More Words, Deeper Hole

Everything Is Nice reads and reviews all 67 stories over 990 pages pages of Hartwell and Cramer's The Ascent Of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF.

A further inescapable problem is that Hartwell and Cramer have subtitled their anthology ‘The Evolution of Hard SF’ but they have singularly failed to put forward a clear definition of what hard science fiction actually is.

Wasn't this failure to coherently define also a feature of the Hartwell and Cramer Space Opera anthology?

From Charlies' Diary:

It seems to me that one of our besetting problems these days is that there's a shortage of utopias on offer.

The discussion that follows goes some way to explaining why it is we don't see more utopian speculation.

[note because I know some of you want a heads up on this: contains one small mostly harmless comment by Kathryn Cramer]

From Charlies' Diary:

It seems to me that one of our besetting problems these days is that there's a shortage of utopias on offer.

The discussion that follows goes some way to explaining why it is we don't see more utopian speculation.

[note because I know some of you want a heads up on this: contains one small mostly harmless comment by Kathryn Cramer]

Valentin D. Ivanov's A Statistical Study of Locus Online's "Notable Books"

Andrew Wheeler's review of Charles Stross' Wireless, with comments on the New Gloom.

And of course people will remember this Kathryn Cramer essay that asserts that

So, to answer his question, Does SF have to be so gloomy? I guess my answer is that for now it does because it is in touch with the world we inhabit right now.

Did I ever clarify what I meant in this post? Kathryn Cramer thinks I did.

For the record I consider a review a kind of essay.

One problem I have with focusing only on books one likes is that it gives what can be a highly misleading impression about the state of the genre in question. Take the interplanetary adventure: most of the modern examples are deeply flawed, which makes the odds of a positive review from me pretty low [1]. I still enjoy thinking about the genre and I find the flaws are worth discussing even when the result is a book that is barely readable. If I only talked about the books I actually liked, the net effect is that I couldn't actually talk about the genre as it currently exists, just a small subset of it.




1: Particularly if the flaws are ones that are bad ideas authors copy without thinking about them: hydrogen mines on Jupiter, say, or spaceships whose crew/mass ratios are deeply implausible.

I will admit the Space Siphon appears to have been original to Moffitt when I first saw the idea in The Jovian but the originality didn't endear it to me at all.

Did I ever clarify what I meant in this post? Kathryn Cramer thinks I did.

For the record I consider a review a kind of essay.

One problem I have with focusing only on books one likes is that it gives what can be a highly misleading impression about the state of the genre in question. Take the interplanetary adventure: most of the modern examples are deeply flawed, which makes the odds of a positive review from me pretty low [1]. I still enjoy thinking about the genre and I find the flaws are worth discussing even when the result is a book that is barely readable. If I only talked about the books I actually liked, the net effect is that I couldn't actually talk about the genre as it currently exists, just a small subset of it.




1: Particularly if the flaws are ones that are bad ideas authors copy without thinking about them: hydrogen mines on Jupiter, say, or spaceships whose crew/mass ratios are deeply implausible.

I will admit the Space Siphon appears to have been original to Moffitt when I first saw the idea in The Jovian but the originality didn't endear it to me at all.