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Diamonds in the Sky
Diamonds in the Sky is a collection of science fiction stories, each related to a specific theme in astronomy.
The purpose of the anthology is to provide stories with ample and accurate astronomy spanning a range of topics covered in introductory courses. Instructors in high school and college may find these stories useful, as some students may learn concepts more easily through story than from lecture. Fans of science fiction with good science should also enjoy these stories. Contributions include both original stories and reprints from some of the top science fiction writers working today.
Contents:
* In the Autumn of the Empire - Jerry Oltion
* End of the World - Alma Alexander
* The Freshman Hook Up - Wil McCarthy
* Galactic Stress - David Levine
* The Moon is a Harsh Pig - Jerry Weinberg
* The Point - Mike Brotherton
* Squish - Dan Hoyt
* Jaiden's Weaver - Mary Robinette Kowal
* How I Saved the World - Valentin Ivanov (translated from the Bulgarian by the author and Kalin M. Nenov)
* Dog Star - Jeffrey A. Carver
* The Touch - G. David Nordley
* Planet Killer - Kelvin Grazier & Ges Segar
* The Listening Glass - Alexis Glynn Latner
* Approaching Perimelasma - Geoffrey A. Landis
The purpose of the anthology is to provide stories with ample and accurate astronomy spanning a range of topics covered in introductory courses. Instructors in high school and college may find these stories useful, as some students may learn concepts more easily through story than from lecture. Fans of science fiction with good science should also enjoy these stories. Contributions include both original stories and reprints from some of the top science fiction writers working today.
Contents:
* In the Autumn of the Empire - Jerry Oltion
* End of the World - Alma Alexander
* The Freshman Hook Up - Wil McCarthy
* Galactic Stress - David Levine
* The Moon is a Harsh Pig - Jerry Weinberg
* The Point - Mike Brotherton
* Squish - Dan Hoyt
* Jaiden's Weaver - Mary Robinette Kowal
* How I Saved the World - Valentin Ivanov (translated from the Bulgarian by the author and Kalin M. Nenov)
* Dog Star - Jeffrey A. Carver
* The Touch - G. David Nordley
* Planet Killer - Kelvin Grazier & Ges Segar
* The Listening Glass - Alexis Glynn Latner
* Approaching Perimelasma - Geoffrey A. Landis
159 pages, ebook
First published March 3, 2009
1 person is currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Mike Brotherton
12 books12 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Mike Brotherton writes hard science-fiction stories with well developed characters.
For a living, Mike is an observational astronomer, researching quasars and active galactic nuclei.
Combining his interest in science fiction writing and astronomy, Mike organizes the yearly Launch Pad workshop, which teaches astronomy to writers of science fiction and fantasy.
About Mike
ASTRONOMY:
When I was six, I wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist. When I was twelve I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I went to college at Rice University intending to get a degree in electrical engineering and work for JPL or NASA. I ended up double majoring in EE and space physics and went on to the University of Texas at Austin to study astronomy. After getting my PhD in 1996, I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. I am now an assistant professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming. My specialty is quasars. I’ve actually used the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Keck Telescope and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. You can find out more here .
WRITING:
Writing starts with reading. I don’t remember learning to read and don’t remember ever having difficulty with reading with one exception in the form of a nasty school librarian who told me in first grade that I “didn’t read that book.” You see, I’d taken a book from the “big stacks” and first graders weren’t supposed to be able to read those. Bitch. I started writing my first novel — something really terrible inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars books — in sixth grade. For the most part I let the writing bug idle until I was in college. I got to write a short story for a Space Colonies course my freshmen year, then did some writing on my own and also for an advanced fiction writing course my junior year. I didn’t sell anything I wrote in college but I did start learning to be professional and submitting my stories. Graduate school slowed me down for a few years but I did join a local SF/F writing group (”The Slugtribe”) and started getting serious about writing. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 1994.
