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 鈥淢issile Gap鈥�, 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. 鈥淎 Colder War鈥� takes a wildly different turn, replacing the nuclear arms race with a quest for control of the powers of unspeakable evil, whereas 鈥淭runk and Disorderly鈥� is just plain fun, a P. G. Wodehouse romp with a trip to Mars and a drunken dwarf mammoth. You鈥檝e got to read it.
Sci-fi special: The fiction of now
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