Sarah Zettel and Joan Slonczewski, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I know very little about either of them.
Isn’t Pat Cadigan considered “hard SF”?
Good point; also Kathleen Ann Goonan. But I think of them both as specifically inclined toward cyberpunk rather than Science-Oriented SF per se.
I really like Sarah Zettel’s SF novels. I’m trying to think if I think of them as hard SF–and I guess I do. She certainly does. (Note–that page is at least three novels out of date)
Joan Slonczewski is a really interesting read, rich in biology. (ooh, look, she has more books I hadn’t heard of yet!) I think of Nicola Griffith as being strong, or strong enough to be hard SF, in biology too, based on Slow River.
What other bio-based/ecology-based hard SF is out there? A Paul someone?