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David Brin
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 David Brin came into prominence in sf in the 1980s with several award-winning hard sf novels,
including Startide Rising (1983), The Uplift
War (1987), and Earth (1990). A working physicist as well as a
part-time professional writer, Brin rapidly became a spokesman for hard sf on the convention circuit.
William Gibson described a particularly vociferous mid-80s panel discussion as composed of cyberpunks versus
"the hard sf 'killer Bs' -- Brin, Bear, and Benford -- who have their own identity, their own dress code," thus
giving the sf field a new image of the conflict between science and art -- the new old guard of hard sf doesn't
dress hip, write hip. The implication of literary conservatism is appropriate here; Brin is of the old school
of Campbellian hard sf, adept at storytelling manipulation and stock characterization in the colorful mode
of Robert A. Heinlein -- clever, facile, slick, entertaining, with a clear and usually unornamented prose style.
His thriving career is proof that there is still a large and enthusiastic audience for science fiction that
incorporates few of the literary changes and devices that have entered the field in the last three decades. He is the
most important writer of hard sf to enter the field in the 1980s.
Brin writes comparatively few short stories. "What Continues, What Fails" is uncharacteristic Brin,
with no male characters, set in a distant future society that reminds one of the atmospheres of, say, James Tiptree,
Jr. or John Varley. Brin here ironically incorporates much of the sensibility of the feminist writers of the
1970s and, as does Godwin with the romanticism of the 50s, contrasts it to the coldness of scientific law and
the enormity of astronomical scale. As in Le Guin's "Nine Lives," questions of identity, and questions of
the unchanging human heart, reverberate through the story.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.