The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  He grumbled on about BLIT terrorists like the Deep Greens, who didn’t need guns and explosives—just a photocopier, or a stencil that let them spray deadly graffiti on walls. According to Whitcutt, TV broadcasts used to go out “live,” not taped, until the notorious activist Tee Zero broke into a BBC studio and showed the cameras a BLIT known as the Parrot. Millions had died. It wasn’t safe to look at anything these days.

  Jonathan had to ask. “So the, um, the special kind of dark outdoors is to stop people seeing stuff like that?”

  “Well … yes, in effect that’s quite right.” The old teacher rubbed his chin for a moment. “They brief you about all that when you’re a little older. It’s a bit of a complicated issue … . Ah, another question?”

  It was Khalid who had his hand up. With an elaborate lack of interest that struck Jonathan as desperately unconvincing, he said, “Are all these BLIT things, er, really dangerous, or are there ones that just jolt you a bit?”

  Mr. Whitcutt looked at him hard for very nearly the length of a beginner’s ordeal. Then he turned to the whiteboard with its scrawled triangles. “Quite. As I was saying, the cosine of an angle is defined …”

  The four members of the inner circle had drifted casually together in their special corner of the outdoor play area, by the dirty climbing frame that no one ever used. “So we’re terrorists,” said Julie cheerfully. “We should give ourselves up to the police.”

  “No, our picture’s different,” Gary said. “It doesn’t kill people, it …”

  A chorus of four voices: “ … makes us stronger.”

  Jonathan said, “What do Deep Greens terrorize about? I mean, what don’t they like?”

  “I think it’s biochips,” Khalid said uncertainly. “Tiny computers for building into people’s heads. They say it’s unnatural, or something. There was a bit about it in one of those old issues of New Scientist in the lab.”

  “Be good for exams,” Jonathan suggested. “But you can’t take calculators into the exam room. ‘Everyone with a biochip, please leave your head at the door.’”

  They all laughed, but Jonathan felt a tiny shiver of uncertainty, as though he’d stepped on a stair that wasn’t there. “Biochip” sounded very like something he’d overheard in one of his parents’ rare shouting matches. And he was pretty sure he’d heard ‘unnatural’ too. Please don’t let Mum and Dad be tangled up with terrorists, he thought suddenly. But it was too silly. They weren’t like that … .

  “There was something about control systems too,” said Khalid. “You wouldn’t want to be controlled, now.”

  As usual, the chatter soon went off in a new direction, or rather an old one: the walls of type-two darkness that the school used to mark off-limits areas like the corridor leading to the old storeroom. The Club were curious about how it worked, and had done some experiments. Some of the things they knew about the dark and had written down were:

  Khalid’s Visibility Theory, which had been proved by painful experiment. Dark zones were brilliant hiding places when it came to hiding from other kids, but teachers could spot you even through the blackness and tick you off something rotten for being where you shouldn’t be. Probably they had some kind of special detector, but no one had ever seen one.

  Jonathan’s Bus Footnote to Khalid’s discovery was simply that the driver of the school bus certainly looked as if he was seeing something through the black windscreen. Of course (this was Gary’s idea) the bus might be computer-guided, with the steering wheel turning all by itself and the driver just pretending—but why should he bother?

  Julie’s Mirror was the weirdest thing of all. Even Julie hadn’t believed it could work, but if you stood outside a type-two dark place and held a mirror just inside (so it looked as though your arm was cut off by the black wall), you could shine a torch at the place where you couldn’t see the mirror, and the beam would come bouncing back out of the blackness to make a bright spot on your clothes or the wall. As Jonathan pointed out, this was how you could have bright patches of sunlight on the floor of a classroom whose windows all looked out into protecting darkness. It was a kind of dark that light could travel through but eyesight couldn’t. None of the Optics textbooks said a word about it.

  By now, Harry had had his Club invitation and was counting the minutes to his first meeting on Thursday, two days away. Perhaps he would have some ideas for new experiments when he’d passed his ordeal and joined the Club. Harry was extra good at maths and physics.

  “Which makes it sort of interesting,” Gary said. “If our picture works by maths like those BLIT things … will Harry be able to take it for longer because his brain’s built that way? Or will it be harder because it’s coming on his own wavelength? Sort of thing?”

  The Shudder Club reckoned that, although of course you shouldn’t do experiments on people, this was a neat idea that you could argue either side of. And they did.

  Thursday came, and after an eternity of history and double physics there was a free period that you were supposed to spend reading or in computer studies. Nobody knew it would be the Shudderers’ last initiation, although Julie—who read heaps of fantasy novels—insisted later that she’d felt all doom-laden and could sense a powerful reek of wrongness. Julie tended to say things like that.

  The session in the musty storeroom began pretty well, with Khalid reaching his twenty seconds at last, Jonathan sailing beyond the count of ten which only a few weeks ago had felt like an impossible Everest, and (to carefully muted clapping) Heather finally becoming a full member of the Club. Then the trouble began, as Harry the first-timer adjusted his little round glasses, set his shoulders, opened the tatty ritual ring-binder, and went rigid. Not twitchy or shuddery, but stiff. He made horrible grunts and pig-squeals, and fell sideways. Blood trickled from his mouth.