Clarion West was a wonderful experience for me though not everyone fares so well. It’s basically boot camp for writers for six weeks, writing 5-6 stories, reading and critiquing over 100 stories, living and learning intensely. I’m still in contact with many of my classmates now nearly a decade later and a rather large percentage of us have become successful writers. We’ve produced over a dozen books and had dozens of short stories published in professional anthologies and magazines. At least half of us are still in there slugging. While the craft acquired at something like Clarion is not to be underestimated, the most important legacy to me has been the friends and professional contacts I made there. Beth Meacham, my editor at Tor, was one of my Clarion instructors and gave me a thumbs-up on the novel synopsis I wrote there. It took me another six or seven years to finish my PhD, hone my craft, and get the actual novel, STAR DRAGON, on her desk.
Other stuff
Mike’s Favorite SF/F Novels in no particular order:
◦Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
◦Hyperion by Dan Simmons
◦Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
◦The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
◦Gateway by Frederick Pohl
◦Replay by Ken Grimwood
◦Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
◦Startide Rising by David Brin
◦The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
◦Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinle
Mike Brotherton writes hard science-fiction stories with well developed characters.
For a living, Mike is an observational astronomer, researching quasars and active galactic nuclei.
Combining his interest in science fiction writing and astronomy, Mike organizes the yearly Launch Pad workshop, which teaches astronomy to writers of science fiction and fantasy.
About Mike
ASTRONOMY:
When I was six, I wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist. When I was twelve I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I went to college at Rice University intending to get a degree in electrical engineering and work for JPL or NASA. I ended up double majoring in EE and space physics and went on to the University of Texas at Austin to study astronomy. After getting my PhD in 1996, I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. I am now an assistant professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming. My specialty is quasars. I’ve actually used the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Keck Telescope and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. You can find out more here .
WRITING:
Writing starts with reading. I don’t remember learning to read and don’t remember ever having difficulty with reading with one exception in the form of a nasty school librarian who told me in first grade that I “didn’t read that book.” You see, I’d taken a book from the “big stacks” and first graders weren’t supposed to be able to read those. Bitch. I started writing my first novel — something really terrible inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars books — in sixth grade. For the most part I let the writing bug idle until I was in college. I got to write a short story for a Space Colonies course my freshmen year, then did some writing on my own and also for an advanced fiction writing course my junior year. I didn’t sell anything I wrote in college but I did start learning to be professional and submitting my stories. Graduate school slowed me down for a few years but I did join a local SF/F writing group (”The Slugtribe”) and started getting serious about writing. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 1994.
Clarion West was a wonderful experience for me though not everyone fares so well. It’s basically boot camp for writers for six weeks, writing 5-6 stories, reading and critiquing over 100 stories, living and learning intensely. I’m still in contact with many of my classmates now nearly a decade later and a rather large percentage of us have become successful writers. We’ve produced over a dozen books and had dozens of short stories published in professional anthologies and magazines. At least half of us are still in there slugging. While the craft acquired at something like Clarion is not to be underestimated, the most important legacy to me has been the friends and professional contacts I made there. Beth Meacham, my editor at Tor, was one of my Clarion instructors and gave me a thumbs-up on the novel synopsis I wrote there. It took me another six or seven years to finish my PhD, hone my craft, and get the actual novel, STAR DRAGON, on her desk.
Other stuff
Mike’s Favorite SF/F Novels in no particular order:
◦Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
◦Hyperion by Dan Simmons
◦Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
◦The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
◦Gateway by Frederick Pohl
◦Replay by Ken Grimwood
◦Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
◦Startide Rising by David Brin
◦The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
◦Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinle
Ratings & Reviews
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Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 22, 2009
A decent anthology of mostly good stories (although one or two were lame) that all get the science right. I really like these kind of short sci-fi stories: hard science, good writing, and an engaging story. Bonus points for stories that have something more to say than "gee whiz -- check this cool idea out" and several of the stories in this collection get bonus points.
Individual reviews below, but beware of spoilers:
"In the Autumn of Empire" by Jerry Oltion. This was an entertaining story about a totatalitarian emperor, whose every mistake is made reality because no one wants to tell the emperor that he is wrong. A little girl asks the emperor why it gets colder in the fall, and he tells her that it is because the Earth moves away from the Sun. So engineers set about tilting the Earth's axis to be perpindicular to its orbital plane, and the story discusses the problems that this creates. The story ends cleverly with the emperor's son coming to power after the emperor's death who promptly declares, based on his misunderstanding of what an analemma signifies on a globe that astronomers have given him, that the Earth needs to be shifted into a figure-eight orbit.
