The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables burned. The smell made me think of cauterization, sealing off a wound.

  I let things run their course, I didn’t touch the controls—but just knowing that I could have changed everything. And I realized then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said: I’m cured now, take the software away, I don’t want the power to choose any more … . I’d never be able to forget where everything I felt had come from.

  My father came to the flat yesterday. we didn’t talk much, but he hasn’t remarried yet, and he made a joke about us going nightclub-hopping together.

  At least I hope it was a joke.

  Watching him, I thought: he’s there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors, human, proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did four thousand more make? Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. I’d just had to face the details a little more starkly.

  And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.

  When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony across the crowded suburb, down towards the Paramatta river, where a storm drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter and garden runoff into the water.

  He asked dubiously, “You happy with this area?”

  I said, “I like it here.”

  GRIFFIN’S EGG

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick (born 1950) is a very serious player of today’s grand game of science fiction. His first two published stories, both appearing in 1980, were “Ginungagap,” which appeared in a special SF issue of the distinguished literary magazine, Triquarterly—the title refers to the primordial chaos out of which the universe was born of Norse mythology, and metaphorically to astrophysics, specifically to a black hole—and “The Feast of St. Janis,” an homage to Gene Wolre, which appeared in New Dimensions 11, edited by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg. His first novel, In the Drift (1984), an alternate history novel in which the Three Mile Island reactor exploded, was one of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials in the same series as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore. Since then he has published his fine novels at a rate of one every three or four years: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Stations of the Tide (1991), a winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), what he called “hard fantasy,” the sharply-satiric Jack Faust (1997), and his new novel, Bones of the Earth (2002), expanded from his Hugo Award-winning story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.”

  His short fiction is collected in Gravity’s Angels (1991), Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000), Tales of Old Earth (2000), and Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary (2000). Swanwick is also the author of two influential critical essays, one on SF, “User’s Guide to the Postmoderns” (1985), and one on fantasy, “In the Tradition …” (1994). He is also the field’s best currently practicing reviewer of short fiction.

  Regarding the changing role of the hard SF writer, he says, “A lot of SF’s world-building of the future was borrowed from people like Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson, hundreds of them, in a very free and generous and allowed borrowing. But now it looks like it is not going to be like that, we’re back to where they were when they were making this stuff up, where the future wasn’t at all obvious or easy to see. They invented a good, hard, convincing future. It’s our job to do it again, and it’s a tough job.”

  He wrote about “Griffin’s Egg” in “Growing Up in the Future,” published in The New York Review of Science Fiction:

  My father was an engineer. He worked for General Electric … . I remember a picture my father brought home from work, an artist’s rendering of a lunar colony based on General Electric technology. It showed stiff, fifties-type people strolling within a domed crater, the sides of which had been contoured in a series of gardened terraces. A quarter century later, I used that image as a starting point for my own lunar colony in a novella called “Griffin’s Egg.” And though I worked some radical changes on that vision, it still had the core power of being a real place that I could believe in existing. It was something I had been promised as a child.

  This story was originally published in the U.K. in 1991 as a stand-alone book, one of the Legend Books series of novellas. Swanwick recalls some things about the hard SF writing process:

  I wrote GE (note the initials) at the tail end of the 1980s. I knew that as soon as I finished it, I would be starting The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and as a result would be away from science fiction for a couple of years. I didn’t want to come back and find myself writing eighties SF in the nineties, so I very deliberately set out to use up all the hard-SF ideation I’d done over the previous decade, but never found a story for. That’s why there’s a solar flare and a nuclear meltdown and a war and so on and so on. The only way to keep ideas from getting stale is to use them while they’re fresh.

  I put in an enormous amount of research that doesn’t show in the story … hours poring over specialized texts, establishing concentrations of elements in the lunar regolith, drawing maps and working out distances between industrial sites, the mechanics of heating and cooling a crater-city … far more than was needed simply to achieve internal consistency. Because in order to write with authority about an extraordinary locale, time, and enterprise none of which exist anywhere save in the story itself I first had to convince myself of their reality.

  The moon? It is a griffin’s egg,

  Hatching to-morrow night.

  And how the little boys will watch

  With shouting and delight

  To see him break the shell and stretch

  And creep across the sky.

  The boys will laugh, The little girls,

  I fear, may hide and cry …

  —Vachel Lindsay

  The sun cleared the mountains. Gunther Weil raised a hand in salute, then winced as the glare hit his eyes in the instant it took his helmet to polarize.

  He was hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee Crater industrial park. The Chatterjee B reactor had gone critical forty hours before dawn, taking fifteen remotes and a microwave relay with it, and putting out a power surge that caused collateral damage to every factory in the park. Fortunately, the occasional meltdown was designed into the system. By the time the sun rose over the Rhaeticus highlands, a new reactor had been built and was ready to go online.

  Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance from Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare Vaporum road. Close by the city, discarded construction machinery and damaged assemblers sat in open-vacuum storage, awaiting possible salvage. Ten kilometers out, a pressurized van had exploded, scattering machine parts and giant worms of insulating foam across the landscape. At twenty-five kilometers, a poorly graded stretch of road had claimed any number of cargo skids and shattered running lights from passing traffic.

  Forty kilometers out, though, the road was clear, a straight, clean gash in the dirt. Ignoring the voices at the back of his skull, the traffic chatter and automated safety messages that the truck routinely fed into his transceiver chip, he scrolled up the topographicals on the dash.

  Right about here.

  Gunther turned off the Mare Vaporum road and began laying tracks over virgin soil. “You’ve left your prescheduled route,” the truck said. “Deviations from schedule may only be made with the recorded permission of your dispatcher.”

  “Yeah, well.” Gunther’s voice seemed loud in his helmet, the only physical sound in a babel of ghosts. He’d left the cabin unpressurized, and the insulated layers of his suit stilled even the conduction rumbling from the treads. “You and I both know that so long as I don’t fall too far behind schedule, Beth Hamilton isn’t going to care if I stra
y a little in between.”

  “You have exceeded this unit’s linguistic capabilities.”

  “That’s okay, don’t let it bother you.” Deftly he tied down the send switch on the truck radio with a twist of wire. The voices in his head abruptly died. He was completely isolated now.

  “You said you wouldn’t do that again.” The words, broadcast directly to his trance chip, sounded as deep and resonant as the voice of God. “Generation Five policy expressly requires that all drivers maintain constant radio—”

  “Don’t whine. It’s unattractive.”

  “You have exceeded this unit’s linguistic—”

  “Oh, shut up.” Gunther ran a finger over the topographical maps, tracing the course he’d plotted the night before: Thirty kilometers over cherry soil, terrain no human or machine had ever crossed before, and then north on Murchison road. With luck he might even manage to be at Chatterjee early.

  He drove into the lunar plain. Rocks sailed by to either side. Ahead, the mountains grew imperceptibly. Save for the treadmarks dwindling behind him, there was nothing from horizon to horizon to show that humanity had ever existed. The silence was perfect.

  Gunther lived for moments like this. Entering that clean, desolate emptiness, he experienced a vast expansion of being, as if everything he saw, stars, plain, craters and all, were encompassed within himself. Bootstrap City was only a fading dream, a distant island on the gently rolling surface of a stone sea. Nobody will ever be first here again, he thought. Only me.

  A memory floated up from his childhood. It was Christmas Eve and he was in his parents’ car, on the way to midnight Mass. Snow was falling, thickly and windlessly, rendering all the familiar roads of Dusseldorf clean and pure under sheets of white. His father drove, and he himself leaned over the front seat to stare ahead in fascination into this peaceful, transformed world. The silence was perfect.

  He felt touched by solitude and made holy.

  The truck plowed through a rainbow of soft grays, submerged hues more hints than colors, as if something bright and festive held itself hidden just beneath a coating of dust. The sun was at his shoulder, and when he spun the front axle to avoid a boulder, the truck’s shadow wheeled and reached for infinity. He drove reflexively, mesmerized by the austere beauty of the passing land.

  At a thought, his peecee put music on his chip. “Stormy Weather” filled the universe.

  He was coming down a long, almost imperceptible slope when the controls went dead in his hands. The truck powered down and coasted to a stop. “Goddamn you, you asshole machine!” he snarled. “What is it this time?”

  “The land ahead is impassable.”

  Gunther slammed a fist on the dash, making the maps dance. The land ahead was smooth and sloping, any unruly tendencies tamed eons ago by the Mare Imbrium explosion. Sissy stuff. He kicked the door open and clambered down.

  The truck had been stopped by a baby rille: a snakelike depression meandering across his intended route, looking for all the world like a dry streambed. He bounded to its edge. It was fifteen meters across, and three meters down at its deepest. Just shallow enough that it wouldn’t show up on the topos. Gunther returned to the cab, slamming the door noiselessly behind him.

  “Look. The sides aren’t very steep. I’ve been down worse a hundred times. We’ll just take it slow and easy, okay?”

  “The land ahead is impassable,” the truck said. “Please return to the originally scheduled course.”

  Wagner was on now. Tannhäuser. Impatiently, he thought it off.

  “If you’re so damned heuristic, then why won’t you ever listen to reason?” He chewed his lip angrily, gave a quick shake of his head. “No, going back would put us way off schedule. The rille is bound to peter out in a few hundred meters. Let’s just follow it until it does, then angle back to Murchison. We’ll be at the park in no time.”

  Three hours later he finally hit the Murchison road. By then he was sweaty and smelly and his shoulders ached with tension. “Where are we?” he asked sourly. Then, before the truck could answer, “Cancel that.” The soil had turned suddenly black. That would be the ejecta fantail from the Sony-Reinpfaltz mine. Their railgun was oriented almost due south in order to avoid the client factories, and so their tailings hit the road first. That meant he was getting close.

