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BRIN, (GLEN) DAVID

I feel that something needs to be said in this entry about the ripple effects of Brin's early successes on the field in general, which were powerful. The success of ``Sundiver'' and (even more) its epic successor ``Startide Rising'' launched the 1980s revival of epic-scale HARD SF, creating market space for the major works of Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and Vernor Vinge, among others.

The impact on me and many other fans of my approximate age (I had started reading SF as a small child in the 1960s and was 23 that year) was electric. With ``Sundiver'' and ``Startide Rising'' we finally got what we barely knew we'd been missing -- intelligent new SF in the epic, rational, optimistic, technophilic Campbellian mode, a commodity depressingly absent in a previous fifteen years which (in retrospect) seemed to have been drearily dominated by bad science-fantasy, New Wave navel-gazing, faddish pessimism, and nervous polemics either for or against a '60s counterculture not very relevant to our experience of life. Brin's work was a revelation -- ``sense of wonder'' was back, and it kicked ass.

I know I'm far from the only fan to have been affected this way.