4. Jules Verne. A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
5. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine.
6. _____ The Island of Dr. Moreau or The War of the Worlds or The First Men in the Moon.
7. _____. When the Sleeper Wakes.
8. M. P. Shiel. The Purple Cloud.
9. William Hope Hodgson. The Night Land.
10. Jack London. The Scarlet Plague.
11. Yevgeny Zamiatin. We.
12. E. M. Forster. “The Machine Stops.”
13. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.
14. Olaf Stapledon. Star Maker.
15. H. P. Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness.
16. John W. Campbell. Who Goes There?
17. Karel Čapek. War with the Newts.
18. George R. Stewart. Earth Abides.
19. James Blish. Cities in Flight.
20. Clifford D. Simak. City.
21. Arthur C. Clarke. The City and the Stars.
22. Robert A. Heinlein. The Door into Summer.
23. Brian W. Aldiss. Starswarm or The Dark Light Years.
24. J. G. Ballard. The Drowned World or The Burning World or The Crystal World.
25. Stanislas Lem. Solaris.
26. Thomas M. Disch. 334.
27. Ursula K. Le Guin & Brian Attebery, eds. The Norton Book of Science Fiction.
It will be evident to the reader familiar with a number of these works that this course superimposes a literary/historical structure upon SF literature, at war with the theory of pulp origins. That’s the way it is.
APPENDIX IV
UNDERSTANDING HARD SF
When we read a work of fiction, we test its details against our experience of the nuances and gestures of everyday life. Appearances are at issue when we investigate and assess the value of a literary text. We consider the text authentic if it matches what we observe—or, in fictional circumstances, could observe—when we look at the world around us. But in the case of science fiction this test does not entirely apply. We must take the seemingly unreal setting and the element of science in the fiction into account.
When we read a work of SF, we also test it against our scientific and technical knowledge. Scientific principles operating behind imaginary rather than everyday experience are at issue. The attitude that underpins science fiction is that there is a reality beyond appearances which is knowable through science. There is a particular variety of science fiction, commonly called “hard” SF, that emphasizes the rigorous nature of our relation to this reality behind experience. Other SF (even such classics as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz), while it usually takes this into account, emphasizes our experience of the nature of human behavior and is more nearly, but not entirely, testable in the ordinary way we read.
I. The Pleasures and Problems of Hard SF
This essay examines the way science functions in science fiction throughout the history and development of the genre—from Poe and Verne and Hawthorne and Wells to the giants of today—focusing primarily upon the type known as “hard science fiction.” Not only is the science in science fiction the foundation of science fictional delights and entertainments, it is in fact chief among those delights. I believe this needs to be said strongly now, at this precise historic moment in the evolution of SF. John Clute has said that at this moment, in the 1990s, SF is a genre in crisis, and many other commentators agree that the SF genre, with its traditions, reading protocols, and literary attitudes, is in danger of marginalization and collapse into a less distinct form of contemporary literature. Anthologies such as The Norton Book of Science Fiction are signposts on the road. This essay is adapted from the introduction to The Ascent of Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is written for an audience not intimately familiar with the history and development of the field. It also refers to many stories as examples, most of which are in the anthology. Our project, introduced here, is to examine the evolution of hard SF and present hard SF as the center of the SF field, not somewhere out on the fringe. And so I begin.
* * *
Hard SF is about the beauty of truth. It is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of the wonder at the perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery. The Eureka. There are a number of ways this is done in hard SF. The crucial moment may in fact come early in the story and the rest of the story may simply require a character (and the reader) to respond to the impact of the discovery. Or it may come at the climax, or there may be a number of these moments in a hard SF story. This is the kind of story, such as Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, or Gregory Benford’s Timescape, or Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, that is seen by readers as a milestone or classic.
Hard SF is, then, about the emotional experience of describing and confronting what is scientifically true. We may compare both the nonrealistic aspects of hard SF and the realistic elements (such as the way the characters experience the hypothetical reality) to our personal experiences of perceived or consensual reality and have our perceptions of reality illuminated by contrast. This is as true of J. G. Ballard’s “Cage of Sand” as it is of Isaac Asimov’s “Waterclap.” The hypothetical experiences are the ones that are particularly illuminating to a reader of hard SF.
Hard SF feels authentic to experienced readers when the way things work in the story is scientifically plausible—in the place and time the story is set. For example: In the event that there were an ellipsoid planet like Hal Clement’s Mesklin, inhabited by an intelligent alien race, then if humans were to visit they might plausibly find that gravity, geology, chemistry, and the alien race itself resembled with some precision and in some detail Clement’s description of this hypothetical place—according to what we know of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology at present.
