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Chemistry |
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I got divorced in 1988 and for a couple of years in the late eighties, I was single. This was a condition I was utterly unprepared for since I hadn’t had a date since the Nixon Administration! I have since happily remarried, thank you very much, but being “in circulation” was good for my writing because it got me interested in falling-in-love stories. I had written many stories in which people were already in love, scarcely any where people fell in love. “Chemistry,” published in Asimov’s in June of 1993, starts with a rather mechanistic look of love: it postulates an advance in biotech called neuroromance (pun intended, Mr. Gibson) whereby the chemistry of the brain is altered to make people temporarily fall in love.
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Big Guy |
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I confess: I’m a net enthusiast. I am thrilled by the idea I can reach the entire world from my keyboard and can invite billions of strangers (in theory!) to read these very words over my shoulder. I am in awe of the net’s potential to change the way we think and feel, how we make and enjoy art, how we talk to our congressmen and our grandmothers. I am delighted with the astonishing novelty of the net; its rules seem to change daily – sometimes by the hour. You know, I actually get paid for some of my daily clicks; I have the good fortune to write a column on sf on the net for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And every so often I so carried away thinking about the future of the net that a story happens. “Big Guy” was published in the June, 1994 issue of Asimov’s; it is not the first, nor will it be the last net fiction I write.
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Think Like A Dinosaur |
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I owe this story, which had the cover of the June 1995 Asimov’s, to John Kessel and Tom Godwin. In the early nineties, my friend John Kessel incited a dust up about Godwin’s seminal sf story, “The Cold Equations.” He questioned the rigor of the science in a story that had long been at the center of the hard sf canon, and took a rather dim view of its socio-political subtext. A lively discussion ensued in the pages of the New York Review of Science Fiction. My contribution to the debate was to be a short-short shocker with a working title of “The Cold Equation.” But in the course of researching the story, I had to good fortune to read Kip Thorne’s wonderful, BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS: EINSTEIN'S OUTRAGEOUS LEGACY.
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Breakaway, Backdown |
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I’m not all that sanguine about our future in space. Now when I was a kid, space was where science fiction began and ended. Brave pioneers would someday push to the asteroid belt and beyond to found their pocket utopias, then benign aliens would beckon or ferocious aliens threaten, and eventually great ships would span galactic empires effortlessly. Space was dangerous, yes, but only if a meteor slammed into your hull or someone pushed you out of the airlock. There was precious little story time wasted on how living in space might make your muscles shrink or your bones rot.
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