The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Izmailova, listen,” Krishna said.

  “I am listening. Talk.”

  Krishna explained, while Izmailova listened with arms folded and shoulders tilted skeptically. When he was done, she shook her head. “It’s a noble folly, but folly is all it is. You want to reshape our minds into something alien to the course of human evolution. To turn the seat of thought into a jet pilot’s couch. This is your idea of a solution? Forget it. Once this particular box is opened, there’ll be no putting its contents back in again. And you haven’t advanced any convincing arguments for opening it.”

  “But the people in Bootstrap!” Gunther objected. “They—”

  She cut him off. “Gunther, nobody likes what’s happened to them. But if the rest of us must give up our humanity to pay for a speculative and ethically dubious rehabilitation … well, the price is simply too high. Mad or not, they’re at least human now.”

  “Am I inhuman?” Krishna asked. “If you tickle me, do I not laugh?”

  “You’re in no position to judge. You’ve rewired your neurons and you’re stoned on the novelty. What tests have you run on yourself? How thoroughly have you mapped out your deviations from human norms? Where are your figures?” These were purely rhetorical questions; the kind of analyses she meant took weeks to run. “Even if you check out completely human—and I don’t concede you will!—who’s to say what the long-range consequences are? What’s to stop us from drifting, step by incremental step, into madness? Who decides what madness is? Who programs the programmers? No, this is impossible. I won’t gamble with our minds.” Defensively, almost angrily, she repeated, “I won’t gamble with our minds.”

  “Ekatarina,” Gunther said gently, “how long have you been up? Listen to yourself. The wire is doing your thinking for you.”

  She waved a hand dismissively, without responding.

  “Just as a practical matter,” Hamilton said, “how do you expect to run Bootstrap without it? The setup is turning us all into baby fascists. You say you’re worried about madness—what will we be like a year from now?”

  “The CMP assures me—”

  “The CMP is only a program!” Hamilton cried. “No matter how much interactivity it has, it’s not flexible. It has no hope. It cannot judge a new thing. It can only enforce old decisions, old values, old habits, old fears.”

  Abruptly Ekatarina snapped. “Get out of my face!” she screamed. “Stop it, stop it, stop it! I won’t listen to any more.”

  “Ekatarina—” Gunther began.

  But her hand had tightened on the cannister. Her knees bent as she began a slow genuflection to the kiln. Gunther could see that she had stopped listening. Drugs and responsibility had done this to her, speeding her up and bewildering her with conflicting demands, until she stood trembling on the brink of collapse. A good night’s sleep might have restored her, made her capable of being reasoned with. But there was no time. Words would not stop her now. And she was too far distant for him to reach before she destroyed the engines. In that instant he felt such a strong outwelling of emotion toward her as would be impossible to describe.

  “Ekatarina,” he said. “I love you.”

  She half-turned her head toward him and in a distracted, somewhat irritated tone said, “What are you—”

  He lifted the bolt gun from his work harness, leveled it, and fired.

  Ekatarina’s helmet shattered.

  She fell.

  “I should have shot to just breach the helmet. That would have stopped her. But I didn’t think I was a good enough shot. I aimed right for the center of her head.”

  “Hush,” Hamilton said. “You did what you had to. Stop tormenting yourself. Talk about more practical things.”

  He shook his head, still groggy. For the longest time, he had been kept on beta endorphins, unable to feel a thing, unable to care. It was like being swathed in cotton batting. Nothing could reach him. Nothing could hurt him. “How long have I been out of it?”

  “A day.”

  “A day!” He looked about the austere room. Bland rock walls and laboratory equipment with smooth, noncommital surfaces. To the far end, Krishna and Chang were hunched over a swipeboard, arguing happily and impatiently overwriting each other’s scrawls. A Swiss spacejack came in and spoke to their backs. Krishna nodded distractedly, not looking up. “I thought it was much longer.”

