The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “There’s a roughly oval valley below us, with a lake like the one where they tested the paraffin but a lot larger. Sen was right; the lake is about three quarters surrounded by a thicket of the same sort of plants we saw there, and its Hotsouth end is dammed in the same way. There are several low, round hills scattered over the valley. The two closest to the lake are covered with the bushes; all the others are bare. Between the two covered ones is another bare but differently colored space extending a kilometer or so toward the bushes and lake. The overgrown area covers about five by seven kilometers. It borders the Hotnorth side of the lake, which is oval and about three kilometers by two, the long measure running Hotnorth-Hotsouth. In the bare section, directly between the two covered hills is something like a wrecked building about a hundred meters square. I can’t guess how high it may have been. Another at the Hoteast edge of the lake seems intact, has about the same area though it isn’t quite so perfectly square, and has an intact flat roof. It’s about fifteen meters high. They’re talking again; you can hear them, I suppose. They seem to want us to—Erni, what’s up?” Akmet fell silent.

  “Something wrong?” asked Ben, while the rest of Nest stopped whatever it was doing.

  “You’ll see.” It was Icewall’s voice. He had gently but firmly sent Pam drifting away from the controls, and was guiding Annie toward the nearer of the overgrown hills.

  “Thirty-four right” came from the speaker. Again. And again. Candlegrease continued straight toward the eminence. Pam managed to silence the native with a rather dishonest “Observing.”

  Tug and tank descended the valley, crossed the bare part to the nearer overgrown hill, climbed it, and came to a halt looking down on what Akmet had described as a wrecked building. From three kilometers closer, there seemed still no better way to describe it.

  The other three cried out together as Erni did a quick-stop. Then, donning a waldo, he deployed one of the smallest bugs and sent it back toward Candlegrease on the side toward the lake.

  Nic, knowing his partner best and far more experienced with the equipment than the other couple, imitated Icewall’s action; but there was no way he could make his bug catch up with the one which had started first. Erni’s mechanical servant took hold of the still unsafetied relief valve which had destroyed the other patch so far back, in the natives’ grim experiment.

  “Hold it, Erni! What do you think you’re up to?” The question came in three different voices, with the words slightly different in each, but was understood even at Nest.

  “Don’t ask silly questions—or don’t you care about Maria?”

  Nic’s lips tightened invisibly behind his breathing mask.

  “I care a lot, and so will the kids when they hear. But that’s no answer.”

  Pam was broadcasting deliberately as she cut in; she was uncertain how much the natives would understand, but it seemed worth trying. “You just want to kill a few thousand of these people to get even?”

  “Don’t be stupid. I won’t be killing anyone. This isn’t a city, it’s one creature. I can punish it—hurt it—without killing it. I can teach it to be careful. You know that, don’t you, Nic?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it, yes. I’m not sure releasing the paraffin up here won’t kill it completely. We’re at about the highest point in the valley, much of our juice is denser than the local air, and the wind is random as usual. If we do kill it, it may not be a lesson. We don’t know that there are any more of these beings on the planet. We certainly haven’t heard from any, and the satellites this one spotted and began talking to can be seen from anywhere on Halfbaked. Think that one over. All the intelligence of a world for two human lives?”

  Erni was silent for several seconds, but his servo remained motionless. At last, “You don’t know that. You can’t be sure.”

  “Of course I can’t. But it’s a plausible idea, like the one that this is a single being. Anything I can do to keep you from taking the chance, I’ll do. Think it over.

  Pam disapproved of what sounded to her like a threat.

  “Why are you blaming these people, or this person, whichever it is, anyway? You don’t know what happened is their fault.”

  “They weren’t careful enough! Look at that wrecked building there! That’s got to be where it happened—”

  “And the dead-vegetation area downslope from it! Maybe they weren’t careful enough—how could they have been? What do they know about hydrogen compounds? What do we know about their behavior here, except what they found out and showed us a while ago, long after the girls were gone? What—”

  “I don’t care what! All I can think about is Jessi! What she was like—what she was—and that I’ll never see her or feel her again. Someone’s got to learn!”

