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Landis, Geoffrey A

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1955-    ) US scientist and author, married to Mary A Turzillo. In the former capacity, he has worked for NASA, particularly on Rover design for Mars missions. He began publishing work of genre interest with"Elemental" in Analog for December 1984. His work began rapidly to attract interest and attention: "Vacuum States" (July 1988 Asimov's) posed a pointed set of questions about the risks of speculative physics research, and "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" (October 1988 Asimov's), an engagingly human take on Time Travel and Mathematics, won a Nebula. "A Walk in the Sun" (October 1991 Asimov's), describing the aftermath of a crash on the Moon, won a Hugo, and "Approaching Perimelasma" (January 1998 Asimov's) derived some unexpected consequences from the exploration of a Black Hole. The latter two stories are collected, with others, in Impact Parameter and other Quantum Realities (coll 2001), which demonstrates Landis's ability to infuse Hard SF ideas with human dilemmas. Subsequently, "Falling onto Mars" (July/August 2002 Analog) also won a Hugo, and "The Sultan of the Clouds" (September 2010 Asimov's) won a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Landis's first novel, Mars Crossing (2000), which won a Locus Award, was similarly committed to scientific verisimilitude; but its thriller plot was more conventional than the Mars explorations of Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson. However, for his short stories alone, Landis deserves to be recognized as one of the central writers currently active in the realist hard sf tradition.

He has also published sf Poetry throughout his career, and has twice won the Rhysling Award. A wide sampling of his work to that point appears in Time Frames: A Speculative Poetry Anthology (anth 1991 chap) edited by Terry A Garey, but Iron Angels (2009) is his first substantive collection. As with his prose, his verse reveals an author fascinated by the detail of the universe. [GS]

see also: Robert A Heinlein Award.

Geoffrey Alan Landis

born Detroit, Michigan: 28 May 1955

works

collections

poetry

  • Iron Angels (Berlin, Connecticut: VanZeno Press, 2009) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/]

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