The Enola Gay crashes on a test run before it is to drop the first atomic bomb, setting in motion events that stray significantly from the historical mid-twentieth century, in a volume that also includes a related essay and interview.
Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson is known as not only the most literary but also the most progressive (read “radical”) of today’s top rank SF authors. His bestselling Mars Trilogy tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. The Years of Rice and Salt is based on a devastatingly simple idea: If the medieval plague had wiped out all of Europe, what would our world look like today? His novel Galileo’s Dream is a stunning combination of historical drama and far-flung space opera, in which the ten dimensions of the universe itself are rewoven to ensnare history’s most notorious torturers.
“The Lucky Strike,” the classic and controversial story Robinson has chosen for PM’s Outspoken Authors series, begins on a lonely Pacific island, where a crew of untested men are about to take off in an untried aircraft with a deadly payload that will change our world forever. Until something goes wonderfully wrong …
Plus: “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions,” in which Robinson dramatically deconstructs “alternate history” to explore what might have been if things had gone differently over Hiroshima that day. As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred, and all-bets-off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.
What People Are Saying
“The foremost writer of literary utopias.” Time
“The best nature writer in the U.S. today also happens to write science fiction.” The Ends of the Earth
“It’s no coincidence that one of our most visionary science fiction writers is also a profoundly good nature writer.” Los Angeles Times
“If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson.” The New York Times
About the Author
Born in 1952, a Californian through and through, Kim Stanley Robinson grew up in Orange County, surfed his way through UC San Diego (writing his doctoral thesis on Philip K. Dick), and now lives in Davis with two kids and a beautiful scientist wife. He spends several weeks a year above 11,500 feet in the high Sierras. Not surprisingly, he’s a good friend of Gary Snyder.