Beaker's Dozen

by Kress, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9780312868437
• ISBN10: 031286843X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-30
• Publisher: Tor Books

Summary

"The twenty-first century, it's often remarked, will transform our knowledge of biology, in the same way that the twentieth century transformed physics. With knowledge of course, comes application. And with the application of all we are learning about genetic engineering come social and ethical questions, some of them knotty. This is where science fiction enters, stage left. Scientific laboratories are where the new technologies are rehearsed. Science fiction rehearses the implications of those technologies. What might we eventually do with out new-found power? Should we do it? Who should do it? Who will be affected? How? Is that a good thing or not? For whom? Of the thirteen stories in this book, eight of them are concerned with what might come out of the beakers and test tubes and gene sequencers of microbiology. Not everything in these stories will come to pass. Possibly nothing in them will; fiction is not prediction. But I hope the stories at least raise questions about the world rushing in onus at the speed--not of light--but of thought." -- Nancy Kress from her introduction

Author Biography

Nancy Kress was born and raised in upstate New York, where she spent most of her childhood either reading or playing in the woods. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in education, as well as an M.A. in English. While she was pregnant with the second of her two sons, she started writing fiction. She had never planned on becoming a writer, but staying at home full-time with infants left her time to experiment.

In 1990 she went full-time as an SF writer. The first thing she wrote in this new status was the novella version of Beggars In Spain, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. She is the author of more than twenty books, including more than a dozen novels of science fiction and fantasy, as well as three story collections, and two books on writing. Of her most recent novels, Probability Space (Tor, 2002) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best SF novel. Her short fiction has appeared in all the usual places, garnering her one Hugo and three Nebula Awards. Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian. She is also the monthly "Fiction" columnist for Writer's Digest Magazine and she teaches writing regularly at various places, including Clarion and The Writing Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She currently resides in Rochester, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 9
Beggars in Spain	p. 11
Feigenbaum Number	p. 91
Margin of Error	p. 109
Fault Lines	p. 117
Unto the Daughters	p. 163
Evolution	p. 173
Ars Longa	p. 197
Sex Education	p. 209
Grant Us This Day	p. 227
Flowers of Aulit Prison	p. 235
Summer Wind	p. 271
Always True to Thee, In My Fashion	p. 283
Dancing on Air	p. 297
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.