From: dstein@oak.math.ucla.edu (David Stein)
Subject: Re: WANTED: list of post-1981 hard SF
Reply-To: dstein@oak.math.ucla.edu (David Stein)
Organization: UCLA Mathematics Department
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 93 18:35:43 GMT


  The recent Hugo award winner short story, Geoffrey A. Landis's 
_A Walk in the Sun_, can be found in G. Dozois's _The Year's Best 
SCIENCE FICTION_ ninth annual collection.

  The story is NOT, in my opinion, an example of good science in 
science fiction.  But it has plenty to offer for criticism by 
students who understands some physics and know a thing or two 
about the moon surface, and it was written, I believe, by a PhD
in Physics (who should have known better).  

Here's my recent review of the story:

  A Walk in the Sun
  Geoffrey A. Landis

    What might have been a good hard sci-fi gimmick story turns
  in the hands of Landis into a catastrophe that will surely earn
  him another Hugo this year (hey, he has a Ph.D. in physics, so he
  must know what he writes, right?).  The protagonist, together with
  her hallucinations, is drawn so unrealistically she is laughable.
  Worse, however, is that Landis's solution of the problem--a lone
  astronaut on the moon in a sunlight powered space-suit has to wait
  one month for a rescue party--breaks down under scrutiny.  Landis
  completely ignores even the most common-sense objections.  Less
  obvious is that the whole set-up of the story, so that the astronaut
  can get into her troubles in the first place, is quite suspect on
  technical and logistical grounds as well.  I assume Landis knows
  about the above difficulties with the sf in the story, but he also
  knows he can get away with it.

And here's a review by Debil and Troly:

        _A Walk in the Sun_ by Geoffrey A. Landis

Troly:  An astronaut crashes on the Moon and has to circumnavigate it
        in a space suit.  There are so many impossibilities here that I
        assumed for most of the story that in fact the events were just
        the astronaut's hallucinations.  (The astronaut does in fact
        hallucinate, imagining her dead sister urging her on.)  See
        the spoiler notes at the end of this article for the details.
        (Actually, the spoiler section contains nothing I'd consider a
        true spoiler, but it was created to appease the hypersensitive.)

Debil:  It is painful to see the only hard sf story of the bunch [Hugo
        award nominees] fall on its face.  Unconvincing, poorly written, 
        it seems an example of the Reversed Equations type of writing--
        you have a solution, now let's make up the equation!  An Ambrose 
        Bierce ending might have been a respectable, if unoriginal, way 
        out.
 
  The same collection offers another story by a Physics PhD; except
that I haven't seen G. Bendford screw up the science part of a story
so far.  Here is my review of his story:

  Matter's End
  Gregory Bendford

  Ever since _Timescape_, Benford manages to frustrate me repeatedly
  by his show of promise but lack of delivery.  Here he presents
  a nightmarish landscape of near-future India on the bring of an
  environmental and social meltdown, shows an engrossing snapshot of a
  local physics research facility in midst of an important discovery
  documenting proton decay, staffs it with believable yet decidedly
  non-ordinary scientists committed to their work despite the
  increasingly hostile attitude facing them,
  and,...
         -- and then he takes it nowhere, or rather where many
  (like Clarke) have gone before.  Worse, he ends up suspended in
  the void his gimmick creates, unable to attach any meaning to
  the result, or even derive some energy from it.

  I hope your professor acquaintance is aware of _Timescape_; if not,
he should put it on his class reading list right away.

 - David

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Debil, on the shores of Bohemia.
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