"End of the World" by Alma Alexander. A woman witnesses the end of the earth as it is burned up by the growing red giant that our sun has become. A well-written story about what our Solar System will be like when it dies billions of years from now.
"The Freshman Hookup" by Wil McCarthy. Uses the metaphores of microscopic creatures in a puddle and students at a university to talk about the formation of the elements in the universe. Definitely more entertaining than educational. In fact, if you don't know about the buildup of the elements and about basic molecular physics, then this "story" would go right over your head.
"Galactic Stress" by David Levine. Short little story about a woman that studies the structure of the universe. She uses a special computer that you actually plug into to make it seem like you are floating in space and can actually touch and pull on the galaxies, stars, etc. The woman accidentally loses the virtual control panel and gets stuck on shrinking mode. Because she began her interface floating hundreds of billions of light years away from the known universe and because the Earth is the center of her "data set" her "terrifying" trip through the universe, as she shrinks, educates the reader about the structure of the universe. The model is apparently very detailed because she is even able to spot, during the final seconds of her "shrinking," the "Sagan Telescope" which sits at L2 beyond the moon, where her boyfriend is living and doing research.
"The Moon Is a Harsh Pig" by Jerry Weinberg. Story of an anthropologist that uses her knowledge of a planet's fake moon to trick a pig-headed, egotistical astronomer. Kind of a stupid story, really.
"The Point" by Mike Brotherton. I liked this one a lot. The story of a boy and a girl that meet in college at their mutual beginning astronomy class, and at the conclusion of the lecture about the eventual destruction of the universe by dark energy, the boy asks the professor what the point of doing anything is, if it's all going to end someday. The remainder of the (very short) story tells the rest of the boy and girl's lives. They fall in love, marry, have children, eventually take life-extending drugs (when they are invented in 2050), then move to Moon, and then to Mars, and so on and so on. Eventually, billions of years in the future, they exist only as conciousness floating in space, but they are being torn apart by dark energy. The girl asks the boy if he remembers when they met, and he replies that he does remember, and then tells the girl that he know understands the point, after doing all he had done and been every where he had been, almost always with the girl.
"Squish" by Dan Hoyt. This was a fun "whirlwind" tour of the solar system as the main character, a man who has been hired to ferret out the fake billionaire owner from the nine billionaire owner clones of the man that hired him, as he travels from planet to planet meeting each clone, each of whom is in charge of various research and/or industrial facilities.
"Jaiden's Weaver" by Mary Robinette Kowal. This was essentially a futuristic retelling of "Where the Red Fern Grows" with a ringed-planet replacing the Ozarks and a "teddy bear spider" replacing dogs. I liked this story about a few of the ways having rings around your planet would affect the seasons, the weather, and culture.
"How I Saved the World" by Valentin Ivanov. The unique voice of this story is apparently the result of it being translated from Polish into English. In any event, tells how an asteroid on a collision course with Earth would actually be diverted (not with atomic bombs, because that would simply create a bunch of asteroids on a collision course with Earth). The main character has volunteered to paint the asteriod black so it will heat up quicker as other countries fire microwave beams at the asteroid. The heating of the asteroid will speed up its diurnal rotation (the night and day spin) causing it to move quicker, and thus, hit the Sun, and only graze Earth's atmosphere.
"Dog Star" by Jeffrey A. Carver. An asteriod prospector accidentally crashes his ship on an asteroid he suspects contains metal, stranding himself and his co-pilot, a genetically enhanced collie that can talk. The "anti-gravity sled" on this ship, which uses gravitational force to push off of surfaces within a few inches of its base, turns out to be their savior. They throw dirt under the sled, the sled pushes off of the dirt and moves upward, so they throw more dirt under the sled, and the sled travels further away from the asteroid. Because the asteroid has weak gravity, the sled escapes the asteroid and heads toward the mining base. This was supposed to be a lesson of how "dark energy" is causing our universe to separate. The author also points out that physicists have confusingly also named "dark matter" the invisible stuff that is apparently holding the galaxies together.
