This is a wonderful collection for any hard SF fan. Benford starts with real science, but his mind must be a pretty strange place, as his ideas go off into twisty directions. I liked every story but one, and that's a pretty good ratio for any collection.
Story and novelette titles include:
A Calculus of Desperation
Doing Alien
In the Dark Backward
The Voice
Kollapse
As Big as the Ritz
The Scarred Man
World Vast, World Various
Zoomers
High Abyss
A Worm in the Well
A Dance to Strange Musics
FROM BACK COVER: SF readers have come to expect the universe from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Gregory Benford: fascinating multilayered characters, thrilling plots, and mind-bending scientific speculations firmly based in cutting-edge technological fact. When it comes to literate, human, unassailably possible science fiction, Benford is in a class by himself--as he proves once again in a stunning array of tales that have never been collected in one volume before. A time-traveler on an illegal trip into the past learns a chilling truth about her own destiny... As a deadly Superflu runs rampant through a polluted, overpopulated Earth, a husband-and-wife scientific team races to salvage a livable future...On a planet where the laws of physics are strangely twisted, a brilliant scientist work undermines an ancient faith and leads to a shattering revelation...An ore-hauler on Mercury, desperate to save her endangered ship and career finds a remarkable way out: a wormhole trapped in the hellish flux of magnetic fields and fiery plasma generated by the nuclear furnace of the sun...These are but a few of the various worlds the respected astrophysicist and SF luminary now transports us to in ships constructed of evocative words and ingenious ideas. Astonishing, provocative, and intellectually stimulating, each selection is a glittering star in the vast cosmos of Gregory Benford's unparalleled imagination.
Story and novelette titles include:
A Calculus of Desperation
Doing Alien
In the Dark Backward
The Voice
Kollapse
As Big as the Ritz
The Scarred Man
World Vast, World Various
Zoomers
High Abyss
A Worm in the Well
A Dance to Strange Musics
FROM BACK COVER: SF readers have come to expect the universe from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Gregory Benford: fascinating multilayered characters, thrilling plots, and mind-bending scientific speculations firmly based in cutting-edge technological fact. When it comes to literate, human, unassailably possible science fiction, Benford is in a class by himself--as he proves once again in a stunning array of tales that have never been collected in one volume before. A time-traveler on an illegal trip into the past learns a chilling truth about her own destiny... As a deadly Superflu runs rampant through a polluted, overpopulated Earth, a husband-and-wife scientific team races to salvage a livable future...On a planet where the laws of physics are strangely twisted, a brilliant scientist work undermines an ancient faith and leads to a shattering revelation...An ore-hauler on Mercury, desperate to save her endangered ship and career finds a remarkable way out: a wormhole trapped in the hellish flux of magnetic fields and fiery plasma generated by the nuclear furnace of the sun...These are but a few of the various worlds the respected astrophysicist and SF luminary now transports us to in ships constructed of evocative words and ingenious ideas. Astonishing, provocative, and intellectually stimulating, each selection is a glittering star in the vast cosmos of Gregory Benford's unparalleled imagination.