  “Long enough. We’ve already salvaged everyone connected with Sally Chang’s group, and gotten a good start on the rest. Pretty soon it will be time to decide how you want yourself rewritten.”

  He shook his head, feeling dead. “I don’t think I’ll bother, Beth. I just don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “We’ll give you the stomach.”

  “Naw, I don’t …” He felt a black nausea come welling up again. It was cyclic; it returned every time he was beginning to think he’d finally put it down. “I don’t want the fact that I killed Ekatarina washed away in a warm flood of self-satisfaction. The idea disgusts me.”

  “We don’t want that either.” Posner led a delegation of seven into the lab. Krishna and Chang rose to face them, and the group broke into swirling halves. “There’s been enough of that. It’s time we all started taking responsibility for the consequences of—” Everyone was talking at once. Hamilton made a face.

  “Started taking responsibility for—”

  Voices rose.

  “We can’t talk here,” she said. “Take me out on the surface.”

  They drove with the cabin pressurized, due west on the Seething Bay road. Ahead, . the sun was almost touching the weary walls of Sömmering crater. Shadow crept down from the mountains and cratertops, yearning toward the radiantly lit Sinus Medii. Gunther found it achingly beautiful. He did not want to respond to it, but the harsh lines echoed the lonely hurt within him in a way that he found oddly comforting.

  Hamilton touched her peecee. “Putting On the Ritz” filled their heads.

  “What if Ekatarina was right?” he said sadly. “What if we’re giving up everything that makes us human? The prospect of being turned into some kind of big-domed emotionless superman doesn’t appeal to me much.”

  Hamilton shook her head. “I asked Krishna about that, and he said no. He said it was like … were you ever nearsighted?”

  “Sure, as a kid.”

  “Then you’ll understand. He said it was like the first time you came out of the doctor’s office after being lased. How everything seemed clear and vivid and distinct. What had once been a blur that you called ‘tree’ resolved itself into a thousand individual and distinct leaves. The world was filled with unexpected detail. There were things on the horizon that you’d never seen before. Like that.”

  “Oh.” He stared ahead. The disk of the sun was almost touching Sömmering. “There’s no point in going any farther.”

  He powered down the truck.

  Beth Hamilton looked uncomfortable. She cleared her throat and with brusque energy said, “Gunther, look. I had you bring me out here for a reason. I want to propose a merger of resources.”

  “A what?”

  “Marriage.”

  It took Gunther a second to absorb what she had said. “Aw, no … I don’t …”

  “I’m serious. Gunther, I know you think I’ve been hard on you, but that’s only because I saw a lot of potential in you, and that you were doing nothing with it. Well, things have changed. Give me a say in your rewrite, and I’ll do the same for you.”

  He shook his head. “This is just too weird for me.”

  “It’s too late to use that as an excuse. Ekatarina was right—we’re sitting on top of something very dangerous, the most dangerous opportunity humanity faces today. It’s out of the bag, though. Word has gotten out. Earth is horrified and fascinated. They’ll be watching us. Briefly, very briefly, we can control this thing. We can help to shape it now, while it’s small. Five years from now, it will be out of our hands.

  “You have a good mind, Gunther, and it’s about to
get better. I think we agree on what kind of a world we want to make. I want you on my side.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You want true love? You got it. We can make the sex as sweet or nasty as you like. Nothing easier. You want me quieter, louder, gentler, more assured? We can negotiate. Let’s see if we can come to terms.”

  He said nothing.

  Hamilton eased back in the seat. After a time, she said, “You know? I’ve never watched a lunar sunset before. I don’t get out on the surface much.”

  “We’ll have to change that,” Gunther said.

  Hamilton stared hard into his face. Then she smiled. She wriggled closer to him. Clumsily, he put an arm over her shoulder. It seemed to be what was expected of him. He coughed into his hand, then pointed a finger. “There it goes.”

