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Edward Bryant
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 Edward Bryant is a short story writer whose stance from his earliest stories at the beginning of the
1970s has been stylistically ambitious. Many of his early stories were set in a colorful imagined setting
hauntingly similar to Ballard's Vermillion Sands or Ray Bradbury's Mars collected in
Cinnabar (1976). Perhaps Bryant's primary fascination has always been with the imagery of science fiction, not science. Normally he writes
in modes other than hard science fiction, but in a few notable instances, including such stories as
"Particle Theory" and "giANTS," his interests have coincided with hard sf.
He is of the first generation of writers influenced by the sf monster films of the 1950s (These
"sci-fi" films were considered just plain bad sf, powerful but inaccurate and therefore silly -- later campy). So Bryant
entered this territory -- pioneered by Miles Breuer in early sf -- filled with comical giantism created by
science, and took it seriously. For one thing, Breuer and the movies are innocent of the physics of the square-cube law,
but this is the point upon which Bryant's story turns. And for another, Bryant knows he's doing serious
writing to rigorous standards. And in the end, he's trying to satisfy the demands of hard sf and the conflicting
demands of fashionable contemporary fiction outside of genre, thus advancing the literary boundaries of hard sf.
The final moment is a memorable and complex image, of which the literal meaning is obscure. This story
should be considered along with Gregory Benford's work
(Timescape, "Exposures," etc.) and Bryant's own
"Particle Theory," as setting a new standard for hard sf at the beginning of the 1980s.
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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.