Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.
Sto caricando le informazioni... Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizonsdi Gardner Dozois (A cura di)
Nessuno Sto caricando le informazioni...
Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Twenty-three stories, most hard" science, some familiar and some by authors I'd never heard of before.... In other words, something for most any sf fan who likes short stories or likes to discover new authors. I'd give it a higher rating, but my taste and the editor's taste were seldom congruent." ( ) My reactions to reading this anthology in 2002. “Preface”, Gardner Dozois -- Brief look at the theme of exploration stories in world literature and exploration stories in sf. Dozois notes that the theme wanes and blooms in interest amongst writers. Ironically, when real space exploration, at least of the manned variety, was winding down, space exploration stories in sf were picking up. They used the new scientific findings for romantic and adventure stories set in space like the old planetary romances used then uncontradicted speculations. “The Sentinel”, Arthur C. Clarke -- At least the second time I’ve read this story. It was longer than I remembered nor did I remember it taking place in 1996. “Moonwalk”, H.B. Fyfe -- A man against nature tale that reminded me strongly of Jack London, particularly his “Building a Fire”, and the true story of mountain man John Colter. This 1952 story has the sole survivor of a lunar tractor accident walking away from it, trying to find help from his fellow explorers far away before his oxygen gives out. (His wife is one of the members of the lunar base.) Fyfe even throws in some grandiose descriptions of the lunar landscape. “Grandpa”, James H. Schmitz -- The only other time I’ve read this story is about 25 years ago, but I remembered most of it. It’s still a clever story of the unraveling-a-deadly-secret-of-an-alien-ecosystem variety. It does, however, now want to make me read more of Schmitz. He strikes me as just as clever at working out alien ecosystems as the earlier Stanley G. Weinbaum though he was first. “The Red Hills of Summer”, Edgar Pangborn -- This is the first Pangborn I’ve read, and I can see why he’s a neglected favorite of critics and writers. It’s not that the plot of this story -- a survey team exploring a planet for possible colonization by people fleeing an Earth contaminated by atomic warfare -- is that remarkable. It’s the characterization of the narrator and his beloved Miranda, the fairly well-worked out alien ecosystem and especially the evocative, moody prose with such phrases as “the snarling statistics of mortality” and “the shadow of private unhappiness” that makes it special. I’ll probably seek out more Pangborn including West of the Sun which is an expansion of this story. “The Longest Voyage”, Poul Anderson -- At least the third time I’ve read this excellent Anderson story. I noticed two additional things this time. First was the use of names that had analogous resonances with place names important to explorers in the Age of Magellan (the obvious inspiration for this story). Thus the Aureate Cities suggest El Dorado and the island empire of Hisagazi sounds rather Japanese. I also found it interesting that self-described “nineteenth century liberal” (at least that was they way he described himself in the 1990s -- I don’t know if his politics were the same in 1960 when this story was published) has the society of his space traveler Val Nira sound very much like a rationalistic, centrally-planned technoutopia: a leisured republic whose rulers are chosen by exam and where criminals are cured via therapeutic means and war is unknown. “Hot Planet”, Hal Clement -- An enjoyable 1963 hard sf story (what else, from Clement?) about exploring a volcanic Mercury. As Dozois notes, science has invalidated the whole story with new data about Mercury, but, at the time, this was an accurate sf story. “Drunkboat”, Cordwainer Smith -- This 1963 story from Smith exhibits his usual linguistic playfulness and odd structure. It’s quite a while before we even figure out what Rambo is supposed to have done; the story’s beginning is about the possible motives and credits for Rambo’s accomplishment but not what it is. “Becalmed in Hell”, Larry Niven -- An ok story. “Nine Hundred Grandmothers”, R. A. Lafferty -- As is typical, I’m given to understand, with Lafferty, this strange, entertaining story of a quest for immortality is perhaps a morality tale, perhaps satire, and a cross between a fairy tale and sf. “The Keys to December”, Roger Zelazny -- Zelazny, I’m reminded yet again, was a master story teller who used so many styles in his stories, and here he shows the influence of his wide reading in poetry (a concluding paragraph that is a slight restating of the first). I liked a lot of things in this story besides its style. “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow”, Ursula K. Le Guin -- The title comes