Andrew Weiner
Teoksen Girl on Fire tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Andrew M. Weiner is the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Professor Weiner is the coeditor of two conference proceedings and has published six book chapters, over 200 journal articles, and over 350 conference papers. His research näytä lisää focuses on ultrafast optical signal processing, high-speed optical communications, and ultrabroadband radio-frequency photonics. He is especially well known for pioneering the field of femtosecond pulse shaping, for which he has received numerous awards. näytä vähemmän
Tekijän teokset
Empire Of The Sun 3 kappaletta
Streak 1 kappale
The Man Who Was Lucky [short fiction] 1 kappale
Seeing {novella} 1 kappale
The Purple Pill 1 kappale
Eternity Baby {novelette} 1 kappale
This Is the Year Zero {short story} 1 kappale
Changes 1 kappale
Des nouvelles de D. street 1 kappale
Associated Works
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993) — Avustaja — 319 kappaletta, 5 arvostelua
Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers and Other Stories from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (1992) — Avustaja — 65 kappaletta
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction May 1978, Vol. 54, No. 5 (1978) — Avustaja — 15 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 11, No. 7 [July 1987] (1987) — Avustaja — 14 kappaletta
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction May 1983, Vol. 64, No. 5 (1983) — Avustaja — 12 kappaletta
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction November 1982, Vol. 63, No. 5 (1982) — Avustaja — 12 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 12, No. 1 [January 1988] (1988) — Avustaja — 12 kappaletta
Canadian Speculative Fiction (Prairie Fire, Vol. 15., no.2 - 1994 Summer) (1994) — Avustaja — 11 kappaletta
Science Fiction Eye #08, Winter 1991 — Avustaja — 1 kappale
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Kanoninen nimi
- Weiner, Andrew
- Virallinen nimi
- Weiner, Andrew Simon
- Syntymäaika
- 1949-06-17
- Sukupuoli
- male
- Kansalaisuus
- Canada ( [1973])
UK (birth) - Syntymäpaikka
- London, England, UK
- Ammatit
- science fiction writer
novelist
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Palkinnot
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 24
- Also by
- 29
- Jäseniä
- 254
- Suosituimmuussija
- #90,187
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.8
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 11
- ISBN:t
- 31
- Kielet
- 1
Weiner quite effectively and efficiently presents this story via a sort of detective story. Narrator Victor Lewin is not a detective but, as Weiner was, a psychologist. He relates the story in exactly the sort of language you’d expect of that sort of man, and the prose is sparse enough to rapidly tell the story, complete with some flashbacks, but not so sparse as to seem the mere outline of a novel.
The Interplanetary Corporation has a lot of money involved in its first terraforming project, and the death of the station’s leisure officer Andrew Duggan, seemingly by suicide, points to a larger problem. The company is worried about the declining efficiency of the station and lags in the project, so Lewin is sent to investigate.
He makes the odd choice to go undercover as the new leisure officer. His supervisor Haines argues against it. Haines was a once-renowned psychological troubleshooter for the company. Now Lewin thinks he’s a has-been who never wants to leave the office. However, he has the support of Ron G. Spooner, Jr, the only child of legendary company founder Spooner who entered the family business. Spooner, Sr is a man Lewin admires despite a liberal academic friend (Lewin is an ex-academic) sneering that Spooner has a fascistic personality dominated by his will and the desire to dominate others.
On arrival, Lewin immediately comes to learn Duggan’s death was suspicious. Details about it weren’t noted by station commander Muller. The station’s maintenance man Remus thinks Duggan was murdered given that there is no way the normal safety interlocks should have allowed Duggan to walk outside without his suit on.
Is there a saboteur on the station? If so, are they working for a competing company? Is it a Contractionist (a coalition of anarchists, feminists, some traditional conservatives, and environmentalists opposed to what Spooner represents)? Is Ron Jr, eager to take over from his aging father, sabotaging the project to discredit his him?
Was Duggan murdered out of sexual jealousy? The company likes married couples at its facilities and personnel often have marriage contracts with monogamy clauses, and, often, the dismissal of one half of the couple means the other is forced out of employment.
Lewin’s cover isn’t very secure, and members of the station suspect right from the start that he’s a “detective” sent to investigate Duggan’s death.
There is also the possibility of implanted delusions facilitated by a dream machine developed by science officer Theron, Duggan’s widow.
When Duggan insists on going outside with Theron, he actually sees a giant, white version of Duggan urging him to join him on the hostile surface of Gehenna. (The idea of the alien consciousness of Gehenna being white owes, I suspect, something to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.)
Further deaths and intrigue follow with a very satisfying and traditional resolution of the mysteries behind the deaths and what’s going on with Gehenna.
Weiner includes some flashbacks which deal with “father-son stuff” in which Lewtin’s family life partly mirrors the troubled relationship of the Spooners and speculation that maybe terraforming Gehenna is a tragic and foolish manifestation of a masculine will to control and dominate.
We also get background on the broader world where masses are permanently unemployed with jobs leaving Earth and a short, but delicious, satire on academia with the character of Rosemary, Lewin’s ex-wife, possessor of a Ph.D. in “ancient and modern soap operas”, member of the History of Popular Culture Association, and an intellectual only “within the most generous definition of the term”. Rosemary’s field of study appeals to her because of “the simplicity of the material, its ease of manipulation”.
As usual with the books in the Isaac Asimov Presents series, Asimov gives us a two page introduction, “Science Fiction Mysteries”. Here he talks about the difficulties of mixing the detective and science fiction genres. The former is all about restoring order with the latter, in its best forms, about disorder and societal changes.… (lisätietoja)