  Lunar sunset was a simple thing. The crater wall touched the bottom of the solar disk. Shadows leaped from the slopes and raced across the lowlands. Soon half the sun was gone. Smoothly, without distortion, it dwindled. A last brilliant sliver of light burned atop the rock, then ceased to be. In the instant before the windshield adjusted and the stars appeared, the universe filled with darkness.

  The air in the cab cooled. The panels snapped and popped with the sudden shift in temperature.

  Now Hamilton was nuzzling the side of his neck. Her skin was slightly tacky to the touch, and exuded a faint but distinct odor. She ran her tongue up the line of his chin and poked it in his ear. Her hand fumbled with the latches of his suit.

  Gunther experienced no arousal at all, only a mild distaste that bordered on disgust. This was horrible, a defilement of all he had felt for Ekatarina.

  But it was a chore he had to get through. Hamilton was right. All his life his hindbrain had been in control, driving him with emotions chemically derived and randomly applied. He had been lashed to the steed of consciousness and forced to ride it wherever it went, and that nightmare gallop had brought him only pain and confusion. Now that he had control of the reins, he could make this horse go where he wanted.

  He was not sure what he would demand from his reprogramming. Contentment, perhaps. Sex and passion, almost certainly. But not love. He was done with the romantic illusion. It was time to grow up.

  He squeezed Beth’s shoulder. One more day, he thought, and it won’t matter. I’ll feel whatever is best for me to feel. Beth raised her mouth to his. Her lips parted. He could smell her breath.

  They kissed.

  GREAT WALL OF MARS

  Alastair Reynolds

  Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) was born in Barry, South Wales, raised in Cornwall, educated in Newcastle and St. Andrews, Scotland, and now lives in Holland. He holds a Ph.D. in astronomy and works for the European Space Agency. He is one of the British space opera writers to emerge in the mid- and late 1990s, and the most hard SF of them. To date his stories have been published almost exclusively in Interzone and in Spectrum SF, the ambitious new SF magazine from Scotland. His first novel was Revelation Space (2000) and his second, Chasm City was published in 2001. His new novel, Redemption Ark, was published in the U.K. in 2002.

  Reynolds provides a log of notes on his stories and comments on hard SF on his Web site, members.tripod.com/~voxish/sf~_hard~_intro.html.

  First we quote from “On Hard SF” by Alastair Reynolds:

  … the term [hard SF] is ugly and misleading, but it seems we’re stuck with it. It doesn′t mean that hard SF is any more demanding on the reader than the rest of the genre, nor is it any more radical in outlook (although there is such a beast as Radical Hard SF). Actually, far too much of what passes for hard SF is pretty limp and unimaginative stuff; tired re-hashings of ideas which might have been new and shiny in Heinlein’s day, but which now read as being deeply rooted in established conventions of the genre, and politically conservative to boot.

  … and it’s probably not too far from the truth to say that hard SF is that branch of SF in which the writer goes to some trouble to ensure that the events in the tale could, plausibly, happen in the universe as we know it. Hard SF—which as a subgenre is almost as old as SF itself—has very frequently tended to be set in the future (although there are some excellent exceptions) and there has been a strong tendency for it to be set in locales other than our own planet, a trend which continues to date and is a direct consequence of the types of story which predominate in hard SF.

  What exactly do I mean when I say hard SF aims at plausibility? By this I mean that good hard SF stories should try to not contain glaring errors of fact, and by fact I mean the kind of detail which is easily checked using standard reference material—popular science books, for instance. Take the case of the atmosphere of an alien planet, for instance. Current thinking is that a breathable atmosphere simply can’t exist in the absence of life, which would mean that a desert planet could not sustain explorers unless they brought air with them. These days, however, most self-respecting SF writers who set their stories in exotic venues are aware of the more obvious pitfalls, and if they feel the need to have their characters travel around in faster-than-light spaceships, it’s generally taken for granted that this is an acceptable violation of the laws of physics for plot purposes, and not evidence of the author’s ignorance of special relativity … .

