The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Next time at practice, I said, Gregor, were those your grandparents?

  Like my grandparents.

  And that girl, who was she?

  No answer.

  Like a cousin or something?

  Yes.

  Gregor, what about your parents? Where are they?

  He just shrugged and started throwing me the ball.

  I got the impression they lived in another branch of his co-op somewhere else, but I never found out for sure. A lot of what I saw on Mars I liked—the way they run their businesses together in co-ops takes a lot of pressure off them, and they live pretty relaxed lives compared to us on Earth. But some of their parenting systems—kids brought up by groups, or by one parent, or whatever—I wasn’t so sure about those. It makes for problems if you ask me. Bunch of teenage boys ready to slug somebody. Maybe that happens no matter what you do.

  Anyway we finally got to the end of the season, and I was going to go back to Earth after it. Our team’s record was three and fifteen, and we came in last place in the regular season standings. But they held a final weekend tournament for all the teams in the Argyre Basin, a bunch of three-inning games, as there were a lot to get through. Immediately we lost the first game and were in the loser’s bracket. Then we were losing the next one too, and all because of walks, mostly. Werner relieved Thomas for a time, then when that didn’t work out Thomas went back to the mound to re-relieve Werner. When that happened I ran all the way in from center to join them on the mound. I said Look you guys, let Gregor pitch.

  Gregor! they both said. No way!

  He’ll be even worse than us, Werner said.

  How could he be? I said. You guys just walked eleven batters in a row. Night will fall before Gregor could do that.

  So they agreed to it. They were both discouraged at that point, as you might expect. So I went over to Gregor and said Okay, Gregor, you give it a try now.

  Oh no, no no no no no no no. He was pretty set against it. He glanced up into the stands where we had a couple hundred spectators, mostly friends and family and some curious passersby, and I saw then that his like-grandparents and his girl something-or-other were up there watching. Gregor was getting more hangdog and sullen every second.

  Come on Gregor, I said, putting the ball in his glove. Tell you what, I’ll catch you. It’ll be just like warming up. Just keep throwing your curve ball. And I dragged him over to the mound.

  So Werner warmed him up while I went over and got on the catcher’s gear, moving a box of blue dot balls to the front of the ump’s supply area while I was at it. I could see Gregor was nervous, and so was I. I had never caught before, and he had never pitched, and bases were loaded and no one was out. It was an unusual baseball moment.

  Finally I was geared up and I clanked on out to him. Don’t worry about throwing too hard, I said. Just put the curve ball right in my glove. Ignore the batter. I’ll give you the sign before every pitch; two fingers for curve, one for fastball.

  Fastball? he says.

  That’s where you throw the ball fast. Don’t worry about that. We’re just going to throw curves anyway.

  And you said you weren’t to coach, he said bitterly.

  I’m not coaching, I said, I’m catching.

  So I went back and got set behind the plate. Be looking for curve balls, I said to the ump. Curve ball? he said.

  So we started up. Gregor stood crouched on the mound like a big praying mantis, red-faced and grim. He threw the first pitch right over our heads to the backstop. Two guys scored while I retrieved it, but I threw out the runner going from first to third. I went out to Gregor. Okay, I said, the bases are cleared and we got an out. Let’s just throw now. Right into the glove. Just like last time, but lower.

  So he did. He threw the ball at the batter, and the batter bailed, and the ball cut right down into my glove. The umpire was speechless. I turned around and showed him the ball in my glove. That was a strike, I told him.

  Strike! he hollered. He grinned at me. That was a curve ball, wasn’t it.

  Damn right it was.

  Hey, the batter said. What was that?

  We’ll show you again, I said.

  And after that Gregor began to mow them down. I kept putting down two fingers, and he kept throwing curve balls. By no means were they all strikes, but enough were to keep him from walking too many batters. All the balls were blue dot. The ump began to get into it.

  And between two batters I looked behind me and saw that the entire crowd of spectators, and all the teams not playing at that moment, had congregated behind the backstop to watch Gregor pitch. No one on Mars had ever seen a curve ball before, and now they were crammed back there to get the best view of it, gasping and chattering at every hook. The batter would bail or take a weak swing and then look back at the crowd with a big grin, as if to say Did you see that? That was a curve ball!

  So we came back and won that game, and we kept Gregor pitching, and we won the next three games as well. The third game he threw exactly twenty-seven pitches, striking out all nine batters with three pitches each. Walter Feller once struck out all twenty-seven batters in a high school game; it was like that.

