The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Look, that sky isn’t some problem with my eyes. It’s real. Hear that?” Something big and soft had struck the door of the van, rocking it.

  “And we here have finished the program of materialistic science, have we not? We flattered the West by taking it seriously. As did the devotees.”

  Clay grinned despite himself. It was hard to feel flattered when you were fleeing for your life.

  Mrs. Buli stretched lazily, as though relaxing into the clasp of the moist night. “So we have proven the passing nature of matter. What fresh forces does that bring into play?”

  “Huh!” Clay spat back angrily. “Look here, we just sent word out, reported the result. How—”

  “So that by now millions, perhaps billions of people know that the very stones that support them must pass.”

  “So what? Just some theoretical point about subnuclear physics, how’s that going to—”

  “Who is to say? What avatar? The point is that we were believed. Certain knowledge, universally correlated, surely has some impact—”

  The van lurched. Suddenly they jounced and slammed along the smooth roadway. A bright plume of sparks shot up behind them, brimming firefly yellow in the night.

  “Axle’s busted!” Clay cried. He got the van stopped. In the sudden silence, it registered that the motor had gone dead.

  They climbed out. Insects buzzed and hummed in the hazy gloom.

  The roadway was still straight and sure, but on all sides great blobs of iridescent water swelled up from the ground, making colossal drops. The trembling half-spheres wobbled in the frayed moonlight. Silently, softly, the bulbs began to detach from the foggy ground and gently loft upward. Feathery luminescent clouds above gathered on swift winds that sheared their edges. These billowing, luxuriant banks snagged the huge teardrop shapes as they plunged skyward.

  “I … I don’t …”

  Mrs. Buli turned and embraced him. Her moist mouth opened a redolent interior continent to him, teeming and blackly bountiful, and he had to resist falling inward, a tumbling silvery bubble in a dark chasm.

  “The category of perfect roundness is fading,” she said calmly.

  Clay looked at the van. The wheels had become ellipses. At each revolution they had slammed the axles into the roadway, leaving behind long scratches of rough tar.

  He took a step.

  She said, “Since we can walk, the principle of pivot and lever, of muscles pulling bones, survives.”

  “How … this doesn’t …”

  “But do our bodies depend on roundness? I wonder.” She carefully lay down on the blacktop.

  The road straightened precisely, like joints in an aged spine popping as they realigned.

  Angles cut their spaces razor-sharp, like axioms from Euclid.

  Clouds merged, forming copious tinkling hexagons.

  “It is good to see that some features remain. Perhaps these are indeed the underlying Platonic beauties.”

  “What?” Clay cried.

  “The undying forms,” Mrs. Buli said abstractly. “Perhaps that one Western idea was correct after all.”

  Clay desperately grasped the van. He jerked his arm back when the metal skin began flexing and reshaping itself.

  Smooth glistening forms began to emerge from the rough, coarse earth. Above the riotous, heaving land the moon was now a brassy cube. Across its face played enormous black cracks like mad lightning.

  Somewhere far away his wife and daughter were in this, too. G’bye, Daddy. It’s been real.

  Quietly the land began to rain upward. Globs dripped toward the pewter, filmy continent swarming freshly above. Eons measured out the evaporation of ancient sluggish seas.

  His throat struggled against torpid air. “Is … Brahma … ?”

  “Awakening?” came her hollow voice, like an echo from a distant gorge.

  “What happens … to … us?”

  His words diffracted away from him. He could now see acoustic waves, wedges of compressed, mute atoms crowding in the exuberant air. Luxuriant, inexhaustible riches burst from beneath the ceramic certainties he had known.

  “Come.” Her voice seeped through the churning ruby air.

  Centuries melted between them as he turned. A being he recognized without conscious thought spun in liquid air.

  Femina, she was now, and she drifted on the new wafting currents. He and she were made of shifting geometric elements, molecular units of shape and firm thrust. A wan joy spread through him.

  Time that was no time did not pass, and he and she and the impacted forces between them were pinned to the forever moment that cascaded through them, all of them, the billions of atomized elements that made them, all, forever.

  THE HAMMER OF GOD

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Arthur C. Clarke (born 1917) lives with his adopted family in Sri Lanka. He received a knighthood in January 1999. He says, “On New Year’s Day, the British High Commissioner gave me the splendid news that Her Majesty was awarding me a Knighthood for ’Services to Literature.’ I regarded this as a compliment to the entire genre of Science Fiction as much as to myself. The English Lit mandarins could put this piece of news in their pipes and smoke it.”

  He was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society (1946-47 and 1950-53). In 1945, he made the first proposal that satellites could be used for communications. His first SF story, “Loophole,” appeared in Astounding in 1946. His first SF novel, Prelude to Space, was published in 1951. It was quickly followed by The Sands of Mars (1951), Islands in the Sky (1952), Against the Fall of Night (1953), and Childhood’s End (1953). Expedition to Earth, the first of more than a dozen collections, included the story “The Sentinel,” later the basis for the film 2001 (1968), which Clarke expanded into the bestselling novel 2001 (1968).