  “You mean someone’s got to pay, don’t you?”

  “All right, someone’s got to pay! And what do you think you can do to stop it, Dominic Wildbear Yucca, who is so disgustingly civilized he doesn’t care for the memory of the mother of his kids!”

  “Who is so disgustingly civilized he doesn’t want to admit to his kids, and his friends, that he didn’t try to keep a good friend from—”

  “Friend! How can you call yourself a—”

  “You’ll see.”

  “How?”

  What Nic would have said in answer is still unknown; he refused to tell anyone later. Pam cut in again.

  “Look! Isn’t it enough to scare them—scare it? Look what’s happening! Look at the city, or the creature, or whatever it is!”

  Even Erni took his eyes from the screen of his servobug. For the first and only time since the native’s hydrocarbon experiment, they clearly saw the dandelion seeds. Hordes of them, rocketing up from every part of the overgrown area, catching the swirling, wandering winds, many falling back to the ground close to their launch points, but some being carried up and away in every direction.

  The woman saw Erni’s distraction, and pressed home her argument. “They want to save what they can! Those things really are seeds. They scatter them when the parent is in danger, or knows it’s dying!”

  “You—you don’t know that either.” Erni sounded almost subdued, and certainly far less frenzied than a few seconds earlier. Nic began to hope, and waited for Pam to go on.

  Erni’s attention now was clearly on the scenery rather than his bug. Even though he still had his hands in the waldos, there was a very good chance that Dominic’s bug could knock the other away from the valve in time.

  Nic took what seemed to him a better chance by passing up the opportunity. Pam was silent, so he finally spoke softly.

  “I can forgive your cracks about my not caring, because I do care and know how you feel. But what you want to do is just the same sort of angry, thoughtless thing as those words, isn’t it?”

  Erni’s answer seemed irrelevant.

  “If it’s scared, why doesn’t it ask me to stop?”

  “Using what words?” asked Pam softly.

  “Me unclear.” The native utterance partly overlapped the woman’s, and proved the most effective sentence of the argument.

  Slowly, Erni drew his hands from the waldo gloves, and gestured Akmet to take over the bug’s control.

  “Better try to get ‘we’ across while you’re at it, Pam,” was all he said. He let himself drift away from controls and window.

  “Me and we unclear. One at a time.”

  Pam might have been smiling behind her mask. She did look hesitantly at her companions, especially Erni. Then she tried her explanation. Numbers, after all, had long been in the common vocabulary.

  “Observe Annie closely. Me, one animal. We, more than one animal. Four animals in Annie.”

  Erni made no objection, but added quietly, “No valve danger. Which way?”

  “Right.” Erni, now thoroughly embarrassed, glanced around at the others as though asking whether they really trusted him to drive. The other men were concentrating on the bugs outside, the woman seemed to be watching the putative seeds.
They were mostly settled back to the ground or blown out of sight by now. No more were being launched, apparently. Maybe the suggested explanation had been right, but even its proponent was skeptical. Maybe they were some sort of weapon … .

  It soon became obvious that Annie was being led to the other shedlike structure. This one was at the edge of the lake but somewhat down slope from the overgrown areas. There seemed a likely reason, though not the only possible one, for this: care. No one suggested this aloud to the driver. It seemed too obvious that Jellyseal had, during unloading, wrecked the first building and killed much of the being or population which formed the copse.

  As they followed instructions along the edge of the overgrown area, bunch after bunch of tangled branches waved close past Annie’s windows. Looking in? None of them doubted it. Pam continued alternately reporting and teaching, describing their path and surroundings to Nest and reacting to observations through the window with remarks like “One animal driving. One animal talking. Two animals moving bugs.”

  They were guided around the structure to the lower side. This was open, and Annie was directed to enter. The far side, toward Hotnorth, could be seen to be open also, and though there was much growth within, there was plenty of room for tug and tank. Erni dragged his charge within.

