Reviews for Primary Science Knowledge and Understanding

The average rating for Primary Science Knowledge and Understanding based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-21 00:00:00 Meleneal Cameron There’s a mournful essay included here which is worth mentioning. It moans and groans that by 1979 science fiction is now big. Big! For many years the sf community had been despised and ignored, and now sf is becoming mainstream. Well, the dream is coming true. But in an unexpected way. Science fiction is not breaking into the mainstream, exactly. The mainstream is sort of coming over and engulfing science fiction. (It was Star Wars which started the whole thing.) I had a very confusing conversation with my daughter a couple of years ago which illustrates what happened to science fiction (and fantasy). I was talking about mainstream fiction as opposed to genre fiction, and she simply could not figure out what I meant by “mainstream”. What are you talking about? What’s this mainstream thing? I explained some more and she said “oh, you mean sort of dramas”. Well, er, yes, I guess – a novel that’s not a thriller, not sf, not fantasy, not horror, not YA, not romance…. You know, mainstream. It turns out that “mainstream” is now a tiny genre and the formerly subsidiary genres are now the new mainstream. Science fiction and fantasy is mainstream now and has been for years. The old mainstream is now called “literary fiction” I guess.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-01 00:00:00 Devontez Carolina Published in 1981, Nebula Winners 15 contains the winning novella, novelette and short stories for 1979, as well as some runners-up together with two essays on writing. The standard of writing is, of course very high. The only real sign of dating is in the essay by Vonda N Mcintyre which deals with the process of preparing and submitting a manuscript, much of it ancient history. The stories all stand up well after 38 years, with some real giants of SF represented here. Barry N Longyear's 'Enemy Mine' is especially good, and IMHO better than the movie version which dumbed the story down too much. Excellent.