o here we go, into the breach again, time to get hard. Time to plunge into a great hole—or rift, or reef, or fissure, or gap, or tunnel, or benthos, or hatch, or faultline, or Big Inside, or catacomb—and solve the problem down there at the heart of the sea, or the spaceship, or the asteroid, or the planet, or the galaxy.
The Hard SF Renaissance, a vast and complicated omnium gatherum of hard SF from 1990 on (of the 41 stories here assembled, some of them almost book-length, only one dates from as early as 1987), contains large number of stories about guys beating holes to a pulp, which may just be a natural consequence of the fact that almost all hard SF is written by men (of the examples David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have gathered together here, only three are by women, and none of these is a Hole Tale), but it does make you wonder, all the same, if maybe you're missing something. Could all these guys be having more fun writing these stories than you could ever guess by reading them?
There does seem to be something about problem tales that whiffs of favoritism. A hard-SF story tends to be constructed as a test of its protagonist's ability to solve some life-threatening problem in a physical environment that has been constructed to offer a solution. To survive such a story is to win. So given the fact that hard-SF writers tend to create really smart characters they agree with and congratulate, the stories they write, these tales whose heroes are winners, tend to read as being boastful. It is a kind of cronyism. It is what makes the beauties and ardors of the best hard SF so difficult for "outsiders" to appreciate, because outsiders (I include myself) tend to feel—perhaps when they do not understand the physics of a hard-SF story, or when they sense that the author has skewed his universe to generate an outcome possible only in a universe so skewed—that they have been failed by the tale, that they have been Disappeared from the author's world.
I think there is no other form of SF or fantasy that generates so powerful a sense that the world—I mean the great globe which we inherit—belongs by right to winners, but that this world is rigged, a one-armed bandit fixed to chime for tinkers.
Hartwell and Cramer would not agree, though they hedge a bit in their introduction and their copious notes to individual tales. They do make it clear, however, that many of the writers who came to prominence in the 1990s—their list includes Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, Iain M. Banks, Ian MacDonald and Gwyneth Jones; they could have also mentioned Karl Schroeder and Peter Watts, both of whom contribute stories to The Hard SF Renaissance—have tended to incorporate hard-SF techniques into the more complex formularies of space opera, a marriage (I think) which humanizes hard SF (freeing it from the right-wing and/or libertarian agendas that in earlier decades made its authors seem simpletons in whiteface), while giving a bit more spine to space opera.
As Hartwell and Cramer also note, most of the writers who accomplished these harmonies of late-century SF craft were not American. The reasons for this are near and far to seek, a book's worth of argument about America. It might be said, however, that the weight of SF as a tradition (and as a series of metaphors for the American century just past) has burdened young American writers more heavily than their peers abroad. It is perhaps less difficult for British writers, or Canadian for that matter, to think of the world as both shadowy and full of revel.
So it's not surprising, perhaps, that the humanly most complex stories included here—other than Nancy Kress' great novella, "Beggars in Spain" (1991), a tale whose carapace is hard SF but whose guts are legion—are by non-Americans like Paul McAuley, whose "Reef" (2000) not only features an exciting plunge down a hole in an asteroid, but also delineates a form of society that might plausibly generate the sort of people who inhabit hard-SF stories. (It is one of the signal failures of American hard SF in earlier years that the gated-community environments they described bore little resemblance to the America they thought they were isomorphing.) McAuley's tale, though grim in synopsis, conveys as well an exhilaration rarely to be felt (though often asserted) in the rest of the book.
Hard SF needs to put on some Clothes
It is almost an Emperor's Clothes sort of thing: It is as though everybody in the field pretends not to notice how really depressed most hard SF is, how seriously lacking in affect are most of its protagonists, how lassitudinous are the worlds these protagonists inhabit and transform. Almost every single inhabitant of the modern American hard-SF story seems to be suffering from gray-out, from a subacute depressive condition escapable only through occasional spasms of problem-solving.
There is not, I'm afraid, much human cheer to be found in this vast volume, then. Partial exceptions include Kim Stanley Robinson's "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars" (1999) and "The Lady Vanishes" (1996) by Charles Sheffield (who died today,
Saturday, 2 November 2002; he will be deeply missed). The flattened affect in James Patrick Kelly's very fine "Think Like a Dinosaur" (1995) is a direct consequence of its narrator's profound trauma—he has had to terminate a live human being for reasons too complex to render, within a hard-SF frame that comments, quite savagely, on the kind of understanding of the world espoused in Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" (1955), a tale about which many thousands of words have been written, pro and con.
But Kelly's tale stands out in its recognition that profound flattened affect in itself cries out for attention to be paid. The depressiveness of most hard-SF protagonists, their hysterical displacement of personal distress and cultural anomie into projects, should be, perhaps, a central focus of the stories in which they appear. Some stories assembled here do take on the issue. Both McAuley's and Kelly's tales can be understood as examining, en passant, the problem of deep depression in the hyper-modern world, as can Joe Haldeman's "For White Hill" (1995).
Two stories directly hinge on the condition of mind of their heroes: Karl Schroeder's "Halo" (1996), which was not published in the United States, takes as his main subject matter the deep abnormality of the typical hard-SF protagonist; and Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful" (1997), also published abroad, is a taxing discourse on the relationship between mind and brain. But too many of the remaining stories in the Hartwell/Cramer volume treat the pathological flatness of their protagonists as normative.
This is not to deprecate the achievements represented in The Hard SF Renaissance. Robert Reed's "Marrow" (1997) is a big space-opera tale, featuring a Jupiter-sized planet/generation starship with a hard-SF dilemma in its craw; Brian Stableford's Swiftian "A Career in Sexual Chemistry" (1987) recounts the life story of a sexually dysfunctional man named Casanova who changes the world utterly in order to get laid; and the two teenage protagonists of Vernor Vinge's "Fast Times at Fairmont High" (2001), seemingly trapped in www.geek.drone careers at the insanely competitive high school of the title, do develop personalities in the end, and learn a lot (one senses a whole book here waiting to flourish from this large acorn).
Hard SF is a big, slogging, definitive anthology; its compilers, who must have read lots more than what they selected, have our gratitude and approbation, with a slight wrist-slap for the poor copyedit (the late Dede Weil was never, for instance, not in her worst nightmares, Diedre Weil).
The displacedness of the stories Hartwell/Cramer were able to select, however, remains profound. The Hard SF Renaissance is a compendium of estrangements. It is deep weird. I loved some of the hard bits.