  “He’s bitten his tongue,” said Heather. “Oh lord, what’s first aid for biting your tongue?”

  At this point the storeroom door opened and Mr. Whitcutt came in. He looked older and sadder. “I might have known it would be like this.” Suddenly he turned his eyes sideways and shaded them with one hand, as though blinded by strong light. “Cover it up. Shut your eyes, Patel, don’t look at it, and just cover that damned thing up.” .

  Khalid did as he was told. They helped Harry to his feet: he kept saying “Sorry, sorry,” in a thick voice, and dribbling like a vampire with awful table manners. The long march through the uncarpeted, echoey corridors to the school’s little sickroom, and then onward to the Principal’s office, seemed to go on for endless grim hours.

  Ms. Fortmayne the Principal was an iron-gray woman who according to school rumors was kind to animals but could reduce any pupil to ashes with a few sharp sentences—a kind of human BLIT. She looked across her desk at the Shudder Club for one eternity of a moment, and said sharply: “Whose idea was it?”

  Khalid slowly put up a brown hand, but no higher than his shoulder. Jonathan remembered the Three Musketeers’ motto, One for all and all for one, and said, “It was all of us really.” So Julie added, “That’s right.”

  “I really don’t know,” said the Principal, tapping the closed ring-binder that lay in front of her. “The single most insidious weapon on Earth—the information-war equivalent of a neutron bomb—and you were playing with it. I don’t often say that words fail me …”

  “Someone left it in the photocopier. Here. Downstairs,” Khalid pointed out.

  “Yes. Mistakes do happen.” Her face softened a little. “And I’m getting carried away, because we do actually use that BLIT image as part of a little talk I have with older children when they’re about to leave school. They’re exposed to it for just two seconds, with proper medical supervision. Its nickname is the Trembler, and some countries use big posters of it for riot control—but not Britain or America, naturally. Of course you couldn’t have known that Harry Steen is a borderline epileptic or that the Trembler would give him a fit …”

  “I should have guessed sooner,” said Mr. Wh
itcutt’s voice from behind the Club. “Young Patel blew the gaff by asking what was either a very intelligent question or a very incriminating one. But I’m an old fool who never got used to the idea of a school being a terrorist target.”

  The Principal gave him a sharp look. Jonathan felt suddenly dizzy, with thoughts clicking through his head like one of those workings in algebra where everything goes just right and you can almost see the answer waiting in the white space at the bottom of the page. What don’t Deep Green terrorists like? Why are we a target?

  Control systems. You wouldn’t want to be controlled.

  He blurted, “Biochips. We’ve got biochip control systems in our heads. All us kids. They make the darkness somehow. The special dark where grown-ups can still see.”

  There was a moment’s frozen silence.

  “Go to the top of the class,” murmured old Whitcutt.

  The Principal sighed and seemed to sag in her chair a little. “There had to be a first time,” she said quietly. “This is what my little lecture to school-leavers is all about. How you’re specially privileged children, how you’ve been protected all your lives by biochips in your optic nerves that edit what you can see. So it always seems dark in the streets and outside the windows, wherever there might be a BLIT image waiting to kill you. But that kind of darkness isn’t real—except to you. Remember, your parents had a choice, and they agreed to this protection.”

  Mine didn’t both agree, thought Jonathan, remembering an overheard quarrel.

  “It’s not fair,” said Gary uncertainly. “It’s doing experiments on people.”

  Khalid said, “And it’s not just protection. There are corridors here indoors that are blacked out, just to keep us out of places. To control us.”

  Ms. Fortmayne chose not to hear them. Maybe she had a biochip of her own that stopped rebellious remarks from getting through. “When you leave school you are given full control over your biochips. You can choose whether to take risks … once you’re old enough.”

  Jonathan could almost bet that all five Club members were thinking the same thing: What the hell, we took our risks with the Trembler and we got away with it.

  Apparently they had indeed got away with it, since when the Principal said “You can go now,” she’d still mentioned nothing about punishment. As slowly as they dared, the Club headed back to the classroom. Whenever they passed side-turnings which were filled with solid darkness, Jonathan cringed to think that a chip behind his eyes was stealing the light and with different programming could make him blind to everything, everywhere.

  The seriously nasty thing happened at going-home time, when the caretaker unlocked the school’s side door as usual while a crowd of pupils jostled behind him. Jonathan and the Club had pushed their way almost to the front of the mob. The heavy wooden door swung inward. As usual it opened on the second kind of darkness, but something bad from the dark came in with it, a large sheet of paper fixed with a drawing-pin to the door’s outer surface and hanging slightly askew. The caretaker glanced at it, and toppled like a man struck by lightning.

  Jonathan didn’t stop to think. He shoved past some smaller kid and grabbed the paper, crumpling it up frantically. It was already too late. He’d seen the image there, completely unlike the Trembler yet very clearly from the same terrible family, a slanted dark shape like the profile of a perched bird, but with complications, twirly bits, patterns like fractals, and it hung there blazing in his mind’s eye and wouldn’t go away—

  —something hard and horrible smashing like a runaway express into his brain—

  —burning falling burning falling—

  —BLIT.

