by Nancy Kress
“Well, we suppose that’s pretty interesting,” said the new elephants without much enthusiasm. “Can we do anything else?”
“Oh, yes,” the new spacemen assured them, pulling out their .550 Nitro Expresses and .475 Holland & Holland Magnums and taking aim. “You can die.”
“This can’t be happening! You yourselves were elephants yesterday!”
“True. But we’re men now.”
“But why kill us?” demanded the elephants.
“Force of habit,” said the men as they pulled their triggers.
Then, with nothing left to kill, the men who used to be elephants boarded their ship and went out into space, boldly searching for new life forms.
•
Neptune has seen many species come and go. Microbes have been spontaneously generated nine times over the eons. It has been visited by aliens thirty-seven different times. It has seen forty-three wars, five of them atomic, and the creation of 1,026 religions, none of which possessed any universal truths. More of the vast tapestry of galactic history has been played out on Neptune’s foreboding surface than any other world in Sol’s system.
Planets cannot offer opinions, of course, but if they could, Neptune would almost certainly say that the most interesting creatures it ever hosted were the elephants, whose gentle ways and unique perspectives remain fresh and clear in its memory. It mourns the fact that they became extinct by their own hand. Kind of.
A problem would arise when you asked whether Neptune was referring to the old-new elephants who began life as killers, or the new-old ones who ended life as killers.
Neptune just hates questions like that.
COMMENTARY: JOYS AND JEREMIADS
As I pointed out in my introduction, speculative fiction is actually many fields, each with its separate pleasures, difficulties, and histories both commercial and literary. No one will ever agree where the boundaries lie among these subsets of SF, least of all their practitioners. But let us pretend, for convenience’s sake, that we can name the fields, and let us listen to the joys and jeremiads of those who resonate there in this early twenty-first century.
HARD SCIENCE FICTION
Geoffrey A. Landis
Geoffrey Landis is the author of much first-rate hard SF, including the well-received novel Mars Crossing.
I have a secret to tell you: Science is a game.
It’s a team sport, for the most part, although there are occasional superstars who dazzle all with their speed and skill. And it’s a game where, for the most part, the opponent is not really the other player. Like golf, I suppose: all the players are aiming for the same goal, and it’s only a question of which one gets there a bit faster, a bit more elegantly. (Although it would be an amusing game of golf indeed in which all of the players were in the woods, and none quite sure in which direction was the hole.)
Science is an exciting game with bold strokes of skillful play, blending meticulously crafted strategy and wild improvisation; full of sudden reverses and agonizing fumbles and unexpected goals.
The universe is the real opponent, and the rules of the game are always changing, but the objective is always the same: trying to understand a universe of infinite subtlety. The trophy isn’t a medallion given away in Stockholm; that’s just an afterthought, no more the actual game than the summary in the morning paper the day after a baseball game. The real prize is to understand something that has never before been understood.
People liken science to a puzzle more often than to a game, but, puzzle or game, it’s the ultimate sport, one which athletes devote decades to training for, a sport which will consume them for the rest of their lives.
It’s a very slow game—a single play can take decades; one match can take a lifetime. Some of us train hard and play hard but never score a goal. It’s a slow sport for spectators, but for an aficionado, it has more subtlety than chess, more thrills than a bullfight, more chained horsepower than the Indy 500.
Science fiction—or the stuff we call “hard” science fiction— then, is a way for amateurs to join the sport. The universe, in hard science fiction, is a puzzle, and the challenge the author sets is, Can you understand it? Science fiction invents worlds to match wits against and in which the match can take less than a lifetime.
Like science, hard science fiction is always changing. The atomic spaceships of the 1940s have given way to puzzles of alien ecologies and wormhole physics, with cosmology and quantum physics taking the place of orbital mechanics. As science gets more sophisticated, hard SF is getting harder to write (or perhaps I should say that good hard SF is getting harder to write; there certainly is still enough fiction with the trappings of hard SF, with marvelous machines and blazing buzzwords of science flying majestically through the purple sky). But as we unlearn much of the things we once knew about the planets and about the universe, we learn new things about our own solar system and others, and the new solar system we are entering is as strange and wonderful as the old—perhaps stranger—and no less a place for science fiction. For the best hard SF engages the edges of real science and poses puzzles that draw on all that we now know about the universe. Good hard science fiction makes us think about the universe we live in, with all its possibilities and weirdness and wonder.
Kenneth Brewer once asked Freeman Dyson what it felt like when he had put together the puzzle of quantum electrodynamics and for a moment knew something that nobody else in the world knew. “Well,” Dyson said, “you have to know that it’s the greatest feeling in the world.”
SOFT- AND MEDIUM-VISCOSITY
SCIENCE FICTION
Scott Edelman
Scott Edelman is a longtime SF editor.
Science keeps marching on, and for the past century (or perhaps even longer, depending upon which critic does the carbon dating) science fiction has been by its side, marching merrily along with it. In fact, one of science fiction’s proudest achievements has always been that we’re usually a few steps ahead, with science struggling to catch up, huffing and puffing as it attempts to weave reality out of our dreams. Often we even find ourselves light-years ahead, in danger of losing sight of science all together.