Hard SF relies, at some point in the story, on expository prose rather than literary prose, prose aimed at describing the nature of its particular reality. The reality that is the case is usually not literally true but at the same time adheres to the principles by which science describes what is known. Originally this exposition was merely a device for achieving verisimilitude (in Poe), as it still is often in non-genre writing; but by the advent of 1920s “scientifiction” it had become of central interest and by the 1940s the essential point or turning point of a science fiction story.
Because hard SF is a literary form demanding of both its writers and its readers significant amounts of scientific knowledge as well as previous reading in the genre, it has continued to yield a disproportionate number of the central images common to all forms of science fiction and to generate new translations of scientific ideas into literary contexts through which they can then become the devices and ultimately the clichés of many other stories. Stories such as Clifford D. Simak’s “Desertion” and James Blish’s “Surface Tension,” in which humanity is physically transformed to live in alien environments, contain the seeds of many other stories in the genre. If it served no other function this would still preserve its critical importance.
It is a commonly held opinion of the writers who write hard SF, and the perception of the readers who prefer to read it, that hard SF is the core of all science fiction. It is as well a body of works set apart from the large body of run-of-the-mill SF throughout the modern period. Its heroic figures are H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Gregory Benford. Hard SF is SF with “the right stuff.”
However, hard science fiction is an acquired taste and a special pleasure. Devoted readers of hard SF know the real thing when they see it, the way readers of poetry are able to distinguish real poetry from greeting-card versifying: by the way in which the text fulfills an implied contract between writer and reader. Even work by a great poet that is (arguably) imperfectly executed can nevertheless be important and influential. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats with its “purple noon” might serve as an example. Or, in descending order, m
uch of Rudyard Kipling’s or Robert W. Service’s poetry. Nevertheless, we know it as authentic: the real thing.
An essential condition of this recognition (of “the right stuff”) is experience gained from reading in the genre. (We acknowledge the difficulty of using the word “genre” to describe both poetry and science fiction but intend to use it to refer to any body of literature with distinct reader expectations and reading protocols that distinguish that body from other genres.) Also useful is technical knowledge of the rules by which the particular literary game is usually played. In the case of hard science fiction one must be able to summon up a basic knowledge of the scientific laws and principles by which our contemporary world is believed to operate. Sad to say, this last condition prevents enjoyment of the work by many otherwise educated and experienced readers, but there is enough of a spectrum of striking imagery, startling and innovative ideas, and a generally high level of literary execution in the corpus of hard science fiction that most readers of contemporary fiction new to hard SF could survive the initial shock to their habitual reading protocols as long as they are aware of the attitudes and preconceptions native to it and experience the excitement of this vigorous, lively, and influential branch of science fiction.
The primary pleasures of hard science fiction do not reside in its stylistic effects. One can summarize a hard SF story and communicate its essential spark without reference to its execution. It is normally a conservative literature, traditionally told in clear journalistic prose eschewing consciously literary effects: the prose of scientific description. Historically this is one of the main techniques for achieving verisimilitude in a literature which is in fact radically distanced from the here-and-now in a majority of the stories. It is also an advantage for the main body of writers and readers who come from a scientific or technological background and often read and write mostly in this prose style. Many of them harbor a deep suspicion of the self-consciously literary, together with an ingrained belief in the efficacy of scientific know-how to solve problems in the real world (and in any imaginable world). This last assumption underlies all hard science fiction. Even those stories that appear to be antithetical to this attitude or written in conscious reaction to it (J. G. Ballard’s “Cage of Sand” and Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” respectively) take this attitude as their starting point.
The experience of reading all science fiction generates a feeling of radical distance or escape from the real world, but paradoxically the experience of reading hard science fiction adds to that a need to bring external knowledge to the story—knowledge that exists only in the real world and is accessible to the reader through education and general knowledge of science. Hard SF uses spectacular images envisioned according to plausible scientific extrapolation in order to isolate us from ordinary life and confront us with the ideal universe of science. This isolation can produce extraordinary intellectual and emotional effects, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (with its vision of the dead solar system after a supernova linked to the birth of Christ) or Rudy Rucker’s “Ms. Found in a Copy of Flatland” (in which the central character is literally trapped in a two-dimensional universe).
Hard SF then always depends upon scientific knowledge external to the story. “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven, for instance, depends for its finest moment upon basic knowledge of the relative position of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun in the solar system: high school astronomy. “Stop Evolution in Its Tracks” by John Sladek is funny only if you know the most basic facts of evolutionary biology. “Chromatic Aberration” by John M. Ford is based on the theory of paradigm shifts—without knowledge of said theory it is still a creditable emulation of magic realism but not recognizably hard SF.
Science fiction as a whole comes in many varieties, but overall it tends to depend more on a knowledge of the body of hard science fiction written in the genre over the past few decades than upon science. SF as a whole ranges from Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, or Ray Bradbury, brilliantly literate at their best, to a spectrum of journeyman works by category writers. Ordinary science fiction adventure in particular—the works of Jack Vance serve as a distinguished example—tends to exist only in reference to earlier SF. It could arguably not exist without the tropes and cliché locutions (spaceship, time machine, space warp, blaster) developed with rigorous logic and strict adherence to scientific principles in past hard SF stories. Even Ray Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles takes place on the sandy habitable Mars of earlier SF writers, not the known planet of the time Bradbury wrote the stories (the late 1940s and early 1950s).