  After long and evil dreams of bird-shapes that stalked him in darkness, Jonathan found himself lying on a couch, no, a bed in the school sickroom. It was a surprise to be anywhere at all, after feeling his whole life crashing into that enormous full stop. He was still limp all over, too tired to do more than stare at the white ceiling. ,

  Mr. Whitcutt’s face came slowly into his field of vision. “Hello? Hello? Anyone in there?” He sounded worried.

  “Yes … I’m fine,” said Jonathan, not quite truthfully.

  “Thank heaven for that. Nurse Baker was amazed you were alive. Alive and sane seemed like too much to hope for. Well, I’m here to warn you that you’re a hero. Plucky Boy Saves Fellow-Pupils. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can get sick of being called plucky.”

  “What was it, on the door?”

  “One of the very bad ones. Called the Parrot, for some reason. Poor old George the caretaker was dead before he hit the ground. The anti-terrorist squad that came to dispose of that BLIT paper couldn’t believe you’d survived. Neither could I.”

  Jonathan smiled. “I’ve had practice.”

  “Yes. It didn’t take that long to realize Lucy—that is, Ms. Fortmayne—failed to ask you young hooligans enough questions. So I had another word with your friend Khalid Patel. God in heaven, that boy can outstare the Trembler for twenty seconds! Adult crowds fall over in convulsions once they’ve properly, what d’you call it, registered the sight, let it lock in … .”

  “My record’s ten and a half. Nearly eleven really.”

  The old man shook his head wonderingly. “I wish I could say I didn’t believe you. They’ll be re-assessing the whole biochip protection program. No one ever thought of training young, flexible minds to resist BLIT attack by a sort of vaccination process. If they’d thought of it, they still wouldn’t have dared try it … . Anyway, Lucy and I had a talk, and we have a little present for you. They can reprogram those biochips by radio in no time at all, and so—”

  He pointed. Jonathan made an effort and turned his head. Through the window, where he’d expected to see only artificial darkness, there was a complication of rosy light and glory that at first his eyes couldn’t take in. A little at a time, assembling itself like some kind of healing opposite to those deadly patterns, the abstract brilliance of heaven became a town roofscape glowing in a rose-red sunset. Even the chimney-pots and satellite dishes looked beautiful. He’d seen sunsets on video, of course, but it wasn’t the same, it was the aching difference between live flame and an electric fire’s dull glare: like so much of the adult world, the TV screen lied by what it didn’t tell you.

  “The other present is from your pals. They said they’re sorry there wasn’t time to get anything better.”

  It was a small, somewhat bent bar of chocolate (Gary always had a few tucked away), with a card written in Julie’s careful left-sloping script and signed by all the Shudder Club. The inscription was, of course: That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

  FAST TIMES AT FAIRMONT HIGH

  Vernor Vinge

  Vernor Vinge (born 1944) is a master of hard science fiction who has moved to the forefront of the field in recent years. Vinge is a mathematician living in California who has been writing hard SF for thirty years and slowly gaining a reputation as one of the significant talents in the field. Virtually unnoticed in the 1960s and 1970s, his novels and stories have sometime been spaced years apart, so that although he entered the field at nearly the same time as Larry Niven, his work was known for years only to a comparatively small circle of specialists. He is also, of all hard SF writers, the one who has been often concerned over the years with computers and advances in computer technology. In contrast to William Gibson, who invented an image so popular and potent that it has been imposed on the real world of computers, Vinge is the writer who understands the technology and most accurately forecast and described in his SF the implications of computers and personal computer communication. He is as radical a hard SF writer as anyone in this book, but the politics in his fiction in the early 1980s was Libertarian, and Sterling named him in Cheap Truth as one of the figures in opposition to Radical Hard SF/the Movement.

  He became famous far outside the SF field in the 1990s for an essay, originally published in The Whole Earth Quarterly, in which he introduced the idea of the Singularity
: “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (1993). His abstract: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.”

  Competition is one of Vinge’s themes. In “Nature, Bloody in Tooth and Claw?” (1996 address to U.K. Eastercon), he says:

  … other paradigms for competition and evolution will be much more appropriate in the Post-Human era. Imagine a worldwide, distributed reasoning system in which there are thousands of millions of nodes, many of superhuman power. Some will have knowable identity—say the ones that are currently separated by low bandwidth links from the rest—but these separations are constantly changing, as are the identities themselves. With lower thresholds between Self and Others, the bacterial paradigm returns. Competition is not for life and death, but is more a sharing in which the losers continue to participate. And as with the corporate paradigm, this new situation is one in which very large organisms can come into existence, can work for a time at some extremely complex problem—and then may find it more efficient to break down into smaller souls (perhaps of merely human size) to work on tasks involving greater mobility or more restricted communication resources.

  The last fifteen years have been his most productive period, featuring his The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001), and his best novels to date, Marooned in Real-time (1986); A Fire Upon the Deep (1992); A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and a festschrift, True Names (2001). The last two each won the Hugo Award. He is now widely popular, has recently retired to write full time, and seems likely to be one of the major hard SF writers of the next decade.