Cover artist Michael Tedesco Language English Pages xiv + 241 | Country United States Publication date 1986 Originally published 1986 Page count 241 | |
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Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback) Genres Fiction, Novel, Science Fiction, Speculative fiction Nominations Locus Award for Best Collection Similar Works by Kim Stanley Robinson, Science Fiction books | ||
The Planet on the Table is the first collection of science fiction stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, published in hardcover by Tor Books in 1986. A British paperback edition appeared in 1987, as well as a Tor paperback reprint; a French translation was issued in 1988. The collection was republished in the 1994 Tor omnibus Remaking History and Other Stories. The collection takes its title from a poem by Wallace Stevens, which provides the book's epigraph.
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One story in the collection, "Black Air," won a World Fantasy Award in 1984, as well as being nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Three other stories were nominated for the Hugo or Nebula Awards, one for both. Six of the eight stories held top-twenty rankings in the annual Locus polls, and The Planet on the Table itself took tenth place in the 1987 "Best Collection" rankings. The New York Times selected the collection as one of 1986's most notable books.
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Reception
New York Times reviewer Gerald Jonas praised Robinson as "a powerful and consistent science fiction voice", finding the author "at his best when he writes of people to whom the supernormal is commonplace." The Toronto Star's Douglas Barbour described Robinson as "one of the few writers to enter sf during the '70s whose work continues to push the field outwards rather than retreating to the safe conventional 'escapism' of the past", declared the collection to be one that "no one interested in the field should miss."
Orson Scott Card, although praising Robinson's language as "precise and exquisitely crafted" and describing the author "storyteller with a mercilessly clear vision of the world," faulted the stories as excessively controlled, with Robinson's accomplished technique more noticeable than his work's emotional impact.