And even though interstellar travel may have been invented in the creaky visionary space adventures of E. E. “Doc” Smith, Ph.D., hard SF writers then went to work on the problems his inventions presented and used his devices in other stories wherein they were reconceived with plausible scientific rationales. The hard SF discussions that took place in the stories, in frequent speculative nonfiction articles, and in the letter columns of the SF magazines from the late 1920s to the present have been the forum for establishing and maintaining standards of plausibility in hard SF, and in all SF. One sense in which hard science fiction is the core of the whole genre is that the rest of the literature is in this real sense secondary to it—exists primarily in implied reference to its prior logical developments, ideas, and specialized terms—all assumed by writers as being known and familiar to the genre audience.
Texts in all genres fulfill an implied contract between writer and reader: This story will exist within the recognizable boundaries of the genre conventions and will deliver the pleasures expected of a text in this genre. Since genres are by nature interactive, in the sense that writers read in the genre and readers, in addition, interact with the writers (who are public figures—and in the science fiction field, with its fanzines and hundreds of conventions a year, this interaction is frequent and constant), the re-use of good ideas, with innovative variations, is common. One might compare this to the way sonneteers in literary history gained reputation by innovation within the form, or more recently, mystery writers became the darling of genre connoisseurs by building a better locked-room story. Thus Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity generated a whole body of “world-building” fiction over several decades, which includes Frank Herbert’s Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, and Larry Niven’s Ringworld.
In reading hard SF you are participating in an experience that involves you in the tension between the story’s radical distance from the real world and its similarity to real-world scientific principles upon which the imagined world also operates, and through which the imagined characters perceive their experience. James Blish’s “Surface Tension,” for instance, in which tiny genetically-engineered descendants of humans living in a large mud puddle on an alien planet develop enough scientific knowledge to build a wooden spaceship in which to explore the airy spaces above the surface of their puddle-world, is a paradigm. This tension generates in experienced readers an intense involvement in the innovative content (ideas) of the fiction, since the new and different ideas are still familiar through being based on known principles. The elements of fiction (story, characterization, plot, thematics, etc.) draw you in emotionally while the necessity of applying knowledge of science distances you intellectually—asking you, at the same time, to become emotionally involved in the problems of the characters in the fiction and to follow and understand in an intellectual sense the scientific grounding of the fiction. Hard SF, then, requires a double consciousness in readers, an intense involvement coupled paradoxically with (at least at the crucial points of exposition) great aesthetic distance.
SF readers nevertheless expect to be surprised at some point by a sudden perception of connection to things they know or observe in daily life. If the revelation is of the inner life, as in Daniel Keyes’s well-known Flowers for Algernon, then the story is not hard SF; if the revelation is of the functioning of the laws of nature, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Transit of Earth” or Isaac
Asimov’s “Waterclap,” then the story is hard SF. In a hard SF story, the expectation is both escape and surprise: The conjunction between them should entertain and inform our view of the nature of reality.
Hard SF achieves its characteristic affect or stimulation of feeling essentially through informing, by being, in fact, didactic. One is taken a great distance in time and space only to learn something possibly or plausibly true in the here and now. To a greater or lesser extent most science fiction escapes the limits of a real world to somewhere else in time and space, a setting radically distanced (not days or weeks in the future but hundreds or thousands or millions of years; not in another country but far away in space). But hard science fiction uses the distance to bring us home again in an apparently intellectual way, not usually through insight into human character but through insight into the mechanics of the universe, true in all times and places. Thus a story such as Larry Niven’s “The Hole Man” teaches us little about the character of scientists but a lot about its idea: the nature, and possible misuse, of a tiny black hole; James Blish’s “Beep” opens up a myriad of possibilities for new levels of complex information transfer; Hilbert Schenck’s “The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck” gives us information about hurricanes.
Furthermore, the world of the hard SF story is deterministic, ruled by scientific law: It is inimical to all life and especially dangerous to anyone who does not know said law or how to figure it out—scientific method facts. This is the world of J. G. Ballard as well as the world of Hal Clement. “Somebody had asked me,” said Clement in a recent interview “why I didn’t have bad entities—villains—in my stories, generally speaking, and my point was that the universe was a perfectly adequate villain!” The universe is enough of an antagonist. So it follows that the villains of hard SF pervert science or are ignorant of it. The assumption that knowledge is good is essential to the hard SF affect, even when it is being undercut, as in Kate Wilhelm’s “The Planners,” or Vernor Vinge’s “Bookworm, Run!”
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