Featuring more than sixty groundbreaking short stories by modern science fiction's most important and influential writers, The Ascent of Wonder offers a definitive and incisive exploration of the SF genre's visionary core. From Poe to Pohl, Wells to Wolfe, and Verne to Vinge, this hefty anthology fully charts the themes, trends, thoughts, and traditions that comprise the challenging yet rich literary form known as "hard SF." "Hard SF is represented here from its origins with the likes of Hawthorne's 'Rappacchini's Daughter' to J. G. Ballard's dour 'Prima Belladona,' a recasting of the original tale. Hartwell and Cramer shrewdly place each story; Edgar Allan Poe's 'Descent into the Maelstrom,' for instance, is the field's 'founding document,' and Hal Clement's 'Proof' is proof that carefully worked out science, linked to the imaginative exploration of a single what-if, is what the field is all about. Even so, with writers such as Clement and Robert Heinlein at its philosophical heart, this anthology casts its net wide enough to include the best of the cyberpunkers, writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as well as mavericks, such as Philip K. Dick, represented here with a mathematical tease called the 'The Indefatigable Frog.' A focused, disciplined collection brilliantly introduced by the editors and Gregory Benford; readers will be treated to the progression of the field and vastly entertained, too." -- Booklist David G. Hartwell is also the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror , along with several other books. Kathryn Cramer has also co-edited The Hard SF Renaissance , Spirits of Christmas , and other titles.