Olaf Stapledon’s work provides one version. This perspective of deep time has been an important engine of science fiction ever since.
This describes how humans, for the first time, really had to think about the age of things and their own cosmic unimportance. He describes the sense of radical alienation that this provoked, quoting a passage from one of Thomas Hardy’s novels where a character discovers a fossil in a cliff. In _Trillion Year Spree_, Brian Aldiss suggests that one of the wellsprings of science fiction was the Victorians’ discovery that human beings were not at the center of the universe, were at most a temporary florescence in a process of evolution that had continued for billions of years before, and might continue for billions of years after. The third book in that previous series, Vast, is one of the great unrecognized SF classics of the last twenty years.
Linda Nagata’s follow-up to the Nanotech Succession books, Edges is coming out. Which seems to me to be unjustly neglected, as it compares well to the works of, for example, Al Reynolds.Today is a big day for some of us. By some freakish accident I stumbled across a copy of "Vast" a few years ago, began reading-and was hooked first by the chutzpah of the concept presented in the first few pages (how you keep the crew of a slower-than-light starship working for years on end) and then by the rest of her far-future vision. (I nearly missed her books completely - they have barely been published in the UK. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui. Linda has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she's been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. Her newest science fiction novel is The Red: First Light, a near-future military thriller published under her own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC.
Though best known for science fiction, she writes fantasy too, exemplified by her "scoundrel lit" series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Linda Nagata is the author of multiple novels and short stories including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella "Goddesses," the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. But variety is good, and so I have a new guest blogger for you: Linda Nagata. While I (Charlie) am on vacation for most of a month, you might have noticed some familiar faces popping up to guest-blog here.
0 kommentar(er)
