The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “You know,” she says, “that they desired humanness.”

  “They could have it again.”

  Imagine a crowned head shaking. “No. I do not suppose any other node would create a world to house their mortality, would either care to or believe it was right.”

  “Then why not you, who have so many worlds in you?”

  Gaia is not vindictive. A mind like hers is above that. But she says, “I cannot take them. After such knowledge as they have tasted of, how could they return to me?” And to make new copies, free of memories that would weigh their days down with despair, would be meaningless.

  “Yet—there at the end, I felt what Christian felt.”

  “And I felt what Laurinda felt. But now they are at peace in us.”

  “Because they are no more. I, though, am haunted,” the least, rebellious bit, for a penalty of total awareness is that nothing can be ignored or forgotten. “And it raises questions which I expect Alpha will want answered, if answered they can be.”

  After a time that may actually be measurable less by quantum shivers than by the stars, Wayfarer says: “Let us bring those two back.”

  “Now it is you who are pitiless,” Gaia says.

  “I think we must.”

  “So be it, then.”

  The minds conjoin. The data are summoned and ordered. A configuration is established.

  It does not emulate a living world or living bodies. The minds have agreed that that would be too powerful an allurement and torment. The subjects of their inquiry need to think clearly; but because the thought is to concern their inmost selves, they are enabled to feel as fully as they did in life.

  Imagine a hollow darkness, and in it two ghosts who glimmer slowly into existence until they stand confronted before they stumble toward a phantom embrace.

  “Oh, beloved, beloved, is it you?” Laurinda cries.

  “Do you remember?” Christian whispers.

  “I never forgot, not quite, not even at the heights of oneness.”

  “Nor I, quite.”

  They are silent awhile, although the darkness shakes with the beating of the hearts they once had.

  “Again,” Laurinda says. “Always.”

  “Can that be?” wonders Christian.

  Through the void of death, they perceive one speaking: “Gaia, if you will give Laurinda over to me, I will take her home with Christian—home into Alpha.”

  And another asks: “Child, do you desire this? You can be of Earth and of the new humanity.”

  She will share in those worlds, inner and outer, only as a memory borne by the great being to whom she will have returned; but if she departs, she will not have them at all.

  “Once I chose you, Mother,” Laurinda answers.

  Christian senses the struggle she is waging with herself and tells her, “Do whatever you most wish, my dearest.”

  She turns back to him. “I will be with you. Forever with you.”

  And that too will be only as a memory, like him; but what they were will be together, as one, and will live on, unforgotten.

  “Farewell, child,” says Gaia.

  “Welcome,” says Wayfarer.

  The darkness collapses. The ghosts dissolve into him. He stands on the mountaintop ready to bear them away, a part of everything he has gained for those whose avatar he is.

  “When will you go?” Gaia asks him.

  “Soon,” he tells her: soon, home to his own oneness.

  And she will abide, waiting for the judgment from the stars.

  ARTHUR STERNBACH BRINGS THE CURVEBALL TO MARS

  KIM Stanley Robinson

  Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) began writing SF stories in the 1970s, publishing about ten stories before gaining his Ph.D. in English in 1982. His dissertation was later published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984). He became a famous SF writer in 1984 upon the publication of his first novel, The Wild Shore, an excellent post-catastrophe SF novel in the Steinbeckian tradition of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. It had the bad luck to be published in the same year as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, to which it came in second for major awards. Worse, it allowed Robinson to become a symbol of the opposition for the adherents of the Movement, cyberpunk’s official name in the mid-eighties. He did win some major awards, and was nominated for more. But the discourse surrounding Robinson’s major works of that decade—the Orange Country trilogy: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990), and the novels Icehenge, Memory of Whiteness, and Escape from Katmandu (1989)—was contoured by literary politics.

  Then in the 1990s Robinson mined his 1985 novella “Green Mars” for what became his Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), Blue Mars (1996), all award winners and nominees—a stand-alone novel, Antarctica (1997), and a collection, The Martians (1999). The Mars trilogy is generally recognized as one of the SF masterworks of the decade and confirmed him in the front ranks of contemporary SF writers. The trilogy also moved him very publicly into hard SF, especially due to the wonderfully detailed settings, and in the portrayal of scientists as characters doing the daily work of science. He said in a Locus interview: “Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you’re seeing justifies the conclusions you’re making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it’s not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It’s slow, tedious, inconclusive, it’s hard to tell good guys from bad guys—it’s everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not.” His interest in themes of frontier life and of colonization marks him politically as a North American. But Robinson also injects large doses of politics and political discussion, left wing, communitarian, and socialist Utopian ideas into the Mars novels, an unusual spin for hard SF.

  Robinson’s Mars books were among the first in what became, as one reviewer put it, the “millennial wave of Mars exploration tales.” In a time when it was fashionable to explore notions of virtuality, Robinson remained steadfastly loyal to actuality as the true origin of stories. Rather than exploring the multi-layered worlds of virtual reality and uploaded minds, he took on the task of imagining what it would be like if people colonized Mars, and how they would get along there. Not the SF trope Mars, the easily habitable planet, in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey (1934), Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), or for that matter, Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (1964), but the real place as described by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration. While to some extent, his approach to Mars comes out of Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1953), his approach is not so much world-building on the planetary scale, as a faith in powerful settings to tell powerful stories.

