Results by title
2 books match the query 'Hard Science Fiction'
Ascension
A NovelSteve Tomasula
University of Alabama Press, 2022
A visually stunning narrative of three eras in humankind’s vexed relationship with nature.
Ascension is a novel about the end of nature, or rather, the end of three “natures”: the time just before Darwin changed the natural world; the 1980s, just as the digital and genetic revolutions begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate nature at both the scale of the planet and at the genome. The narrative follows three different biologists on the brink of each of these cultural extinctions to explore how nature occupies our imaginations and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.
Ascension is a story of how we continually remake the world and are in turn remade by the new nature we’ve created. It is the story of humans yearning to understand their families, themselves, and the world they live in as it comes to a close, leaving them to anticipate what will follow. Rich in visual depictions of the natural world—from nineteenth century engraving and paintings to twentieth century photography and twenty-first century databases—Ascension uses the materials of three eras to drive home our inability to escape nature, and the ways our fates are irrevocably bound together even as our actions usher in an end-time.
Hard Science Fiction
George E Slusser
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986
These 16 essays from the fifth annual J.Lloyd Eaton Conference at the University of California, Riverside, seek to come to grips with science fiction’s core, the core at which “science must ultimately seem to outweigh the fiction.”
Never before has hard SF been the topic of such extended discussion by such qualified people. The dialogue constitutes new (and potentially shocking to a traditional literary critic) modes of literary criticism, modes that take into account the impact of scientific speculation and method on our culture and on the ways our culture invents stories and myths.
Essayists include writer/scientist professors Robert L. Forward, David Brin, and Gregory Benford. Noted critics and writers with scientific backgrounds or interests include: James Gunn, Frank McConnell, George Guffey, John Huntington, Paul Carter, Patricia Warrick, Paul Alkon, Robert M. Philmus, David Clayton, Eric S. Rabkin, Herbert Sussman, Michael Collings, and George E. Slusser.