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Donald M. Kingsbury
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 Donald M. Kingsbury is a mathematician and science fiction writer very much of the Campbell
school, who published one story as a young man in the early 1950s in Astounding and then did not appear again
until the late 1970s, when he came to prominence with four long hard sf stories, including this one. Thereafter,
he turned to the novel and produced Courtship
Rite (1982) and The Moon Goddess and the
Son (1987), and recently the novel in Larry Niven's hard sf universe of the Man-Kzin Wars (in volume IV of the series by
divers hands), "The Survivor" (1991). Kingsbury is particularly adept at building complex hard sf settings,
deeply rationalized and cleverly twisted into the unexpected, to provoke his characters into illuminating modes
of behavior. As interested in psychology as in the hard sciences, Kingsbury is like no one so much as
Frank Herbert, the author of Dune (1965), whose complex and detailed investigations of how the sociology and
the psychology of the characters of his world were determined by its physical characteristics. By his
thorough conceptualizing and careful execution, he achieves a feeling of realism in his created worlds unusual
even among hard sf writers.
What Kingsbury derives directly from Campbell is a kind of cold godlike rational approach that
contrasts strongly to the humanity of his characters. It is as if the author is playing both sides, the characters versus
the universe. Yet it contrasts strongly with the cold, godless affect of, say, the majority of Ballard's fiction.
The Campbellian affect is of an active god (though outside and behind the story) who plays by rules, the
scientific laws-the god of "The Cold Equations."
By clever allusion and careful use of specific detail, Kingsbury achieves the illusion of a whole
consistent universe outside the borders of the story, one in which we as readers live for the duration, at a time later
than the events portrayed. His stories have the sweep and feel of history and, like sf writers from Wells
and Kipling to the present, uses the historical affect to lend an epic importance to the events -- but the setting
is frequently a future very distant in time and space, sometimes not clearly connected to our own present.
And because he is also concerned with the details of physics and math in his universe, as well as the other
sciences that underpin his future world, he is in the tradition of the world-builders such as Hal Clement, Frank
Herbert, and Anne McCaffrey.
"To Bring in the Steel" is one of his few short stories, and is set in the recognizably human future in
San Francisco and in space on the ship Pittsburgh, clamped to an asteroid it carries to Earth -- mining and
smelting the asteroid as it hurtles homeward through the void from beyond Mars. And the captain is an obsessive
worthy of Bester or Ballard, who just happens to be a problem solver (as in, say, Frank Herbert's
Under Pressure, 1956). But the central character is a woman who, in the grand tradition, moves from personal failure to
fulfillment by adopting the problem-solving ethic. Kingsbury is a master of the surprise twist and the
unexpected reversal of roles, of fortune, of conventions, especially of conventional morals. Learning better is
Kingsbury's usual theme; psychology and sociology are always central to his stories. His work is more authentically
like classic Heinlein than any other writer to emerge in the 1970s (with the possible exception of John Varley,
who has the imagery and affect perfectly down but is innocent of hard science).
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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.