  As we said in The Ascent of Wonder (1994), Arthur C. Clarke is the poet of technology and cosmology in modern SF. He is also as much a proponent of space travel as was his peer, Robert A. Heinlein. But Gregory Benford has remarked, “There’s more similarity between Arthur C. Clarke and Thoreau than there is between Clarke and Heinlein.” For Clarke, the beauties of vistas in space are the beauties of nature, and the exploration of space is the quest for knowledge and close experience of nature, for things never before seen and felt by an individual human. And the medium through which this exploration will be achieved is technology.

  Technological artifacts may, in addition, be beautiful in and of themselves, interesting, mysterious, promising. Clarke, unlike Heinlein or Asimov, is also the poet of the big machine. And in this he has always been a leader in hard SF, and has maintained the bond between SF and the twin communities devoted to the construction of enormous machines for scientific exploration—experimental physics and the space community—for decades. Clarke’s stories tend to be about the emotional rewards of the quest for knowledge as opposed to the power knowledge can confer.

  In the 1990s, Clarke was unwell but still published a few pieces, and collaborated with Gregory Benford, Gentry Lee, and Stephen Baxter on projects. Clarke was important not only for historical reasons but because he was actively collaborating with Baxter and thereby having influence on one of the most important newer writers.

  Clarke’s politics are not often overt, but are neither of the Libertarian right nor the radical left. They hark back to the liberal “one world” United Nations ideals of the mid-20th century. At a crucial moment for hard SF in the early 1980s, Jerry Pournelle called together Robert A. Heinlein, Gregory Benford, and others to form an official science advisory committee to then President Ronald Reagan and promoted what was then called the Star Wars defense program. (See Greg Bear note, below.) Gregory Benford tells in his essay “Old Legends” in Greg Bear’s anthology, New Legends, of Clarke’s visit to one of their meetings:

  The Advisory Council met in August of 1984 in a mood of high celebration. Their pioneering work had yielded fruits unimaginable in 1982. Robert Heinlein, the dean of American science fiction writers, attended; th
e Council had attracted interest from some speculative quarters and, historically, writers had provided many ideas basic to the space program. Out of the shimmering summer heat came a surprise visitor—Arthur C. Clarke, in town to promote the opening of the film made from his novel, 2010.

  In 1950, Clarke had described an electromagnetic catapult to launch people and cargo from the surface of the moon. This idea evolved into the “mass driver” now being studied for use as a “magnetic machine gun” to shoot down ICBMs. Clarke had testified before Congress against SDI, and regarded the pollution of space by weapons, even defensive ones, as a violation of his life’s vision.

  Heinlein attacked as soon as Clarke settled into Larry Niven’s living room. The conversation swirled from technical issues—could SDI satellites be destroyed by cheap rocks put into orbit? Would SDI lead to further offensive weapons in space? Would it help or hinder other uses of near-Earth orbit?—to a clear clash of personalities. Clarke—cool, analytical, mild-mannered-was taken aback. His old friend Heinlein regarded Clarke’s statements as both wrong-headed and rude. Foreigners on our soil should step softly in discussions of our policies, Heinlein said. Clarke was guilty of “British arrogance.”

  Clarke had not expected this level of feeling among old comrades. They had all believed in the High Church of Space, as one writer present put it. Now, each side regarded the other as betraying that vision, of narrowness, of imposing unwarranted assumptions on the future of mankind. It was a sad moment for many when Clarke said a quiet goodbye and disappeared into his limousine, stunned. Later that afternoon he asked me tentatively, “Do most of the American science fiction writers feel this way?”

  We see this moment as symbolic of the developing divide between U.S. and U.K. hard SF in the 1980s, of the consequences of the overt right-wing politicization of American hard SF that began in the 1970s. (See also the Gregory Benford “Immersion” note.)

  “The Hammer of God,” about an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, appeared in Time magazine in 1992. It is didactic SF on a grand scale with characters only faintly sketched in. Although Gardner Dozois reprinted it in his Year’s Best volume, it got less attention within the field than it deserved. It did, however, feed the prominent political discussions in the U.S. government and elsewhere during the decade about what to do in the event of the discovery of an actual asteroid on a collision course with our planet. This is still in the news as this anthology is published.

  It came in vertically, punching a hole ten km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater two hundred km across.

  That was only the beginning of disaster: now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over.

  The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million B.C.

  Captain Robert Singh never tired of walking in the forest with his little son Toby. It was, of course, a tamed and gentle forest, guaranteed to be free of dangerous animals, but it made an exciting contrast to the rolling sand dunes of their last environment in the Saudi desert—and the one before that, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But when the Skylift Service had moved the house this time, something had gone wrong with the food-recycling system. Though the electronic menus had fail-safe backups, there had been a curious metallic taste to some of the items coming out of the synthesizer recently.