"The Touch" by G. David Nordley. Story of a man and woman that have been converted into universe traveling super beings (a lot like the couple in "The Point") and their efforts to heal a female bird-like alien of cancer, and then to save the alien race from a nearby star that is about to go super nova (a white dwarf sucking gas from a red giant that orbits it). I liked the science explanations in this story, and also the study of the ethics of living forever. I also liked the belief, held by the aliens, that refusing to convert themselves to immortals would be like committing suicide. The story also explored the "prime directive" theme from Star Trek: to interfere or not to interfere with doomed alien civilizations.
"Planet Killer" by Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier. This was a fun story about a ship making one of the first FTL trips in human history, and a mystery that they uncover at various stops along the way. The authors are obviously big Battlestar Galactica fans (there are references to the "CIC" and a character says "frak"), and sticklers to militaristic detail. At several stops, the ship finds planets that have been drastically modified approximately 1000 years ago: gas giants with too much Helium-3 in their atmosphere, rocky planets with radioactive smog for atmospheres, and ice planets or moons with half a hemisphere of amorphous ice and the other half of crystalline ice. The ship eventually discovers that the damage was caused when two neutron stars orbiting one another came together, formed a black hole, and shot a focused blast of gama rays into space. "Gama bursters" have been observed, apparently, in other galaxies, but never in the Milky Way. The "gama burster" blasted all of the systems that the ship had observed, which the crew realizes only after they account for their FTL travel and drift of stars over a thousand years. And the gama ray missed the Solar System, just barely. The captain makes this a lesson of the fragility of Earth and human life and of the harshness of the universe.
"The Listening Glass" by Alexis Glynn Latner. Story of a man that falls from the central tower of a radio telescope on the far-side of the moon. His 500-foot drop is "cushioned" by the lens of the telescope, which is several meters off of the floor of a crater. He then must quickly try to repair the damage his fall caused to the lens, with the help of a few fellow astronomers and a couple of engineer/mechanic/pilots. They want to do it fast to be able to capture the early radio signals given off by a recently blown supernova in a distant galaxy. This story was packed with lots of various hard sf ideas (many of them, very, very familiar, like the significant other at a space-station at a lagrange point, which was used in another Diamonds in the Sky story), but ultimately, was not very satisfying because it had very little tension and minimal plot. I did learn some about neutrino stars.
"Approaching Perimelasma" by Geoffrey A. Landis published on the Diamonds in the Sky website. A cool story about a tiny, millimeter high clone of a man sent into a blackhole to study what goes on beyond the event horizon. The plan to get him back out? Send a wormhole portal in immediately after he crosses the event horizon, he slows down his descent into the black hole's singularity, and he passes through the wormhole portal just before it is shredded by the black hole's gravity. A pretty ingenious story that was very interesting hard scifi, dealing with the various ways to get around the problems presented by traveling into a black hole and describing what it would be like (e.g., make the ship entering very small to reduce the varying effects of the gravitational forces pulling on the ship, the wormhole idea, how everything looked as he approached the blackhole -- stars going around the blackhole like leaves floating around a rock in a stream of water, as he gets closer, the visible light around him contracting into a tunnel directly above him as he descends to the black hole beneath him -- how the universe was once he passed through the black hole (the time and space axis flip spots, so everything looks like a line (representation of time in physical space) that he can travel along (stars surrounded by spiraling rock cylindars are planets)). I also enjoyed the story's meditation on what constitutes self (the poor clone can't have all of his predecessor's memories because his brain is too small, so he only has portions of it, and thus, he believes, he is his own person, not really a clone) and on the inevitability of the passage of time in our universe.
Individual reviews below, but beware of spoilers:
"In the Autumn of Empire" by Jerry Oltion. This was an entertaining story about a totatalitarian emperor, whose every mistake is made reality because no one wants to tell the emperor that he is wrong. A little girl asks the emperor why it gets colder in the fall, and he tells her that it is because the Earth moves away from the Sun. So engineers set about tilting the Earth's axis to be perpindicular to its orbital plane, and the story discusses the problems that this creates. The story ends cleverly with the emperor's son coming to power after the emperor's death who promptly declares, based on his misunderstanding of what an analemma signifies on a globe that astronomers have given him, that the Earth needs to be shifted into a figure-eight orbit.
