The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain, thought, she would fall forever. If that was the case, he had only brought forward her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had inflicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess—even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years …

  “Where are you taking us?” he asked.

  Galiana issued some neural command which made the bullet seem to become transparent.

  “There,” she said.

  Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in, until the object was much clearer.

  Dark—misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.

  “Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”

  “Yes,” Galiana said.

  “But the worms—”

  “Don’t exist anymore.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed … but that was only what we wanted you to think.”

  For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”

  “Ever since the cease-fire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”

  Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device which lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something which had never existed before in the whole of human experience.

  He was looking at a starship.

  “We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try and stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.”

  “What about the Demarchists?”

  “They won’t stop us.” It was said with total assurance—implying, what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumored that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.

  Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”

  “That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny—we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one tenth of a millimeter per second—but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Think about it. The tube in Mars was two thousand kilometers long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over six minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”

  Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”

  “Complete deceleration in one fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”

  “I can’t survive that.”

  “No; you can’t. Not now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be anything they can’t fix in Phobos.”

  “It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”

  “You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”

  “And you still tell me none of this was planned?”

  “No; but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though … you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind … at the back of our mind …”

  “You always hoped it might come to this?”

  Galiana smiled.

  He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.

  Clavain nodded assent, ready for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.

  He was ready to defect.

  A NICHE

  Peter Watts

  Peter Watts (born 1958) lives in Toronto, Ontario, and has contributed his own story note:

  Peter Watts began publishing science fiction with a paper in the Journal of Mammalogy in 1984. He continued to write throughout the eighties, but while his statistical fiction proved successful amongst marine mammalogists, he was unable to sell any stories containing actual characters and plot. During this time he acquired an impressive collection of personalized rejections, notably from Analog, the bastion of hard SF. These letters frequently described Watts’s stories as “awfully negative,” although they encouraged him to persevere in his efforts. Over the years, however, Analog’s rejections became increasingly terse (suggesting that Watts, always one to buck a trend, was actually getting worse with practice). In 1990 he submitted ″A Niche,” an uplifting tale of sexual abuse, deep-sea ecology, and career counseling. He was rewarded by his first-ever form-letter rejection from Analog.

  Realizing that he would never achieve fame or fortune in the U.S. Watts submitted “A Niche” to the less-lucrative Canadian market hoping to at least recoup the cost of his printer ribbon. The story sold immediately, won an Aurora Award, and has been reprinted several times (most notably in Hartwell and Grant’s 1994 Canadian-SF showcase Northern Stars from Tor Books).

  Recognizing a Good Thing when he saw it, Watts immediately padded an additional ninety thousand words onto the narrative and sold Starfish (1999), his first novel, to Tor. Starfish was an unexpected critical and commercial success, netting a “Notable Book of the Year” nod from the New York Times, an honorable mention for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and rejections from both German and Russian publishing houses on the grounds that it was “too dark.” (Being considered too dark for the Russians remains one of Watts’s proudest accomplishments.) Starfish was universally praised for its evocation of the deep-sea environment. The sequel, Maelstrom (2001, Tor), takes place almost entirely on land: It therefore avoids the elements that readers most loved about the first book, replacing them with a sprawling entropic dystopia in which Sylvia Plath might have felt at home, if Sylvia Plath had had a graduate degree in evolutionary biology. Maelstrom may mark the first time that the New York Times used the terms “exhilarating” and “deeply paranoid” to describe the same novel. These novels, despite Watts’s best efforts, have turned into the first two-thirds of a trilogy. Watts is presently working on the final volume, Behemoth, and a first-contact
novel exploring the evolutionary value of sentience. He still hasn’t sold a short story to the American mags; his collected short fiction (originally released in a variety of Canadian publications) is available in Ten Monkeys Ten Minutes, a skimpy trade paperback from Tesseract Books (Edmonton). He continues to live a double life as a biologist (albeit far from a cutting-edge one), and has also dabbled in computer-game script writing. Peter Watts is generally a lot more optimistic than you might expect, considering.

  And in addition to his note, he has provided this statement on hard SF [here lightly condensed]:

  Let’s start by throwing away that hoary old question, what is hard SF? We’ve been around the block a few times; challenged for a definition we need only say, we know it when we see it.

  Ask instead, what is hard science fiction for?

  It′s been said that science fiction exists as an array of possible futures, a Gumpesque box of chocolates from which we can choose our course. This interpretation assumes some baseline level of real-world credibility, of course—if you’re shopping for a real future, you don′t waste time with Unicorn Truffles—so hard SF is often distinguished from its softer, inferior cousins by virtue of adherence to rigorous—or at least, plausible—science.

