Asimov's SF, April-May 2007
Page 36
I asked her to come closer.
Something swam toward me through the gray. I made out a crimson mouth and enormous brown eyes. Gradually, the separate features resolved into a face that, though blurred, was indisputably open and lovely.
“You're beautiful,” I said.
“Thank you.” A pause. “It's been awhile since you told me that."
Her face withdrew. I couldn't find her in the murk. Anxious, I called out. “I'm here,” she said. “I'm just getting something."
“What?"
“Cream to rub on your chest and shoulders. It'll make you feel better."
She sat on the bed—I felt the mattress indent—and she began massaging me. Each caress gave me a shock, albeit gentler than the ones I had felt initially. Soft hands spread the cream across my chest and I began to relax, to feel repentant that I had neglected her. I offered apology for doing so, saying that I must have been preoccupied.
Her lips brushed my forehead. “It's okay. Actually, I'm hopeful..."
“Hopeful? About what?"
“It's nothing."
“No, tell me."
“I'm hoping some good will come of all this,” she said. “We've been having our problems lately. And I hope this time we spend together, while you recuperate, it'll make you remember how much I love you."
I groped for her hand, found it. We stayed like that a while, our fingers mixing together. A white shape melted up from the grayness. I strained to identify it and realized it was her breast sheathed in white cloth.
“I'm up here,” she said, laughter in her voice, and leaned closer so I could see her face again. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? The doctor said I should test your memory. So we can learn if there's been any significant loss."
“Yeah, okay. I'm feeling more together now."
I heard papers rustling and asked what she was doing.
“They gave me some questions to ask. I can't find them.” More rustling. “Here they are. The first one's a gimmee. Do you recall your name?"
“Jack,” I said confidently. “Jack Lamb."
“And what do you do? Your profession?"
I opened my mouth, ready to spit out the answer. When nothing came to me, I panicked. I probed around in the gray nothing that seemed to have settled over my brain, beginning to get desperate. She touched the inside of my wrist, a touch that left a trail of sparkling sensation on my skin, and told me not to force it. And then I saw the answer, saw it as clearly as I might see a shining coin stuck in silt at the bottom of a well, the first of a horde of memories waiting to be unearthed, a treasure of anecdote and event.
Firmly, and with a degree of pride as befitted my station, I said, “I'm a financier."
Copyright © 2007 Lucius Shepard
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* * *
ON BOOKS: WHITHER THE HARD STUFF?
by Norman Spinrad
"As someone who has been writing a column and contributed fiction to Asimov's for pretty close to as long as it has been in existence, I congratulate the magazine for having survived three decades of the literary history of science fiction, and playing a central part in it. I pay homage to the successive editorial staffs, and particularly the present one, valiantly carrying forth the tradition and the mission in a good deal less than easy times. Live long and prosper. Or at least live long."—Norman Spinrad
HORIZONS
by Mary Rosenblum
Tor, $24.95
ISBN: 0765316048
* * * *
BLINDSIGHT
by Peter Watts
Tor, $25.95
ISBN: 0765312182
* * * *
INFOQUAKE
by David Louis Edelman
Pyr, $15.00
ISBN: 1591024420
* * * *
SPEARS OF GOD
by Howard V. Hendrix
Del Rey, $14.95
ISBN: 0345455983
* * * *
By now, surely every reader of this column and most people at all interested in the “genre” know that prose science fiction as opposed to “SF” is in dire straits. It's being squeezed from one side by the abundance of films, TV shows, video games, and so forth purveying its tropes, images, and thematic material to wider audiences than any book is likely to reach, and on the other by the former fantasy tail that has long since come to wag the “SF” genre publishing dog.
Writers of science fiction in general who have no real interest in switching to fantasy are struggling to survive as fantasy dominates the lists of SF publishers, the SF racks in the stores, and sales. Those publishers who care are struggling to keep it alive by trying to locate and reach or create a readership to replace aging diehard fans and kids who read less and less of anything at all in order to keep it commercially viable.
Thus far the results are not in, an optimist might say, because the packaging, marketing, and publicity modalities have not yet been discovered, or if they have, not yet employed. For after all, the turning to the writing of science fiction by so-called “mainstream writers” with at least commercial success would seem to indicate that the demographics are there, especially since much of their stuff, while perhaps better written than most of what “science fiction writers” turn out, is pretty pallid and primitive by thematic, extrapolative, speculative, and scientifically knowledgeable standards.
But what of “hard science fiction"? The truth is that hard science fiction has just about always been a minority taste even among science fiction readers. Others have had and may still have more stringent definitions than I, involving a certain snobbishness by devotees of the “hard” physical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and astronomy directed against such “soft” sciences as biology, psychology, and ecology, but I prefer a more inclusive definition.
As far as I'm concerned, hard science fiction has a primary restrictive definition and a secondary prescriptive definition.
Restrictively, hard science fiction must take care not to violate the currently known laws of mass-energy; if it doesn't, it's not hard science fiction.
