Rude Astronauts: Real and Imagined Stories

Rating:
Summary: Steele is our best hope for gritty sf.
Review: Steele brings us a collection of shorts in Rude Astronauts, some of which are excellent. The besst of them are set in his alternate history where spaceflight was first acheived in WW2. These stories capture the feel of early genre hard sf, but stick to the reality of the science tightly. The remainder or the book is devoted to a trio of stories in the vein of 'Orbital Decay' and 'Lunar Descent', an optimistic nuts n' bolts near future. Though it as if the seventies never ended in these stories it adds a down to earth quality. An excellent read