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George Turner
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 George Turner is the dean of Australian sf writers, a serious Australian novelist who turned to
science fiction writing in the late 1970s, after establishing a reputation as a fearsome and knowledgeable critic of
the genre. His bent is Campbellian, but his execution is contoured by deeply-held moral convictions and his life
as a contemporary novelist. Ursula K. Le Guin's work of the 60s and 70s is perhaps the most important
influence on his science fiction writing (as Stanislaw Lem is on his criticism), but his roots lie deep in decades of
reading the genre before he began writing sf. His first sf novel,
Beloved Son (1978), involves interstellar travel, a
post-holocaust civilization in the 21st century, and genetic engineering-this last has remained one of the
principal concerns of his fiction, in recent works such as
The Sea and Summer (1987 -- a.k.a. Drowning
Towers), Brain Child (1991), and The Destiny
Makers (1993). His future societies have a satisfying complexity,
portraying class conflict and economic disparities in a gritty, realistic fashion absent from most American sf.
"In a Petri Dish Upstairs" is set at an earlier time in the same future world as
Beloved Son and its sequels,
Vaneglory [1981] and Yesterday's
Men (1983). Turner considers a situation similar to that in
Ing's "Down and Out on Ell-5 Prime": a human satellite culture evolving in nearby space environments with a
need to break free of the domination of groundlings. But while American sf sees space as simply the new
frontier, Turner, the Australian, envisions it as an alien place with a strange and different culture, one with its own
moral imperatives and structures -- as he envisions the future on Earth as operating under other moral structures
different from ours today.
Evolution has always been one of the underlying ideas of hard sf, and so sf has developed a spectrum
of conventional isolated environments (the space colony, the generational spaceship, the domed city), all images
of enclosed worlds where evolution may be isolated and examined. The latest of these is "cyberspace,"
the internal world of computer space, posited by William Gibson in his cyberpunk fiction (see "Johnny
Mnemonic"). Other interesting comparisons and contrasts include Asimov's "Waterclap" (both the space colony
and the domed city under the sea), and Heinlein's "It's Great to Be Back" (space colonies as the next step in
the evolution of human society).
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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.