Prescriptively, it should be fiction in which technological change, or a scientific or technological question or speculation is central or at least important to the thematic point, the dramatic thrust, the action of the story, the personal lives of its characters, and ideally all of them.
I think that's a pretty inclusive definition of the literary sub-genre. But just how wide and numerous is even the current maximum potential readership that might want to read such stuff and enjoy it if it did?
Think about it. Those with no interest in science and technology per se, or even the impact of science and technology on culture and consciousness, are not about to be interested in reading hard science fiction or enjoy it if they happen upon it by accident, and the scientifically illiterate aren't even going to be able to understand it.
In a society where the distinction between astronomy and astrology is probably blurry in more minds than not, where more people give credence to the existence of angels than to the evolutionary process, where very few viewers see anything wrong in spacecraft executing banking turns in a vacuum, where school systems and textbook publishers find themselves forced to give equal time to “creationism,” and where the teaching of science in primary and secondary schools is itself in steep decline, surely the potential readership for hard science fiction must be dwindling even faster than that for science fiction in general.
So can “hard science fiction” survive? And if so, what does it have to become in order to survive? Does its survival really matter to anyone but a dwindling coterie of hardcore devotees? And just what do we now mean by hard SF? Has it mutated? Is this a good thing or a bad thing, or both?
The first two novels we will consider here, Blindsight by Peter Watts and Horizons by Mary Rosenblum, surely answer the first question in the affirmative, since at least they exist and have been published.
Blindsight takes place on a spaceship out
beyond Pluto on a mission to make first contact with aliens, at least in the present tense front story. Horizons takes place mostly on a space station. Neither of them presents events that would seem to violate the presently known laws of mass-energy, and there are technical and/or scientific questions intimately involved with the stories told by both.
So it would not only be difficult but Talmudically pointless to attempt to concoct a definition of “hard science fiction” narrow enough to exclude both of these novels. Though I suppose there might still be geeky fannish dinosaurs who would exclude the Rosenblum on the grounds that it is centered on space technology rather than space “science” and squishy biology rather than macho physics.
But Horizons certainly does not violate the restrictive definition of hard science fiction. Much more of it than not takes place in an orbital space station of the sort that has become a consensus artifact of the fictional future; a city in space whose culture (or cultures) is diverging from those of the Earth, more or less self-contained and autarchic except for some vital significant exceptions, growing its own food supply hydroponically. It is mostly reached from the planetary surface by space elevator, and spins about an axis to supply various degrees of artificial gravity to its different levels.
Okay, maybe I have a little dinosaur in me, too. Problems of material strength and mass aside, connecting the ground to an orbital station via cable would mean whipping the thing around through the whole atmosphere daily to meteorological results few who utilize this fictional device care to contemplate. And of course it could only work at all going to a station in geosynchronous orbit. “Spin gravity” is not gravity at all, but centrifugal force emulating gravity, as the astronaut Wally Shirra once pointed out to me in sarcastic good humor. Meaning that your head is moving at a different speed than your feet, meaning unless the moment-arm is a score or so miles long, the coriolus forces are going to have you puking your guts out.
These two cavils are admittedly nit-picking, but just the sorts of nits that hardcore devotees of hard science fiction enjoy picking. It's part of the game. But on the other hand, these minor scientific faux pas are on a level sufficiently allowable for Rosenblum's artificial space station gravity and its ground-to-space-transportation system to be acceptable in a hard science fiction novel. They have been used many times before, as necessary literary license, for science has long since learned that humans cannot really thrive in zero-g indefinitely.
Or can they?
And if they can, will they really be “human"?
Which is where I would argue that Horizons fulfills at least my prescriptive definition of hard science fiction. Children born and raised in the zero-g hub have some fairly drastic phenotype adaptations to living without gravity, and this “mutation” is spreading to other levels of the space station. But is it a mutation?
Apparently not, because their DNA does not differ from the human norm. Rosenblum does not go into it too perilously deeply, but the idea is that under these altered environmental conditions the same genotype is expressing a different phenotype. Is this scientifically possible? Is this an alternate mode of speciation? Is this speciation at all?
It's an arguable and therefore interesting scientific question. Think of how movement north by homo sapiens out of Africa into less sunny climes resulted in reduced melanin concentrations in the skin. Adaptation by mutation and natural selection or by the same genes expressing an adapted phenotype? Or is that just a more sophisticated version of discredited Lysenkoism? And if it is a form of politically incorrect Lysenkoism, does that necessarily render it scientifically impossible?
This is the sort of hard science fictional speculation that would have easily made sufficient material for a short story or even a novelette in John W. Campbell's Astounding, but even then it would have needed at least some sort of action or at least adversarial plot to become the McGuffin of a hard science fiction novel.
