WORLD building is at the heart of great science fiction, but it can be tricky at less than book length. is a master of the art, however, and he manages to squeeze some fascinating worlds into the stories collected in Wireless.
In “Missile Gap”, the surface of an alternate Earth still trapped in the cold war has been peeled off and stretched across a vast disc a million years in the future. Humans survive the process and go exploring with an impressive resilience, but their new world is far stranger than they can comprehend. “A Colder War” takes a wildly different turn, replacing the nuclear arms race with a quest for control of the powers of unspeakable evil, whereas “Trunk and Disorderly” is just plain fun, a P. G. Wodehouse romp with a trip to Mars and a drunken dwarf mammoth. You’ve got to read it.
Sci-fi special: The fiction of now
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