  Plausible, is it? Okay, then: Goodbye Niven, goodbye Herbert and Vinge. Begone with your genes that code for luck, your spaceships piloted by psychics, and your galactic Slow Zones. Goodbye Brin: A Ph.D. should’ve known better than to resort to ftl. You’re not plausible enough for this sandbox.

  But of course I′m attacking a straw man here—because as we all know, it’s not the math that counts, it’s the attitude. Those guys over there with the elves and the wizards are just a bunch of New Age mystics, glorifying irrationality. They tell us to have faith, to believe in magic. They insist we pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. We, on the other hand, are missionaries of rationalism. We reject pixie-dust outright: We may not have the blueprints for a warp engine handy, but you’d better believe that our future technologies have sprung from the same empirical science that gave us Teflon and chemotherapy. Our tales abide by the spirit of science, if not the letter.

  Ignore for the moment people like Tolkien, who—without even having the password to our secret clubhouse—created perhaps the most rigorously consistent virtual world in English literature. There’s a more serious point at which our arguments start to come off the rails: The science in science fiction may not, when we get right down to it, be all that important after all.

  Science fiction explores the interface between humanity and technological change. That’s what fundamentally defines the genre: Its human face distinguishes it from the technical journals, and its technological side distinguishes it from other kinds of fiction. Yet this balance is profoundly (and necessarily) uneven. Want to explore the societal impact of immortality? It’s a poor writer who’d devote half a novel to telomeres and mitochondrial membranes. Much better to gloss over those details, assume the result, and focus on the human consequences. In other words, there may be little intrinsic correlation between the ″hardness″ of science fiction and its value as an exploratory device.

  So, are the naysayers right after all? Does this whole end of the spectrum amount to an escapist pastime for geeks more interested in toys than people? Is it not about technology at all, but politics? (And are you as sick as I am of the endless debate over whether “The Cold Equations” was a heart-wrenching lesson on the wages of ignorance, or just a chrome-plated misogynist excuse to toss some uppity chick out an airlock?)

  What is hard SF for?

  I can only tell you what is to me, personally: It′s a gauntlet. A self-imposed challenge to Watts the biologist to keep the science plausible, no matter how unimportant that seems in a genre full of humanoid aliens and ftl. A challenge to Watts the writer, to tell a story without breaking the scientist’s rules.

  It′s a bit like rewriting the Old Testament in iambic pentameter. It’s an arbitrary goal, and there are easier ways to get the message across. The constraints chafe: prose would be so much simpler. Even if one succeeds on technical points, the final product can be graceless and ugly: an essay posing as narrative, a killer idea tarted up with paper-thin characters and stuffed to bursting with exposition. We have our share of failures.

  But what if you not only succeed despite those constraints, but actually produce better work because of them? What if the end result, miraculously, doesn’t seem forced and contrived, but soars? Then you’ve wandered onto the battlefield with one hand tied behind your back, and done more than survive. You’ve triumphed.

  That’s why I write hard science fiction. I don′t know how close I’ve come to that goal, but after all I’m just starting out.

  And I′ve got time.

  One could not ask for a more individual take on hard SF. Watts is one of the strongest new hard SF talents of recent years and arrives with years of knowledge and practice, a fully developed SF writer. Note that the central characters of “A Niche” are named Clarke and Ballard.

  When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.

  Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge, and she hears Beebe’s armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.

  How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.

  She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.

  Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you’re three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.

  It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they’ve done to her.

  It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She is so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she is scarcely aware of them any more. So she can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

  Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they’re supposed to increase the apparent size of one’s personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn’t help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.

  She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.

  Ballard stands up. “Ready to go?”

  “You’re in charge,” Clarke says.

  “Only on paper.” Ballard smiles. “As far as I’m concerned, Lenie, we’re equals.” After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn’t always seem real.

  Something hits Beebe from the outside.

  Ballard’s smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station’s titanium skin.

  “It takes a while to get used to,” Ballard says, “doesn’t it?”

  And again.

  “I mean, that sounds big …”

  “Maybe we should turn the lights off,” Clarke suggests. She knows they won’t. Beebe’s exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can’t see it from inside—Beebe has no windows—but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge
of that unseen fire—

  Thud!

  —most of the time.

  “Remember back in training?” Ballard says over the sound. “When they told us that abyssal fish were supposed to be so small … .”

  Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There is no other sound.

  “It must’ve gotten tired,” Ballard says. “You’d think they’d figure it out.” She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.

  Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.

  Better to face it outside, where she knows what’s coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.

  Going outside is like drowning, once a day.

  Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.

  When she catches her breath, and loses it.

  When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.

  It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under, vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.