In the end, it does prove to be the scientific and thematic McGuffin of Horizons, but these days, blowing up a short story centered on a scientific conundrum into a hard science fiction novel with action loops and an obstructing villain or two will not do. A modern—or if you prefer post-modern—hard science fiction novel must do more than that to attract and hold anything but a miniscule readership.
It must be not so much a hard science fiction novel as something else that also satisfies the parameters of hard science fiction. Horizons does this successfully, at least in literary terms, by being a political thriller, a spy novel of sorts, and one with characterological and moral depths, even a business novel in a way, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
The novel is set in a future where there are still nations and plenty of national chauvinism and racism, but kept more or less in check and overseen by a World Council with far bigger teeth than the present United Nations. There are several habitat stations, or Platforms as they are called in Horizons, politically semi-autonomous up to a certain point, in thrall to Earthside governments or corporate interests beyond it, or to what amount to tongs of a sort. For this is a future in which East Asia in general and greater China in particular are not only in the ascendancy but have gone somewhat economically, politically, and culturally retro.
The main protagonist, Ahni Huang, is both a scion (scioness?) of one of the most powerful of these neo-tongs and an experienced operative loaded with various nano-enhancements, a natural choice therefore to be sent by her father to the Platform where her brother was murdered, find out who dunnit and why, and take the appropriate vengeance.
There she falls in with and eventually in love with Dane, master of the zero-g hydroponic farmstead, secretly sheltering a clan of the beings? people? mutants? humans? adapted to life without gravity.
Which of the above they really are—or, more to the point, as which of the above will baseline humans treat them—is the core of a story with complex machinations by a complex cast of well-rendered characters, a revolutionary independence movement by the citizens of the Platforms, considerable equally well-rendered action hugger-mugger, and a difficult moral question that Mary Rosenblum may answer to her own satisfaction, and that of more readers than not—myself included—but probably not everyone.
Whether these descendants of baseline humans have adapted to permanent life in zero gravity by genetic mutation or adaptive alternate phenotype expression ends up being emotionally irrelevant. For one way or the other, they are better adapted to life beyond the planetary surface, and therefore they are either the future of space-going homo sapiens or our successor species. Rosenblum leads the reader to the politically correct emotional response of acceptance, but one wonders whether homo erectus or neanderthalus would have felt particularly welcoming of the advent of homo sapiens if they understood we would succeed them.
Horizons, then is a successful example, at least in literary terms, of how old-fashioned hard science fiction must adapt to the current environment if it is to escape the tar pits to live long and prosper. Fortunately this evolution seems not to be particularly threatening to the previous literary phenotype thereof. For what we have here is a novel that fulfills the positive prescriptions for true hard science fiction while becoming something more that it must evolve into in order to survive commercially.
Hard science fiction plus.
Plus what doesn't really matter.
In Horizons, Mary Rosenblum adds a complex thriller-type political plot, a revolution, a family feud of sorts, a love story of sorts, and so forth, to a thematic core that probably would have sold a novelette to John W. Campbell. He might not have agreed with Rosenblum's thematic conclusion, but he certainly would have enjoyed arguing about it, as would his readers.
But this is not the Golden Age of Astounding, or even the Space Age of Analog. And like it or not—and given what it says about the declining state of interest in and understanding of scientific matters and the true moral questions they raise, I certainly do not—enthusiastic readers for hard science fiction without
a plus have themselves become an endangered species. It's an open question whether there are still enough of them around for such stuff to remain commercially publishable.
I do not really count myself a passionate and adamant defender of pur sang hard science fiction. But I certainly know that even such science fiction without additional crowd-pleasing elements can be literarily serious, well-written, exciting, and enjoyable to those intellectually equipped to enjoy it and with the inclination to do so, even if only occasionally.
An elite literature for an elite readership.
Politically incorrect or not, there, I've said it, and like it or not, it's become true.
Yet I would contend that not only does such a literature deserve to survive, but if it is in the process of becoming commercially unpublishable in this culture, it's a very ominous sign for a lot more than science fiction publishing. It casts doubt on the continuation of the upwardly evolving scientific and technological dynamic that has kept so-called “Western Civilization” from ossifying like most every other civilization that has arisen on this planet.
Certainly at the very least something of real intellectual and literary value would be lost if there were not enough potential readers around to make something like Peter Watts’ Blindsight publishable, and therefore in the end writeable. And what such a loss would indicate about the state of the cultural union would be much, much worse.
In Blindsight, the mysterious appearance and then disappearance of a multitude of fiery objects in the skies of a future Earth, followed by the detection by an AI probe of a large alien artifact out beyond Pluto, causes the powers-that-be to send a manned mission out there to find out what's what and take appropriate destructive action should it prove prudently necessary.
It's a long way, a voyage of years, and what is sent is a small crew in suspended animation. A military type. A single human body containing deliberately created multiple personalities to serve as a linguist and cultural anthropologist, among other things. A cyborgly enhanced biologist. For a dictatorial team leader whose will must be obeyed, a vampire, whose genotype was resurrected from extinction by “paleogenetics."