Carbide Tipped Pens

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By Ben Bova & Eric Choi

Publisher Description

This hard sci-fi anthology features seventeen all-new stories from an international roster of today’s most acclaimed authors.

Hard science fiction is the literature of change, rigorously examining the impact of science and technology on humanity, the future, and the cosmos. As science advances, new frontiers in storytelling open up as well. In Carbide Tipped Pens, over a dozen of today’s most creative imaginations bring the grand tradition of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein into the twenty-first century.

Ranging from ancient China to the outer reaches of the solar system, this outstanding collection of original stories finds wonder, terror, and gripping human drama in topics as diverse as space exploration, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change, alternate history, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, interplanetary war, and even the future of baseball.

From tattoos that treat allergies to hazardous space missions, from the end of the world to the farthest limits of human invention, Carbide Tipped Pens turns startling new ideas into state-of-the art science fiction.

Includes short stories by Ben Bova, Gregory Benford, Robert Reed, Aliette de Bodard, Jack McDevitt, Howard Hendrix, Daniel H. Wilson, and many others!

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14 Reviews

3.5

Metaphorosis Reviews

Created 5 months ago

“<a>reviews.metaphorosis.com</a> 3 stars A collection of stories focused on new hard science fiction. I like to believe that I used to be a scientist, and I do retain a faint memory of that period, along with some leftover jargon. When I started to read science fiction, hard SF was a key part of it, and no doubt bolstered my feeling that this was serious stuff, not just escapism. Along, probably, with everyone else, I've noted a decline in hard SF over the last decades. I don't write any myself. It sometimes seems like Stephen Baxter and Ben Bova are the only one waving the flag. So it was nice to see Bova and Eric Choi put together an anthology aimed at addressing the deficit. The anthology starts strong, with a series of well written, credible stories that show off the strengths of hard SF. Unfortunately, just over halfway through, the quality dips, and we run into hard SF's traditional weakness - stories with credible science, but characters so cool and distant that it's hard to care about them, which makes reading the story more academic exercise than pleasurable. I can go to New Scientist to read articles; I want something different from a story. Perhaps attempting to display its breadth, the anthology also displays newer, more modern weakness stolen from other genres: the apparent belief that an opaque (almost incomprehensible) story peppered with technology is innovative, when in fact it's just bad writing (even from a known author). Some of the stories give a certain wanna-be hard SF feel - for example mixing imperial and metric units. Clearly that does happen (recall a certain Mars orbiter), but I'd hope that in the future we're not mixing the units in a single sentence (or using imperial at all, actually). Similarly, there's occasionally a laziness in calculation or extrapolation. When I read hard SF, I expect the background calculations to work. In this book, they usually do, but not always. It's one thing to imagine implanted cells that create and deliver drugs, but jumping from that to built-in radio transmitters is a big leap. It may be that not all readers find fault with this, but I found some of the stories to be too overtly opinionated with regard to current politics. It's one thing to extrapolate global warming policies; it's another to complain about funding for Osama bin Laden missions. SF is not just about escapism, but there is an element of getting away from mundane tribulations. All that said, the stories in the anthology were largely good, with one or two very good, and a few not so good. Some of the best were: The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever by Daniel H. Wilson. An astrophysicist comforts his daughter when he spots an imminent disaster. A counterpoint to the flat-character flaw noted above, this one is all about people, and a strong opener for the collection. The Circle by Liu Cixin (translated by the ubiquitous Ken Liu). An imperial advisor proposes a way to investigate life's secrets. The writing in the story is in the "good, but not great" category, but it's good enough to support a very interesting concept - using people for calculations. This is an idea that's been covered by others (e.g., Sean McMullen's Eyes of the Calculor), but not quite in this way. I've got Liu's Three Body Problem (which this is an excerpt from) on my list as well, and I'm curious to see whether he can make it work as well at novel length. She Just Looks That Way by Eric Choi. A young man with a crush looks to surgery to relieve his obsession. This is another of the stories carried more by an interesting idea than by the writing. It could have been shorter and simpler, but after some treacherous ground in the middle, Choi pulls it out in the end. SIREN of Titan by David DeGraff. A goal-driven robotic rover begins to act up. Despite the title, there's only a faint, conceptual link to the Kurt Vonnegut book. This story is in some ways the antithesis of the Liu and Choi stories; that is, the idea is relatively thin, but the story is so well written that it just doesn't matter. Possibly the best story in the book. Overall, a good collection, but not really one that is likely to turn the tide for hard SF. I would have hoped for a stronger collection that more consistently avoided the sub-genre's traditional flaws. NB: Received free copy from Net Galley.”

Richard Gombert

Created over 1 year ago

Aaron J. Pung

Created about 2 years ago

Dawnofthenerds

Created almost 5 years ago

Rita Florez

Created almost 5 years ago

About Ben Bova

Ben Bova (1932-2020) was the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction, including Able One, Transhuman, Orion, the Star Quest Trilogy, and the Grand Tour novels, including Titan, winner of John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. His many honors include the Isaac Asimov Memorial Award in 1996, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature” in 2008.

Dr. Bova was President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, and a former editor of Analog and former fiction editor of Omni. As an editor, he won science fiction’s Hugo Award six times. His writings predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), electronic book publishing, and much more.

In addition to his literary achievements, Bova worked for Project Vanguard, America’s first artificial satellite program, and for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, the company that created the heat shields for Apollo 11, helping the NASA astronauts land on the moon. He also taught science fiction at Harvard University and at New York City’s Hayden Planetarium and worked with such filmmakers as George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry.