The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  James Patrick Kelly (born 1951) was told as a young writer by his teachers at the Clarion workshop that science fiction stories should be well thought out and well researched and so he set out to write that way. Only later did he learn that many writers in the field don’t bother to work that hard. But by then, his habits were in place. He is not one of hard SF’s politically committed true believers, but rather is intrigued by the dramatic possibilities of hard SF situations. He has a clear graceful style and a willingness to do the work of making the science in his stories count. His stories are tight and polished and his narrators tend to have a strong voice and point of view that allow Kelly to play out the drama of the situation he has chosen.

  Although a writer identified with the Sycamore Hill workshop in the 1980s, the hotbed of Humanist opposition to the cyberpunks, he was also chosen as representative of the original Movement (along with Greg Bear, another surprise) by Bruce Sterling for inclusion in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Much of his fiction has a serious hard SF side that appeals broadly to all readers in the field.

  Though he is primarily a short story writer (publishing mainly in Asimov’s) he has published four novels: Planet of Whispers (1984), Freedom Beach (1985) with John Kessel, Look into the Sun (1989), and Wildlife (1994). Two collections of his stories have been published—Heroines (1990), and Think like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997)—his new collection, Strange but Not a Stranger, was out in 2002. He writes a monthly column about the web for Asimov’s. His story “Undone” (2001) was selected for all three best of the year volumes and was a Nebula nominee. For some time now, Kelly has, as John Clute put it, “stood on the verge of recognition as a major writer.”

  Recently, he has used his talents in a new way. He says, “To celebrate my mid-life crisis several years ago, I decided to try something completely different: playwriting. I’ve had pretty good luck with this … . I’ve written five radio plays for Seeing Ear Theater. Three were adapted from stories, ‘Think like a Dinosaur,’ ‘Breakaway, Backdown’ and ‘The Propagation of Light in a Vacuum.’ Two were originals ‘Carrion Death’ and ‘Feel the Zaz’ although I subsequently emitted a story version of ‘Zaz.’”

  “Think like a Dinosaur” won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. It is in the classic hard SF mode and is in fact in dialog with the touchstone of hard SF reading protocols, Tom Godwin’s controversial “The Cold Equations.” It is an act of literary politics, a genuine hard SF story that undermines, by calling into question, the sexual politics in the subtext of the classic original. But it does not establish a position on the right or left, but in the center. If there is a new literary political synthesis in 1990s American SF, it is at the point where the hard SF stories of Benford, Kelly, and Sterling meet.

  Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station’s delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian’s idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.

  “Welcome back.” The float’s whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.

  She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it’s because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life’s great adventure was over.

  “Matthew?” she said.

  “Michael.” I couldn’t help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.

  I’ve guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri’s is the only quantum scan I’ve ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm3. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she’d had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. She understood what it meant to balance the equation.

  I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex’s L1 port and came through our airlock at promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. They had darkened her skin against epsilon Leo’s UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she’d be navigating our.2 micrograv.

  “Welcome to Tuulen Station.” I smiled and offered my hand. “My name is Michael.” We shook. “I’m supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide.”

  “Guide?” She nodded distractedly. “Okay.” She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I said, “the dinos are in their cages.”

  Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. “You call the Hanen dinos?”

  “Why not?” I laughed. “They call us babies. The weeps, among other things.”

  She shook her head in amazement. People who’ve never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit. And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn’t convinced that humans were psychologically ready to go to the stars.

  “Have you eaten?” I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms.

  “Yes … I mean, no.” She didn’t move. “I am not hungry.”

  “Let me guess. You’re too nervous to eat. You’re too nervous to talk, even. You wish I’d just shut up, pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let’s just get this part the hell over with, eh?”

  “I don’t mind the conversation, actually.”

  “There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What’s my name again?”

  “Michael?”

  “See, you’re not that nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to eat like a human.”

  “Okay.” She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched. “Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea.”

  “Now, tea they’ve got.” She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers snicked at the velcro carpet. “Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings.”

  “The Gendians don’t keep lawns. They live underground.”

  “Refresh my memory.” I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. “Are they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?”

  “They look nothing like ferrets.”

  We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long wall showed a live
view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.

  I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.

  While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in discreet mode. She didn’t look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. =A problem,= her voice buzzed in my earstone, =most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two from today’s schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour?=

  “Sure,” I said. “Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?” I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window on the wall. “Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I’m just the doorman.”

  Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamala with her other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall, but she had an enormous head that teetered on her neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver scales shone. =Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you?= She raised her left hand, spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.

  “Of course, I … .”

  =And you will permit us to render you this translation?=

  She straightened. “Yes.”

  =Have you questions?=

  I’m sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I broke in. “Which came first, the lizard or the egg?”

  Silloin ignored me. =It will be excellent for you to begin when?=

  “She’s just having a little tea,” I said, handing her the cup. “I’ll bring her along when she’s done. Say an hour?”

  Kamala squirmed on the couch. “No, really, it will not take me … .”

  Silloin showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. =That would be most appropriate, Michael.= She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.

  “Why did you do that?” Kamala’s voice was sharp.

  “Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You’re not the only migrator we’re sending this morning.” This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw, the other sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen concept of identity. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the time fly.”