The distance that separates the dreamers and the facilitators hardly matters. What matters is our role in this relationship. And the part we have chosen to play is that of prophet. With our stories, we walk before science with a metaphorical lantern, guiding, inspiring, illuminating the possible destinations. And then, spurred by these seductive vapors, science does go on, choosing some of our possible futures to make real, discarding others as—at least for now—either impossibly ridiculous or sadly out of reach.
Some of the paths turn out to be dead ends. But others lead to the Moon.
How the world loves science fiction at times such as those, when we turn out to have been right! The world sure does love its winners, and we’ve hit the bull’s-eye many times. Hugo Gernsback would have been proud of us. But to be embraced only when science delivers on science fiction’s predictions seems a little hollow to me, as if the general public needs to be bribed with successes in order to give us their love. In literature, as in life, I’d prefer my love to be a little less one-sided and a little more unconditional.
I don’t want science fiction to be loved only when we look forward with it, before we can possibly know which stories got it right and which did not, but also when we’re looking back at it from a further future. But how can we create a work that is not just for its own time but also for all time, when so many generations have gotten it wrong? At one time, phlogiston was widely believed to be the true matter of the universe, and atomic theory was seen as just a myth. How are we to know at any given moment whether, by arming our futures with technological and scientific details, we will be seen by later generations as prescient—or just plain silly?
We can’t. As much as we dream of time machines, we are too much of our own time. Which means that like it or not, some of our hardest science fiction will ooze to mere putty in the hands o
f the future.
Some will call it heresy, but I’ve come to see that the only futures that the future will be able to stomach will be the soft ones. Rigorous, but soft nonetheless.
So I say, All hail the black box. What powers the ships hurtling across the galaxies, the engines that keep towering cities floating high above the alien seas below, or the mechanical brains that motivate a race of robots? Does it truly matter? The hardest of SF writers want to worry about how they and other miracles work. But those who worry instead about how what works affects us are likelier to last into the future as more than museum curiosities. That is why though I enjoy hard SF, and have certainly bought much of it as an editor, I worry that it can only be written for the writer’s generation alone, and so I do not practice it when I wear my own writer’s hat.
That is why I choose the black box. What’s inside? Who knows? Each generation will choose differently in filling it. Sometimes there have been wires inside, or vacuum tubes, or printed circuitry. Who knows what the future will bring and with what technology our descendants will choose to inhabit the black boxes that we build in our stories? That is why I only need to be made to believe. I do not need so much information as to be capable of building it. Verisimilitude should be enough, for, after all, we do not seek out reality itself in fiction but rather the semblance of reality.
We cannot truly blueprint the future, only dream it. And that in itself should be enough of a reward. Or else we will end up speaking a language that will be coherent only to the people already in the room.
There is, of course, a downside for those who choose to write other than the hardest sort of SF. This pitfall comes from certain subsets of our audience and of our peers. There are those who will say that by focusing on the affect rather than the effect, we are embracing ignorance, that we are “less than,” or indeed, not writing science fiction at all.
But that is a small price to pay for the accompanying joys.
This I know:
The future will bring miracles, and the world will change because of it. And the world will change whether those miracles come powered by steam or electricity or atomics or some method as yet unknown. The miracles themselves are only the catalysts for the sense of wonder that future folks will feel. And it is that which we must examine.
Or else we shall suffer as most of our spiritual forebears have done, and our ghosts will watch as all the fruits of our field turn into artifacts that to our children are nothing more than quaint.
SF HUMOR: A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS
(condensed from Writers Booty magazine)
Terry Bisson
Terry Bisson is a multiple award winner for his quirky, intelligent SF.
For only pennies a day, you can be writing and selling SF humor from your own home. Sound too good to be true? Read on! A necessarily partial phone survey (11.43 percent don’t have working phones, and 8.54 percent don’t answer intelligibly) of SFWA’s humor writers shows the top five earning considerably more than a dollar a day (how does $1.39 sound to you?) while the average ($0.39) still holds a comfortable lead over the related but low-paying genres of Industrial Erotica, Adventure Travel, and Trash.
SF is unique among America’s low-flying lits in that it is almost one-fourth humor: 23.45 percent funny, to be precise. This is considerably less than Romantic Sports which is almost 30 (29.23) percent funny, but well above both Romance (18.24) and Sports (15.32). Humor itself, the flagship as it were, is only 51.76 percent funny, and that average is artificially inflated by Mark Twain, who would be a SFWA member if he weren’t so dead.
Much of SF’s considerable smile factor is due to the high-spirited young writers it attracts. SF and Fantasy together induct an average of almost sixteen new scribblers a year (15.42), of whom more than six (6.19) are funny. Let’s look at a typical year—2001. Nationally, 118 writers went pro that year, an above-average eighteen of whom were picked up by SFWA, which handles the draft for the related fields of SF, Fantasy and Low Slipstream. Of these rookies, seven were funny, four almost funny, and two were just weird. By way of comparison, the mainstream gained forty-one new pros, of whom only six were a little funny and two were actually depressing.