  “Stop.” Since there was an opening in front, he obeyed, though he remained alert. The bugs operated by Akmet and Nic had come in too, and all four explorers watched, not without an occasional glance forward, as the doorway behind was plugged more and more tightly by growing branches and finally, as nearly as either bug could see, became airtight.

  “Carbon hydride stop.” Reading between the words, the bug handlers detached Candlegrease. Erni eased Annie forward. Three things started to happen at once, all interesting for different reasons.

  Flattened bladders appeared among the branches and were borne toward Candlegrease’s valves. Apparently the paraffin was not to be exposed to local air this time.

  A wall of tangled growth began to form between Annie and her tow, without waiting for the bugs to get back to the tug. Nic and Akmet, after a quick but silent look at each other, abandoned the machines; there were plenty more, and there seemed no objection to their being “observed” at leisure by the natives.

  The doorway ahead began to fill with a similar block. This also caused human reaction. Erni sent the tug grinding firmly forward.

  “Oxygen hydride stop.”

  No attention was paid to this. In a few seconds Annie was outside, with a patch of torn and flattened vegetation behind where the growing wall had been.

  “Water stop.”

  Pam remained calm, and Erni did not stop until they were a hundred meters from the lab, as they all now thought of it. Pam explained.

  “Water stop danger for animals.”

  The native voice did not respond at once, and after some seconds Cloud’s voice reached them from Nest.

  “Y’know, Pam dear, I think you’ve just faced your friend outside with the problem of what an individual is. Don’t be surprised if you have to restate that one.”

  The woman answered promptly and professionally.

  “You mean my friend or friends. You’re hypothesizing still. Let’s call this one Abby, and start looking around for Bill—”

  “Water next time.”

  “Water next time,” she agreed.

  “All right, it’s—they’re—she’s civilized,” muttered Erni after a moment.

  “Of course. So are you,” answered Dominic. All three looked at him sharply, but he ignored the couple.

  “You wouldn’t really have turned that valve, would you?”

  The younger man was silent for several seconds. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.

  “We didn’t really talk you out of it, did we?”

  “I guess not. That’s the funny part. Once I was where I could do it, I—I don’t know; I guess having the power, knowing I was in charge and no one could stop me—well, that was enough.” He paused. “I think. Then the arguments distracted me, and I realized you’d sneaked your bug close enough so you probably could have stopped me. And I didn’t care that you could.

  “Nic, I’ll help you tell the kids, if you’ll tell me why getting even can seem so important.”

  “We’d better tell them that, too. If we can figure it out. Y’know, I’m not sure I would’ve stopped you.”

  The Treeferns listened sympathetically, and since they were also human not even Pam thought to ask why Jellyseal’s failure was the natives’ fault.

  REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

  Greg Egan

  Greg Egan has been one of the most innovative and controversial hard SF writers of the nineties. He says in an interview: “I think what happens in my novels is that the border between science and metaphysics shifts: Issues that originally seemed completely metaphysical, completely beyond the realms of scientific enquiry, actually become part of physics. I’m writing about extending science into territory that was once believed to be metaphysical, not about abandoning or ‘transcending’ science at all.”

  And in an interview in Gigamesh, July 1998, he said about this story, one of his most important and controversial works:

  “I had no short fiction at all published in ‘96, and I’ll only have two stories published this year. Part of the reason is the time I’ve spent on novels, but also I’ve been taking longer to write stories lately. ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful,’ which was published in Interzone in April, took me three months. I think it was time well spent, though; I’m happy with every word in that story. Obviously you can never say ‘No one could have done this better,’ but when you can honestly say that you wouldn’t personally change a thing, it’s a good feeling.”