  At the other extreme of the hard SF spectrum, the science is strongly foregrounded, to the extent that the stories can sometimes seem little more than physics problems fleshed out with characters, and in which the reader may be required to get their head round sometimes difficult new concepts. Perhaps the best current exponent of this “ultra-hard” SF is Greg Egan, whose stories … can be as intellectually challenging as a review article in Nature, and sometimes require about the same level of attention from the reader … . Other writers who also specialize in genuinely far-out hard SF include Gregory Benford and Geoffrey Landis.

  Somewhere in the middle, forming a spectrum, is the bulk of what we think of as hard SF. There are writers like scientist David Brin who will cheerfully trash the laws of physics in the interests of plot and exuberance (see, for instance, Startide Rising), but who embeds genuine scientific puzzles (often of an ecological nature) into his tales. And there are writers like Greg Bear, who had no formal scientific education, yet whose work is as convincing in detail and grand vision as any of the scientist-writers of his generation and which occasionally reaches the extremes of hardness typified by Egan and a few others.

  And in reference to the context of “Great Wall of Mars”:

  “Galactic North” appeared in Interzone 145, July 1999. It started out as an idea I’d had a few years earlier, which was to do a story in the same vein as a few others that are particular favorites of mine: Larry Niven’s “The Ethics of Madness,” Joe Haldeman’s “Tricentennial,” Gregory Benford’s “Relativistic Effects” and Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero. In all of these space-based stories, the action jumps forward by ever-increasing chunks of time, leading to a dizzying sense of dislocation and sense of wonder as the centuries slam by. (Three later stories which achieve a similar effect, and which I read while writing this one, are Stephen Baxter’s dazzling “Pilot” (part of his Xeelee sequence), Robert Reed’s “Marrow” (which has now been expanded into a novel) and Ian McDonald’s “The Days of Solomon Gursky.”)

  “Great Wall of Mars” appeared in Spectrum SF 1, February 2000. I started this one in 1999, almost immediately after completing “Galactic North,” and it’s another story set in the same future history. This time it’s a more claustrophobic, relatively near-future story about a military standoff on Mars between augmented and non-augmented human factions. It was with this story that I decided to start making a conscious effort to simplify my storylines (some of them had got a bit too complex for their own good) and thereby free up space for some—ahem—character development.

  You realize you might die down there,” said Warren.

  Nevil Clavain looked into his brother’s one good eye; the one the Conjoiners had left him with after
the battle of Tharsis Bulge. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But if there’s another war, we might all die. I’d rather take that risk, if there’s a chance for peace.”

  Warren shook his head, slowly and patiently. “No matter how many times we’ve been over this, you just don’t seem to get it, do you? There can’t ever be any kind of peace while they’re still down there. That’s what you don’t understand, Nevil. The only long-term solution here is …” he trailed off.

  “Go on,” Clavain goaded. “Say it. Genocide.”

  Warren might have been about to answer when there was a bustle of activity down the docking tube, at the far end from the waiting spacecraft. Through the door Clavain saw a throng of media people, then someone gliding through them, fielding questions with only the curtest of answers. That was Sandra Voi, the Demarchist woman who would be coming with him to Mars.

  “It’s not genocide when they’re just a faction, not an ethnically distinct race,” Warren said, before Voi was within earshot.

  “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. Prudence?”

  Voi approached. She bore herself stiffly, her face a mask of quiet resignation. Her ship had only just docked from Circum-Jove, after a three-week transit at maximum burn. During that time the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the current crisis had steadily deteriorated.

  “Welcome to Deimos,” Warren said.

  “Marshalls,” she said, addressing both of them. “I wish the circumstances were better. Let’s get straight to business. Warren; how long do you think we have to find a solution?”

  “Not long. If Galiana maintains the pattern she’s been following for the last six months, we’re due another escape attempt in …” Warren glanced at a readout buried in his cuff. “About three days. If she does try and get another shuttle off Mars, we’ll really have no option but to escalate.”