  For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour’s worth of patter; I’d done that often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine, and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.

  “Tell me a secret,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A secret, you know, something no one else knows.”

  She stared as if I’d just fallen off Mars.

  “Look, in a little while you’re going someplace that’s what … three hundred and ten light years away? You’re scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous, and elsewhere; we’ll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to tell.”

  She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. “This is another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still have not decided whether to send me.”

  “Oh no, in a couple of hours you’ll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking.”

  “You are crazy.”

  “Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It’s from the Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I’ll go first. If my secret isn’t juicy enough, you don’t have tell me anything.”

  Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn’t being swallowed by the big blue marble.

  “I was brought up Catholic,” I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. “I’m not anymore, but that’s not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics, which I got a ‘D’ in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.

  “One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should’ve lifted her license back in the ’50s. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.

  “Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe you’d have to grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the gym and we were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon. He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our parents that had died. When I made a joke about it to the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school suspension.”

  Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the holders built into the table.

  “Want some more?” I said.

  She stirred restlessly. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “It’s part of the secret.” I leaned forward in my chair. “See, my family lived down the street from Holy Spirit Cemetery and in order to get to the carryvan line on McKinley Ave., I had to cut through. Now this happened a couple of days after I got in trouble at the assembly. It was around midnight and I was coming home from a graduation party where I had taken a couple of pokes of insight, so I was feeling sly as a philosopher-king. As I walked through the cemetery, I stumbled across two dirt mounds right next to each other. At first I thought they were flower beds, then I saw the wooden crosses. Fresh graves: here lies Father Tom and Mama Moogoo. There wasn’t much to the crosses: they were basically just stakes with crosspieces, painted white and hammered into the ground. The names were hand printed on them. The way I figure it, they were there to mark the graves until the stones got delivered. I didn’t need any insight to recognize a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I switched them, what were the chances anyone was going to notice? It was no problem sliding them out of their holes. I smoothed the dirt with my hands and then ran like hell.”

  Until that moment, she’d seemed bemused by my story and slightly condescending toward me. Now there was a glint of alarm in her eyes. “That was a terrible thing to do,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” I said, “although the dinos think that the whole idea of planting bodies in graveyards and marking them with carved rocks is weepy. They say there is no identity in dead meat, so why get so sentimental about it? Linna keeps asking how come we don’t put markers over our shit. But that’s not the secret. See, it’d been a warmish night in the middle of June, only as I ran, the air turned cold. Freezing, I could see my breath. And my shoes got heavier and heavier, like they had turned to stone. As I got closer to the back gate, it felt like I was fighting a strong wind, except my clothes weren’t flapping. I slowed to a walk. I know I could have pushed through, but my heart was thumping and then I heard this whispery seashell noise and I panicked. So the secret is I’m a coward. I switched the crosses back and I never w
ent near that cemetery again. As a matter of fact,” I nodded at the walls of reception room D on Tuulen Station, “when I grew up, I got about as far away from it as I could.”

  She stared as I settled back in my chair. “True story,” I said and raised my right hand. She seemed so astonished that I started laughing. A smile bloomed on her dark face and suddenly she was giggling too. It was a soft, liquid sound, like a brook bubbling over smooth stones; it made me laugh even harder. Her lips were full and her teeth were very white.

  “Your turn,” I said, finally.

  “Oh, no, I could not.” She waved me off. “I don’t have anything so good … .” She paused, then frowned. “You have told that before?”

  “Once,” I said. “To the Hanen, during the psych screening for this job. Only I didn’t tell them the last part. I know how dinos think, so I ended it when I switched the crosses. The rest is baby stuff.” I waggled a finger at her. “Don’t forget, you promised to keep my secret.”

  “Did I?”

  “Tell me about when you were young. Where did you grow up?”

  “Toronto.” She glanced at me, appraisingly. “There was something, but not funny. Sad.”

  I nodded encouragement and changed the wall to Toronto’s skyline dominated by the CN Tower, Toronto-Dominion Centre, Commerce Court, and the King’s Needle.

  She twisted to take in the view and spoke over her shoulder. “When I was ten we moved to an apartment, right downtown on Bloor Street so my mother could be close to work.” She pointed at the wall and turned back to face me. “She is an accountant, my father wrote wallpaper for Imagineering. It was a huge building; it seemed as if we were always getting into the elevator with ten neighbors we never knew we had. I was coming home from school one day when an old woman stopped me in the lobby. ‘Little girl,’ she said, ‘how would you like to earn ten dollars?’ My parents had warned me not to talk to strangers but she obviously was a resident. Besides, she had an ancient pair of exolegs strapped on, so I knew I could outrun her if I needed to. She asked me to go to the store for her, handed me a grocery list and a cash card, and said I should bring everything up to her apartment, 10W. I should have been more suspicious because all the downtown groceries deliver but, as I soon found out, all she really wanted was someone to talk to her. And she was willing to pay for it, usually five or ten dollars, depending on how long I stayed. Soon I was stopping by almost every day after school. I think my parents would have made me stop if they had known; they were very strict. They would not have liked me taking her money. But neither of them got home until after six, so it was my secret to keep.”