Who says you can’t tell a book by its cover? The high risibility-index of SF is due in large part to appearances. Many (254 total) SF writers dress funny, often intentionally. There are no gender distinctions here with the women being fully (99.44 percent) as funny-looking as the men. Author photos are of course the “wings” that bring these laughs to the readers, which is why trade books are not as funny as hardcovers, and mass market paperbacks get less funny every day.
It’s not all personnel, however. The impressive display of humor in modern SF is due in large measure to tradition. From the high comedy of Frankenstein to the rollicking chase scenes of Dune (who can forget those goofy worms?), humor has played an important role in SF. And it’s becoming more rather than less important: of the 1,786,873 dialogue interchanges added to the literature since Apollo 11, fully 987,543 have contained puns, jokes, or wry rejoinders, and this is discounting the narrative drollery (more troublesome to quantify) that is a staple of the field.
But tradition, though honored, can play only a supporting role in an innovative genre. Many of the laughs in SF (33.78 percent of the total) have to do with the material itself. SF is quite correctly considered a literature of ideas, and ideas are funny, at least some of them; and even the ones that aren’t funny are funnier than manners, morals, or money, the mainstream obsessions that still (go figure!) account for 64.87 percent of America’s printed matter.
It must be noted that within the linked fields of Fantasy and SF, the playing field is far from level. Robots and rocket ships are almost always funny (68.98 percent of the time), but monsters? Not! Elves are not funny at all (perhaps because they try so hard). Aliens are funnier than unicorns by a factor of ten, and castles are funny only to those who have not lived in them for five or more consecutive days.
Of course, a career in SF doesn’t automatically bring laughs, except from the immediate family. If a robot whines in the forest and no one laughs, is it funny? The SF humorist needs an agent, and SF agents are a special breed (65.67 percent special, in fact) known for their ability to laugh at as well as with their clients. The best of them (32.65 percent) actively seek sarcastic rejections, and the worst (27.87 percent, allowing for overlap) like to receive small dead animals in the mail.
These agents can’t afford to waste their time on the trade mags like Locus and SF Chronicle, which rarely print humor (1.456 laughs per page, not counting ads), nor on the all-humor mags like The New Yorker and Analog, which are written in-house by lunatics. For speedy, top-penny sales, SF deal-makers go straight for the prestige ’zines like Asimov’s, F&SF, and SciFiction, whose editors are so eager to please that they have been known (987 documented incidents) to laugh at their own jokes.
Agents can’t do it all, though, which brings us to the most powerful weapon in any SF writer’s arsenal: the personal touch. Successful SF and Fantasy pros understand that the best time to make an editor laugh is after midnight. Between ten and two a.m. is best, when all but the most hopeless (three at last count) are home in bed. Remember to keep it light: the last thing an editor wants is a collect call from a writer who runs out of funny stories after only twenty minutes on the phone!
So now you know the ropes. Isn’t it about time you put on your funny hat, powered up your word processor, and joined the ranks of the SF pros who are turning laughs into dollars at the rate of pennies a day?
CONTEMPORARY FANTASY
Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan’s story “The Chief Designer” won the 2002 Sturgeon Award.
For me, the great lure of fantasy as a reader and as a writer, is the chance to explore the truly weird—weirder even than the most way-out science fiction stories, which must necessarily ride, in relative comfort, the rails of scientific, technological, and social extrapolation. By contrast, the fantasy story
is free to set off on foot without a map, whistling a jaunty tune as dark clouds roll in from the west, shadows reach out from alleyways, street signs become few and far between, and the first fat drops splash down the back of the neck: unnerving, yes, but exhilarating, too.
The two great fantasy magazines of the early twentieth century got it right in their very titles: Weird Tales and Unknown. The titles of three terrific recent collections nail it, too: Stranger Things Happen, Tales of Pain, and Wonder, and Magic Terror. And all of the above exemplify a relatively new approach to fantasy, finding the uncanny not just in the pastoral long ago and far away but also next door, down the street, around the corner, the day before yesterday.
Today, the field of contemporary fantasy is full of wild talents, visionaries, writers of the marvelously and necessarily weird—and in lo, what numbers! Never before have first-rate contemporary fantasists so many and so varied written at the peak of their powers simultaneously. To name a few favorites among them is to leave out too many, but even the most preliminary list indicates that these are extraordinary times in the field of contemporary fantasy, as in the world at large.
Consider the past few years. Kelly Link’s marvelous and indescribable collection Stranger Things Happen declares a new genre, one so far occupied only by Stranger Things Happen and perhaps by nothing else, ever, at least until Link’s next book comes along. From The Sandman through American Gods, Neil Gaiman has demonstrated an uncanny ability not only to channel and revive old myths but to create new ones. The novels of Jonathan Carroll—The Wooden Sea being a recent example—never stop opening doors in the reader’s head, not even after the book itself is closed.