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mburnamfink's review
4.0
After Hieroglyph and Everything Change, perhaps the inevitable next destination for the Center for Science and the Imagination is outer space. There 2017 offer, Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities is a collection of seven short stories from leading fiction writers, a dozen scholarly essays from the ASU faculty, and a dialog between scifi great Kim Stanley Robinson and Mars scientist Jim Bell.
These stories don't shy away from how hard life in space will be. That's hard as in hard vacuum, hard radiation, the tyrannies of the Tsiolkovsky equation, and the lag of merely lightspeed communication. But yet, space is still the final frontier, and even if the economics of space exploration are not there, and may never be there, we still dream of what we may find and become out in the black. The best story, in my opinion, is Vandana Singh's "Shikasta", about an encounter between a multicultural exploration team, their AI probe, and an alien life form closer to sentient volcanism than anything we might recognize. Madeline Ashby brings a taut small world story about choice and responsibility in "Death on Mars", while Karl Schroeder does a little buzzword mashing, but tries to find a way out of the thicket of property rights in "The Baker of Mars". All the authors bring a good game, and the accompanying essays provide criticism and context (with footnotes).
This is a great collection of hard science-fiction, meshed with science and science policy. Fans will enjoy this book, and I could easily see slotting some of the fiction and essays into a course module on space and space related issues. And for the price of free, the ebooks are well worth your time.
*Disclosure Notice: I am a graduate of ASU, and know many of the contributors as friends or colleagues. I was not part of the project, and received no compensation for this review.
These stories don't shy away from how hard life in space will be. That's hard as in hard vacuum, hard radiation, the tyrannies of the Tsiolkovsky equation, and the lag of merely lightspeed communication. But yet, space is still the final frontier, and even if the economics of space exploration are not there, and may never be there, we still dream of what we may find and become out in the black. The best story, in my opinion, is Vandana Singh's "Shikasta", about an encounter between a multicultural exploration team, their AI probe, and an alien life form closer to sentient volcanism than anything we might recognize. Madeline Ashby brings a taut small world story about choice and responsibility in "Death on Mars", while Karl Schroeder does a little buzzword mashing, but tries to find a way out of the thicket of property rights in "The Baker of Mars". All the authors bring a good game, and the accompanying essays provide criticism and context (with footnotes).
This is a great collection of hard science-fiction, meshed with science and science policy. Fans will enjoy this book, and I could easily see slotting some of the fiction and essays into a course module on space and space related issues. And for the price of free, the ebooks are well worth your time.
*Disclosure Notice: I am a graduate of ASU, and know many of the contributors as friends or colleagues. I was not part of the project, and received no compensation for this review.
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