Reprint: Forty Signs of Rain

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Kim Stanley Robinson

Today I reprint a review of Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson, which first appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction 193, September 2004.

Reprint: Life on Mars

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Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, John Barnes, Jonathan Strahan, Kage Baker, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Nnedi Okorafor, Rachel Swirsky, Stephen Baxter

This review of Life on Mars edited by Jonathan Strahan first appeared in Bull Spec 5, Spring 2011.

It doesn’t specifically say so on the cover, but this is a YA collection. This is a category that simply did not exist when I was of an age to be the target audience, now it seems to be all pervasive. But what exactly is it? The authors aren’t exactly talking down to their audience, or, at least, I have seen works that are as complex in language, ideas and structure that are ostensively aimed at an adult audience. But the stories do seem to address their audience by the simple expedient of having a protagonist of the same age (the one exception to this rule is ‘Discovering Life’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, which also happens to be the only story that is not original to this anthology. Its presence here tends to suggest that, other than the age of the protagonist, there is no real difference between adult and young adult fiction.)

Reprint: How to Change the World

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A.J.P. Taylor, David McCullough, G.M. Trevelyan, Harry Turtledove, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, James M. McPherson, John Keegan, Keith Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson, MacKinley Kantor, Paul J. McAuley, Philip K. Dick, Robert Cowley, Terry Bisson, Ward Moore, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

A few days ago I said I was going to do something further on Hard SF to follow up on my posts of a few days ago. Well, I’m several hundred words into it, but it looks like it might end up being longer than originally imagined, so it might be another few days before it appears. So I started casting around for another reprint to appear here and happened upon this essay about alternate history. It is clearly something I wrote, but I have no memory of writing it, I have no idea who I might have written it for, and I have no record of whether it was actually published anywhere.

Life After Life

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Kate Atkinson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Bradbury

One of the questions I find myself returning to time and again is: what is science fiction? Or, perhaps more accurately, why do we consider book X to be science fiction, but not book Y? The borders are fluid, porous, constantly open to being redefined, reimagined, they are never the same for any two people, they are never the same for one person at different times; yet we always end up drawing distinctions, deciding to read X as science fiction, Y as mainstream. I don’t think there is any great mystery about why this should be: we are a pigeonholing species, categorization is simply what we do. But how do we do it? What is the trigger that determines which side of our imaginary border we place any particular book?