"End of the World" by Alma Alexander. A woman witnesses the end of the earth as it is burned up by the growing red giant that our sun has become. A well-written story about what our Solar System will be like when it dies billions of years from now.
"The Freshman Hookup" by Wil McCarthy. Uses the metaphores of microscopic creatures in a puddle and students at a university to talk about the formation of the elements in the universe. Definitely more entertaining than educational. In fact, if you don't know about the buildup of the elements and about basic molecular physics, then this "story" would go right over your head.
"Galactic Stress" by David Levine. Short little story about a woman that studies the structure of the universe. She uses a special computer that you actually plug into to make it seem like you are floating in space and can actually touch and pull on the galaxies, stars, etc. The woman accidentally loses the virtual control panel and gets stuck on shrinking mode. Because she began her interface floating hundreds of billions of light years away from the known universe and because the Earth is the center of her "data set" her "terrifying" trip through the universe, as she shrinks, educates the reader about the structure of the universe. The model is apparently very detailed because she is even able to spot, during the final seconds of her "shrinking," the "Sagan Telescope" which sits at L2 beyond the moon, where her boyfriend is living and doing research.
"The Moon Is a Harsh Pig" by Jerry Weinberg. Story of an anthropologist that uses her knowledge of a planet's fake moon to trick a pig-headed, egotistical astronomer. Kind of a stupid story, really.
"The Point" by Mike Brotherton. I liked this one a lot. The story of a boy and a girl that meet in college at their mutual beginning astronomy class, and at the conclusion of the lecture about the eventual destruction of the universe by dark energy, the boy asks the professor what the point of doing anything is, if it's all going to end someday. The remainder of the (very short) story tells the rest of the boy and girl's lives. They fall in love, marry, have children, eventually take life-extending drugs (when they are invented in 2050), then move to Moon, and then to Mars, and so on and so on. Eventually, billions of years in the future, they exist only as conciousness floating in space, but they are being torn apart by dark energy. The girl asks the boy if he remembers when they met, and he replies that he does remember, and then tells the girl that he know understands the point, after doing all he had done and been every where he had been, almost always with the girl.
"Squish" by Dan Hoyt. This was a fun "whirlwind" tour of the solar system as the main character, a man who has been hired to ferret out the fake billionaire owner from the nine billionaire owner clones of the man that hired him, as he travels from planet to planet meeting each clone, each of whom is in charge of various research and/or industrial facilities.
"Jaiden's Weaver" by Mary Robinette Kowal. This was essentially a futuristic retelling of "Where the Red Fern Grows" with a ringed-planet replacing the Ozarks and a "teddy bear spider" replacing dogs. I liked this story about a few of the ways having rings around your planet would affect the seasons, the weather, and culture.
"How I Saved the World" by Valentin Ivanov. The unique voice of this story is apparently the result of it being translated from Polish into English. In any event, tells how an asteroid on a collision course with Earth would actually be diverted (not with atomic bombs, because that would simply create a bunch of asteroids on a collision course with Earth). The main character has volunteered to paint the asteriod black so it will heat up quicker as other countries fire microwave beams at the asteroid. The heating of the asteroid will speed up its diurnal rotation (the night and day spin) causing it to move quicker, and thus, hit the Sun, and only graze Earth's atmosphere.
"Dog Star" by Jeffrey A. Carver. An asteriod prospector accidentally crashes his ship on an asteroid he suspects contains metal, stranding himself and his co-pilot, a genetically enhanced collie that can talk. The "anti-gravity sled" on this ship, which uses gravitational force to push off of surfaces within a few inches of its base, turns out to be their savior. They throw dirt under the sled, the sled pushes off of the dirt and moves upward, so they throw more dirt under the sled, and the sled travels further away from the asteroid. Because the asteroid has weak gravity, the sled escapes the asteroid and heads toward the mining base. This was supposed to be a lesson of how "dark energy" is causing our universe to separate. The author also points out that physicists have confusingly also named "dark matter" the invisible stuff that is apparently holding the galaxies together.
