The Hard SF Renaissance Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Introduction

  GENE WARS - Paul McAuley

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  WANG’S CARPETS - Greg Egan

  GENESIS - Poul Anderson

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  ARTHUR STERNBACH BRINGS THE CURVEBALL TO MARS - KIM Stanley Robinson

  ON THE ORION LINE - Stephen Baxter

  BEGGARS IN SPAIN - Nancy Kress

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  MATTER’S END - Gregory Benford

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  THE HAMMER OF GOD - Arthur C. Clarke

  THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR - James Patrick Kelly

  MOUNT OLYMPUS - Ben Bova

  MARROW - Robert Reed

  MISSION YEAR 0.00:

  MISSION YEAR 1.03:

  MISSION YEAR 1.22:

  MISSION YEAR 4.43:

  MISSION YEAR 6.55:

  MISSION YEAR 88.55:

  MISSION YEAR 88.90:

  MISSION YEAR 89.09:

  MISSION YEAR 114.41:

  MISSION YEARS 511.01–1603.73:

  MISSION YEAR 4895.33:

  MISSION DATE—INCONSEQUENTIAL

  MICROBE - Joan Slonezewski

  THE LADY VANISHES - Charles Sheffield

  BICYCLE REPAIRMAN - Bruce Sterling

  AN EVER-REDDENING GLOW - David Brin

  SEXUAL DIMORPHISM - Kim Stanley Robinson

  INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT - G. David Nordley

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS - Robert J. Sawyer

  A WALK IN THE SUN - Geoffrey A. Landis

  FOR WHITE HILL - Joe Haldeman

  A CAREER IN SEXUAL CHEMISTRY - Brian Stablelord

  REEF - Paul McAuley

  EXCHANGE RATE - Hal Clement

  REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL - Greg Egan

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  GRIFFIN’S EGG - Michael Swanwick

  GREAT WALL OF MARS - Alastair Reynolds

  A NICHE - Peter Watts

  GOSSAMER - Stephen Baxter

  MADAM BUTTERFLY - James P. Hogan

  UNDERSTAND - Ted Chiang

  HALO - Karl Schroeder

  DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS - David Langford

  FAST TIMES AT FAIRMONT HIGH - Vernor Vinge

  REALITY CHECK - David Brin

  THE MENDELIAN LAMP CASE - Paul Levinson

  KINDS OF STRANGERS - Sarah Zettel

  THE GOOD RAT - Allen Steele

  BUILT UPON THE SANDS OF TIME - Michael Flynn

  TAKLAMAKAN - Bruce Sterling

  HATCHING THE PHOENIX - Frederik Pohl

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  IMMERSION - Gregory Benford

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  NEW PEOPLE, NEW PLACES, NEW POLITICS

  The hard SF tradition is continuous from at least the late 1930s. In our 1994 hard SF anthology, The Ascent of Wonder, we argued that “There has been a persistent viewpoint that hard SF is somehow the core and the center of the SF field.” But while hard SF was never entirely out of fashion, since the 1940s it has not been as central to popular SF, nor as fashionable, as it became in the 1990s.

  The term was coined by P. Schuyler Miller in 1957, and in its origins has always been to some extent nostalgic, in that it was coined to describe fiction that measured up to the “real” SF of the past. But it has also always signified SF that has something centrally to do with science, and it is this latter aspect of the term that we choose to emphasize, and it is this latter aspect that is most evident in the renaissance of hard SF in the 1990s.

  The big names in hard SF in the nineties, based on number of stories published, were Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, G. David Nordley, Paul McAuley, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Sheffield, Brian Stableford, Allen Steele, Bruce Sterling, Robert J. Sawyer, etc. Many of them wrote a number of stories in other genres or subgenres, but also made significant contributions in SF Otherwise the big names of this and earlier generations, Poul Anderson, David Brin, Greg Bear, Hal Clement, Ben Bova, and Larry Niven, Jack Williamson, etc., wrote significant novels, and published less than ten stories in the whole decade, although some of those stories were certainly important. And Arthur C. Clarke, following the deaths of Heinlein and Asimov, became the standard bearer for the old ideals of hard SF unmixed with overt politics and remained a bestselling writer.

  Those old ideals, of vision of the future distant in time and space, and filled with wonder far removed from the politics of today, did not disappear in the 1990s. But they began to seem old fashioned, because many of the main ideas of hard SF had become politicized in the real world in the 1980s, associated with either the right or the left—near future space travel and weaponry with the right, nuclear dangers and the environment with the left, etc.

  Here is the legend of right-wing political involvement in the real world USA in hard SF, the origin story of the SF advisors to President Reagan, who inspired the “Star Wars” defense plan in the early 1980s (as told by Greg Bear in his 2001 World SF convention guest of honor speech):

  Jerry Pournelle got together Poul [Anderson], and Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Dean Ing, Robert Heinlein, and a number of other writers—Bjo Trimble was there with her daughter, Lora—lots of science fiction writers getting together with generals, rocket scientists young and old, new and experienced, and people from NASA, and politicians, discussing this possibility: that perhaps nuclear war was going to become a push-button affair where computers would make the decision.

  No one could tolerate that, and we had to start building defensive shields. So we started putting together different ideas. General Danny Graham had one vision, and some of the writers had another. And they had a science fiction fan for a president; his name was Ronald Reagan.

  Now we laugh. Do you want your presidents to be smart? Do you want them to be dreamers? Or do you want them to be lucky? Because this thing that went forth that Ronald Reagan did was the vastest bluff in the blue-bottom baboon history of the
whole Cold War. Ronald Reagan said we could put a whole umbrella over the United States and protect [it] … . Science fiction writers helped the rocket scientists elucidate their vision and clarified it. They put it together in prose that Ronald Reagan could understand, and Ronald Reagan who read science fiction, said “Why not?” And he was lucky and so, that thing that had terrified me as a child surviving the Cuban missile crisis, … the ever present shadow of nuclear war, all of that, suddenly wasn’t really there anymore.

  All political narratives are oversimplified in fiction, especially when the narrative is repeated by opponents of the group in question. Probably this story has been as well, but the committee was a fact, and it was a committee formed by the political right in SF, that, a decade after the famous Vietnam ads (and see Joe Haldeman “For White Hill” story note for more on this), added significant credence to the identification of American hard SF with right-wing politics and fulfilled one of the dreams of SF—that if our stories were read by and our prophecies were listened to by the people who run the world, then the world would change for the better.

  Certain writers such as Ted Chiang, Catherine Asaro, Paul Levinson, Michael Flynn, Alexander Jablokov, David Langford, Ian MacDonald, Robert Reed, George Turner, James Patrick Kelly, and Robert Charles Wilson also came into prominence (some after decades of publishing) as hard SF or space opera writers, each with several highly regarded stories. (Many of them wrote other kinds of fiction.)

  There were other significant threads, and significant works by important writers, that are not part of this argument, or this anthology. (This is not intended as a comprehensive literary history of 1990s SF.) Many popular, talented, and award-winning SF writers such as Connie Willis, John Kessel, Jack Womack, Howard Waldrop, James Morrow, Terry Bisson, Tim Powers, Harry Turtledove, Karen Joy Fowler, and Neal Stephenson, wrote in other areas in the 1990s. (The 1990s was also the decade of the rise of Alternate History as a main form of SF, for instance.)

  In this anthology we present representative examples from among the significant SF writers and hard SF stories of the decade, and try to point out linkages and relationships to give some clearer understanding of how hard SF, often mixed with space opera (or vice versa) has evolved in recent years, escalating into the new century. This book focuses on what has been called “The New Hard SF,” “Baroque Hard SF Space Opera” (or “Baroque Space Opera”),” “Hard Character SF,” and a number of other unwieldy terms. The New Thing of the nineties, was broader than just hard SF, but there was certainly a hard SF renaissance and the stories in this book prove it.

  No consensus has emerged as to what to call it: a lot of diverse things happened, even within the compass of this book. It is sometimes called Radical Hard SF and that is the term we will trace because it illuminates certain interesting things about the evolution of the field in the last couple of decades.

  This term originated in an Interzone editorial by David Pringle and Colin Greenland (in Interzone #8) and was then preempted by Bruce Sterling in his polemical fanzine Cheap Truth, as a description of what Sterling wanted the Movement to be. (See the note for Sterling’s “Bicycle Repairman.”) And of course neither cyberpunk nor the stories in Interzone turned out as anticipated in the various calls for Radical Hard SF. But seeds had been planted. It was clear that what Radical Hard SF was in opposition to was a perceived trend in American SF in the 1980s toward militarist, right-wing or libertarian, space war fiction marketed as synonymous with hard SF. The pages of Cheap Truth were filled with attacks on that stuff.

  Some issues in the evolution of space opera need to be addressed, before we can fully understand what happened to hard SF. So let us turn there for a moment.

  The Hugo Awards for best novel for the last twenty years have generally been given to space opera or hard SF, from David Brin and C.J. Cherryh to Vernor Vinge, Lois Bujold, and Orson Scott Card—as opposed to the shorter fiction awards, which have been distributed much more widely over the range of SF and fantasy styles and possibilities. It is arguable that the Hugo Award has always gone primarily to space opera, as currently defined, though many of the earlier winners, up to the end of the 1970s, would have been mortally offended to be identified as such. Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating the worst form of formulaic hackwork.

  But in the early and mid-1980s space opera completed a redefinition process begun in the late 1970s in particular by influential editors Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey, and in the 1990s space opera had become synonymous with popular science fiction adventure fiction. It was also the term most often used in the U.S. to describe Star Trek and Star Wars fiction. It is clear that both films and television helped promote this redefinition. And finally, it is evident that this redefinition was intended to conflate hackneyed work with ambitious SF adventure fiction, to blur distinctions in order to sell more books and make the media tie-in writing-for-hire fiction seem more respectable.

