The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  At five o’clock I drove back as far as Rosslyn and signed out a small piece of unclassified equipment from one of the labs. I ate dinner at a fast food place close to the Metro, browsing through Bryant’s library copy of The Invisible Man. When I left I bought a chicken salad sandwich and a coke to take away with me. It might be a long night.

  By six o’clock I was sitting in my car on Cathedral Avenue, engine off and driver’s window open. It was a “No Parking” spot right in front of Lois’s apartment building. If any policeman came by I would pretend that I had just dropped someone off, and drive around the block.

  I wasn’t the only one interested in the entrance. A man sat on a bench across the street and showed no signs of moving, while a blue car with a Virginia license plate drove by every few minutes. Dusk was steadily creeping closer. Half an hour more, and the street lights would go on. Before that happened, the air temperature would drop and the open doors of the apartment building would close.

  The urge to look out of the car window was strong. I resisted, and kept my eye fixed on the little oblong screen at the rear end of the instrument I was holding. It was no bigger than a camera’s viewfinder, but the tiny screen was split in two. On the left was a standard video camera image of the building entrance. On the right was another version of the same scene, this one rendered in ghostly black and white. Everyone walking by, or entering the building, appeared in both pictures.

  Or almost everyone. At 6:45 precisely, a human form showed on the right hand screen only. I looked up to the building entrance, and saw no one. But I called out, softly enough to be inaudible to the man across the street, “Lois! Over here. Get in the car. Wait until I open the door for you.”

  I saw and heard nothing. But I got out, went around the car, and opened the passenger door. Then I stood waiting and feeling like a fool, while nothing at all seemed to be happening. Finally I smelled perfume. The car settled a little lower on its springs.

  “I’m in,” whispered Lois’s voice. I closed the door, went back to my side, and started the engine. The man across the street had watched everything, but he had seen nothing. He did not move as I pulled away.

  I glanced to my right. No one seemed to be there, because through the right-side car window I could see the buildings as we passed them. The only oddity was the passenger seat of the car. Instead of the usual blue fabric, I saw a round grey-black patch about a foot and a half across.

  “I’m alone and we’re not being followed,” I said. “Take it off if you want to. Unless of course you’re naked underneath it.”

  “I’m not.” There was a soft ripping noise. “You already knew that if you think about it.”

  I had to stop the car. It was that or cause a pile-up, because the urge to turn and watch was irresistible.

  “I guessed it,” I said. “No clothes were found in the building in Reston, so you had to be able to put whatever it is over them.”

  It was close to dusk, and I had pulled the car into a parking lot underneath a spreading oak tree. As I stared at the passenger seat, a patch of fair hair suddenly appeared from nowhere against the upper part of the passenger window. The whole background rippled and deformed as the patch grew to reveal Lois’s forehead, face, and chin. As her neck came into view there was a final wave of distortion, and suddenly I was looking at Lois, dressed in a rather bulky body suit.

  “Too much work for the microprocessors,” she said, and pushed her hair off her forehead with her hands. “When you put too great a load on them, they quit trying.”

  She peeled off the suit, first down to her waist, then off her arms and hands, and finally from her legs and feet. She was wearing an outfit of thin silk and flexible flat-heeled loafers. In her hands the suit had become an unimpressive bundle of mottled gray and white. She stared down at it. “Still needs work. For one thing, it’s too hot inside.”

  “That’s how I knew you were there.” I picked up the instrument I had been using. “I didn’t know how you were doing it—I really still don’t—but I knew a living human has to be at 98.6. This instrument senses in thermal infrared wavelengths, so it picked up your body heat image. But it didn’t show a thing at visible wavelengths.”

  “Anyone in the suit is invisible out to wavelengths of about one micron—enough so they don’t show in visible light or near infrared.” She hefted the suit. “On the other hand, this is a first-generation effort using silicon sensors. I could probably do a lot better with something like gallium arsenide, but I’ll still have a thermal signature. And if I move too fast or make unusual movements, the processors can’t keep up and the whole system fails.”

  “And it’s not a great idea to wear perfume. That’s when I was absolutely sure it was you. Want to tell me how it works? I have an idea what’s going on, but it’s pretty rough.”

  “How much time did you spend with my notebooks?”

  “Half a day.”

  “Take two more days, and you’d work it all out for yourself. But I’ll save you the effort.” She tapped the copy of The Invisible Man, sitting where I had left it on top of my dashboard. “Wells could have done better, even in 1900. He knew that animals in nature do their best to be invisible to their prey or their predators. But they don’t do it by fiddling around with their own optical properties, which just won’t work. They know that they are invisible if they look exactly like their background. The chameleon has the right idea, but it’s hardware-limited. It can only make modest color and pattern adjustments. It occurred to me that humans ought to be able to do a whole lot better. You’d got this far?”

  “Pretty much.” I saw a patrol car slow down as it passed us, and I started the engine and pulled out into the street. “The suit takes images of the scene behind you, and assigns the colors and intensities to liquid crystal displays on the front of the suit. Somebody fifteen to twenty feet away will see the background scene. The suit also has to do the same thing to the back, so someone behind you will see an exact match to the scene in front of you. The problem I have is that the trick has to work from any angle. I couldn’t see any way that fiber optic bundles could handle that.”

  “They can’t. I tried that road for quite a while, but as you say, optical fibers don’t have the flexibility to look different from every angle. I only use them to allow me to see when I’m inside. An array of pinhole-sized openings scattered over the front of the suit feeds light through optical fibers to form images on a pair of goggles. Straightforward. The invisibility trick is more difficult. You have to use holographic methods to handle multi-angle reflectances, and you need large amounts of computing power to keep track of changing geometry—otherwise a person would be invisible only when standing perfectly still.” Lois touched the bundled suit. “There are scores of microprocessors on every square centimeter, all networked to each other. I figure there’s more computing power in this thing than there was in the whole world in 1970. And it still crashes if I move faster than a walk, or get into a situation with complex lighting and shadows. Uniform, low-level illumination and relatively uniform backgrounds are best—like tonight.” She cocked her head at me, with a very odd expression in her eyes. “So. What do you think, Jerry?”

  I looked at her with total admiration and five sorts of misgiving. “I think what you have done is wonderful. I think you are wonderful. But there’s no way you can hide this. If I’m here a day or two ahead of everyone else, it’s only because I know you better than they do.”

  “No. It’s because you’re smart, and compartmenting of ideas drives you crazy, and you refuse to do it. It would take the others weeks, Jerry. But I had no intention of hiding this—otherwise I would never have stayed in the Washington area. Tomorrow I’ll go in to work as usual, and I can’t wait to see their faces.”

  “But after what you’ve done—” I paused. What had she done? Failed to sign out of a building when she left. Disappeared for a week without notifying her superiors. Removed government property from secure premises without approval. But she cou
ld say, what better practical test could there be for her invention, than to become invisible to her own organization?

  Her bosses might make Lois endure a formal hearing on her actions, and they would certainly put a nasty note in her file. That would be it. She was far too valuable for them to do much more. Lois would be all right.

  “What now?” I said. “You can’t go back to your own apartment without being seen, even if you put the suit back on. It’s dark, and the doors will be closed.”

  “So?”

  “Come home with me, Lois. You’ll be safe there.”

  That produced the longest pause since she had stepped invisible into my car. Finally she shook her head.

  “I’d really like to, but not tonight. I’ll take a rain check. I promise.”

  “So where do we go?”

  “You go home. Me, you drop off at the next corner.”

  I was tempted to say that I couldn’t do it, that she didn’t have her suit on. But living in a city with over half a million people confers its own form of invisibility. Provided that Lois stayed away from her apartment, the chance that she would be seen tonight by anyone who knew her was close to zero. And she still had the suit if she felt like using it.

  I halted the car at the next corner and she stepped out, still holding the drab bundle. She gave me a little smile and a wave, and gestured at me to drive on.

  Next morning I was in my sub-basement department exactly on time. I called Lois’s office. She was not there. I kept calling every few minutes.

  She was still not there at midday, or later in the afternoon, or ever again.

  This time there were no telltale ATM withdrawals, no hints that she might still be in the local area. Some time during the night she had been back to Reston, entered the building with its round-the-clock surveillance, and removed her notebooks. In their place sat a single sheet of white cardboard. It bore the words, in Lois’s handwriting, “I know why the caged bird sings.”

  That sheet was discussed in a hundred meetings over the next few weeks. It was subjected to all kinds of chemical and physical analysis, which proved conclusively that it was simple cardboard. No one seemed to know what it meant.

  I know, of course. It is a message from Lois to me, and the words mean, It can be done. There is a way out, even from the deepest dungeon or highest tower.

  I told everything I knew about the invisibility suit. Other staff scientists rushed off excitedly to try to duplicate it. I came back to the Department of Ultimate Storage, to the old routine.