  David Swanger in an article in NYRSF (entitled “Hard Character SF”) expands on the implications of new scientific views of the extent to which personality is physiologically, biochemically, and genetically determined:

  Genre SF [historically] manifested two different attitudes to the “human sciences.” The part of the field that yearned for literary respectability took them at their own evaluation, and imported them … . Freud was emphatically welcomed into the field in such novels as The Demolished Man and More than Human. The New Wave of the sixties accepted mainstream ideas of character (and its indictment of genre SF for ignoring them) wholesale, as did the influx of female writers in the seventies … .

  But the Campbellian strain of the field, which gave birth to hard SF, always had a different attitude. It was always (and rightly) suspicious of Freud, and rather than standing in awe of the “human sciences,” it sought to reform them, making them over into true, rigorous sciences … . Even the notorious Dianetics of L. Ron Hubbard was trumpeted as Freud made scientific. The forties and fifties saw many more stories attempt to harden the softer sciences. But the state of the art to support such fantasies and hopes was lacking, and the action and excitement in the field went elsewhere, as described above, until the eighties, when cyberpunk, via Bruce Sterling/Vincent Omniveritas’s manifestos, explicitly called out the humanists to duel for the soul of SF, while in the background, a more traditional Campbellian hard SF, better equipped than its predecessor, enjoyed a slow, quiet renaissance. In the nineties, these two streams have flowed together … . The brash, confrontational willingness of Egan to “burn the motherhood statement” (Sterling) and cheerfully mock humanist pieties comes from cyberpunk. But it is the science, fifty years wiser, feeding the other stream that promises a hard SF that can finally take on the humanists on their own ground and win: “hard character SF.”

  And here at last, we see the return of the Campbellian dream in its entirety: not only the new, truly scientific vision of ourselves, as in Bear and Benford, but also the challenge to traditional and Modernist literature alike … . That is the promise of hard character SF

  Wayne Daniels, in an essay on Egan’s story in The New York Review of Science Fiction, said:

  … . the nature of a person see
ms, on our reading of [this story], to involve necessary qualifications of either a scientific or philosophical description. Mark … is at pains to make it clear that he has not been delusional at any stage. He is, if you will, “in his right mind,” except that the mind in question has had a basic part of its affective structure destroyed. Before and after, Mark is clear that the way he feels has nothing rational about it in relation to the external world. The cognitive aspect of his person is still functioning well enough for that. But however we parse the psychological and physiological elements of his situation, the reality of it is conveyed—perhaps can only be conveyed—by the language of value, of self-worth, and of feeling. Because he learns the mechanism of happiness the hard way, he has no confidence in language that merely suggests the phenomenon to be a mental one, though that is how he has experienced it, and continues to experience it; and for the purpose of telling, he is obliged to deploy the very language that no longer seems adequate. The alternative is exclusively to use words that, while empirically satisfactory, convey nothing of his experience. Whatever remains of Mark the person depends, for self-understanding, on two quite different, seemingly incommensurable descriptions of itself.

  The accomplishments of the medical treatment in “Reasons to Be Cheerful” are more modest than in Ted Chiang’s “Understand” (to be found later in this volume): the protagonist’s capacity for happiness and enjoyment are restored. But because his is an indiscriminant happiness, he is given the capacity to choose what gives him pleasure. He is given not the capacity to control the world but rather the way he feels about the world. This would seem to amount to the same thing except that he is not given the ability to control how the world feels about him. One of the emerging themes in these stories is the oppositions and symmetries that can be found in the relations between the self and the world, the mind and matter.

  ONE

  In September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered a state of almost constant happiness. It never occurred to me to ask why. Though school included the usual quota of tedious lessons, I was doing well enough academically to be able to escape into daydreams whenever it suited me. At home, I was free to read books and web pages about molecular biology and particle physics, quatemions and galactic evolution, and to write my own Byzantine computer games and convoluted abstract animations. And though I was a skinny, uncoordinated child, and every elaborate, pointless organized sport left me comatose with boredom, I was comfortable enough with my body on my own terms. Whenever I ran—and I ran everywhere—it felt good.