"The Touch" by G. David Nordley. Story of a man and woman that have been converted into universe traveling super beings (a lot like the couple in "The Point") and their efforts to heal a female bird-like alien of cancer, and then to save the alien race from a nearby star that is about to go super nova (a white dwarf sucking gas from a red giant that orbits it). I liked the science explanations in this story, and also the study of the ethics of living forever. I also liked the belief, held by the aliens, that refusing to convert themselves to immortals would be like committing suicide. The story also explored the "prime directive" theme from Star Trek: to interfere or not to interfere with doomed alien civilizations.
"Planet Killer" by Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier. This was a fun story about a ship making one of the first FTL trips in human history, and a mystery that they uncover at various stops along the way. The authors are obviously big Battlestar Galactica fans (there are references to the "CIC" and a character says "frak"), and sticklers to militaristic detail. At several stops, the ship finds planets that have been drastically modified approximately 1000 years ago: gas giants with too much Helium-3 in their atmosphere, rocky planets with radioactive smog for atmospheres, and ice planets or moons with half a hemisphere of amorphous ice and the other half of crystalline ice. The ship eventually discovers that the damage was caused when two neutron stars orbiting one another came together, formed a black hole, and shot a focused blast of gama rays into space. "Gama bursters" have been observed, apparently, in other galaxies, but never in the Milky Way. The "gama burster" blasted all of the systems that the ship had observed, which the crew realizes only after they account for their FTL travel and drift of stars over a thousand years. And the gama ray missed the Solar System, just barely. The captain makes this a lesson of the fragility of Earth and human life and of the harshness of the universe.
"The Listening Glass" by Alexis Glynn Latner. Story of a man that falls from the central tower of a radio telescope on the far-side of the moon. His 500-foot drop is "cushioned" by the lens of the telescope, which is several meters off of the floor of a crater. He then must quickly try to repair the damage his fall caused to the lens, with the help of a few fellow astronomers and a couple of engineer/mechanic/pilots. They want to do it fast to be able to capture the early radio signals given off by a recently blown supernova in a distant galaxy. This story was packed with lots of various hard sf ideas (many of them, very, very familiar, like the significant other at a space-station at a lagrange point, which was used in another Diamonds in the Sky story), but ultimately, was not very satisfying because it had very little tension and minimal plot. I did learn some about neutrino stars.
"Approaching Perimelasma" by Geoffrey A. Landis published on the Diamonds in the Sky website. A cool story about a tiny, millimeter high clone of a man sent into a blackhole to study what goes on beyond the event horizon. The plan to get him back out? Send a wormhole portal in immediately after he crosses the event horizon, he slows down his descent into the black hole's singularity, and he passes through the wormhole portal just before it is shredded by the black hole's gravity. A pretty ingenious story that was very interesting hard scifi, dealing with the various ways to get around the problems presented by traveling into a black hole and describing what it would be like (e.g., make the ship entering very small to reduce the varying effects of the gravitational forces pulling on the ship, the wormhole idea, how everything looked as he approached the blackhole -- stars going around the blackhole like leaves floating around a rock in a stream of water, as he gets closer, the visible light around him contracting into a tunnel directly above him as he descends to the black hole beneath him -- how the universe was once he passed through the black hole (the time and space axis flip spots, so everything looks like a line (representation of time in physical space) that he can travel along (stars surrounded by spiraling rock cylindars are planets)). I also enjoyed the story's meditation on what constitutes self (the poor clone can't have all of his predecessor's memories because his brain is too small, so he only has portions of it, and thus, he believes, he is his own person, not really a clone) and on the inevitability of the passage of time in our universe.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 11, 2012
The project underpinning this collection* is laudable, and so was the NSF's decision to fund it.
In contrast with those lofty goals, the result is consterning. I guess it reflects the appalling state of the genre in the USA.
By my count, there are three decent stories in there. Mary Robinette Kowal's story was an especially good take on the topic. So this collection isn't worthless.
But the bad stories outweigh the decent ones. Some of them are merely weak, bland, didactic or in poor taste. Some naturally stray from the topic. But others are positively loathsome, and reprehensible to boot! The authors were supposed to write about astronomy so you'd expect a modicum of decency. But some stories have stuff like FTL.