  But there is a difference—two differences. First, I am working harder than ever in my life, and now it is toward a definite goal. Not only is there a way out, but Lois assures me that I can find it; otherwise, she would never have promised a rain check.

  The second difference is in Walker Bryant. He leaves me almost totally free of duties, but he comes frequently down from his office to mine. He says little, but he sits and stares at me as I work. In his eyes I sometimes detect a strange, wistful gleam that I never noticed before. I think he knows that there was more to my meeting with Lois than I have admitted, and I think he even suspects what it may have been.

  I will leave him a message when I go. I don’t know what it will say yet, but it must be something that he can understand and eventually act upon. Even Air Force colonels deserve hope.

  BICYCLE REPAIRMAN

  Bruce Sterling

  Bruce Sterling (born 1954) began his career with the novels Involution Ocean (1977) and The Artificial Kid (1980). In the early eighties he became the center of a literary dust storm by publishing the fanzine Cheap Truth under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas (available on the Web at www.io.com/~ftp/usr/shiva/SMOF-BBS/cheap.truth). The first issue was mainly an attack on fantasy: “As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands.” For four or five issues, Sterling attacked fiction he found irritating and praised a wide variety of books (most issues had a”Cheap Truth Top Ten” list) with descriptions like these: Past Master by R.A. Lafferty—“His most decipherable SF novel”—or A World Out of Time by Larry Niven—“Heartening indication that Niven may escape total artistic collapse.” Eventually, Sterling came round to the rhetoric for which he is most known and Cheap Truth evolved into the propaganda organ for the movement later known as cyberpunk. When laying out Cheap Truth #6, he took a pair of scissors to a photocopy of David Pringle and Colin Greenland’s editorial in Interzone #8 (Summer, 1984), which read:

  Last issue we described Interzone as a magazine of radical science fiction and fantasy. Now we should like to go further and outline (however hazily) a type of story that we want to see much more of in this magazine: the radical, hard SF story. We wish to publish more fiction which takes its inspiration from science, and which uses the language of science in a creative way. It may be fantastic, surrealistic, “illogical,” but in order to be radical hard SF it should explore in some fashion the perspectives opened up by contemporary science and technology. Some would argue that the new electronic gadgetry is displacing the printed word—if so, writers should fight back, using guerrilla tactics as necessary and infiltrating the territory of the enemy.

  At the time, Sterling was one of only a handful of U.S. subscribers to Interzone, and set out to spread this gospel in the U.S. The Cheap Truth #6 editorial, created using rubber cement and Burroughsian cut-up technique, read:

  EDITORIAL. radical, hard SF

  seeing signs that something new is imminent—

  new fiction from the bounty of new technology.

  ///the perspectives opened up by contemporary science fight back, using guerilla

  tactics

  new information systems f/a/s/h/i/o/n that new science fiction

  for the *electronic age*

  Thus, in the U.S. Radical Hard SF was one of the early names for the Movement that editor Gardner Dozois later christened cyberpunk. Later cyberpunk fiction was characterized by a particular attitude, specific literary furniture, and a fetish for new technology but early on—in Sterling’s vision—it had centrally to do with reinventing hard SF. Of those writers identified with early cyberpunk to whom the term stuck, Sterling is the one most interested in science.

  The novel Schismatrix (1985) and the related stories that made him famous were re-released in 1996 as Schismatrix Plus. He collaborated with William Gibson on The Difference Engine (1990), became a media figure who appeared on the cover of Wired, became a journalist who wrote the expose The Hacker Crackdown (1992), and returned to nearly full-time commitment to science fiction in 1995, with a new explosion of stories and novels, including Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), and Distraction (1998). His most recent novel, Zeitgeist (2000), is fantasy.

  This story first appeared in John Kessel and Mark Van Name’s anthology of speculative fiction writing from the Sycamore Hill writers’ workshop, Intersections. It’s a story growing out of the sensibility of cyberpunk, and not without some ironic commentary on cyberpunk along the way. It’s about a messy, high-tech future, gritty and paranoid, lubricated by some of those good old genre juices that have kept science fiction alive and growing in this decade.

  Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.

  Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday’s grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.

  Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he’d collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.

  Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the brok
en atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.

  More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle’s spot-welded door-knocker.

  Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters’ flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.

  Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor Thirty-four. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.

  Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.

  The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid’s cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What’s up, zude?”

  “Hard night, Lyle?”

  “Just real busy.”

  The kid’s nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin’ a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”