  This story, from The Martians, of how baseball is played on Mars, is hard SF with a light touch. It explores the physics of baseball, in the persona of a sports fan trying to adapt the sport to a radically changed environment.

  He was a tall skinny Martian kid, shy and stooping. Gangly as a puppy. Why they had him playing third base I have no idea. Then again they had me playing shortstop and I’m left-handed. And can’t field grounders. But I’m American so there I was. That’s what learning a sport by video will do. Some things are so obvious people never think to mention them. Like never put a lefty at shortstop. But on Mars they were making it all new. Some people there had fallen in love with baseball, and ordered the equipment and rolled some fields, and off they went.

  So there we were, me and this kid Gregor, butchering the left side of the infield. He looked so young I asked him how old he was, and he said eight and I thought Jeez you’re not that young, but realized he meant Martian years of course, so he was about sixteen or seventeen, but he seemed younger. He had recently moved to Argyr
e from somewhere else, and was staying at the local house of his co-op with relatives or friends, I never got that straight, but he seemed pretty lonely to me. He never missed practice even though he was the worst of a terrible team, and clearly he got frustrated at all his errors and strike-outs. I used to wonder why he came out at all. And so shy; and that stoop; and the acne; and the tripping over his own feet, the blushing, the mumbling—he was a classic.

  English wasn’t his first language, either. It was Armenian, or Moravian, something like that. Something no one else spoke, anyway, except for an elderly couple in his co-op. So he mumbled what passes for English on Mars, and sometimes even used a translation box, but basically tried never to be in a situation where he had to speak. And made error after error. We must have made quite a sight—me about waist-high to him, and both of us letting grounders pass through us like we were a magic show. Or else knocking them down and chasing them around, then winging them past the first baseman. We very seldom made an out. It would have been conspicuous except everyone else was the same way. Baseball on Mars was a high-scoring game.

  But beautiful anyway. It was like a dream, really. First of all the horizon, when you’re on a flat plain like Argyre, is only three miles away rather than six. It’s very noticeable to a Terran eye. Then their diamonds have just over normal-sized infields, but the outfields have to be huge. At my team’s ballpark it was nine hundred feet to dead center, seven hundred down the lines. Standing at the plate the outfield fence was like a little green line off in the distance, under a purple sky, pretty near the horizon itself—what I’m telling you is that the baseball diamond about covered the entire visible world. It was so great.

  They played with four outfielders, like in softball, and still the alleys between fielders were wide. And the air was about as thin as at Everest base camp, and the gravity itself only bats .380, so to speak. So when you hit the ball solid it flies like a golf ball hit by a big driver. Even as big as the fields were, there were still a number of home runs every game. Not many shut-outs on Mars. Not till I got there anyway.

  I went there after I climbed Olympus Mons, to help them establish a new soil sciences institute. They had the sense not to try that by video. At first I climbed in the Charitums in my time off, but after I got hooked into baseball it took up most of my spare time. Fine, I’ll play, I said when they asked me. But I won’t coach. I don’t like telling people what to do.

  So I’d go out and start by doing soccer exercises with the rest of them, warming up all the muscles we would never use. Then Werner would start hitting infield practice, and Gregor and I would start flailing. We were like matadors. Occasionally we’d snag one and whale it over to first, and occasionally the first baseman, who was well over two meters tall and built like a tank, would catch our throws, and we’d slap our gloves together. Doing this day after day Gregor got a little less shy with me, though not much. And I saw that he threw the ball pretty damned hard. His arm was as long as my whole body, and boneless it seemed, like something pulled off a squid, so loose-wristed that he got some real pop on the ball. Of course sometimes it would still be rising when it passed ten meters over the first baseman’s head, but it was moving, no doubt about it. I began to see that maybe the reason he came out to play, beyond just being around people he didn’t have to talk to, was the chance to throw things really hard. I saw too that he wasn’t so much shy as he was surly. Or both.

  Anyway our fielding was a joke. Hitting went a bit better. Gregor learned to chop down on the ball and hit grounders up the middle; it was pretty effective. And I began to get my timing together. Coming to it from years of slow-pitch softball, I had started by swinging at everything a week late, and between that and my shortstopping I’m sure my teammates figured they had gotten a defective American. And since they had a rule limiting each team to only two Terrans, no doubt they were disappointed by that. But slowly I adjusted my timing, and after that I hit pretty well. The thing was their pitchers had no breaking stuff. These big guys would rear back and throw as hard as they could, like Gregor, but it took everything in their power just to throw strikes. It was a little scary because they often threw right at you by accident. But if they got it down the pipe then all you had to do was time it. And if you hit one, how the ball flew! Every time I connected it was like a miracle. It felt like you could put one into orbit if you hit it right, in fact that was one of their nicknames for a home run, Oh that’s orbital they would say, watching one leave the park headed for the horizon. They had a little bell, like a ship’s bell, attached to the backstop, and every time someone hit one out they would ring that bell while you rounded the bases. A very nice local custom.