  Murchison was little more than a confluence of truck treads, a dirt track crudely leveled and marked by blazes of orange paint on nearby boulders. In quick order Gunther passed through a series of landmarks: Harada Industrial fantail, Sea of Storms Macrofacturing fantail, Krupp funfzig fantail. He knew them all. G5 did the robotics for the lot.

  A light flatbed carrying a shipped bulldozer sped past him, kicking up a spray of dust that fell as fast as pebbles. The remote driving it waved a spindly arm in greeting. He waved back automatically, and wondered if it was anybody he knew.

  The land hereabouts was hacked and gouged, dirt and boulders shoved into careless heaps and hills, the occasional tool station or Oxytank Emergency Storage Platform chopped into a nearby bluff. A sign floated by: TOILET FLUSHING FACILITIES 1/2 KILOMETER. He made a face. Then he remembered that his radio was still off and slipped the loop of wire from it. Time to rejoin the real world. Immediately his dispatcher’s voice, harsh and staticky, was relayed to his trance chip.

  “—ofabitch! Weil! Where the fuck are you?”

  “I’m right here, Beth. A little late, but right where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Sonofa—” The recording shut off, and Hamilton’s voice came on, live and mean. “You’d better have a real good explanation for this one, honey.”

  “Oh, you know how it is.” Gunther looked away from the road, off into the dusty jade highlands. He’d like to climb up into them and never come back. Perhaps he would find caves. Perhaps there were monsters: vacuum trolls and moondragons with metabolisms slow and patient, taking centuries to move one body’s-length, hyperdense beings that could swim through stone as if it were water. He pictured them diving, following lines of magnetic force deep, deep into veins of diamond and plutonium, heads back and singing. “I picked up a hitchhiker, and we kind of got involved.”

  “Try telling that to E. Izmailova. She’s mad as hornets at you.”

  “Who?”

  “Izmailova. She’s the new demolitions jock, shipped up here on a multicorporate contract. Took a hopper in almost four hours ago, and she’s been waiting for you and Siegfried ever since. I take it you’ve never met her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I have, and you’d better watch your step with her. She’s exactly the kind of tough broad who won’t be amused by your antics.”

  “Aw, come on, she’s just another tech on a retainer, right? Not in my line of command. It’s not like she can do anything to me.”

  “Dream on, babe. It wouldn’t take much pull to get a fuckup like you sent down to Earth.”

  The sun was only a finger’s breadth over the highlands by the time Chatterjee A loomed into sight. Gunther glanced at it every now and then, apprehensively. With his visor adjusted to the H-alpha wavelength, it was a blazing white sphere covered with slowly churning black specks: More granular than usual. Sunspot activity seemed high. He wondered that the Radiation Forecast Facility hadn’t posted a surface advisory. The guys at the Observatory were usually right on top of things.

  Chatterjee A, B, and C were a triad of simple craters just below Chladni, and while the smaller two were of minimal interest, Chatterjee A was the child of a meteor that had punched through the Imbrian basalts to as sweet a vein of aluminum ore as anything in the highlands. Being so convenient to Bootstrap made it one of management’s darlings, and Gunther was not surprised to see that Kerr-McGee was going all out to get their reactor online again.

  The park was crawling with walkers, stalkers, and assemblers. They were all over the blister-domed factories, the smelteries, loading docks, and vacuum garages. Constellations of blue sparks winked on and off as major industrial constructs w
ere dismantled. Fleets of heavily loaded trucks fanned out into the lunar plain, churning up the dirt behind them. Fats Waller started to sing “The Joint is Jumping” and Gunther laughed.

  He slowed to a crawl, swung wide to avoid a gas-plater that was being wrangled onto a loader, and cut up the Chatterjee B ramp road. A new landing pad had been blasted from the rock just below the lip, and a cluster of people stood about a hopper resting there. One human and eight remotes.

  One of the remotes was speaking, making choppy little gestures with its arms. Several stood inert, identical as so many antique telephones, unclaimed by Earth-side management but available should more advisors need to be called online.

  Gunther unstrapped Siegfried from the roof of the cab and, control pad in one hand and cable spool in the other, walked him toward the hopper.

  The human strode out to meet him. “You! What kept you?” E. Izmailova wore a jazzy red-and-orange Studio Volga boutique suit, in sharp contrast to his own company-issue suit with the G5 logo on the chest. He could not make out her face through the gold visor glass. But he could hear it in her voice: blazing eyes, thin lips.

  “I had a flat tire.” He found a good smooth chunk of rock and set down the cable spool, wriggling it to make sure it sat flush. “We got maybe five hundred yards of shielded cable. That enough for you?”

  A short, tense nod.

  “Okay.” He unholstered his bolt gun. “Stand back.” Kneeling, he anchored the spool to the rock. Then he ran a quick check of the unit’s functions: “Do we know what it’s like in there?”