Gary Westfahl

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5 Quotations from Gary Westfahl

Campbellian adj. 1993 G. Westfahl Critical History of Hard SF in Science Fiction Studies July 157 As a way to begin a discussion of hard SF, it is surely useful to examine when and how the term emerged…. Gregory Benford recalled a conversation with Poul Anderson in the early 1960s when they employed the phrase “Campbellian science fiction.”
cloaking device n. 1998 G. Westfahl Why the Stars Are Silent in Interzone Feb. 44/1 At some point, a careless alien tourist would drop a ray gun where it could be picked up by a local constable, or a rookie pilot would accidentally turn off the cloaking device, momentarily revealing an alien dreadnought in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
hard science fiction n. 1993 G. Westfahl Critical History of Hard SF in Science Fiction Studies July 158 The term kept coming up in the 1960s and 1970s; he said that Clifford D. Simak’s ‘Limiting Factor’ ‘is a puzzle story…perhaps the closest to ‘hard’ science fiction in the anthology under review’ (9/62 155)…In December, 1963, he referred to ‘‘hard’ science fiction—the technical kind’ (86); in May, 1964, he said Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s Fifth Planet was ‘to a degree a ‘hard’-type story which might even stir some interest in Hal Clement, chief sculptor of that form’ (87); in the same issue he commented, ‘Maybe we're short of the ‘hard’ technical science fiction of the early years’ (89).
mundane n. 2 1998 G. Westfahl Why the Stars Are Silent in Interzone Feb. 45/1 Readers and writers believed that the genre, if lacking the power of specific prediction, was still somehow better aware of, or more attuned to, the future, and that its enthusiasts were better prepared for the future than the mundanes.
proto-cyberpunk n. 1993 G. Westfahl in Extrapolation(vol. 34, no. 2) 190 (review of Larry McCafferty’s Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction) There are other science fiction writers—A. E. van Vogt, Jack Williamson, Charles L. Harness, even the weirder Heinlein—who could be legitimately cast as proto-cyberpunks.