  So I enjoyed it. It’s a beautiful game even when you’re butchering it. My sorest muscles after practice were in my stomach from laughing so hard. I even began to have some success at short. When I caught balls going to my right I twirled around backwards to throw to first or second. People were impressed though of course it was ridiculous. It was a case of the one-eyed man in the country of the blind. Not that they weren’t good athletes, you understand, but none of them had played as kids, and so they had no baseball instincts. They just liked to play. And I could see why—out there on a green field as big as the world, under a purple sky, with the yellow-green balls flying around—it was beautiful. We had a good time.

  I started to give a few tips to Gregor, too, though I had sworn to myself not to get into coaching. I don’t like trying to tell people what to do. The game’s too hard for that. But I’d be hitting flies to the outfielders, and it was hard not to tell them to watch the ball and run under it and then put the glove up and catch it, rather than run all the way with their arms stuck up like the Statue of Liberty’s. Or when they took turns hitting flies (it’s harder than it looks) giving them batting tips. And Gregor and I played catch all the time during warm-ups, so just watching me—and trying to throw to such a short target—he got better. He definitely threw hard. And I saw there was a whole lot of movement in his throws. They’d come tailing in to me every which way, no surprise given how loose-wristed he was. I had to look sharp or I’d miss. He was out of control, but he had potential.

  And the truth was, our pitchers were bad. I loved the guys, but they couldn’t throw strikes if you paid them. They’d regularly walk ten or twenty batters every game, and these were five-inning games. Werner would watch Thomas walk ten, then he’d take over in relief and walk ten more himself. Sometimes they’d go through this twice. Gregor and I would stand there while the other team’s runners walked by as in a parade, or a line at the grocery store. When Werner went to the mound I’d stand by Gregor and say, You know Gregor you could pitch better than these guys. You’ve got a good arm. And he would look at me horrified, muttering No no no no, not possible.

  But then one time warming up he broke off a really mean curve and I caught it on my wrist. While I was rubbing it down I walked over to him. Did you see the way that ball curved? I said.

  Yes, he said, looking away. I’m sorry.

  Don’t be sorry, That’s called a curve ball, Gregor. It can be a useful throw. You twisted your hand at the last moment and the ball came over the top of it, like this, see? Here, try it again.

  So we slowly got into it. I was all-state in Connecticut my senior year in high school, and it was all from throwing junk-curve, slider, split-finger, change. I could see Gregor throwing most of those just by accident, but to keep from confusing him I just worked on a straight curve. I told him Just throw it to me like you did that first time.

  I thought you weren’t to coach us, he said.

  I’m not coaching you! Just throw it like that. Then in the games throw it straight. As straight as possible.

  He mumbled a bit at me in Moravian, and didn’t look me in the eye. But he did it. And after a while he worked up a good curve. Of course the thinner air on Mars meant there was little for the balls to bite on. But I noticed that the blue dot balls they played with had higher stitching than the red do
t balls. They played with both of them as if there was no difference, but there was. So I filed that away and kept working with Gregor.

  We practiced a lot. I showed him how to throw from the stretch, figuring that a wind-up from Gregor was likely to end up in knots. And by mid-season he threw a mean curve from the stretch. We had not mentioned it to anyone else. He was wild with it, but it hooked hard; I had to be really sharp to catch some of them. It made me better at shortstop too. Although finally in one game, behind twenty to nothing as usual, a batter hit a towering pop fly and I took off running back on it, and the wind kept carrying it and I kept following it, until when I got it I was out there sprawled between our startled center fielders.

  Maybe you should play outfield, Werner said.

  I said Thank God.

  So after that I played left center or right center, and I spent the games chasing line drives to the fence and throwing them back in to the cut-off man. Or more likely, standing there and watching the other team take their walks. I called in my usual chatter, and only then did I notice that no one on Mars ever yelled anything at these games. It was like playing in a league of deaf-mutes. I had to provide the chatter for the whole team from two hundred yards away in center field, including of course criticism of the plate umpires’ calls. My view of the plate was miniaturized but I still did a better job than they did, and they knew it too. It was fun. People would walk by and say, Hey there must be an American out there.

  One day after one of our home losses, 28 to 12 I think it was, everyone went to get something to eat, and Gregor was just standing there looking off into the distance. You want to come along? I asked him, gesturing after the others, but he shook his head. He had to get back home and work. I was going back to work myself, so I walked with him into town, a place like you’d see in the Texas panhandle. I stopped outside his co-op, which was a big house or little apartment complex, I could never tell which was which on Mars. There he stood like a lamppost, and I was about to leave when an old woman came out and invited me in. Gregor had told her about me, she said in stiff English. So I was introduced to the people in the kitchen there, most of them incredibly tall. Gregor seemed really embarrassed, he didn’t want me being there, so I left as soon as I could get away. The old woman had a husband, and they seemed like Gregor’s grandparents. There was a young girl there too, about his age, looking at both of us like a hawk. Gregor never met her eye.