McAndrew Almost Complete

I first encountered Charles Sheffield, and his wonderful characters of brilliant physicist Arthur Morton McAndrew and spaceship captain Jeannie Rokker in Sheffield's first collection, Hidden Variables. That volume contained several of McAndrew's tales, along with a couple of independent stories. A few years later came a second collection, pure McAndrew, and even though there were only a couple of new entries I bought it. Ditto a few years after that when a third collection came out. I snapped it up in an instant. When Baen Books announced The Compleat McAndrew, I not only bought the paperback, but the electronic book version as well. And when I heard that T.K.F. Weisskopf's Cosmic Tales: Adventures in the Sol System was going to have a McAndrew story (alas, the last), I haunted the bookstores until I found a copy.

These are hard science fiction. They are all "puzzle stories", McAndrew tries to solve some sort of problem in physics and usually ends up in a fix that requires the help of his traveling companion Jeannie Rokker (who has more sense than him) to come to his rescue. We explore the mysteries of inertia, dark matter, the solar focus, see the future Earth, dive in the oceans of Europa and much more in these tales. There's a lot of hard science here, but the characters are fun, the dialogue is fun, and the stories are just plain fun, hard science or no. Highly recommended. Too bad Sheffield never found a problem in physics "worthy" of a McAndrew novel, I would have loved to seen him shine in a longer work.

Contains: Introduction; Killing Vector; Moment of Inertia; All the Colors of the Vacuum; The Manna Hunt; The Hidden Matter of McAndrew; The Invariants of Nature; Rogueworld; With McAndrew, Out of Focus; McAndrew and the Fifth Commandment; Appendix: Science & Science Fiction; McAndrew and The Law (appears in Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Sol System, edited by T.K.F. Weisskopf, Baen Books, 2004).

Counts as twelve entries in the 2005 Short Story Project.