There's a story written by a guy with scientific credentials and which is concerned with relativistic effects. It even unwittingly spells out the reason FTL why impossible in that framework. The author claims there's no FTL in his story, yet it includes actual FTL travel by the way of wormholes. I kid you not! Without FTL, that story would have been comically implausible and bad. But with FTL, I'm not laughing.
I don't mind stuff like FTL in PKD stories for instance. But if you're going to write about science, mind the fucking decencies!
There's something interesting about the way badness is gendered in this collection. The sample size is small but it's something I've observed elsewhere.
One in five of the collection's writers is a woman. Yet the two best stories were written by women and the worst story written by a woman eschewed badness.
My favorite writer in this genre is a guy so please don't assume I'm some kind of misandrist. Then again he isn't a yank.
* http://www.mikebrotherton.com/diamonds/
In contrast with those lofty goals, the result is consterning. I guess it reflects the appalling state of the genre in the USA.
By my count, there are three decent stories in there. Mary Robinette Kowal's story was an especially good take on the topic. So this collection isn't worthless.
But the bad stories outweigh the decent ones. Some of them are merely weak, bland, didactic or in poor taste. Some naturally stray from the topic. But others are positively loathsome, and reprehensible to boot! The authors were supposed to write about astronomy so you'd expect a modicum of decency. But some stories have stuff like FTL.
There's a story written by a guy with scientific credentials and which is concerned with relativistic effects. It even unwittingly spells out the reason FTL why impossible in that framework. The author claims there's no FTL in his story, yet it includes actual FTL travel by the way of wormholes. I kid you not! Without FTL, that story would have been comically implausible and bad. But with FTL, I'm not laughing.
I don't mind stuff like FTL in PKD stories for instance. But if you're going to write about science, mind the fucking decencies!
There's something interesting about the way badness is gendered in this collection. The sample size is small but it's something I've observed elsewhere.
One in five of the collection's writers is a woman. Yet the two best stories were written by women and the worst story written by a woman eschewed badness.
My favorite writer in this genre is a guy so please don't assume I'm some kind of misandrist. Then again he isn't a yank.
* http://www.mikebrotherton.com/diamonds/
June 18, 2016
I love me some hard-SF, and I also love astronomy. The premise of this anthology (which includes a mix of new stories and reprints) is to showcase short fiction that accurately highlights various concepts in astronomy: planetary science, the life and death of stars, etc. The intent was apparently to create a book that could be enjoyed for pleasure and also used as an educational tool.
The problem with that kind of goal is that you run the risk of the stories being overly didactic: flimsy plots and characters who exist mainly as an excuse to deliver a lecture. That happens a couple times in this book, but not as often as it could have. On the whole these stories are both enjoyable and interesting from an intellectual point of view, and a few are real gems.
Favorites include: "End of the World" by Alma Alexander, "Jaiden's Weaver" by Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Touch" by G. David Nordley, and "Approaching Perimelasma" by Geoffrey A. Landis, the science of which is a strong precursor to what we saw in the movie Interstellar.
The problem with that kind of goal is that you run the risk of the stories being overly didactic: flimsy plots and characters who exist mainly as an excuse to deliver a lecture. That happens a couple times in this book, but not as often as it could have. On the whole these stories are both enjoyable and interesting from an intellectual point of view, and a few are real gems.
Favorites include: "End of the World" by Alma Alexander, "Jaiden's Weaver" by Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Touch" by G. David Nordley, and "Approaching Perimelasma" by Geoffrey A. Landis, the science of which is a strong precursor to what we saw in the movie Interstellar.
January 9, 2011
A free ebook (see http://www.mikebrotherton.com/diamond... ) of short sci-fi based around good current astronomy and science facts. It's 'hard' sci-fi by definition. Overall fairly enjoyable, but to me many of the stories ended up a bit stilted. If feels like the authours started with set of facts they wanted to convey, and wrapped a story around them, and in many cases it's the story that suffers. Even with the uneven quality, there are some enjoyable pieces in here, and the facts themselves are interesting reading too, even if presented awkwardly.
February 8, 2016
Literary quality's a little uneven in places, but on the whole, it's a good collection of stories with - most importantly given its intent - good science underneath 'em. Worth reading.
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