after the line in Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” that mentions “vegetable love” (the second to last paragraph also quotes from the poem). I actually liked this story quite a bit, a first in Le Guin’s work that I’ve read. I liked the idea of planetary survey teams being composed of neurotics and crazy people, albeit crazy people who can tolerate each others’ quirks. All, that is, except for empath Sensor Osden, who picks up people’s instinctive wariness to strangers and feeds it back making them increasingly suspicious, wary, and hateful toward him. I liked this take on empathy rather than on the more usual one of cursed empath who just feels the world’s pain or has to escape society (though there is some of that here). “A Meeting With Medusa”, Arthur C. Clarke -- I thoroughly enjoyed this trip through Jupiter’s atmosphere and the look at its imagined ecosystem the second time I read it. However, after reading Charles Fort recently, I noticed in this story that Clarke seems to have been inspired by Fort (given his interest in the paranormal, I consider highly likely he read Charles Fort though I don’t know for sure). (His Rendezvous with Rama was inspired by the notion that some of the observed UFOs were simply spaceships refueling and paying us no mind.) In this story, Clarke has whirling lights in the atmosphere of Jupiter which are explicitly said to be like the “Wheels of Poseidon” sighted in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. These underwater whirling lights are mentioned in Fort’s The Book of the Damned (Clarke mentions one of the same incidents cited by Fort) “The Man Who Walked Home”, James Tiptree, Jr. -- I’ve always thought, in my brief exposure to her work, that Tiptree was an overrated writer, and this story does nothing to change that opinion. The middle part of the story, a post-apocalypse tale spanning centures and telling of the yearly appearance of a time traveler (moving backwards in time) was interesting. However, Tiptree throws on a overly long ending and beginning told from the point of view of the time traveler. The beginning was needlessly obscure and too long. presumably it was there to hook the reader through mystification. The ending viewpoint was ok but still too long.) “Long Shot”, Vernor Vinge -- “In the Hall of the Martian Kings”, John Varley -- This is the first time I’ve read this classic tale. Dozois, in his introductory notes, says the story may well have led, after its publication in 1977, to the rebirth of the Martian sf story. The engineered plastic plants and “animals” remind one of later nanotechnology stories (particularly Kevin Anderson’s and Doug Beason’s Assemblers of Infinity), but this story was from the seventies when genetic engineering, with some technical rigor behind it, was becoming a major theme, and, as Gregory Benford has pointed out, genetic engineering may eventually give us most of what genetic engineering promises. “Ginungagap”, Michael Swanwick -- This 1980 story, either Swanwick’s first or second published story (Dozois’ introductory notes on this are a bit unclear), was published in something called TriQuarterly 49 which, if memory serves me right, is a literary magazine. Like James P. Hogan’s "Assassin" and, to a lesser extant, Aldris Budrys' Rogue Moon and Clifford D. Simak's Goblin Reservation, this story takes the philosophical issues of identity involved in transporting humans via a matter transporter (here the information about an organisms is broken into a long-chain polymer molecule which is sent through a wormhole -- Swanwick carefully does not describe the mechanisms for converting the encoded information into a body; a separate transmission is done to cover the electrolyte balance in the original body). The situation, humans not knowing if they can trust an alien race enough to send a human through their matter transmitter also reminded me of the wary alien-human meeting in Murray Leinster's "First Contact". Dozois notes that this story can be seen as a precursor cyberpunk story. There's some truth to that in that the story is set in a world of highly-competitive jobs and dominated by corporations where the consequences of information theory (including, of course, treating humans as just a type of bundled information) is present. However, the tone of "high-tech, low-life" (as the famous description of cyberpunk goes) is not there. "Exploring Fossil Canyon", Kim Stanley Robinson -- This is the second time I've read this story from Robinson's Mars cycle (this one takes place on a terraformed Mars but not the one of Robinson's Mars trilogy). Once again, I was impressed by Robinson's use of scientific principles and nomenclature as metaphors and characterization devices. This time, I noticed, when protagonist Eileen Monday thought about all the literary tales set on Mars, the line about "no plastic windmill-creatures" as an allusion to John Varley's "In the Hall of the Martian Kings". "Promises to Keep", Jack McDevitt -- "Lieserl", Stephen Baxter -- A slight story about a woman engineered to live in the sun (after her physical death, her mind is transferred into a habitat in the sun's photosphere) and see what's gone wrong with it. (This may be part of Baxter's Xeelee sequence since it's said someone is "killing" the sun, and, I believe, some alien in that universe has the power to do that.) I really wasn't that moved by the character's central plight: aging a year every day. The exact reason for the speed of her aging wasn't made clear. "Crossing Chao Meng Fu", G. David Nordley -- This is a genuine sense-of-wonder story about an expedition to cross an icy plain in a permanently shaded crater on Mercury. No life is found there, no alien artifact. The expedition could be done by robot, but the explorers want to go because it's there, exploring reality instead of seeing the world mediated by a videoscreen. The poet-literature professor narrator unexpectedly finds an ancient exploring spirit awakened in his overweight, out of shape body. He also proves to have an unexpectedly quick mind in emergencies and very useful powers of observation. He mainly goes on the expedition to get himself a spot on a possible future expedition to Miranda. His prose is self-deprecating and realistic, exactly what you would expect a man in his situation, discovering unknown desires (including for a fellow explorer) and depths in the wilderness. There is an odd interlude with one woman describing her circumcision and inability to have normal sex. Nordley is unimpressed with the idea of protecting "primitive cultures from 'western interference'" -- a refreshing idea from a one of my fellow Macalester graduate. “Wang’s Carpets”, Greg Egan -- Another austere existential story from Egan. This seems to be either set in the same future as his novel Diaspora or an excerpt from that novel. I believe he once described that novel as “space opera for ais”. Well, if it’s space opera, it’s a peculiarly Eganesque one, a story where it is not racial extinction or alien menace that is battled but ennui. The central conflict of the story is nothing less than man’s purpose in a godless universe; more specifically, it deals with the concept of anthrocosmology (also used in his novel Distress). In a future of human consciousnesses edited and cloned and placed in machine bodies and synthetic bodies and an endless quantity of virtual realities (one character is said to have been “scanned” into machinehood back in the 21st century), posthumans have established “polises”. Some communities have embraced the anthrocosmological idea that the universe exists as the result of human thought. These same communities usually see little wrong with embracing life in virtual realities and bodies of their choosing. The man group in this story are their idealogical opponents. They try to maintain their ties to the physical universe and seek intelligent aliens that will refute the anthrocosmological principle. “A Dance to Strange Musics”, Gregory Benford -- This is the second time I’ve read this story, and I still think it’s a classic sf story, the second to last paragraph is one of the best I’ve read in sf. “Approaching Perimelasma”, Geoffrey A. Landis -- This story also makes an interesting counterpoint to Greg Egan’s “Wang’s Carpets” in that both feature the notion of human consciousness recorded (and edited) and transcribed to human hardware. (Though here, the narrator notes that he has kept his human form though in a size small enough to escape most of the destruction wrought by the tidal forces of the black hole.) This story is notable for three reasons. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
È contenuto inContieneMenzioni
Distant planets, galaxies, alien races--the universe is vast and filled with an almost unimaginable range of possibilities. But imagine it we can. Here are more than twenty stories from the most inventive writers in the field, including: Poul Anderson * Stephen Baxter * Greg Bear * Gregory Benford * Arthur C. Clarke * Hal Clement * Greg Egan * H. B. Fyfe * R. A. Lafferty * Geoffrey A. Landis * Ursula K. Le Guin * Jack McDevitt * Larry Niven * G. David Nordley * Edgar Pangborn * Kim Stanley Robinson * James H. Schmitz * Cordwainer Smith * Michael Swanwick * James Tiptree, Jr. * John Varley * Vernor Vinge These are the stories of discovering those possibilities-the stories of the explorers and pioneers who push the envelope further out--exciting tales of alien landscapes and adventures on far distant shores that are the heart and soul of science fiction. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessuno
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.087620835291Literature English (North America) American fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Speculative fiction Science fiction Collections Themes and subjects Humanity Types of person Geographers and historians GeographersClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |