Whither The Hard Stuff?

By now, surely every reader of this column and most people at all interested in the “genre”  know that prose science fiction as opposed to “SF” is in dire straits. It’s being squeezed from one side by the abundance of films, TV shows, video games, and so forth purveying its tropes, images, and thematic material to wider audiences than any book is likely to reach, and on the other by the former fantasy tail that has long since come to wag the “SF” genre publishing dog.

Writers of science fiction in general who have no real interest in switching to fantasy are struggling to survive as fantasy dominates the lists of SF publishers, the SF racks in the stores, and sales. Those publishers who care are struggling to keep it alive by trying to locate and reach or create a readership to replace aging diehard fans and kids who read less and less of anything at all in order to keep it commercially viable.

Thus far the results are not in, an optimist might say, because the packaging, marketing, and publicity modalities have not yet been discovered, or if they have, not yet employed. For after all, the turning to the writing of science fiction by so-called “mainstream writers” with at least commercial success would seem to indicate that the demographics are there, especially since much of their stuff, while perhaps better written than most of what “science fiction writers” turn out, is pretty pallid and primitive by thematic, extrapolative, speculative, and scientifically knowledgeable standards.

But what of “hard science fiction”? The truth is that hard science fiction has just about always been a minority taste even among science fiction readers. Others have had and may still have more stringent definitions than I, involving a certain snobbishness by devotees of the “hard” physical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and astronomy directed against such “soft” sciences as biology, psychology, and ecology, but I prefer a more inclusive definition.

As far as I’m concerned, hard science fiction has a primary restrictive definition and a secondary prescriptive definition.

Restrictively, hard science fiction must take care not to violate the currently known laws of mass-energy; if it doesn’t, it’s not hard science fiction.

Prescriptively, it should be fiction in which technological change, or a scientific or technological question or speculation is central or at least important to the thematic point, the dramatic thrust, the action of the story, the personal lives of its characters, and ideally all of them.

I think that’s a pretty inclusive definition of the literary sub-genre. But just how wide and numerous is even the current maximum potential readership that might want to read such stuff and enjoy it if it did?

Think about it. Those with no interest in science and technology per se, or even the impact of science and technology on culture and consciousness, are not about to be interested in reading hard science fiction or enjoy it if they happen upon it by accident, and the scientifically illiterate aren’t even going to be able to understand it.

In a society where the distinction between astronomy and astrology is probably blurry in more minds than not, where more people give credence to the existence of angels than to the evolutionary process, where very few viewers see anything wrong in spacecraft executing banking turns in a vacuum, where school systems and textbook publishers find themselves forced to give equal time to “creationism,” and where the teaching of science in primary and secondary schools is itself in steep decline, surely the potential readership for hard science fiction must be dwindling even faster than that for science fiction in general.

So can “hard science fiction” survive? And if so, what does it have to become in order to survive? Does its survival really matter to anyone but a dwindling coterie of hardcore devotees? And just what do we now mean by hard SF? Has it mutated? Is this a good thing or a bad thing, or both?

It must be not so much a hard science fiction novel as something else that also satisfies the parameters of hard science fiction. Horizons does this successfully, at least in literary terms, by being a political thriller, a spy novel of sorts, and one with characterological and moral depths, even a business novel in a way, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

The novel is set in a future where there are still nations and plenty of national chauvinism and racism, but kept more or less in check and overseen by a World Council with far bigger teeth than the present United Nations. There are several habitat stations, or Platforms as they are called in Horizons, politically semi-autonomous up to a certain point, in thrall to Earthside governments or corporate interests beyond it, or to what amount to tongs of a sort. For this is a future in which East Asia in general and greater China in particular are not only in the ascendancy but have gone somewhat economically, politically, and culturally retro.

The main protagonist, Ahni Huang, is both a scion (scioness?) of one of the most powerful of these neo-tongs and an experienced operative loaded with various nano-enhancements, a natural choice therefore to be sent by her father to the Platform where her brother was murdered, find out who dunnit and why, and take the appropriate vengeance.

There she falls in with and eventually in love with Dane, master of the zero-g hydroponic farmstead, secretly sheltering a clan of the beings? people? mutants? humans? adapted to life without gravity.

Which of the above they really are—or, more to the point, as which of the above will baseline humans treat them—is the core of a story with complex machinations by a complex cast of well-rendered characters, a revolutionary independence movement by the citizens of the Platforms, considerable equally well-rendered action hugger-mugger, and a difficult moral question that Mary Rosenblum may answer to her own satisfaction, and that of more readers than not—myself included—but probably not everyone.

Whether these descendants of baseline humans have adapted to permanent life in zero gravity by genetic mutation or adaptive alternate phenotype expression ends up being emotionally irrelevant. For one way or the other, they are better adapted to life beyond the planetary surface, and therefore they are either the future of space-going homo sapiens or our successor species. Rosenblum leads the reader to the politically correct emotional response of acceptance, but one wonders whether homo erectus or neanderthalus would have felt particularly welcoming of the advent of homo sapiens if they understood we would succeed them.

Horizons, then is a successful example, at least in literary terms, of how old-fashioned hard science fiction must adapt to the current environment if it is to escape the tar pits to live long and prosper. Fortunately this evolution seems not to be particularly threatening to the previous literary phenotype thereof. For what we have here is a novel that fulfills the positive prescriptions for true hard science fiction while becoming something more that it must evolve into in order to survive commercially.

Hard science fiction plus.

Plus what doesn’t really matter.

In Horizons, Mary Rosenblum adds a complex thriller-type political plot, a revolution, a family feud of sorts, a love story of sorts, and so forth, to a thematic core that probably would have sold a novelette to John W. Campbell. He might not have agreed with Rosenblum’s thematic conclusion, but he certainly would have enjoyed arguing about it, as would his readers.

But this is not the Golden Age of Astounding, or even the Space Age of Analog. And like it or not—and given what it says about the declining state of interest in and understanding of scientific matters and the true moral questions they raise, I certainly do not—enthusiastic readers for hard science fiction without a plus have themselves become an endangered species. It’s an open question whether there are still enough of them around for such stuff to remain commercially publishable.

I do not really count myself a passionate and adamant defender of pur sang hard science fiction. But I certainly know that even such science fiction without additional crowd-pleasing elements can be literarily serious, well-written, exciting, and enjoyable to those intellectually equipped to enjoy it and with the inclination to do so, even if only occasionally.

An elite literature for an elite readership.

Politically incorrect or not, there, I’ve said it, and like it or not, it’s become true.

Yet I would contend that not only does such a literature deserve to survive, but if it is in the process of becoming commercially unpublishable in this culture, it’s a very ominous sign for a lot more than science fiction publishing. It casts doubt on the continuation of the upwardly evolving scientific and technological dynamic that has kept so-called “Western Civilization” from ossifying like most every other civilization that has arisen on this planet.

BLINDSIGHT
by Peter Watts
Tor, $25.95
ISBN: 0765312182

Certainly at the very least something of real intellectual and literary value would be lost if there were not enough potential readers around to make something like Peter Watts’ Blindsight publishable, and therefore in the end writeable. And what such a loss would indicate about the state of the cultural union would be much, much worse.

In Blindsight, the mysterious appearance and then disappearance of a multitude of fiery objects in the skies of a future Earth, followed by the detection by an AI probe of a large alien artifact out beyond Pluto, causes the powers-that-be to send a manned mission out there to find out what’s what and take appropriate destructive action should it prove prudently necessary.

It’s a long way, a voyage of years, and what is sent is a small crew in suspended animation. A military type. A single human body containing deliberately created multiple personalities to serve as a linguist and cultural anthropologist, among other things. A cyborgly enhanced biologist. For a dictatorial team leader whose will must be obeyed, a vampire, whose genotype was resurrected from extinction by “paleogenetics.”

And Siri Keeton, a man half of whose brain has been removed and replaced by circuitry for medical reasons, who is the novel’s first person narrator, and whose role in the mission is to be just that for the leadership back on Earth—a supposedly neutral and detached observer sending back straight reportage of a strange kind, a kind of scientific interpreter who supposedly doesn’t exactly have to understand what he’s interpreting.

That’s the set-up, and the rest of the novel consists of this team’s confrontation with the alien object they find and its creators and denizens. A classic first contact novel. And certainly meant as hard science fiction by the author, since Watts, at least by his own lights, and quite convincingly by mine, has worked all this out with such scientific rigor, or at least speculative scientific rigor, that he appends seventeen pages of “notes and references” to the novel almost as if it were being submitted to a scientific journal. It can’t get much more hard science fiction than that.

Siri Keeton’s voice, which Watts adopts for his narration—which is to say this narrator’s consciousness—is sophisticated, ironic, and interestingly alien in and of itself. The backstory of a failed love affair that he tells is illuminating, the interactions of this strange crew with its enigmatic vampire captain are fraught with tension, its other group dynamics are well-rendered, and there’s plenty of physical action when they reach the alien artifact.

But the dramatic core of Blindsight, the plot-engine, remains a series of scientific questions, speculations, and discoveries. First concern- ing the physical nature of the huge habitat they discover, then the problem of penetrating it, followed by their encounters and conflicts with the lifeforms within it, the explication of their truly weird biology, and finally the revelation of just how alien these creatures and their “civilization” really are on a level more profound than that of any other fictional aliens I, at least, have ever encountered.

Since this revelation is the thematic and dramatic climax of the novel, I will try not to reveal too much here, except to say that it delves very deeply indeed into the differences among intelligence, sentience, and consciousness, which of them is evolutionarily necessary for the arising of what, and that Watts’ science fictional answers are so fascinatingly counter-intuitive that he seeks to justify them in “notes and references” as a scientist even though he does a fine job of it as a fiction writer in the body of the novel.

Clearly, then, Peter Watts’ all-but declared literary ambition is to be a first class hard science fiction writer on the sophisticated literary level of Gregory Benford or Arthur C. Clarke. And with Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth, and now Blindsight, he demonstrates that he can achieve it.

But whether he or anyone else can build a commercially viable career on novels in which, however well-written and characterologically interesting, the speculative science is not only front and center, but provides the dramatic and thematic capper, is more questionable.

I consider myself a fairly scientifically sophisticated reader, and I found Blindsight challenging on that level. Challenging, but, in the end, fascinating and rewarding. The question is whether there are enough readers left out there who find that sort of experience actually enjoyable to continue to keep such fiction commercially publishable.

On the other hand, there do seem to be two species of hard science fiction arising that are actually trendy—that is, if you consider nanotechnology and the virtual realities created in the cybersphere actual science. I’ve said that I prefer an inclusive definition of hard science fiction, so I suppose that I do, but with caveats.

My definition of hard SF requires that it not violate the known laws of mass and energy, and there I have some problems with some of the literary uses to which the concept of “nanotechnology” has been put.

Sure, you can create tiny little machines, but when you get them down to the molecular level, with their manipulators on the atomic level, how do they manipulate individual atoms without running afoul of quantum effects? And how can you possibly coordinate zillions of them to produce the sort of magic goo that can turn shit into shinola and dirt into spaceships? Where can there be sufficient data storage in the individual molecular-scale units to store the instructions to coordinate them?

I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible. I think this sort of nanotech is the literary equivalent of a magic wand. Literarily acceptable and quite useful, but hard science it ain’t.

But when it comes to virtual realities, one cannot argue that they have even the potential for violating the laws of mass and energy, since their existence is by definition virtual—that is, outside the “real world,” the physical universe in which such laws apply. And the fictional technology that creates them is already almost here in primitive form, lacking only the development of means of inputting full artificial sensory data—smell, feel, taste, kinesthetics, as well as sight and sound—directly into the relevant brain centers. And, indeed, this sort of thing has already been demonstrated on an experimental level.

However, there’s something a little fishy about the way virtual realities are so often used on a literary level. Writing about them, about their effects on consciousness and culture, is one thing, and can even be the material for hard science fiction. But setting a story entirely or almost entirely within virtual reality without dealing in a consequential way with the dichotomy between virtual existence and corporeal existence is really just using it as a frame for fantasy, a doorway into anything.

Not that there’s anything literarily wrong with fantasy or surrealism, far from it. But what’s the point in tarting it up as “science fiction,” let alone “hard science fiction”?

INFOQUAKE
by David Louis Edelman
Pyr, $15.00
ISBN: 1591024420

Case in point: Spears of God by Howard V. Hendrix. The publisher bills this novel as a near-future thriller. And that is indeed what it is, and an exceedingly complex one, so complex that on a spy-versus-spy level it is almost impossible to summarize, which is not necessarily a flaw in this sort of thing.

But thriller or not, it is also unequivocally a science fiction novel, with a scientific discipline and conundrum being the central McGuffin of the whole complex story. The science here is meteoritics. This is a branch not of astronomy but of geology—the study not quite that of meteors, but of meteorites, the rocks themselves after they have fallen to Earth. And science can’t get any harder than that.

Right?

Well, in Spears of God, yes and no.

Hendrix goes to literally enormous length and almost literally exhaustive detail to, uh, ground this novel in the mineralogy of meteorites. Readers of this novel will learn more about the physical nature of the variations of meteorites not only than they wanted to know but—in my case, at least—than they thought was to be known. It’s complete, it’s impressive, and it seems obsessive to the point of becoming mind-numbing.

But while Spears of God is about meteorites, the mineralogy of meteorites, though it may take up thousands of words, is not at all what the novel is really about.

In this near-future world—and the action takes place in the United States, Arabia, South America—various agencies are collecting meteorites, and not always by legal or moral means. Why? That is the mystery that runs the plot engine of at least the first half of the book.

Two meteoriticists and sometime lovers in the process of searching for a special meteorite sacred to a perhaps legendary tribe atop an isolated mesa in South America find that it has been snatched by an act of genocide. They rescue four young survivors with arcane psychic powers linked to a fungus linked to the meteorite.

A general running a project to create enhanced supersoldiers is after them, the meteorite, and the fungus. There’s the ex-lover of the male member of the couple that found the children involved. A man crazed by the death of his daughter at the hands of terrorists in Israel. The head of the National Security Agency. A bewilderingly complex cast of characters.

It takes almost as long for the speculative threads underlying the plot to weave together. This is not necessarily a bad thing in a post-modern hard science fiction novel whose additional “plus” is such a thriller plot and structure, if they interweave and finally come together in the manner of a musical fugue. Structurally, Hendrix more or less pulls it off here; you learn enough of what this is more or less all about to more or less keep your interest in the multiple storylines going until they come together. And the plot lines have enough internal interest to keep you plowing through the heavy doses of scientific explication.The plot is all over the place, or rather the multiple plot lines, meaning both the planet and the Byzantine machinations that take an overlong time to converge. It takes maybe three quarters of the book for it all to begin to coalesce into a climax that brings it all together in an attempt by one of the several conflicting sides to steal the black meteorite embedded in the Ka’aba in Mecca and another to destroy the Ka’aba in order to provoke a nuclear war. . . .

If that is what it really is.

Hendrix clearly knows his meteorites on a technical scientific level, and inflicts overlarge and overabundant expository lumps on the reader to demonstrate it. At first this seems like simply a hard science fiction writer too in love with his own scientific erudition—and indeed, maybe it is that, too. Hendrix also seems to know a lot about brain chemistry, fungal botany, and psychopharmacology, and lays all that on with a bit too heavy-handed a trowel, too. I happen to be not entirely unversed in these subjects, and what he lays on there seems to be the real deal, too.

However. . . .

In much the same mode and with much the same excess, Hendrix demonstrates, or seeks to demonstrate, that meteorites have been associated with mystical visions, the birth of religions, and so forth, all over the world since time immemorial. Okay, he seems to have done his homework here, too, and that such “stars fallen to the earth” would generate religious beliefs and mystical visions seems credible cultural anthropology. But for me at least this begins a slow slide down a slippery slope.

For Hendrix also applies this exhaustive, and somewhat exhausting to read, “scientific” explication to psychic and paranormal powers associated with meteorites, generated by meteorites, generated by galactic trans-spermial material brought to Earth by meteorites to bring about some sort of evolutionary quantum leap into a transcendent apotheosis. . . .

And this apotheosis arrives not only as a deus ex machina at the climax of the convergent complex series of thriller plotlines. Not only is it what brings that climax about, but it is the climax of the action plot, and well . . .

Well, revealing any more would be going too far.

Now don’t get me wrong. It would be the height of hypocrisy for the author of The Void Captain’s Tale, Child of Fortune, and He Walked Among Us to piss and moan about Howard Hendrix or anyone else dragging transcendental or psychedelically visionary matters into a science fiction novel or even centering such a novel on them, even making them the thematic apotheosis of one. That’s not what disturbs me about Spears of God.

What disturbs me about Spears of God is that Hendrix therein not only expounds his expository lumps concerning telepathy, paranormal psychic powers, mystic psychedelic experiences, and so forth in the same prose style and “scientifically erudite” manner as the geology of meteorites, real psychopharmacology, fungal botany, cultural anthropology, and molecular brain biochemistry. And he also seems to be using this equivalency as a literary device to create the illusion that they all have the same scientific legitimacy, exist on the same reality level, and that none of it violates the known laws of mass and energy of the universe in which the readers find themselves.

And it just isn’t true.

I know I’m going to catch hell for saying it. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and better someone with no pretension to credentials as a rigorous hard science fiction writer who has certainly used such elements literarily in works he would not deny are truly science fiction than someone more easily put down as a fanatic defender of a lost cause.

“Science fiction,” sure, why not? Faster-than-light spaceships, slans, warp-drives running on orgasm, time travel, gods from the machines, so why not telepathy, telekinesis, the triumph of the will over time and space, whatever, as long as it’s written with sufficient literary skill and panache to suspend disbelief for the duration of a well-told and entertaining tale.

For the duration of a well-told and entertaining tale.

But as something wrapping itself in the literary cloak of hard science fiction, using the hoary and even clunky literary techniques of hard science fiction to further blur the distinction between true science and rubber science, between true scientific speculation and high-grade bullshit in the minds of readers in a culture where such distinctions are in danger enough of disappearing already does that culture a serious disservice.

It could be argued, and it probably will be, perhaps even by Howard Hendrix himself, that it is precisely the loss of this distinction, the general ignorance of and indifference to what the laws of mass and energy in the real world really are, the sheer unpopularity of the scientific method as a means of testing imaginative hypothesis against the cold equations, that forces anyone who would write anything even in the general aesthetic mode of hard science fiction to resort to such means to reach a potential readership of a sufficient size for it to be commercially viable.

And on the evidence, this seems all too true, and I suspect that this sort of intellectual compromise is one direction so-called hard science fiction is going to be taking in order to survive at all. So I can hardly blame Howard Hendrix or anyone else for taking it, as long as they really know what they are doing and why.

But such intellectual compromise with demographic reality is a vicious circle, a negative feedback loop. Writers with a hard science fiction bent are forced by cultural and therefore publishing circumstance to compromise the intellectual rigor of a literary mode whose signature is intellectual rigor. This in turn contributes at least in some small way to the cultural circumstance that produces that very unfortunate necessity.

Is promoting this cultural confusion on scientific matters really the only way something like “hard science fiction” can survive?

Maybe not.

Time will tell.

Peter Watts, Mary Rosenblum, and even David Louis Edelman seem to be pursuing alternate strategies. There are nine and sixty ways of composing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.

But that doesn’t mean that all the results will be commercially viable.