  The crowd was loving it. Gregor’s face was less red. He was standing straighter in the box. He still refused to look anywhere but at my glove, but his look of grim terror had shifted to one of ferocious concentration. He may have been skinny, but he was tall. Out there on the mound he began to look pretty damned formidable.

  So we climbed back up into the winner’s bracket, then into a semi-final. Crowds of people were coming up to Gregor between games to get him to sign their baseballs. Mostly he looked dazed, but at one point I saw him glance up at his co-op family in the stands and wave at them, with a brief smile.

  How’s your arm holding out? I asked him.

  What do you mean? he said.

  Okay, I said. Now look, I want to play outfield again this game. Can you pitch to Werner? Because there were a couple of Americans on the team we played next, Ernie and Caesar, who I suspected could hit a curve. I just had a hunch.

  Gregor nodded, and I could see that as long as there was a glove to throw at, nothing else mattered. So I arranged it with Werner, and in the semifinals I was back out in right-center field. We were playing under the lights by this time, the field like green velvet under a purple twilight sky. Looking in from center field it was all tiny, like something in a dream.

  And it must have been a good hunch I had, because I made one catch charging in on a liner from Ernie, sliding to snag it, and then another running across the middle for what seemed like thirty seconds, before I got under a towering Texas leaguer from Caesar. Gregor even came up and congratulated me between innings.

  And you know that old thing about how a good play in the field leads to a good at-bat. Already in the day’s games I had hit well, but now in this semifinal I came up and hit a high fastball so solid it felt like I didn’t hit it at all, and off it flew. Home run over the center field fence, out into the dusk. I lost sight of it before it came down.

  Then in the finals I did it again in the first inning, back-to-back with Thomas—his to left, mine again to center. That was two in a row for me, and we were winning, and Gregor was mowing them down. So when I came up again the next inning I was feeling good, and people were calling out for another homer, and the other team’s pitcher had a real determined look. He was a really big guy, as tall as Gregor but massive-chested as so many Martians are, and he reared back and threw the first one right at my head. Not on purpose, he was out of control. Then I barely fouled several pitches off, swinging very late, and dodging his inside heat, until it was a full count, and I was thinking to myself Well heck, it doesn’t really matter if you strike out here, at least you hit two in a row.

  Then I heard Gregor shouting Come on, Coach, you can do it! Hang in there! Keep your focus! All doing a passable imitation of me, I guess, as the rest of the team was laughing its head off. I suppose I had said all those things
to them before, though of course it was just the stuff you always say automatically at a ball game, I never meant anything by it, I didn’t even know people heard me. But I definitely heard Gregor, needling me, and I stepped back into the box thinking Look I don’t even like to coach, I played ten games at shortstop trying not to coach you guys, and I was so irritated I was barely aware of the pitch, but hammered it anyway out over the right field fence, higher and deeper even than my first two. Knee-high fastball, inside. As Ernie said to me afterwards, You drove that baby. My teammates rang the little ship’s bell all the way around the bases, and I slapped hands with every one of them on the way from third to home, feeling the grin on my face. Afterwards I sat on the bench and felt the hit in my hands. I can still see it flying out.

  So we were ahead 4–0 in the final inning, and the other team came up determined to catch us. Gregor was tiring at last, and he walked a couple, then hung a curve and their big pitcher got into it and clocked it far over my head. Now I do okay charging liners, but the minute a ball is hit over me I’m totally lost. So I turned my back on this one and ran for the fence, figuring either it goes out or I collect it against the fence, but that I’d never see it again in the air. But running on Mars is so weird. You get going too fast and then you’re pinwheeling along trying to keep from doing a faceplant. That’s what I was doing when I saw the warning track, and looked back up and spotted the ball coming down, so I jumped, trying to jump straight up, you know, but I had a lot of momentum, and had completely forgotten about the gravity, so I shot up and caught the ball, amazing, but found myself flying right over the fence.

  I came down and rolled in the dust and sand, and the ball stayed stuck in my glove. I hopped back over the fence holding the ball up to show everyone I had it. But they gave the other pitcher a home run anyway, because you have to stay inside the park when you catch one, it’s a local rule. I didn’t care. The whole point of playing games is to make you do things like that anyway. And it was good that that pitcher got one too.

  So we started up again and Gregor struck out the side, and we won the tournament. We were mobbed, Gregor especially. He was the hero of the hour. Everyone wanted him to sign something. He didn’t say much, but he wasn’t stooping either. He looked surprised. Afterward Werner took two balls and everyone signed them, to make kind-of trophies for Gregor and me. Later I saw half the names on my trophy were jokes, “Mickey Mantel” and other names like that. Gregor had written on it “Hi Coach Arthur, Regards Greg.” I have the ball still, on my desk at home.

  ON THE ORION LINE

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter (born 1957), emerged in the late eighties and in the nineties as one of Interzone’s new breed of hard SF writer. He has written an abundance of fine hard SF, both in short story and novel form. He has relatively speaking burst into prominence overnight. Asked how he would explain the recent renaissance of hard SF of which he is a key figure, he replied:

  With great difficulty. For one thing, I’m pretty certain there is no conscious “movement.” Paul McAuley and I, for instance, emerged in parallel, both working off our personal influences. I greatly admire Paul’s work but I don’t think I’d say I’m influenced by it. I think it’s also possible the shock and disappointment that the real space program delivered to our collective systems has now worked through. The Moon turned out to be dead and dull, space flight there was difficult and a bore, Mars is almost inaccessible to us right now and sterilized by ultraviolet anyhow, Venus is a hellhole … we’ve learned all this in the last couple of decades, and it shattered a lot of fond illusions … Now we’ve worked through all that, to some extent. You have works like Robinson’s and Sargent’s which deal with the solar system as it is, not how we’d like it to be—and it still turns out to be an interesting place.

  In 1995 and 1996 he became a major figure internationally in hard SF when his work was published outside the U.K. Not only were his earlier novels reprinted in the U.S., but his 1995 The Time Ships was a leading contender in 1996 for the Hugo Award for best novel. In the mid and late 1990s he produced nearly ten short stories a year. He appeared in most of the major magazines, sometimes twice. A new novel, Voyager, was released in England and in the U.S. in early 1997. Baxter is now one of the big names in hard SF, the author of a number of highly regarded novels (he has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and others for his novels) and many short stories. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction summarizes his early career thusly:

  He began publishing SF with “The Xeelee Flower” for Interzone in 1987, which with most of his other short work fits into his Xeelee Sequence, an ambitious attempt at creating a Future History; novels included in the sequence are Raft (1989), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993) and Rind (1994). The sequence—as centrally narrated in the second and fourth volume—follows humanity into interstellar space, where it encounters a complex of alien races; the long epic ends (being typical in this of U.K. SF) darkly, many aeons hence.

  He published four books in 2000 alone, including a collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days; Longtusk (Mammoth, book two); Reality Dust; and Manifold: Time in the U.S., and won the Philip K. Dick Award again for his collection, Vacuum Diagrams (1999). In 2001, he had five new books out: three novels, Manifold: Space, Manifold: Origin, and Icebones, the non-fiction book Deep Future, and the collection Omegatropic: Non-Fiction & Fiction. He is notably prolific. His 1995 novel, The Time Ships, is a sequel to H. G. Wells’s 1895 The Time Machine published on its hundredth anniversary of publication. Then came Voyage (1996), Titan (1997), and Moonseed (1998). In 2002, he had several new books out: Deep Future, a non-fiction book which David Langford describes as “a lively though often chilling tour of possible futures,” and a new novel, Phase Space.

  “On the Orion Line” explores both the space opera theme of the short-lived individual caught in a long-lived galactic war and the hard SF theme of good old-fashioned bootstrapping. It is told from the point of view of a not-very-bright fifteen-year-old, an unusual choice in recent hard SF. In this story his ignorance is a pretext for the better-informed characters to explain the physics (the role served in older SF by the professor’s beautiful daughter). Also, his ignorance serves to highlight, though only gently, the moral issues raised by the story.

  The Brief Life Bums Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.

  The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters—and a few low-grade tars like me—were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line—six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm—and the stellar explosions marked battles that must have concluded years ago.

  And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.

  The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it—an open lattice with struts half a million kilometers long—thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.

  I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.

  My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand to, and render assistance any way that was required—most likely with basic medical attention should we go
into combat. Right now the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.

  The action on the Brightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices, from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theater.

  There was a soft warning chime.

  The captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First Officer Till, and Jeru, the commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring—apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.

  I felt my heart beat harder.

  Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, had come back out again.

  One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.

  Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. “You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this side of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.”