Georgia on My Mind and Other Places by Charles Sheffield

Author:Charles Sheffield [Sheffield, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9781612420301
Google: 2Kf1_uXaB2oC
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2012-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Afterword to “Humanity Test”

I’ve heard writers at conventions envying the first generation of science fiction writers. There were all these neat fresh ideas, you see, waiting to be written about for the very first time. So it isn’t fair for the rest of us who came along later, because we don’t have that virgin intellectual forest waiting to be explored.

That thought makes about as much sense as envying Newton or Maxwell because the laws of gravity and electromagnetism were sitting about waiting for somebody to discover them. The creative process was probably harder then than now, since many tools that make work easier today had not been developed.

The problem is a real one, though. What does a writer do when someone has already had the basic idea and written the classic story? One answer is, have a different idea and write a different story.

Another answer is to take the same idea, and push it one step forward.

Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” is a science fiction classic. A young stowaway on a spaceship must be jettisoned, because the added mass that she gives to the ship will make its mission impossible. The story was chilling; once read, never forgotten.

But was it the only answer? I decided that it was not, and wrote “Humanity Test”—a solution to the insoluble problem set up in Tom Godwin’s story.

Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero is another absolute classic, a story that can be written only once and seems to be the logical end of the line. I tried to go beyond it in At the Eschaton, a novella that will be coming out from Tor Books in the next year or so. I’m sure I can’t top Tau Zero, but it was certainly fun to try.

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