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Richard Grant
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 Richard Grant is one of the younger sf writers to enter the genre with literary ambitions in the
early 1980s. Like John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Terry Bisson, and others, his educational background is
the literary humanities. After a few short stories, he devoted himself to novels, with favorable critical reception.
Among his early stories is "Drode's Equations," a mathematical sf story somewhat in the mold of the
ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. It neatly straddles the border between the literal and the metaphorical, and comes
up with an unusual solution to the intellectual problem posed. It exists in dialogue with another classic
mathematical sf story, Norman Kagan's "The Mathenauts" (the title story of a Rudy Rucker anthology), in
which graduate students travel literally to abstract mathematical universes by feats of mathematical imagination.
On its subtextual level, "Drode's Equations" is a story that subverts hard science fiction even
while achieving it, and, as an intentional subversion of genre, is characteristic of much of the speculative fiction of
recent years. Richard Grant has published an essay in which he denies the desirability of category or
genre boundaries for writers. This is not a new attitude for an sf writer (it was all the rage in the 1960s), but it is
again characteristic of many of the best younger writers of the past and present decade. The values of
hard science fiction are being called into question by a bright new generation, again. Interesting comparisons
include Gene Wolfe, whose "All the Hues of Hell" establishes metaphors for hard science without stating
the tenors, and John M. Ford, whose "Chromatic Aberrations" is an hybrid of hard sf and magic realism, and
one might contrast it to the work of Rudy Rucker, the hard sf mathematician of the cyberpunks.
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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
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.