conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Hard SF Renaissance about Renaissance, Edited, Kathryn with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies.. Start with the sentence 'Edited by the author and Kathryn Cramer, The Hard SF Renaissance (2002) is a thematic sequel to their 1994 anthology <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312855095/${0}"> The Ascent of Wonder </a>'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Edited by the author and Kathryn Cramer, The Hard SF Renaissance (2002) is a thematic sequel to their 1994 anthology <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312855095/${0}"> The Ascent of Wonder </a>. The first anthology argued that "[t]here has been a persistent viewpoint that hard [science fiction] is somehow the core and the center of the SF field." The Hard SF Renaissance asserts that hard SF has truly become the heart of the genre and supports its assertion by assembling nearly a thousand pages of short stories, novelettes, and novellas originally published between the late 1980s and early 2000s. A different theory says hard SF stories are engineering puzzles disguised as fiction; The Hard SF Renaissance repudiates this theory in regard to modern hard SF. Most of the selections have strong prose and rounded characters, several are classics, and gadget-driven clunkers are mercifully few.