  In the 1980s, the traditional optimistic, problem-solving kind of hard SF was marginalized by the advent of cyberpunk (originally the Movement: radical reformers of hard SF) and by the ascendence of the Humanists (originally—and self-parodyingly—the Boffos of Sycamore Hill: the “boring old farts” of the writing workshop in Sycamore Hill, North Carolina, who were actually the same age as the cyberpunks). Both groups, and the outer circles of imitators and followers of both, rejected space opera and the common forms and styles of hard SF, and the politics of the Right, in favor of new attitudes and approaches, new dress codes and new critical value systems, and left-leaning politics. The standard essay on the subject is Michael Swanwick’s “User’s Guide to the Postmoderns.”

  The real attention in the 1980s and the early 1990s went to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and their cohorts and emulators, on the one hand, and to Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, and Orson Scott Card on the other. Lois McMaster Bujold (published by Baen books and serialized in Analog) became prominent, and Dan Simmons too. Orson Scott Card’s two-volume anthology of 1980s SF (Future on Fire [1991] and Future on Ice [1998]) is the best available selection of eighties writers. There is no comparable anthology for the 1990s. But Card’s long and judgmental story notes must be read along with and in juxtaposition to the general introductions to Gardner Dozois’ annual Year’s Best Science Fiction (in which the fashions and prevalent attitudes are clearly presented, sometimes in very different terms than in Card’s books).

  Promoting hard SF in the 1980s was left primarily to influential editor Jim Baen, first at Tor Books and then from 1983 on at Baen Books, and to Analog. (Examples of what Baen was promoting and what the Movement was attacking included the Libertarian fiction of Vernor Vinge, the late work of Robert A. Heinlein, and the There Will Be War anthology series edited by Jerry Poumelle.) Hard SF, it seemed, was narrowing to a subgenre concerned primarily with military fiction and political attacks, usually from the right, on liberal causes and politicians, and with artificially set up problems solved by stereotypical characters, in neither venue valuing literary style.

  In The Ascent of Wonder, an anthology we felt was a necessary corrective to this seeming narrowing, we examined the historical origins of hard SF and tried to tease out what hard SF had actually to do with science. The book had three introductions, one each by Gregory Benford, Kathryn Cramer, and David G. Hartwell. Benford argued for hard SF’s “fidelity to facts”: “Hard SF plays with the net of fact up and strung as tight as the story allows.” Cramer remarked that in the decades since John W. Campbell’s death, “the hard SF attitude became a saleable commodity of its own, separable from scientific content. Particularly during the Reagan years, hard SF evolved into right-wing power fantasies about military hardware, men killing things with big machines …” She invited the reader instead to explore the myriad ways science could be used in hard SF. Hartwell described hard SF as being about the “beauty of truth” and “the emotional experience of describing and confronting what is true,” portraying hard SF as a literat
ure of faith in science, in opposition to literary modernism.

  Some fine and popular writers emerged from Baen Books and from Analog (Lois Bujold at Baen Books, Michael Flynn at Analog), but with these and a few other significant exceptions, Baen Books and Analog didn’t get much serious attention, nor many award nominations in the field, by the beginning of the 1990s. Nor were many of the stories selected for prestigious reprint in Year’s Best anthologies, despite the fact that Analog was, and always has been, the magazine with the highest circulation in the SF field. A bunch of the Analog writers, whose fiction was published nearly exclusively therein, got together in the nineties as a booster group and had themselves photographed on several occasions at conventions with editor Stanley Schmidt as the “Analog Mafia.” But they did not succeed in appearing as a hip, young, cutting-edge group.

  It was among the British writers in particular that a new space opera (which was the most obvious U.K. response to the call for Radical Hard SF) conspicuously flowered in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. British SF critic Paul Kincaid, in 2001 in an essay on 1990s SF, “The New Optimism,” says:

  British science fiction, meanwhile, was following exactly the opposite trajectory [from American SF]. While cyberpunks admitted the influence of the British New Wave, writers such as Colin Greenland in Take Back Plenty and Ian McDonald in Desolation Road were paying self-conscious homage to the freewheeling American SF adventures of their youth.

  … the most influential writer in Britain today is lain (M.) Banks … . Certainly in science fiction terms there are lines of descent clearly visible from Banks to Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds. The science fiction they have created is big, sprawling, often funny or at least idiosyncratic, and undeniably optimistic. Banks’s Culture, a world of plenty and diversity and the ability to do just about anything one might desire, is the most utopian vision of the far future I have encountered in a very long time. Here is a future to aim for that is wealthy and free, a future in which competent women and men can succeed against heavy odds. A future that is, except for its distinctly left-wing bias, remarkably like the dream that used to be found in American SF during the optimistic fifties.