7/5/2023 0 Comments Books like ringworldWith a hard SF writer like Niven, the story emerges out of the world: the world and its rules and laws are what generate and drive and constrain the story. Hard SF works the opposite way - it allows its stories to be shaped by what we know about technology and the universe and how they work. There’s a school of science fiction where the writer decides where they want the story to go and then makes up a world or a technology or a branch of physics that will get it there. Hard SF - as I choose to define it, irresponsibly, with no reference to or knowledge of how other people define it - is SF that takes its science and engineering seriously. He was born in 1938 and fits into that generation in between Golden Agers like Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein and the cyber-info-punks like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. I think it’s fair to say that Niven is the quintessential “hard” SF writer. You know who I don’t hear enough about? Larry Niven. So in case that one needs explanation, it basically means “refusing to shut up.”)Īnd I can crap on with the best/worst of them about Joyce and Woolf and Kafka and whoever else, but there’s already been plenty of crapping on about them. She’s Australian, and at this point I no longer know which idioms are American or Australian anymore. (“Crapping on” is one of my wife’s expressions. You know how it is with your literary heroes - you never want to stop crapping on about how great they are. Follow Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays.
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