  “What’s that, Daddy?” asked the four-year-old, pointing to a small hairy face peering at them through a screen of leaves.

  “Er, some kind of monkey. We’ll ask the Brain when we get home.”

  “Can I play with it?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It could bite. And it probably has fleas. Your robotoys are much nicer.”

  “But …”

  Captain Singh knew what would happen next: he had run this sequence a dozen times. Toby would begin to cry, the monkey would disappear, he would comfort the child as he carried him back to the house …

  But that had been twenty years ago and a quarter-billion kilometers away. The playback came to an end; sound, vision, the scent of unknown flowers and the gentle touch of the wind slowly faded. Suddenly, he was back in this cabin aboard the orbital tug Goliath, commanding the one hundred person team of Operation ATLAS, the most critical mission in the history of space exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh could never revisit. Decades in space—and neglect of the mandatory zero-G exercises—had so weakened him that he could now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from the planet of his birth.

  “One hour to rendezvous, Captain,” said the quiet but insistent voice of David, as Goliath’s central computer had been inevitably named. “Active mode, as requested. Time to come back to the real world.”

  Goliath’s human commander felt a wave of sadness sweep over him as the final image from his lost past dissolved into a featureless, simmering mist of white noise. Too swift a transition from one reality to another was a good recipe for schizophrenia, and Captain Singh always eased the shock with the most soothing sound he knew: waves falling gently on a beach, with sea gulls crying in the distance. It was yet another memory of a life he had lost, and of a peaceful past that had now been replaced by a fearful present.

  For a few more moments, he delayed facing his awesome responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to the “Bald Is Beautiful” school, if only because wigs were a nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable “Brainman,” could make bare heads the norm within a single decade. Not even quick-change skin coloring, or the lens-corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses, had made such an impact upon style and fashion.

  “Captain,” said David. “I know you’re there. Or do you want me to take over?”

  It was an old joke, inspired by all the insane computers in the fiction and movies of the early electronic age. David had a surprisingly good sense of humor: he was, after all, a Legal Person (Nonhuman) under the famous Hundredth Amendment, and shared—or surpassed—almost all the attributes of his creators. But there were whole sensory and emotional areas which he could not enter. It had been felt unnecessary to equip him with smell or taste, though it would have been easy to do so. And all his attempts at telling dirty stories were such disastrous failures that he had abandoned the genre.

  “All right, David,” replied the captain. “I’m still in charge.” He removed the mask from his eyes, and turned reluctantly toward the viewport. There, hanging in space before him, was Kali.

  It looked harmless enough: just another small asteroid, shaped so exactly like a peanut that the resemblance was almost comical. A few large impact craters, and hundreds of tiny ones, were scattered at random over its charcoal-gray surface. There were no visual clues to give any sense of scale, but Singh knew its dimensions by heart: 1,295 m maximum length, 456 m minimum width. Kali would fit easily into many city parks.

  No wonder that, even now, most of humankind could still not believe that this modest asteroid was the instrument of doom. Or, as the Chrislamic Fundamentalists were calling it, “the Hammer of God.”

  The sudden rise of Chrislam had been traumatic equally to Rome and Mecca. Christianity was already reeling from John Paul XXV’s eloquent but belated plea for contraception and the irrefutable p
roof in the New Dead Sea Scrolls that the Jesus of the Gospels was a composite of at least three persons. Meanwhile the Muslim world had lost much of its economic power when the Cold Fusion breakthrough, after the fiasco of its premature announcement, had brought the Oil Age to a sudden end. The time had been ripe for a new religion embodying, as even its severest critics admitted., the best elements of two ancient ones.

  The Prophet Fatima Magdalene (née Ruby Goldenburg) had attracted almost one hundred million adherents before her spectacular—and, some maintained, self-contrived—martyrdom. Thanks to the brilliant use of neural programming to give previews of Paradise during its ceremonies, Chrislam had grown explosively, though it was still far outnumbered by its parent religions.

  Inevitably, after the Prophet’s death the movement split into rival factions, each upholding the True Faith. The most fanatical was a fundamentalist group calling itself “the Reborn,” which claimed to be in direct contact with God (or at least Her Archangels) via the listening post they had established in the silent zone on the far side of the Moon, shielded from the radio racket of Earth by three thousand km of solid rock.

  Now Kali filled the main viewscreen. No magnification was needed, for Goliath was hovering only two hundred m above its ancient, battered surface. Two crew members had already landed, with the traditional “One small step for a man”—even though walking was impossible on this almost zero-gravity worldlet.

  “Deploying radio beacon. We’ve got it anchored securely. Now Kali won’t be able to hide from us.”

  It was a feeble joke, not meriting the laughter it aroused from the dozen officers on the bridge. Ever since rendezvous, there had been a subtle change in the crew’s morale, with unpredictable swings between gloom and juvenile humor. The ship’s physician had already prescribed tranquilizers for one mild case of manic-depressive symptoms. It would grow worse in the long weeks ahead, when there would be little to do but wait.