![]() ![]() Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. ![]() All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect. ![]() Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he'd been alive. The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from. A tale of survival in desperate, strange circumstances, it stands in a long sf tradition, and quite matches the classics. You will find this tale of adroitly conceived constraint up to his highest standard, and richly deserving its award. I have sat in convention bars and tossed ideas back and forth with Geoff for hours, and always found his instincts for technical matters on the mark. His career is built on solidly made short stories, making him a member of a small band, perhaps no more than thirty, who make up the hard sf community. Geoff Landis is uniquely qualified to play this exacting game, for he is a trained physicist working for NASA. His way out demands an extreme of endurance and cleverness, but all along the game is played fairly-no miracles pop out of hats. In this crisply constructed story, Landis hedges his hero in with inescapable constraints, then demands that solution come from facing the hard facts of the airless moon. Hard science fiction proceeds from a fidelity to both the facts and attitudes of science, into the murkier landscape of the human soul.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |