Science Fiction Studies

#60 = Volume 20, Part 2 = July 1993

ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

SPECIAL ISSUE: ON HARD SCIENCE FICTION.

• David N. Samuelson. Modes of Extrapolation: The Formulas of Hard Science Fiction

• John J. Pierce. The Literary Experience of Hard Science Fiction

• Gregory Benford. Time and Timescape

• Gary Westfahl. "The Closely Reasoned Technological Story": The Critical History of Hard Science Fiction

OTHER ARTICLES

• Claire Sponsler. Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play

• Susan Stone-Blackburn. Consciousness Evolution in Early Telepathic Tales

David N. Samuelson

Modes of Extrapolation: The Formulas of Hard Science Fiction

As long as science fiction has had a coherent existence, writers and critics have debated its relevance to science. From Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, through Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr., to Gregory Benford and J.G. Ballard, SF's "hardness'' has been both help and hindrance to popular and critical appreciation. In the last half-century, the label "hard SF'' has been applied to tales in which scientific theories and technological applications get a significant share of attention. Both friends and foes of hard SF acknowledge that it bears some relationship to science, pure or applied, though they do not agree on the worth of that core. Neither camp claims scientific "hardness'' as a guarantee of literary quality, and some detractors of hard SF derive the label from "hard to read,'' because it is badly written. Some essays from the 1983 Eaton Conference on SF and fantasy, collected in Hard Science Fiction, approach the controversy from a post-structuralist position, denying any claims of science to have a unique corner on truth. SF writers argued for scientific content and accuracy; literature professors discounted them, seeing "hardness'' as mere rhetoric.

Rhetorical features of science do help characterize hard SF, since it uses scientific findings and theories as measures of reality. Accurate but unobtrusive science may not define the subgenre, but neither does a rhetoric of hardness without scientific substance. In the best examples, the two interact positively, demanding reader sensitivity to both as indicators of quality. Writing and reading hard SF require a mind set that thrives on "hypotheticals,'' fantastic assumptions with theoretical justification in science, a seemingly paradoxical yoking of fantasies to the oxen of science and technology.

If agreement fails on what constitutes hard SF, confusion reigns about who writes it. Some Eaton contributors emphasized Stanislaw Lem, C.S. Lewis, William Morris and the 17th century geologist, Thomas Burnet, none of whom qualify in my view. Hard SF has never existed in large quantities. Without some technical education, it is difficult to write, and most scientists do not write fiction. In SF's formative years, Verne, Wells, Gernsback and E.E. "Doc'' Smith at least had technical training. During the "Golden Age,'' SF magazines published scientific puzzle stories and tales invoking the vast universe. Few writers, however, wrote hard SF before the '50s. The major body of evidence is less than 50 years old, and more people seem to be writing it now than ever before.

Authors who write hard SF regularly include Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Robert L. Forward, Larry Niven, Paul Preuss, Charles Sheffield, and Vernor Vinge. More occasional visitors include Brian W. Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, David Brin, John Brunner, Michael Crichton, Gordon R. Dickson, Harry Harrison, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Fred Hoyle, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, Carl Sagan, and George Zebrowski. Besides the classic and basically unclassifiable Olaf Stapledon, the essays following propose Stephen Baxter and John Cramer; other plausible newcomers include Roger McBride Allen, Michael Kube-McDowell, Michael McCollum, Allen Steele, and John Stith.

Whomever we include or exclude, hard SF is a largely Anglo-American and masculine production. Stories of nuts-and-bolts technological SF from the Soviet Union, reported by historians, are largely untranslated; similar American stories seldom escape the pages of Analog, known to its detractors as "the magazine with rivets.'' From Michelangelo to Le Corbusier, Continental Europeans have embraced large architectural designs, but unearthly engineering projects seem to excite mainly Americans, flushed perhaps with the successes and failures of our national design of continually changing social engineering. C.J. Cherryh may be the only woman to find writing hard SF congenial, but backgrounds in science inform the fiction of Vonda McIntyre, Pamela Sargent, and Joan Slonczewski. Doris Lessing, author of a half-dozen intellectual "space fantasies,'' respects hard SF, though she lacks the technical education to write it herself.
Hard SF could not have spread without a growing receptive audience. Required science classes in high school and college, news media reporting, and simply living with technology have made readers progressively more conversant with issues involving science. The broadening of SF itself correspondingly increased the number of readers comprising a potential audience for the hard stuff. Although of varying hardness, novels by Asimov, Clarke, Crichton, Heinlein, Herbert, and Sagan even became best-sellers, a measure of popularity undreamed in the Golden Age.

Hard SF has influence beyond its numbers, moreover, flavoring other writers' work, adding elements to the stew, as well as setting limits to speculation. A prolific fictional inventor, Samuel R. Delany recognizes the need to rationalize changes, even if only by implication. The work of Philip K. Dick reverberates with technological change, dissolving the borders between humans and machines, illusion and reality. Ursula K. Le Guin, rarely an exponent of hard SF, felt obliged to rationalize "mindspeech'' and to recognize light as a speed limit. Not just a variety of SF, hard SF is also a direction or tendency.

Defenders of hard SF often pose two contradictory arguments: that it is at the core of the entire genre, and that it is always in danger of being abandoned. The latter is certainly on shaky historical grounds and the sense that SF must always be returned to a hard core may well be Golden Age nostalgia. The innocence of early SF is lost, to be sure, but the belief that the past was better is particularly inappropriate for this branch of SF. Compared with its predecessors, the hard SF of the past decade or so makes this as close to a Golden Age as we have ever had.

My humanistic training makes me uncomfortable with the idea of historical "improvement'' in the arts, except in an artist's apprenticeship. The discomfort increases when I seem to be granting real existence over time to a group of works united by a rhetorical abstraction, and taking a deterministic predictive stance. It seems to me, however, that both external historical forces and its own inner dynamic produce an ideal of hard SF continually in the making. Perhaps never realized in the past or present, this "ideal type'' is always hoped for in the future. In the history of hard SF, this may be the future.

Barely recognizing the existence of hard SF, however, let alone its generating power, scholars and critics largely fail to deal with either the science or the rhetoric. Relatively ignorant of science, most of us are uncomfortable with it. Those who study SF prefer to deal with Delany and Dick, Le Guin and Lem, whose fictions are more congenial to literary concerns with subtle and plurisignifying characterization, structure, and style. It is perhaps no coincidence that literary critics, as specialists under fire both from outside and inside their own discipline, also favor SF which at least implies the decline of Western civilization. While I share many of their interests, I see attempts to restrict SF to these unrepresentative examples as reductionist and short-sighted.

Picking the flowers that smell sweetest inevitably severs them from their roots, ignoring not only the soil but also the fertilizers that enabled them to grow and blossom. Hard SF does not lack semiotic interest, but its codes and conventions differ from those most of us as critics are trained to understand and appreciate. Style tends to be more direct and limited in signification, characterization more deterministic, standards of judgment for behavior more relativistic.

The Star Trek universe is a simple test case known and loved by millions. Its narrative structures may be less subtle than those of the scientific problems and the physical universe within its stories. Examples show rational thought and technological civilization persisting into a future, and puzzles being solved in an hour or two of screen time. Both premises, which suffuse much of hard SF, may be unbelievably naive and ethnocentric, but they are not universal. Aldiss, Benford, Bear, and Pohl show literary sophistication in their fiction, even as they raise our eyes from the decline of the West to humanity's fragile hold on survival, its glimmers of intelligence and self-understanding.

Considering how uncongenial most literary people find science, the Eaton Conference was a reasonable start. Continuing debate in print, however, has largely bypassed hard SF. As the accompanying bibliography makes clear, titles seldom mention it by name. Under "hard SF,'' Hal Hall's 1987 reference bibliography lists only Bainbridge and Dalziell, Bridgstock, and Benford's ``real world'' essay. Norman Spinrad, mentioning hard SF by name, sees it as potentially solving the genre's identity crisis. By taking science seriously, not just as a source of images, James Gunn's scholarly efforts have even earned some critics' enmity, as Pierce points out in this symposium.
Other SF writers—Anderson, Asimov, Clarke, Clement, Lem, Pournelle and Niven, Preuss—have written about writing hard SF. John Barnes recently explained his use of forecasting, and Paul Park discussed science in his novels. Benford has written on various elements of hard SF, including narrative voice, aliens, and the transcendent "vision'' of science, while fending off ``regressive'' tendencies in fantasy and utopia. Other secondary materials—including John J. Pierce's 3-volume thematic history of SF—discuss examples and exponents of hard SF, largely assuming its value. Recent books about Asimov, Clarke, Clement, Verne and Wells also highlight the science in their fiction.

The matter of hard SF is inseparable from the role in SF of science. Samuelson's 1962 thesis and Westfahl's dissertation trace interest in the subject back to the 1920s and 1930s, while scholars in the last two decades have produced books on the presence in SF of physics, linguistics, robots, and computers, as well as the "cyberpunk'' fad. There were even two "coffee-table'' books on the subject. Close Encounters? Science and Science Fiction has a good short sketch of the science in SF, while The Science in Science Fiction at least takes a stab at being a reference volume.

Some of the best models available for analyzing hard SF, however, virtually ignore it as a subgenre. Bainbridge, Berger, Hirsch and Stableford explore the sociology of SF and Ray Lynn Anderson examines the rhetoric of science in Asimov, Clarke and Hoyle. Delany's theoretical work stresses codes and conventions involved in reading anything as SF, basically relegating science to a storehouse of images. Joanna Russ also argues SF's rhetorical need for scientific constraints. Albert W. Wendland grapples with SF's gradations from conceptual to perceptual world-building, while Gary K. Wolfe uses SF's icons to illuminate hard SF's central issue: encounter with the unknown. Countering Wolfe on the space station, Westfahl shows it typically standing for resistance rather than accommodation to the alien.

Like Wendland and Samuelson in their dissertations, Carl D. Malmgren argues that SF appropriates the world view of science; his typology goes further, moreover, scrutinizing variations in characters, societies, settings, even science itself, the last step allowing for him a theoretical place for science fantasy. Versions of the scientific world-view form points of departure for other critics. Robert Nadeau and Susan Strehle examine the role of physics in works by 20th century writers outside SF. Katherine N. Hayles specifically applies field theory and chaos theory to works by non-SF writers, although her more recent study mentions by name Dick and Lem, along with Italo Calvino and William Gibson. Novels by Aldiss, Delany, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., that nobody would call hard SF are Frank Sadler's examples in looking for influences of 20th century science on SF.

To such a relatively short and mostly oblique list, this special issue adds four essays. Gary Westfahl begins appropriately by exploring origins: when does the term ``hard science fiction'' emerge and what elements build reader perceptions of who writes it? John J. Pierce defends hard SF for its unique literary experience. A physicist and a practicing SF writer, Gregory Benford meditates on the scientific underpinnings of his most popular novel, Timescape. My own lengthy contribution is an excerpt from work in progress. In the context of scientific principles from which the distinctive formulaic nature of SF arises, it anatomizes an essential generic element specially emphasized in hard SF: extrapolation.

The definitive study of hard SF has yet to be written; it may not even be possible until SF is no longer written. The cutting edge is always somewhere between the known and the unknown, the proven and the unproven, like the ``fantastic'' in Tzvetan Todorov's conception, always threatening to resolve into the mundane or the marvelous. Scientific and technological progress make mere reportage out of SF "hypotheticals.'' Short-lived theories make once bright ideas only "alternate history.'' Assuming science continues to progress in its approximations of reality, the nucleus that is hard SF always moves out of grasp. Constantly decentering the entire field, hard SF shifts the periphery, sparking ideas in SF that may be less scientifically rigorous but often is more artistically satisfying.
As long as science and technology bring changes, writers will try to capture and bottle it in stories. We scholars and critics can only eat and drink what is put before us, not create it before its time. We can, and I think should, however, encourage writers to try out new recipes, knowing a few gourmets will put them to the test.

On Hard Science Fiction: A Bibliography

This list of secondary citations for the introduction includes numerous essays by Benford, Slusser and Westfahl and others tracing the science in SF debate over the decades. For other references, see bibliographies in Samuelson 1962, Westfahl 1986 and entries (sometimes misleading) on "science in literature'' and "scientists'' in Hal Hall, comp., Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, 1878-1975, 2 v. (Detroit: Gale, 1987).

Anderson, Poul. "The Creation of Imaginary Worlds: The World Builder's Handbook and Pocket Companion.'' Bretnor 1974, 235-58.
—————. "How to Build a Planet.'' 1966. Knight, 205-14.
—————. "Nebula Award Science Fiction, 1965-1970: The Science.'' Nebula Award Stories Seven. Ed. Lloyd Biggle, Jr. NY: Harper, 1973. 213-21.
—————. "Science Fiction and Science, 1: Reality, Fiction, and Points Between.'' Destinies 1.1:292-308, Nov-Dec 1978.
—————. "Science Fiction and Science, 2: The Hardness of Hard Science Fiction.'' Destinies 1.2:248-62, Jan-Feb 1979.
—————. "Science Fiction and Science, 3: On Imaginary Science.'' Destinies 1.3:304-20, Apr-June 1979.
—————. "Science Fiction and Science 4: The Science Fiction in Science.'' Destinies 1.4: 304-20, Aug-Sept 1979.
—————. "Science Fiction and Science 5: Science Fiction and Reason.'' Destinies 1.5: Oct-Dec 1979.
Anderson, Ray Lynn. "Persuasive Functions of Science Fiction: A Study in the Rhetoric of Science.'' Dissertation, U Minn., 1968 [Asimov, Clarke, Hoyle].
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981.
Bainbridge, William Sims. Dimensions of Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard UP, 1986.
—————, and Murray Dalziell. "The Shape of Science Fiction as Perceived by Fans.'' SFS 5:165-71, #15, July 1978.
—————. The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study. NY: Wiley, 1976.
Barnes, John. "How to Build a Future.'' Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 110: 150-75, March 1990.
Benford, Gregory. "Aliens and Knowability: A Scientist's Perspective.'' Bridges to Science Fiction. Ed. George E. Slusser, George R. Guffey, and Mark Rose. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980. 53-63.
—————. ``The Awe and the Aweful.'' Analog Yearbook. Ed. Ben Bova. NY: Ace, 1978. 13-21.
—————. ``Effing the Ineffable.'' Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction. Ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. 13-25.
—————. ``Fantasy as Pollution.'' The Patchin Review 3:5-9, January 1982.
—————. ``Hard? Science? Fiction?'' [book reviews]. Amazing Stories 62:52-60, July 1987.
—————. ``Hard Science Fiction in the Real World.'' Science Fiction Review 13:29-34, February 1985.
—————. ``Imagining the Real.'' The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 84:47-59, January 1993.
—————. ``In the Wave's Wake.'' Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 30:5-9, March 1984.
—————. ``Journey to the Genre's Core.'' Vector 121:22-23, August 1984.
—————. ``Journey to the Genre's Core: A Reply to Damon Knight.'' Science Fiction Review 13:32, August 1984.
—————. ``Pascal's Terror.'' Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds. Ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 271-77.
—————. ``Profession of Science Fiction, 22: A String of Days.'' Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 21:5-17, February 1981.
—————. ``Putting Science into Science Fiction.'' Writer 96:7-10, July 1983.
—————. ``Reactionary Utopias.'' Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future. Eds. George E. Slusser, Colin Greenland, and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. 73-83.
—————. ``Science and Science Fiction.'' Science Fiction: The Academic Awakening. Ed. Willis McNelly. Shreveport, LA: CEA, 1974. 30-34.
—————. ``Science, Science Fiction, and All That. . . .'' Algol 13:29-31, Winter 1976. [abridged ``Science and SF''].
—————. ``Science Fiction, Rhetoric, and Realities: Words to the Critic.'' Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 223-29.
—————. ``Style, Substance, and Other Illusions.'' Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds. Ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 47-57.
—————. ``Teaching Physics with Science Fiction.'' Fan Plus 1:13-14, January 1980.
—————. ``The Time-Word Path: Building Science Fiction.'' Algol 15:31-33, Summer/Fall 1978.
—————. ``Why is There So Little Science in Literature?'' Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine 6:43-50, February 15, 1982.
————— (interviewed). Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 3-30.
Berger, Albert. ``The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell, Jr. and the American Response to Technology.'' Journal of Popular Culture 5:867-943, Spring 1972. [Adapted from M.A. thesis, 1972.]
—————. The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1993. [Expansion and revision of previous item.]
—————. "Nuclear Energy: Science Fiction's Metaphor of Power.'' SFS 6:121-28, #18, July 1979.
—————. "Science Fiction Critiques of the American Space Program, 1945-1958.'' SFS 5:99-109, #15, July 1978.
—————. "Science Fiction and the Ideology of Change in America, 1935-1975.'' Dissertation, Northern Illinois, 1978.
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Bova, Ben. Through Eyes of Wonder: Science Fiction and Science. Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley, 1975.
Bretnor, Reginald, ed. The Craft of Science Fiction. NY: Harper, 1976.
—————. Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. 1953. Chicago: Advent, 1979.
—————. Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow. NY: Harper, 1974
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—————. "The Science of Science-Fiction Writing.'' Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science-Fiction Writing. Ed. Lloyd Arthur Eschbach. 1947. Chicago: Advent, 1964. 89-101.
—————. "The Place of Science Fiction.'' Bretnor 1953, 3-22.
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—————. "Science Fiction: Preparation for the Age of Space.'' Bretnor 1953, 197-220.
Clement, Hal. "The Creation of Imaginary Beings.'' Bretnor 1974, 259-77.
—————. "Hard Sciences and Tough Technologies.'' Bretnor 1976, 37-52.
—————. "Whirligig World.'' Astounding Science Fiction, 51:102-14, June 1953. [regularly reprinted with Ballantine paperback editions of Mission of Gravity]
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Delany, Samuel R. The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—``Angouleme.'' Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977.
—————. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977.
—————. Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Pleasantville, NY: Dragon Press, 1984.
Erlich, Richard D., and Thomas P. Dunn, eds. Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983.
—————. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982.
Evans, Arthur B. Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel. NY: Greenwood, 1988.
Geffe, Philip F., et al. "Scientists in Science Fiction: A Debate.'' 1966-67. Knight. 175-96.
Stephen L. Gillett, Stephen L. "On Building an Earth-like Planet.'' Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact 109:90-107, July 1989.
Goswami, Amit and Maggie. The Cosmic Dancers: Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction. NY: Harper, 1983.
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—————. Isaac Asimov (Starmont Reader's Guide #40). Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1985.
Herbert, Frank. "Men on Other Planets.''
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.
—————. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984.
—————, ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Roslyn D. Haynes, Roslyn D. H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future. NY: NYUP, 1980.
Hirsch, Walter. "Science Fiction: 1926-1950: A Content Analysis.'' Dissertation, Northwestern, 1957.
—————. "The Imagination of the Scientist in Science Fiction.'' American Journal of Sociology, 43:506-12, March 1958.
Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, rev. ed. Athens: Ohio UP, 1987.
Huntington, John. Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989.
Isaacs, Leonard. Darwin to Double Helix: The Biological Theme in Science Fiction. London: Butterworth's, 1977.
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Knight, Damon. Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction. NY; Harper, 1977.
Kostolevsky, Joseph. "Science, Yes—Fiction Maybe.'' Antioch Review 12:236-40, June 1953.
Kuttner, Henry. "Science in Science Fiction.'' Science-Fiction Advertiser 2:3-6, January 1953.
Lambourne, Robert, Michael Shallis, and Michael Shortland, Close Encounters? Science and Science Fiction. Bristol, England: Adam Hilger, 1991.
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—————. Phantastik und Futurologie, 2 vols. Trans. Beate Sorge and Wiktor Szacki (1), Edda Werfel (2). Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1977, 1980. [Polish edition, Fantastyka i futurologia, 1964, 1970; some sections may be found in Microworlds].
Lessing, Doris. "Preface,'' The Sirian Experiments. NY: Knopf, 1980. vii-ix.
Malmgren, Carl. Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
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Moore, Patrick. "To Other Worlds.'' Listener 69:865-66, May 23, 1963.
Muller, H.J. "Science Fiction as an Escape.'' The Humanist 17:333-46, November-December 1957.
Nadeau, Robert. Readings for the New Book of Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.
Nichols, Peter, David Langford, and Brian Stableford. The Science in Science Fiction. NY: Knopf 1983.
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Robinson, Guy S. "Science in Science Fiction: Hypertravel.'' Listener 70:976-77. December 17, 1964.
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—————. "Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction.'' Extrapolation 15:51-59, December 1973.
—————. "Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction.'' SFS 2:112-10, #6, July 1975.
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—————. "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: A Study in the Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Science Fiction with Reference to the Cultural Division Between the Sciences and the Humanities.'' [B.A.] Honors Thesis, Drew, 1962.
—————. Visions of Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Inner to Outer Space. NY: Arno 1974 [1969 dissertation].
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Slusser, George E. "The Frankenstein Barrier.'' Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. pp. 46-71.
—————. "Reflections on Style in Science Fiction.'' Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds. Ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 3-23.
————— and George Guffey. "Literature and Science.'' Interrelations of Literature. Ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli. NY: Modern Language Association, 1982. 176-204.
————— and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Hard Science Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986.
Spinrad, Norman. "The Rubber Sciences.'' Bretnor 1976. 54-69.
—————. Science Fiction and the Real World. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990 [``Modes of Content'' (3 essays), 91-135].
Stableford, Brian. The Sociology of Science Fiction. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo, 1987.
Strehle, Susan. Fiction in The Quantum Universe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
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—————. "'Dictatorial, Authoritarian, Uncooperative': The Case Against John W. Campbell, Jr.'' Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 56:36-61, Autumn 1992.
—————. "An Idea of Significant Import: Hugo Gernsback's Theory of Science Fiction.'' Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, 48:26-50, Spring 1990. [Adapted from 1986 dissertation].
—————. "Islands in the Sky: Space Stations in the Universe of Science Fiction.'' Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds. Ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 211-25.
—————. "The Mote in Gernsback's Eye; A History of the Idea of Science Fiction.'' Dissertation, UC Riverside, 1986.
—————. "On the True History of Science Fiction.'' Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 47:5-27, Winter/Spring 1990 [adapted from 1986 dissertation].
—————."'Small Worlds and Strange Themes': The Iconography of the Space Station in Science Fiction.'' Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 51:38-63, Spring 1991.
—————. "Words of Wishdom: The Neologisms of Science Fiction.'' Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds. Ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 224-44.
Williams, Norma. "Science in Science Fiction.'' Australian Science Fiction Review 5:10-13, December 1965.
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Wolfe, Gary. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1979.

John J. Pierce

The Literary Experience of Hard Science Fiction

The air of the Nebula was, as always, stained blood-red. A corner of his mind tried to measure the redness—was it deeper than last shift?—while his eyes flicked around the objects scattered through the Nebula above and below him. The clouds were like handfuls of grayish cloth sprinkled through miles of air. Stars fell among and through the clouds in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the Core. The light of the mile-wide spheres cast shifting shadows over the clouds, the scattered trees, the huge blurs that might be whales. Here and there he saw a tiny flash that marked the end of a star's brief existence. (Baxter §1:10)

Rees lives in a universe where the gravitational constant is a billion times that of the universe we know. Only, he doesn't know that, any more than he knows why time is measured in shifts—one legacy of a starship that came to grief in this strange cosmos, leaving the crew and the passengers and their descendants to eke out an existence in what is, by Earthly standards, a living hell. We ourselves would never want to live there, but we are fascinated by what it would be like to live there. Rees' universe doesn't exist, but Stephen Baxter convinces us, in Raft (1992), that it could.

Is this hard science fiction? Absolutely!

Is it literature? Well, that opens a whole can of worms!

Hard SF isn't the prevailing literary fashion, even within `"genre SF''—that body of fiction published as `"science fiction'' in magazines and specialty book lines. On the one hand, Star Trek spin-offs, Dragonrider novels, and the like head the best-seller lists. On the other, the most critically-admired works are from the `"metaphorical'' school of Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and, perhaps, even Ursula K. Le Guin. Whatever else can be said of a work like Raft, it is safe to predict that it will never show up in any literary canon —"conservative'' or "radical''—any more than it will be a runaway commercial success.

Hard SF will always be a minority taste. When Robert A. Heinlein started writing SF for the `"slick'' magazines after World War II, he realized from the outset that he would have to minimize the science to reach a wider audience (10).¹ When he finally did reach a mass book-reading audience, it was with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), which stressed social and religious satire—Heinlein himself denied that it was SF at all (260). Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) doubtless caught up non-SF readers more for its Great Thoughts than for its ecology—as demonstrated by the sequels it spawned. Even Isaac Asimov, when he hit the best-seller lists with a series of belated Foundation/Robot novels, stressed social issues rather than hard science. Hard SF may become the stepchild of its own genre: it simply isn't the best way to make a living. Ask Stephen Baxter—or even Hal Clement.

Hard SF also seems to remain a stepchild of SF scholarship. Some critics, it seems, not only don't want to read hard SF, but don't want to read about it. Robert A. Collins, for example, faulted James Gunn's The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for, among other things, a bias toward hard SF: in particular, he was irritated by Poul Anderson's "Alien Worlds'' entry because it failed to discuss the "'metaphorical uses' [of created worlds], which interest me more than the so-called 'scientific' ones.'' Collins cites Michael Bishop's "Rogue Tomato''² as the kind of SF that should have been covered under "Alien Worlds'' (12).

Although Collins may rightly believe that metaphorical SF was slighted in the Gunn encyclopedia, it is hard SF that is slighted elsewhere. David G. Hartwell, in his introduction to The World Treasury of Science Fiction, felt it necessary to defend an esthetic that once was taken for granted by genre- SF writers and fans:

I do not, of course, deny the metaphorical level of SF texts. I simply state the obvious, which somehow seems to have been lost in several decades of critical discussion: in a work of science fiction, the reader must grant the premise that whatever is stated as the case is literal and true. For instance, in Gerard Klein's ``Valley of Echoes,'' the reader must believe that we are two hundred years in the future, exploring the planet Mars, not merely in some surreal landscape that embodies a metaphor for the human condition. (xvii-xviii)

As Hartwell granted, this esthetic is limited almost entirely to American SF; elsewhere in the world, the kind of fiction exemplified by the Golden Age at John W. Campbell's Astounding seems to have been taken "as some kind of joke or as a repository of imagery to be used for purposes other than SF'' (xvii). Of course, Hartwell's memory may be selective. Was there ever really any hard science in the work of A.E. van Vogt, a major contributor to Astounding? We have all heard or read anecdotes about what passed for science in much of the earlier genre SF at Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. Perhaps there has always been hard SF and soft SF, and the debate between them goes back at least as far as the differences between H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.³

Still, we all know what kind of genre SF Hartwell is talking about, and we also know that it hasn't travelled well abroad. Yet attitudes may be changing. Lem's most recent SF novel, Fiasco, is certainly closer to hard SF than any of his previous work (perhaps something was lost in their translation, but are we really to believe in the mimoids composed of neutrinos in Solaris, or the mix of oxygen and methane in the atmosphere of the world his astronauts visit in The Invincible?), even as it also retains the satirical edge of Lem's previous work. In its cosmic vision and its speculation on the evolution of advanced civilizations past our understanding, Fiasco has much the same feel as such contemporary American hard SF as Gregory Benford's Across the Sea of Suns and Great Sky River.

Benford, indeed, has raised the literary status of hard SF. But, paradoxically, he has not necessarily led us to appreciate the esthetic of hard SF as such. We could argue that in Timescape, for example, the appeal is not so much the scientific invention—a means of sending messages into the past in order to alter history and thus prevent a disaster in the present—as the characterization of scientists and the politics of science. Against Infinity involves the transforming of Ganymede, but the center of the novel is a retelling of William Faulkner's "The Bear,'' in which the alien called Aleph serves a metaphorical function. In The Artifact, the mini black hole is the maguffin for an international suspense thriller. Do we admire Great Sky River more as hard SF or as a heroic saga writ large?
Benford's novels are all hard SF, of course, but they are other things as well. Can hard SF be literature if it is not also these other things? Is there a literary experience characteristic of hard SF in and of itself?

We are all familiar with arguments to the contrary. We have even come to cringe at the mention of Hugo Gernsback, who, as Brian W. Aldiss once put it, reduced SF to "stories built like diagrams, and made clear like diagrams, and stripped of atmosphere and sensibility'' (211). We can only chuckle at much of the hard SF of the Golden Age: for example, George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories, with their outdated technology (gigantic vacuum tubes and the like) inspiring rapture in cardboard characters. Nor do we have to look to the past for the embarrassments of hard SF: Robert L. Forward's Martian Rainbow is a recent case in point. We don't expect War and Peace from Forward, surely, but here he proves he can't even write a good techno-thriller. The politics of the novel (a general setting himself up as religious overlord of Earth) are so crude that we are reminded of Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1930)—those of us who can remember back that far! Forward fills his narrative with chunks of scientific exposition, until it resembles a lumpy porridge. And because he can't make his story work with the actual possibilities of terraforming Mars, he brings in a deus ex machina (literally: magical robots left by aliens of Christmas past). On the evidence of Martian Rainbow, we might well conclude that Forward should have stuck to writing technical articles, and that there is no point to discussing the art of hard SF because there simply isn't any.

Why discuss Forward at all, if he is such a poor writer? We have all seen much better hard-SF novels about Mars, such as Allen Steele's The Labyrinth of Night (which is also a much better political thriller, and even a far better tale of magical aliens). Because Forward is also the author of Dragon's Egg, a novel that won the praise of, among others, Frank Herbert, Hal Clement, and Isaac Asimov as an example of hard SF at its best, he is thus a test case.⁴ If Dragon's Egg is really hard SF at its best, and Martian Rainbow is hard SF at its worst, what's the difference? Its no use pretending that the human side Dragon's Egg is any better. It isn't: Forward's astronauts therein are cut from the same cardboard as those generals, scientists, and technicians in Martian Rainbow. We simply don't notice them, because they aren't the story; the story is the cheela, the creatures Forward makes us believe could actually live on the surface of a neutron star.

Like any number of hard-SF novels, Dragon's Egg includes an appendix in which the author explains the scientific basis for his literary invention. It is all very speculative science, of course, but science itself is based on speculation: theories are advanced and then tested against reality. We have no way of testing Forward's theory against reality, but we trust him as both scientist and hard-SF writer not to knowingly contradict the known possibilities of the universe we inhabit. If Dragon's Egg were a fictionalized essay like its appendix, however, would we read it in the same way we actually read it as a novel? Make no mistake about it: if we appreciate Dragon's Egg at all, we appreciate it as a literary exercise—and this in spite of its obvious literary faults. (Forward is said by Lester del Rey to have needed considerable editorial help in order to produce an acceptable manuscript.)⁵

When we read scientific articles or textbooks, we are like Sergeant Friday on Dragnet: we want "Just the facts, ma'am.'' We get more than just facts, to be sure, from the more imaginative writers of science like Stephen Hawking or Stephen Jay Gould (Forward isn't in their league, either). When we read SF, however, we are still reading fiction, and expect the imaginative experience of reading fiction. C.S. Lewis, in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), even suggested that literature should be judged by how it is read, and though his judgments are no more infallible than those of any other critic, he is (to my mind, at least) right on the mark as to how we experience literature.

In science fiction we experience the creative imagination of the author—a particular kind of imagination. It is not necessarily, certainly not entirely, the metaphorical imagination of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. Neither is it necessarily, and certainly not entirely, that of the "cognitive estrangement'' that has figured in so much critical discussion of SF since Darko Suvin advanced the theory some twenty years ago. There is nothing wrong with either kind of imagination, or the kinds of works that express it, or the kinds of criticism that interpret them. It is plain to see that Philip K.'s transformation into a giant tomato, in Bishop's "Rogue Tomato,'' is a metaphorical device. We don't need to be told that both the Bureaucracy and the Forest it seeks to exploit, in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's The Snail on the Slope (1980), are estranging devices, intended to make us see our own world in a new light. But what are the cheela supposed to represent? According to the theory that metaphors are the essence of literature, they must represent something, or what good are they?

No doubt we could find something if we tried hard enough. In The New York Review of Science Fiction, Damien Broderick argues that the seemingly incomprehensible aliens of Philip Mann's The Eye of the Queen "resemble a child's idea of human adults,'' while the more comprehensible alien invaders of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Footfall are metaphors for the Soviets (1). But for true aficionados of hard SF, such explanations diminish their reading experience rather than enhancing it. If those aliens in Footfall exist only for the sake of a tired allegory about the Cold War, they hardly seem worth the trouble Niven and Pournelle have taken in creating them. SF critics certainly mean well in advancing such interpretations; they are, in fact, often praising SF in the only way they know how. One recalls the legal arguments about the redeeming social values of sexually explicit works: Fanny Hill is thus given a Significance that would baffle John Cleland; it can't be just good erotica.

The literal reading of SF seems to have few defenders, but one of them is no less than Samuel R. Delany, whose argument, though surely familiar to all of us, bears repeating here:

Such sentences as "His world exploded,'' or "She turned on her left side,'' as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. (Triton 337)

Delany denies that SF is true literature: "Literature's philosophical arguments tend to be about the subject, the human consciousness, rather than about the way the real world functions. Science fiction is a critique of the object rather than a critique of the subject—or of the subject in terms of the object'' ("Teaching to Learn'' 74). Yet he also argues that "the science-fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction'' (Triton 340), and he clearly means richer in a literary sense.

Delany may not have read Dragon's Egg, and he might not care for it any more than other critics sensitive to literary style, which he regards as inseparable from content (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw 35ff).⁶ Nevertheless, Forward's novel conforms to his theory that the essence of SF is the "technological discourse'' that enables the SF writer to create "possible images of the impossible.'' By outlining the entire evolution of life on his neutron star (the Cheela begin as plants, using crystal-supported canopies extending above the hot crust as the basis of heat engines to supply their food/energy needs), Forward sets up a memorable scene later in the novel. It develops that the cheela, in extreme circumstances, can revert to the plant stage—and that this even has a rejuvenating effect. Swift-Killer, a warrior explorer, discovers this by accident; and planetary dictator Soother-of-All-Clans later seeks to extend her life—and power—by going through such a metamorphosis deliberately. But she is too old and too sedentary; she has too little muscle tissue to draw on to build a crystalline structure for her canopy. Nevertheless, things seem to be going well—at first.

Then it happened. The tip of one of the weakened spikes broke as it attempted to tighten the skin. Soother's-First was horrified to see a jagged point of dragon crystal sticking up out of the torn fold of skin. The skin held for a while, and the scientists attempted to build a mound up against the side of the body to support the damaged section, but before the support could be arranged, an adjoining spike gave way under the unequal tension, and in a rapid series of sharp cracks and loud crashes, the remainder of the twelve-pointed skeleton broke and fell to the crust. (381)⁷

We do not particularly like Soother, yet Forward has done his work so well that she seems real to us, and we feel a genuine terror at her fate. This is in spite of the fact that Forward's prose, here and elsewhere in Dragon's Egg, is not distinguished: nobody can mistake it for that of a Delany or a Zelazny, or even that of better hard-SF writers like Benford.

What is going on here? We are participating in a literary experience, but it isn't the kind of literary experience we have been taught to appreciate. What befalls Soother is a terrifying event, rather than a metaphor, and the feelings it evokes are those of a literal event. Cognition, as Suvin calls it, is certainly involved: it is the novum (again as Suvin calls it) that allows us to accept the reality of the scene. Yet we do not feel estranged from that reality; instead, we feel caught up and even entranced by it. That is what always happens in the best hard science fiction, and a better term for the esthetic effect of hard SF may be cognitive engagement. Forward uses the novum to engage us in a fascinating new reality, rather than to estrange us from a familiar one, and it is a distinctly literary reality that he creates. We do not read Dragon's Egg as we would a technical paper: whatever faults we may find with his clumsy style and characterization, we can still admire Forward as the creator of a unique fiction. It is precisely because Martian Rainbow offers nothing so unique (anyone writing hard SF about Mars must, of necessity, cover much the same scientific ground), and because Forward makes the error of trying to write the kind of human and political drama for which his limited talents in no way suit him, that we cannot forgive the same faults in that novel.

We find the same esthetic in other examples of hard SF that do not aspire to be literary in the prevailing sense. In John E. Stith's Redshift Rendezvous (1990), the human side of the plot is pure cornball, and Stith's characters as such are nothing to write home about. Yet we are caught up in a story that could take place only in the fascinating reality of a subspace where the speed of light is so low we can actually see the illumination spread to the far corners of the starship cargo hold when the lights are switched on. We trust Stith to have worked out all the logical consequences of his invented reality, but when we read his novel it is the literary experience of that reality we are looking for. The same principle applies to Baxter's Raft, in which we share the experiences of a hero who is at one point exiled to a labor camp on the hulk of a dead star: in Baxter's invented universe it is possible to live and work—albeit not very comfortably—on such a world. Neither Redshift Rendezvous nor Raft offers any significant psychological insight, political message, or metaphor about the human condition. Neither is "literature'' as usually recognized. Yet each of these is a highly literary work in its own way.

Clement's Mission of Gravity is rightly recognized as one of the classics of hard SF. Yet Clement wrote a sequel, Star Light, which was quickly forgotten. The science was just as good in the second novel, but Clement was unable to recreate the literary excitement of the first. The reason is pretty obvious: the world Clement offers in Star Light is simply a dull world—and a dull world makes for a dull story. All sorts of amazing things happen on Mesklin, but practically nothing could happen of Dhrawn. The difference between the two worlds, and the stories they inspire, is the result of a literary rather than a scientific failure. Yet even a fairly conventional world can be redeemed by the literary excitement of hard SF. Rosemary Kirstein's The Steerswoman (1989), for example, is set on what seems at first a generic fantasy world of wizards and dragons. In the course of the story, however, we realize that the "wizards'' are really just ordinary men using the secrets of science, as in Fritz Leiber's classic Gather, Darkness (1950), to awe the masses and that the "dragons'' are only natural creatures. In the sequel, The Outskirter's Secret (1992), we learn that this world is threatened with disaster: something has gone wrong with what we can understand is a long-range terraforming project. But the protagonists in the story can't read the clues as we do, because they don't know the science we do: can they and will they discover the truth in time, and will they be able to do anything about it? We experience suspense, an element as old as fiction—but it is a suspense that derives entirely from our knowledge of science.

Hard science fiction may be a quite limited literary form, but the fact that it can create its own kind of literary experience—even when it has no other claim to literary value—shows that it is a valid literary form, and worthy of respect in its own right. Were it given this respect, we might have the experience of more works that, like Dragon's Egg, succeed as hard SF, however much they may be lacking in other virtues. We would still have Benford, in any case, but we might not be frustrated by lesser talents overreaching themselves: for example, John Cramer in Twistor (1990). This is simply an old-fashioned adventure story that takes too long to get going, seemingly because Cramer (doubtless having read Benford) thinks he has to devote the first half of the novel to academic politics and the like—which he just can't do as well as Benford—to be taken seriously.

We should try to remember that art, like gold, is where we find it—not necessarily where we look for it.

NOTES

1. In 1947-48 Heinlein published four space-adventure stories in The Saturday Evening Post, the biggest of the big slicks and the best-paying magazine market, as well as a few in other magazines that paid better than the genre pulps. The Post had earlier published an occasional SF story by such writers as Rudyard Kipling or Steven Vincent Benét, but Heinlein was the first writer from the SF community to appear in its pages.
2. First published in 1975, this story appears in several anthologies as well as in Bishop's Blooded on Arachne (NY: Pocket Books, 1983).
3. An oft-told story; see, for example, Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1973), 117.
4. Dust-jacket blurbs on the Ballantine/Del Rey hardcover edition, NY, 1980.
5. Personal conversation with Lester del Rey, based on his knowledge of the handling of Forward's novel at Del Rey books.
6. Delany's argument that style and content are the same thing may seem unanswerable. A writer must choose the right words, and each word contributes to the meaning of the text. Only, how does the writer know which are the right words, unless there is some conception (content) of the work that comes before the words? Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, has an intriguing theory about the process of writing that seems to bear on this question (she makes an analogy to the Holy Trinity, in which the Father is the original conception of the work, the Son the finished work, and the Holy Ghost the intermediary). But without getting into arcane theories, consider this: Is there, or is there not, any content in common between two translations of the Bible in different styles?
7. Chapters in Dragon's Egg aren't numbered, but the quote is from one titled "Interaction,'' which is the sixth, and in the fourth subchapter thereof ("Time 14:28: 11 GMT Monday 20 June 2050'').

WORKS CITED

Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree. NY: Doubleday, 1973; Schocken Books, 1974. Same pagination.
Baxter, Stephen. Raft. NY: Roc, 1992.
Broderick, Damien. ``Reading SF as a Mega-text.'' New York Review of Science Fiction 47:1,8-11, July 1992.
Collins, Robert A. Editor's note. SFRA Newsletter 163:11-12, Dec. 1988.
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977.
—————. "Teaching to Learn.'' Unsigned interview. Locus, 361:5,74-75, Feb. 1991.
—————. Triton. NY; Bantam Books, 1976.
Forward, Robert L. Dragon's Egg. NY: Ballantine/Del Rey, 1988.
Hartwell, David. The World Treasury of Science Fiction. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.
Heinlein, Robert A. Grumbles from the Grave. NY: Ballantine/Del Rey, 1990.

Gregory Benford

Time and Timescape

Shortly after finishing my doctoral thesis in 1967, I began doing research at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and resumed my hobby of writing fiction. It had never occurred to me to intertwine the two. Yet as I read recent papers on tachyons, hypothetical faster-than-light particles, I realized that they plainly had a science-fictional feel. In a stroke, my rigorous habits of thought as a physicist mingled with my speculative, artistic aspects. It was my first experience with how hard SF could emerge from the experience of "doing'' science.
In Newton's worldview, time ticked off in an absolute way, and space was measured by a rigid universal framework. This image ruled until the late nineteenth century. H.G. Wells, always a quick study, caught the shifting winds and jury-rigged a new analogy which equated time with space—made it a fourth dimension, which a traveller could navigate.

Einstein shattered immutable time, combining space and time into a single continuum. The velocity of an observer served to rotate time into space, so that events which seemed simultaneous to one person would not look so to another who moved with a different speed. None of this was readily apparent to us, because we all move very much slower than light, which is thought to be the ultimate speed limit.

That limit separated two realms which could never interpenetrate, because approaching the barrier from lower speeds took ever-greater energy. Nothing precluded particles moving faster than light if they started out that way. The light barrier was weirdly symmetric, too. Particles moving infinitely fast have zero energy, just like particles with no velocity on our side of the barrier. Infinity mirrors zero.
Einstein's theory allowed these eerie faster-than-light particles, as he himself knew. Nobody paid much attention to their theoretical possibility until the early 1960s, however, when Gerald Feinberg introduced the name "tachyons'' ("fast ones'' in Greek); by contrast, ordinary matter such as us is made of slow ones, "tardyons.'' The last time I saw Gerry (he died in 1992) he reminded me that the idea had appealed to him because of James Blish's story, "Beep'' (1954; later expanded into The Quincunx of Time, 1973). That tale concerns a faster-than-light communicator (a "Dirac transmitter,'' which he used in later fiction). It works fine, except that the engineers can't eliminate a beep at the end of each message. It turns out that, stretched out, that beep contains all messages from all future times—because, as Blish knew, anything which travels faster than light can be used to send messages backward in time.

Demonstrating this demands space-time diagrams and a fair amount of physics. You can see it qualitatively by noting that a tachyon covers more space than time in its trajectory, so in a sense it has a net debit in its favor—"time to burn.'' Several physicists had confronted directly a problem Gerry left for others—the familiar grandfather's paradox.

Most physicists believed then (and still do) that this paradox rules out tachyons or any other such backward-in-time trick. Some tried to maintain that tachyons could still exist; as Richard Feynman pointed out, a particle traveling backward in time can be redefined as its own antiparticle (made of anti-matter) moving forward in time. This "reinterpretation principle'' would set everything right: apparently anti-causal events would merely be reinterpreted by other observers as perfectly normal events.

This seemed to me a bold finesse from an empty hand. When this ploy appeared in the scientific literature I discussed it with two friends and we wrote a quick paper refuting it. Published in Physical Review D in 1970 (p. 263) under the title "The Tachyonic Anti-Telephone''—see, even in dry old Phys Rev you can have fun with titles, if you try—it remains the only scientific paper I have written without a single equation in it; the argument was logical, not really technical.

We argued that notions like cause and effect could not be so easily made relative. The Feynman argument worked for one particle but not if you used two or more. With a minimum of two, whoever sent a signal could sign it, clearly establishing the origin.

We regarded the whole thing as rather amusing, so we discussed an example in which Shakespeare sends his newest work backward to Francis Bacon. At the time Bacon was a leading contender for the "true'' Shakespeare among those who thought that a mere country boy could not have penned such masterpieces. "If Shakespeare types out Hamlet on his tachyon transmitter, Bacon receives the transmission at some earlier time. But no amount of reinterpretation will make Bacon the author of Hamlet. It is Shakespeare, not Bacon, who exercises control over the content of the message.''

He can simply sign it, after all. Behind all the mathematics in the earlier papers lurked this simple, fatal idea.

Still, I rather liked tachyons. My two coauthors were David Book and William Newcomb. Newcomb was the grandson of the famous Simon Newcomb, an astronomer who wrote the infamous paper showing why airplanes could not fly. When he happened to mention this over a beer, my alarm bells went off. Was I signing onto a similar blinkered perspective, to be cited with ridicule generations later?
So I mulled the matter over, with one eye cocked at the steady stream of papers about time. Could tachyons actually exist? I was urged on by a report from Australia in 1972 that two experimenters had observed a tachyon. Their particle detectors, carried aloft in a balloon to catch cosmic rays, had found that a single event occurred at about 2.5 times light speed. I read their paper with astonishment. Dozens of papers followed, proposing theories for tachyons. Other experimenters tried to duplicate the Australian results—and failed. In the twenty years since, nobody has seen any such event, and statistically they should have. The Australian data was probably wrong.

Still, I wondered how tachyons—which Einstein's special theory of relativity clearly allowed—could fit into the world as we knew it. I essayed an approach in a novelette in Epoch, an anthology of the mid-1970s. Then over five years I wrote a novel, Timescape (published 1980), exploring the simplest situation I could imagine—discovery of tachyons, and the first attempts to probe their properties and use. Rather than the convenient Wellsian traveler, I used scientists as I knew them, warts and all, doing what they would—trying to use the new discovery to communicate something they cared about.

But how to deal with the paradox? I had always rather liked another theory which resolved the multiple-outcome property of conventional quantum mechanics. This interpretation of quantum events supposes that when a given particle, say, passes through a hole in a wall, it can go in several directions. The wave-like property of matter says that the same experiment, repeated many times, will give a pattern of impacts on a far screen. The density of impacts corresponds to the probability that a single particle would follow that trajectory and make that impression. But a single particle's trajectory can't be predicted precisely—we can only get the probability distribution.

Enter a fresh view, due to Hugh Everett of Princeton in the 1950s. Everett said that all the possible outcomes predicted by the probability analysis of quantum mechanics are separately real. This means that every time a particle passes through a hole, the entire universe splits into many possible outcomes.

Envision separable worlds peeling off from every microscopic event. In our world, the particle smacks into the wall and that specific outcome defines our world forever more. Other worlds simultaneously appear, with a slightly different impact point. Every event generates great handfuls of other worlds—a cosmic plentitude of astronomical extravagance. I've often wondered whether Everett was influenced by such SF stories as Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time'' (1934). Certainly he influenced later SF writers, including the Larry Niven of "All the Myriad Ways'' (1963).

The Everett view was fun to think about, and logically defensible, but nobody really believed it. But I found it handy. (Writers are magpies.) I said in my novel that the Everett interpretation didn't really apply to every event. Instead, I reserved the Everett picture for only those events which produced a causal paradox. If a physicist sent a tachyon backward in time and it had no grandfather-killing effects, no problem. If it did, though, then the universe split into as many versions as it took to cover all the possibilities. So you could indeed send some grandfather-killing message (or anything else that made a paradox), and grandfather would die. But not in the universe you were doomed to inhabit. Instead, another universe would appear, unknown to you, in which dear old grandfather died, alas, and you never happened at all. No paradox, since the tachyon which killed gramps came from another universe, from another you.

This seemed nifty enough to furnish a solution to my novel, but I did not take it seriously enough to actually work up a formal quantum field theory. I published the novel and was astonished at its success. I thought it was quirky, somewhat self-indulgent and, in its fascination with how it feels to do science, obviously destined for a small audience. Yet this rather private novel has been my most successful. It has been cited in several books about causal problems and some scientific papers. Quite pleasant for a hard SF writer.
Meanwhile, the problem of time continued. Einstein's special relativity applies to regions of space-time which are "flat'' in the sense that gravity is not significant. Except for introducing the finite speed of light, the theory feels Newtonian. George Bernard Shaw, in a tongue-in-cheek toast to Einstein, put it this way:

Newton was able to combine a prodigious mental faculty with the credulities and delusions that would disgrace a rabbit. As an Englishman, he postulated a rectilinear universe because the English always use the word ``square'' to denote honesty, truthfulness, in short: rectitude.

Einstein's general theory stitches together small regions of locally flat spacetime into a quilt of truly warped structure. Powerfully curved spacetime plays hob with causality. One of Einstein's close friends, Kurt Gödel, produced a model (from Einstein's field theory) for a universe which spins so fast that time and space get radically twisted. Zipping around such a universe can return you to the place and time of your departure. The mathematics, coming from the famous author of Gödel's Proof in mathematical logic, was impeccable.
Could this happen? Many hoped not. With a sign of relief they noted that there is no evidence that our universe rotates. So Gödel's case simply doesn't apply here.

But then in the 1960s several theorists showed that local rotation of stressed spacetime near black holes could do similar tricks. Spin a black hole fast enough and the rotation offsets the gravitational attraction, effectively stripping the guts of the hole bare. The bowels of the beast are not pretty, with exotic zones such as negative spacetime. From such regions a traveler could do as Wells' did, slipping backwards in time. Worse, he might reach a naked singularity, where all physical things (mass, density, gravitational attraction) became indefinitely large.

Mathematics cannot handle singularities, so mathematicians would rather that they be decently clothed. No one has been able to produce suitable garments except by the lo-and-behold method. When I last discussed this with Stephen Hawking, in 1989, he admitted that he suspected that we could merely invoke the clothing of singularities as a rule, beyond proof.

Of course, he pointed out, to explain why we don't see time travelers as everyday visitors, notice the requirements. To make a reasonable time machine with a rotating black hole would take just about the mass of a small galaxy. Generally, time travel seemed to require vast public works projects.

Since then there have been other ideas, such as making quantum "wormholes'' stable and large—all quite large orders. So we now have several ideas of how to make such a machine, though we can't afford one right now.

But why should this matter? If a time machine is ever built, in principle we should be receiving visitors now. Yet we haven't seen any. Why?

An adroit answer provided by Larry Niven supposes that there is nothing at all illogical about time travel, but we must remember that causality still works going forward in time. Every paradox-producing message or traveler sent back will change the conditions back at the origin of the time machine.* Remember Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder'' (1952), in which a dinosaur-hunting expedition bagged its quarry, but accidentally trampled a butterfly with a boot—a striking image. They returned to find the politics and language of their era had shifted.

Imagine that people keep using such a time machine until an equilibrium sets in between past changes and future reactions. The simplest steady-state in which no changes occur is one in which no time machine exists any longer. Events conspire—say, science falls forever into disfavor, or humanity dies out—to make the time machine erase itself.

This "Niven's Law'' follows directly from a basic picture from wave mechanics. Suppose time signals behave like waves. Looping into the past and back to the future, a wave can interfere with itself. Picture ocean waves intersecting, making chop and froth as they cancel here, reinforce there.

Quantum mechanically, even particles can act like waves, so it makes sense to speak of time loops as channels for the propagation of waves of probability. The wave amplitude gives the probability that a particle will exist. A loop which brings a wave back to exactly cancel itself means that the entire process cannot occur—probability zero at the very beginning, where the trip starts.
This picture actually comes from the history of quantum mechanics. One can predict the energy levels of hydrogen by thinking of its electron as a wave propagating around a circle, its orbit about the nucleus. Only certain wavelengths of the wave will fit on the orbital circumference. This quantizing condition yields the values of energy the electron must have.

Several scientific papers have explored this interest in quantum effects as the key to time travel—a welcome change from the gargantuan gravity machines I've already mentioned. In Timescape I tried to finesse the paradoxes by combining special relativity (tachyons) and quantum mechanics. Then the fashion in time machines had shifted to general relativity (Frank Tipler's rotating cylinders, as used by Poul Anderson in The Avatar [1978]), and then to quantum mechanics (wormholes). What about uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics—a much harder job.

Imagine my surprise when in November of 1992 I came upon a paper in Physical Review D, where our old tachyon paper had appeared. Titled somewhat forbiddingly `"Quantum Mechanics Near Closed Timelike Lines,'' it constructs a theory for effects in highly curved space-time which contains causal loops—"closed timelike lines,'' in the jargon. It was written by David Deutsch, who has been studying these matters for a decade at Oxford (not Cambridge, the site of the experiments in Timescape).

"Contrary to what has usually been assumed,'' Deutsch says, ``there is no reason in what we know of fundamental physics why closed timelike lines should not exist.'' In twenty pages of quantum logic calculations, he shows that no obstacle to free will or even grandfather murder really exists.

It's all done with the Everett interpretation. In quantum cosmology there is no single history of space-time. Instead, all possible histories happen simultaneously. For the vast preponderance of cases, this doesn't matter—the ontological bloat of an infinitude of worlds has no observable consequences. It's just a way of talking about quantum mechanics.

Not so for time machines. Then a quantum description requires a set of `"classical'' (ordinary) space-times which are similar to each other—except in the important history of the paradox-loop. The causal loop links all the multiple histories.

Think of unending sheets stacked on end and next to each other, like the pages in this magazine. Timelines flow up them. A causal loop snakes through these sheets, so the parallel universes become one. If the grandson goes back in time, he crosses to another time-sheet. There he shoots granddad, and lives thereafter in that universe. His granddad lived as before and had grandchildren, one of whom disappears, period.

Quantum mechanics always furnishes as many linked universes as there would be conflicting outcomes; it's quite economical. In this view, "it is only ever an approximation to speak of things happening 'in a universe'. In reality the 'universes' form part of a larger object...which, according to quantum theory, is the real arena in which things happen.'' Cosmic stuff, indeed.

Just now, writing this three months after Deutsch's paper appeared, I opened Timescape and tracked down my old thinking. "When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes.... The grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, passing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical.''

I framed my fictional theory this way because it seemed at least a plausible escape hatch from the genuine problems of time machines, using quantum logic. But my deeper motivation was to capture the eerie sense of having altered the past, the age-old dream . . . but for someone else.

If you know this, then such an act is the ultimate altruism: you cannot then benefit in any way from usefully adjusting the past (or suffer, either). Someone exactly like you does benefit (yes, a twin; and I wonder how much my being an identical twin has led to my interest in these ideas)—but you will never see him, and cannot know this except in theory. Most of all, I was struck in writing the closing pages of the novel with that glimpse of vistas unknown, whole universes beyond our grasp, times untouched. To me that is the essential SF impulse. Much critical attention paid the book (such as Susan Stone-Blackburn's, who contributed a critical summary to the new Bantam edition of the novel) lauds its characterization, perhaps because the scientific content and metaphors are less obvious and not traditional.
To me, though, beyond the book's puzzles and plots lurks its central driver: a sense of unchanging immensity, the timescape glimpsed with the flitting attention of a mortal being. This touches on the often-invoked emotions behind much hard SF—awe and thinly veiled transcendence. They are the core passions of Clarke and Stapledon.

In most of my writing I do try to portray humans as they really are, because I am uncomfortably aware that real science is done by people with dirt under their fingernails. In hard SF there is an inevitable tension between conventional short-focus realism and the impact of the larger landscape (humanity foregrounded against the universe) that is central to hard SF's ideology and affect.

The usual hard SF protagonist is an Everyman, who believes in reason and his/her ability to fathom the unknown. Hard SF is not about ironic distance or individual failure, though that may play a part in a particular hard SF work. Still less is it about the symptoms of narrative exhaustion which some term post-modern—pastiche, borrowing, self-aware recycling of genre materials, and the rearrangement of conceptual deck chairs on a cultural Titanic. Titles like Mission of Gravity, Gateway, and Childhood's End are about the great ol' up and out.

It was quite strange to read Deutsch's neatly couched arguments in Physical Review D. There is a certain wrenching sensation in having anticipated the qualitative aspects—not the thickets of equations; Deutsch's quantum logic calculations I find quite daunting—of a theory which seems to open the way to actual use of time machines, if we should ever devise them.

Will we? Perhaps. But hard SF is not about exactly predicting the future. It is about the beauty of a small, reasoning reed, which can see past its own mortality and wonder at the vistas beyond. Its essential drama lies in that huge leap of scale.

23 February 1993

*Larry Niven, "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel,'' All the Myriad Ways (NY: Ballantine, 1971), 110-23.
 

Claire Sponsler

Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play¹

For better or for worse, "cyberpunk'' no longer needs much introduction. Used as commonly and casually as its cousins "cyborg'' and "postmodernism,'' "cyberpunk'' has become a widely accepted term for describing a specific kind of cultural production found in music, film, and fiction in 1980s America.² A fusion of high-tech and punk counterculture characterized by a self-conscious stylistic and ideological rebelliousness, cyberpunk can perhaps best be defined as a reinterpretation of human (and especially male) experience in a media-dominated, information-saturated, post-industrial age. Debate now centers less on what cyberpunk is than on what its value has been, with opinions ranging from Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's sardonic criticism of cyberpunk as ``the vanguard white male art of the age'' (267) to Veronica Hollinger's sympathetic reading of cyberpunk as an exploration of post-humanist subjectivity.³

In spite of cyberpunk's dominance within SF during the 1980s, the consensus among both SF writers and critics is that cyberpunk as a movement is essentially over. Many of the central core of cyberpunk authors, including William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, and Bruce Sterling, have turned to other projects. At the same time, although cyberpunk is still being written here and there, it is difficult to detect anything like a coherent group of second-generation cyberpunk writers. Nevertheless, however passé it may be as a self-conscious literary movement, cyberpunk continues to exert considerable influence on science-fiction writers, though in diffuse and often contradictory ways.⁴ At one extreme, cyberpunk has begun to function as an excluded "Other'' against which many writers shape their fiction. Such is the case with such popular writers as Kim Stanley Robinson, Sheri Tepper, Connie Willis, and Pat Murphy, who, consciously or unconsciously, write against the grain of cyberpunk and in some cases seemingly in direct opposition to it. At the other extreme stand writers like George Alec Effinger, K.W. Jeter, Pat Cadigan, and Emma Bull, who persist in finding the themes and images of cyberpunk vital imaginative terrain, however clichéd, or downright repugnant, those themes and images may now appear to others.

While Effinger, Jeter, Cadigan, and Bull, who admittedly are in the minority among current SF writers, might be considered as representing no more than the last gasp of a dying sub-genre, it seems suggestive that in their work the cyberpunk sensibility has found a dynamic afterlife. Although no new movement with the same kind of shared vision and unified goals has replaced cyberpunk, given the ever-growing fragmentation of our postmodern world any such shared vision in SF, or in any other cultural arena, is perhaps an out-dated possibility.⁵ Instead, cyberpunk now seems to represent a storehouse of themes and images that are open to recycling in works that are not, strictly speaking, cyberpunk. Just as punk music has faded from the current music scene, but lingers on in modified form in industrial dance music, so cyberpunk has been productively reappropriated by recent science-fiction writing that is to all appearances not explicitly classifiable as part of the genre of cyberpunk.

In light of this dispersion of cyberpunk themes and images across the field of recent SF, I would like to look again at one of the chief claims made about cyberpunk, especially by advocates like Sterling. It is frequently argued that cyberpunk's most significant contribution has been its development of a new dystopian realism that takes a long, hard look at the near-future. As with so much of what is said about cyberpunk, this claim both is and isn't true. Science-fiction writers have long felt a social responsibility to imagine better futures, but as Andrew Ross observes, "this sense of utopian responsibility was slowly eroded in the Cold War period by the dominant dystopian and fatalistic visions of nuclear annihilation'' (142). The New Wave movement of the 1960s and the work in the 1970s of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, and Suzy McKee Charnas opened space for new kinds of critical utopian writing, but the genre of (primarily feminist) utopian writing gradually dissolved in the 1980s, in part under the pressure of its own self-criticism and in part for political reasons (see, for example, Peter Fitting's discussion ["Decline'']. At the same time, SF's tradition of dystopian near-futures found in the work of writers such as John Brunner, Philip Dick, Cyril Kornbluth, and Frederik Pohl also began to lose oppositional power, and hence effectiveness as a critique of the present, as images of a bleak, eco-dystopian future became, as Ross puts it, "the 'official' look of the future in popular culture'' (144) played out in the 1970s in innumerable films, television shows, and works of fiction. This is the moment when cyberpunk enters. Inspired by punk culture's anti-utopian "no-future'' look, cyberpunk saw itself as, among other things, accurately depicting a realistic near-future earth. Rejecting what it viewed as the out-dated and now rather quaint fascination of traditional science fiction with aliens, outer space, and far-future millennia, cyberpunk claimed to present us instead with a world that is recognizably our own, one that seems to be lying in wait for us just around the corner. Cyberpunk, it was said, was not concerned with utopian imaginings of a distant future. Nor (though this was said less often) was cyberpunk particularly concerned with critiques of the present in the guise of dystopian near-futures (as were Brunner et al.). Instead, cyberpunk promised a long, cold look at the future soon to be upon us.⁶

One way cyberpunk has tried to stake out its difference from its predecessors is by spurning nuclear annihilation as a grounding device for its narrative representations of the future. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Get the Bomb Off my Back,'' Bruce Sterling, echoing his earlier contention that one of the salient features of cyberpunk is "its boredom with the Apocalypse'' (Introduction to Burning Chrome xi), argues that SF writers in general are no longer preoccupied with the notion of a nuclear holocaust. According to Sterling, cyberpunk in particular has abandoned this long-familiar topos, seeking instead to come to terms with a different, more realistic future. In spite of the obvious appeal of Sterling's claim, with its promise of liberating us from one of the deepest anxieties clouding our collective unconscious, the geopolitics of most cyberpunk stories appear nearly as post-apocalyptic as the SF classics of the Cold War era. Granted that the near-future cyberpunk postulates has come about through technological developments (though surprisingly often with the help of nuclear or natural agents such as an atomic war or an earthquake), the physical settings of most cyberpunk stories nonetheless look strikingly like the setting of any post-holocaust story: blighted, rubble-strewn, broken-down cityscapes; vast terrains of decay, bleakness, and the detritus of civilization; and the nearly complete absence of a benign or beautiful nature. This is a topography familiar to us from innumerable 1980s tech-noir films like Robocop, Blade Runner, Total Recall, or The Terminator, in which destitute urban landscapes littered with abandoned factories, barbed wire fences, and burnt-out buildings provide the ominous background against which the action takes place. Deny it though Sterling might try, cyberpunk typically operates with the assumption that some kind of catastrophe has occurred that has led to much the same kind of eco-wasteland as did the bomb in earlier generations of SF stories. Cyberpunk, in other words, seems to be just as dependent on the aesthetics of disaster as was an earlier generation of SF stories.
There is a difference, however. The distinction—and this may be what Sterling is aiming at—lies in cyberpunk's attitude towards both its apocalypses and their outcomes. As Martha Bartter has pointed out, early post-holocaust science fiction usually presented atomic war both "as obvious disaster and as secret salvation'' (148) that performed an act of urban renewal by razing inhumane cities and providing a place (albeit a hostile one) where select groups could come together as communities and flourish. These stories tended to recreate either the frontier or the village as the ideal human setting, finding in preindustrial forms of social interaction appealing myths for resolving the crises of twentieth-century urban industrialism. In either case, the external world was cast as a hostile and threatening place, inimical to human survival, but acting as a catalyst for social betterment.

Cyberpunk, in contrast, attaches zero value to its apocalypses: they are neither good nor evil, they simply are (or rather have been, since they invariably occur at some time before the story opens). The destructive event, whether nuclear war or natural or man-made disaster, that results in an altered landscape takes place out of sight at some point before the narration begins and has little moral or epistemological impact. The typical cyberpunk reaction to these off-stage cataclysms is in fact profound indifference. In the quintessential cyberpunk novel, Gibson's Neuromancer, for example, the Sprawl—a huge, sprawling, urban zone that stretches down the eastern sea-board of the US—is in some unexplained way the product of rampant urban growth that is set against the desolation of the central and western regions of the United States, which have by some unexplained means been turned into the howling wasteland that we see in Mona Lisa Overdrive. All our attention is focused on the bustling Sprawl and diverted away from both the wastelands and what might have caused them. In Gibson's work, and in other cyberpunk stories, disaster is taken for granted; it is a kind of white noise in the background, humming behind all the action.

Simultaneously with this neutralizing of the apocalypse as a critical event in human history, cyberpunk transforms the negative space of the external environment into a positive zone. Still ruined, it is now converted into a site where interesting things happen and where humans flourish, as the throbbing vitality of Gibson's Sprawl and Chiba City demonstrate. The decayed urban zone provides cyberpunk with a playground where outlaws and outsiders can seize the main chance, adapting and surviving in a ruined cityscape, ultimately discovering an escape to the most important zone of possibility—the new frontier of cyberspace.

In the remainder of this essay, I would like to look at the way cyberpunk's geopolitics has been taken up by three recent SF works—K.W. Jeter's Farewell Horizontal, Emma Bull's Bone Dance, and Pat Cadigan's Synners. (Of the three, Synners fits most easily under the rubric of cyberpunk, while the other two are instances of the adoption of particular cyberpunk themes and images within stories that are not themselves explicitly cyberpunk.) My method will be to read these three novels against three post-holocaust stories in order to show not only how cyberpunk and cyberpunk-inspired writings have been unable, despite Sterling's manifesto, to break entirely with earlier representations of human action within a post-apocalyptic environment, but also, and more importantly, how the decayed yet vitalized cityscape of cyberpunk does differ from the physical worlds of post-holocaust SF. At the end of the essay, I will briefly consider some of the implications of the dispersion of this particular feature of cyberpunk—its geopolitics— across other fictional and cultural fields.

In traditional post-holocaust stories such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959), Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), or even Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), the nuclear landscape always seems filled with a sense of radical emergency. Paranoia, mutants, xenophobia, fear of the disappearance or mutation of the body (and the consequent disintegration of the self), and despair about the hopelessness of post-atomic rubble mark these stories, even when they celebrate human ingenuity.⁷ As Jeff Porter has suggested, these stories often find themselves ``limited to narrow choices between dispossession and revival,'' between fatalism and survivalism. Whichever path they take, traditional post-apocalyptic narratives play out their human struggles within a hostile and alienating ecology, an ecology that to a large extent defines their limited choices.
Alas, Babylon, set in central Florida, chronicles the efforts of a small band of survivors under the leadership of Randy Bragg, a former liberal lawyer, to build a self-sufficient community out of the ruins of civilization produced by a nuclear war that is taking place as the story is being told. Frank's narrative is a striking example of nuclear disaster viewed as urban renewal and of human survival as a kind of social Darwinism. Nuclear disaster is seen in the novel as a neo-Deluge, a quasi-natural event, that wipes the earth clean of the effects of human civilization. As one of the characters remarks:

Nature is proving Darwin's law of natural selection. The defective bee, unable to cope with its environment, is rejected by nature before birth. I think this will be true of man. It is said that nature is cruel. I don't think so. Nature is just, and even merciful. By natural selection, nature will attempt to undo what man has done. (§9:194)

Frank wastes little time describing the destruction that is occurring as a result of the nuclear war, concentrating instead on the efforts of Bragg's valiant band to rebuild a community. Though horrifying desolation surrounds them and all of the major cities of Florida have been destroyed, the suggestively named Fort Repose remains isolated from the atomic debris, a safe haven of pastoralism in the midst of ``the end of civilization as we know it'' (§5:109). Though word comes through on the radio that ``Washington has been atomized'' (§6:127), this is of little concern to the residents of Fort Repose who are more worried about how to cope with the loss of electricity, clean drinking water, and other comforts of middle-class existence. In fact, the obliteration of cities everywhere is seen less as a disaster than as a chance to start over, to make a new and better beginning. The librarian at Fort Repose muses that ``it was strange...that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living'' (§8:167). In Frank's story, the environment is divided into two distinct spaces: the bombed or contaminated zones of former cities and the unscathed rural and suburban outposts. In the former, humans have been wiped out, seemingly with good riddance; in the latter, they have been handed the opportunity to build new and better lives based on what are seen in the novel as simpler, more natural values. Crucially, however, outposts such as Fort Repose can only be imagined against the background of widespread destruction, against a landscape inhospitable to humans, against a holocaust that burns a clean space for the rebuilding of a better humanity (seen in Alas, Babylon as a kind of idealized, middle-class, suburban lifestyle).

A Canticle for Leibowitz inhabits the space left unexamined by Frank, the blasted nuclear landscape hostile to human life. In Miller's story no pastoral pockets of humanity escape unscathed and equipped to refashion a purer version of suburban life. Miller's story opens in a wind-swept desert, over which lone pilgrims (like Brother Francis) wander avoiding robbers, howling wolves, and scattered populations of monsters. Shimmering noon-day heat beats down on once great highways now reduced to mere tracks through the desert. Mounds of rubble mark the sites of former buildings from which stones have been plundered to build new habitations (such as the abbey). Brother Francis' discovery of a Fallout Shelter in which he finds the Memorabilia demonstrates the novel's typical attitude toward the ruins: "The ruins above ground had been reduced to archaeological ambiguity by generations of scavengers, but this underground ruin had been touched by no hand but the hand of impersonal disaster. The place seemed haunted by the presences of another age'' (§2:29). In the midst of a harsh, blasted landscape, the ruins of former cities take on a mystical feel, infused with the breath of a lost civilization that Brother Francis and the other surviving monks devote their lives to resurrecting and rebuilding, trying to discover in the remnants and rubble of the past answers for the future.

The environment is full of brooding evil, threatening human endurance on every side. Survivors huddle together in scattered enclaves where their existence is marked by perpetual labor and the struggle for survival. The desert is vast and ominous; the remnants of humanity must struggle mightily to survive. Tellingly, the search for knowledge that ultimately succeeds in Miller's book results in another holocaust, millions of corpses, and "new ruins'' (§29:318). In Canticle, the quest to rebuild human civilization ultimately fails and there is, finally, no escape from the hostile environment except to leave earth for an alien planet, as some of the survivors do in the end. Terra, the natural habitat of humankind, proves by humankind's own doing permanently inhospitalis.

In Riddley Walker, a powerfully complex and richly imagined post-holocaust story, the feel of the setting is remarkably similar to that of Canticle, though we are now in rainy England rather than the arid southwest USA. Killer dogs roam in packs, green rot grows on the rubble of former civilizations, Riddley's people dig for old iron at Widders Dump and talk about lost cleverness, boats in the air, and pictures on the wind. In Hoban's novel, a hunting-gathering culture living in shelters made of "baskit and gunge with a thatch roof'' (§12:101) clings to half-forgotten, garbled remnants of a pre-holocaust world and searches for both a language and a meaning lost with the bomb's blast in the Bad Time. The bomb's aftershocks have included the destruction of most of the artifacts of civilization and the death of most people. In Riddley's words: "Every 1 knows about Bad Time and what come after. Bad Time 1st and bad times after. Not many come thru it a live'' (§1:2).

This post-bomb world is a ruined, more primitive than pastoral, scene that has been literally bombed back to the dark ages. People shelter in woods and small enclaves as best they can, foraging for food. The continual rain is the dominant symbol of a hostile nature, as Riddley makes clear: "Raining agen it wer nex morning. Theres rains and rains. This 1 wer coming down in a way as took the hart and hoap out of you'' (§11:71). Riddley's quest, his journey to Canterbury in search of answers, "connexions,'' and the "Littl Shyning Man,'' takes him through broken buildings and broken machines littering the countryside, but leads him to no real answers and no real knowledge. He remains alienated from his surroundings, which offer him no help in his quest but rather threaten him at every turn with physical danger and, just as importantly, inescapably depressing bleakness. Hoban envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape in which any rebuilding of civilization seems an impossibility and in which the best humans can do is endure.

I hope my all too brief discussion of these three novels gives some sense of the range and variety of post-holocaust SF, as well as a feel for their standard geopolitics. In these stories, the physical world, destroyed by the atomic bomb's blast, is hostile and forbidding, a no-man's land where humans must struggle to survive, but where struggle can be a purifying experience. The physical world here is unfriendly, unyielding, and unforgiving. Most of all, as the product of humanity's vile and destructive behavior, the physical world must be battled against in the re-building of a better society; it is no partner in the reconstruction of civilization, however much it may provide the impetus for such reconstruction.

In contrast the typical cyberpunk or cyberpunk-inspired setting, though resembling the blasted landscapes of post-holocaust stories, has a rather different feel. Cyberpunk rewrites the typical post-holocaust narrative movement from pessimism to optimism back to pessimism so compellingly played out in Canticle—the assumption that the worst will happen, linked to belief that good can come of it, followed by fear (or certainty) that the worst will happen again. In cyberpunk angst and ambivalence are replaced by acceptance of the ruined state of the landscape; destruction of the natural environment and decay of the urban zone are givens that are not lamented but rather accepted. There is no reflection on the past that caused the apocalypse and little on the future that lies beyond it. More importantly, the cliché of a pre-technological future nostalgically modelled on an idealized version of the past is foreign to cyberpunk, which inhabits not an anti- but a resolutely and genuinely post-industrial future.

Farewell Horizontal (1989) is K. W. Jeter's most obviously mainstream SF novel, yet, crucially, it is infused by a cyberpunk-inspired treatment of setting. Ny Axxter, a free-lance graffix artist who implants biofoil ikons into the chests of Neanderthalish gang members, leaves the safety of life "on the horizontal'' to attempt life "on the vertical'' on the outside of Cylinder, a building that constitutes his known world. Inside Cylinder live the horizontal dwellers, the factory drudges and the privileged, wealthy few. Outside live the outlaws, the freelancers, the warrior gangs such as the Havoc Mass and the Grievous Amalgam. Outside, on the vertical, people ride motorcycles across cable networks and wear microchip implants that let them plug into dimples in Cylinder's surface, tapping into the computerized economic and information net, Ask & Receive.

The milieu Jeter imagines here, the physical world represented in its entirety by Cylinder, would at first glance seem far removed from cyberpunk's deteriorated near-future urban environment. We learn that at some indefinite time in the past, some sort of nuclear holocaust took place that resulted in the sealing off of certain sectors of Cylinder and, we can imagine, in the isolation of those humans who now live in or on Cylinder. There is nothing beyond, beneath, or above Cylinder except air and clouds, and no speculation, until the very end of the novel, by any of the characters, about what lies beyond Cylinder. In the post-war world of Jeter's novel, what an architect would call the "built-environment'' swallows up the whole terrain. There is no natural world, no habitat, no living space beyond Cylinder except for the clouds, the air, freefall, the zone of the gas angels—there are no trees, no mountains, no oceans, not even any cities, only the building, which becomes in its solitude the quintessential representation of urban and rural life simultaneously, an entire city (or even nation) on and within one monumental structure.

Life on Cylinder is divided into two distinct locales. For the outsiders sleeping in slings and tents lashed to the wall, riding their motorcycles up and down the wall, life is dangerous: "Vertical was tough. Anybody could fall off the wall. One way or another; either the big step, right down into the cloud barrier below, or...back the other way, inwall to the horizontal'' (§1: 24). Yet, life on the outside is preferable to life on the horizontal, which is viewed as unending subjugation of the individual mind and body to the demands of machines and production. As Axxter remarks:

Sleeping next to some plastics extrusion machine for four hours...and then punching out widgets for the next twenty, over and over, until there was nothing left in your head except the platonic ideal of a widget. You might as well be a widget then; the transformation into object would be complete. (§8:125)

To live on the inside is to give up on being fully human. To live on the inside is to participate in a blue-collar version of the kind of mindless, conformist existence lived by Gibson's sararimen, who are, like Jeter's "widgets,'' mere cogs in the corporate machine.

In spite of its dangers, the outside of Cylinder is, like Gibson's Night City, an outlaw zone of possibilities for those who dare to live there, and especially for those who probe and question the forces that control it. Similarly, as in Neuromancer, or better yet, in Count Zero where Bobby begins his adventures and his transformation into a console cowboy by venturing outside of his narrowly circumscribed and blinkered life in a vast high-rise housing project and exploring the subversive activities and hidden life taking place all around him, not to interrogate the environment is seen as a failure of the imagination and of adaptation. As one character complains to Axxter, trying to urge him to take risks and explore his environment: "'Like this building, cylinder itself.... You live in it, or on it, but you never think about it. It's obviously constructed, a thing put together, but you never wonder why, or by whom''' (§14:205).
In Farewell Horizonal, as in the more explicitly cyberpunk stories of Shirley, Rucker, Gibson, and Sterling, the people who live on the margins, independently, by their wits and in defiance of official forces, are seen as living up to their fullest potential. With the help of the gas angels, who float freely around Cylinder buoyed by large gas-filled sacs on their backs, Axxter in the end exposes a conspiracy involving the warrior gangs in cahoots with both the media-information service and the corporate powers. In a scenario familiar to us from countless cyberpunk stories, the underdog ultimately triumphs, finds meaning for his own life, and undermines the power of repressive and malevolent authorities. For Jeter, there is nothing alienating or hostile about the environment except when humans unthinkingly surrender themselves to it, trading their freedom for security. Even though Cylinder, as the totality of the landscape in Farewell Horizontal, seems at first glance far removed from cyberpunk's decayed urban landscapes, in the end it amounts to much the same thing. Axxter's final plunge off of Cylinder into the clouds at the close of the novel can be read as penetration into cyberpunk's ultimate zone of possibility—the non-corporeal reality of cyberspace. In this sense, Cylinder functions as a pared-down, stylized, abstract, and even symbolic version of cyberpunk's typical urban ruins. Cylinder may not look the same as Gibson's Sprawl, but it feels the same.

The setting of Emma Bull's Bone Dance (1991), though different in many ways and drawing more obviously on the cyberpunk model, represents a similar kind of ruined cityscape full of potential. Located in a Louisiana town vaguely resembling Hong Kong, the City is a collage of gleaming highrises for the rich and powerful; streets teeming with bicycle cabs, food hawkers, junk stalls, and grill carts; and stately abandoned buildings where the marginalized such as the protagonist Sparrow live. Importantly, Bull's landscape, like Jeter's, is not particularly threatening, but rather replete with opportunities for those who know how to move through it, find hidden resources, and adapt to its conditions. Bull's description of where Sparrow lives offers a glimpse of this emphasis on clever adaptation and resourcefulness:

Home was a corner of the seventh floor.... The back stairs were nearly rotted away.... The lobby elevator was ruined.... I was the only tenant above the third floor, because I was the only one who knew where the service elevator was, and that it worked. (§2.1:52)

Tapping into stolen electricity, living a hidden life out of the eye of the authorities, Sparrow carries on his/her business. Significantly, Sparrow and others like him/her live an expansive, not a constricted, existence that is enabled, not hindered, by the ruined cityscape. In Bull's story, as in Farewell Horizontal, the protagonists are free from restraints, go wherever they wish to go, cross forbidden zones, and through their ability to live on the fringes finally possess more power than the so-called powerful.

In Bone Dance, as in many cyberpunk stories, physical space is, however, ultimately less important than mental space. Like the cyberspace of Gibson's works or Sterling's "net,'' this mental space counters, and represents an evasion of, the ruined physical world. Sparrow, we learn, is a cheval, a neutered human deliberately constructed to survive the war that has taken place before the novel opens and provide a bodily shell for Voodoo Horsemen to inhabit. At the end of the story, in a mental battle of two minds within one body that privileges interior mental space over exterior physical environment, s/he must fight off a Horseman who wishes to possess the body Sparrow now inhabits. In this mental battle it is made abundantly clear that whatever impact the external environment has on human life, it pales in comparison with the significance of interior space. Mind matters much more than body here.

Like Bone Dance, Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991) is a post-paranoia novel that plays with the disappearance of the body, derives pleasure from debris, and goes even farther in making interior space more central than exterior space, perhaps not surprisingly given that it is securely within the genre of cyberpunk. Most cyberpunk stories invest urgency in virtual reality—whether in cyberspace or, in the case of Cadigan's novel, the net. Through this emphasis on virtual reality, the sense of emergency associated with traditional holocaust science fiction's quest for survival in a hostile environment is exorcised in the creation of a new, more important, interior space. Typically, the attitude towards external reality is nonchalant, off-hand, accepting. This nonchalance comes across vividly in Synners in Cadigan's description of the Mimosa, the Manhattan-Hermosa strip that was

part of the old postquake land of the lost. [Gina] wasn't old enough to remember the Big One.... The kids who shanked it on the Mimosa didn't remember the quake, either. For all they knew, the old Manhattan Pier and Hermosa Pier and Fisherman's Wharf had always stretched out over dry sand, just to shelter the space cases who squatted under them. (§2:7)

Once again, some sort of holocaust has wrecked buildings, homes, and various urban structures, but once again all the destruction seems unimportant. There is no longing here for a pre-holocaust landscape, but rather acceptance of the present situation. There is no sense that the present debris is blighted, but rather that it has a function, serving as a usable and hospitable habitat for those who can adjust to it and modify it to their needs.

Stealing data, working for the media-conglomerate Diversifications making videos, tapping into the traffic and information net, Gridlid, Gabe, Sam, Virtual Mark, and Gina typify the characters who can succeed on the fringes, a part of the electronic and social underground. Just as compelling, however, are the computer simulations like Art Fish, who along with a dematerialized Virtual Mark ultimately takes over the net, and Gabe's interactive virtual-reality creations, Marly and Caritha, with whom he has exciting virtual adventures. External reality matters less and less as the net and virtual reality become more real. As one character says, "'We're not in our natural habitat anymore. We've become denizens of the net''' (§32:386). Physical space gives way to virtual space, dissolving the body into the realm of data. In Cadigan's novel, the embodied and the disembodied, the synthesized humans, the simulated humans, and the human humans, all ultimately become equivalent. Crucially, this meshing of humans and computer simulations in cyberspace affords an alternative way of envisioning human response to a post-apocalyptic environment and represents the logical conclusion of cyberpunk's treatment of urban ruins.

In these stories that adopt the geopolitics of cyberpunk, we encounter what are essentially nuclear landscapes without the crisis (the struggle for survival) and the climax (the bomb). Indeed, crisis and climax are largely irrelevant to cyberpunk (an irony given that 1980s Reaganite America saw the resurgence of the most intense moments between the Soviet Union and the US since the Cuban missile crisis). Instead, in Pynchonesque fashion, cyberpunk regards the zone, the decayed cityscape, as a place of possibilities, a carnivalesque realm where anything goes and where there are no rules, only boundaries that can be easily transgressed. Stripped of the modernist ethical values that dominated Cold War SF, cyberpunk and the recent SF that takes up its stance have wholeheartedly endorsed Baudrillard's observation that "the triumph of simulation is as fascinating as catastrophe'' (Fatal Strategies 74). Whereas in earlier science fiction humans had, with few exceptions, to journey to outer space to find such a zone of possibility, in cyberpunk this zone is here, in the cyberspace of the data net and the human mind, and entry into that zone is encouraged, not hampered, by a milieu of urban decay.

In other words, while in earlier post-holocaust stories the ruined landscape was a sign of alienation, a locale inhospitable to humans that had to be fought against in order to accomplish anything good, in the cyberpunk sensibility the landscape and the alienation are converted into positive values. Part of the cyberpunk story is in fact about becoming at home with alienation, staged in a landscape of decay. The typical protagonists of the cyberpunk world are quintessentially alienated individuals, but their alienation is refigured as positive since they are alienated against a banal, corrupt, and homogenizing post-industrial society; correspondingly, the physical milieu they inhabit, wrecked though it is, offers them a playground of creative possibilities. Indeed, these protagonists could agree with Baudrillard that "We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy of communication'' (Fatal Strategies 67). In cyberpunk and in many of the stories that pirate its themes and images we see an exuberant playing out of this shift from alienation to ecstasy. Faced with "a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence'' (America 23), which is how Baudrillard describes contemporary America, the cyberpunk sensibility has reacted with acceptance—and even excitement— rather than despair.

Another way of viewing the cyberpunk-inspired attitude towards blighted landscapes and its privileging of virtual space is as a response to what the architectural critic Kenneth Frampton describes as our contemporary urban "Megalopolitan development—the freestanding high-rise and the serpentine freeway.... a bürolandschaft cityscape: the victory of universal civilization over locally inflected culture'' (17. While Frampton would propose ways of reshaping the "universal placelessness'' (24) of the alienating cityscapes we have inherited as a result of modernist architectural practices, uncontrolled population growth, ecological despoliation, and the rampant spread of capital and technology, cyberpunk takes another route. Embracing the seemingly alienating environs of late twentieth-century urban life, cyberpunk finds in them resources that lead, crucially, to the new space of virtual reality.

An acceptance of the decay of the physical world—especially the urban environment—seen not as a frightening specter but simply as home, the place where we live (Cylinder, the City, the Mimosa), coupled with a fascination with simulated, interior space—the world of cyberspace or virtual reality—may be one of the enduring themes of cyberpunk. It is this at-homeness in urban ruin as well as this privileging of imagined over real space that marks cyberpunk as different from earlier generations of science fiction, rather than, as Sterling claims, simply the refusal to employ such topoi of traditional SF as the nuclear holocaust.

How should we then react to the tendency of recent SF stories such as these to adopt a cyberpunk-like geopolitics? One response might well be to deplore this tendency, since from one perspective cyberpunk's attitude towards the external world can seem distressingly apolitical and apathetic, representing in fact a typical 1980s evasion of responsibility (this has been argued, for example, by critics like Ross and Fitting ["Lessons'']). In this view, cyberpunk can be blamed for accepting the worst ecological trends of our present life as the status quo and passively acquiescing to continued environmental destruction. Cyberspace, in this view, is projected as a fantasy realm of rebellious escape that derives its glamour from its contrast with the decadently decayed physical world around it. SF that takes up the cyberpunk attitude towards decay would be, of course, equall