When we read a work of fiction, we test its details against our experience of the nuances and gestures of everyday life. Appearances are at issue when we investigate and assess the value of a literary text. We consider the text authentic if it matches what we observe—or, in fictional circumstances, could observe—when we look at the world around us. But in the case of science fiction this test does not entirely apply. We must take the seemingly unreal setting and the element of science in the fiction into account.
When we read a work of SF, we also test it against our scientific and technical knowledge. Scientific principles operating behind imaginary rather than everyday experience are at issue. The attitude that underpins science fiction is that there is a reality beyond appearances which is knowable through science. There is a particular variety of science fiction, commonly called “hard” SF, that emphasizes the rigorous nature of our relation to this reality behind experience. Other SF (even such classics as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz), while it usually takes this into account, emphasizes our experience of the nature of human behavior and is more nearly, but not entirely, testable in the ordinary way we read.
I. The Pleasures and Problems of Hard SF
This essay examines the way science functions in science fiction throughout the history and development of the genre—from Poe and Verne and Hawthorne and Wells to the giants of today—focusing primarily upon the type known as “hard science fiction.” Not only is the science in science fiction the foundation of science fictional delights and entertainments, it is in fact chief among those delights. I believe this needs to be said strongly now, at this precise historic moment in the evolution of SF. John Clute has said that at this moment, in the 1990s, SF is a genre in crisis, and many other commentators agree that the SF genre, with its traditions, reading protocols, and literary attitudes, is in danger of marginalization and collapse into a less distinct form of contemporary literature. Anthologies such as The Norton Book of Science Fiction are signposts on the road. This essay is adapted from the introduction to The Ascent of Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is written for an audience not intimately familiar with the history and development of the field. It also refers to many stories as examples, most of which are in the anthology. Our project, introduced here, is to examine the evolution of hard SF and present hard SF as the center of the SF field, not somewhere out on the fringe. And so I begin.
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Hard SF is about the beauty of truth. It is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of the wonder at the perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery. The Eureka. There are a number of ways this is done in hard SF. The crucial moment may in fact come early in the story and the rest of the story may simply require a character (and the reader) to respond to the impact of the discovery. Or it may come at the climax, or there may be a number of these moments in a hard SF story. This is the kind of story, such as Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, or Gregory Benford’s Timescape, or Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, that is seen by readers as a milestone or classic.
Hard SF is, then, about the emotional experience of describing and confronting what is scientifically true. We may compare both the nonrealistic aspects of hard SF and the realistic elements (such as the way the characters experience the hypothetical reality) to our personal experiences of perceived or consensual reality and have our perceptions of reality illuminated by contrast. This is as true of J. G. Ballard’s “Cage of Sand” as it is of Isaac Asimov’s “Waterclap.” The hypothetical experiences are the ones that are particularly illuminating to a reader of hard SF.
Hard SF feels authentic to experienced readers when the way things work in the story is scientifically plausible—in the place and time the story is set. For example: In the event that there were an ellipsoid planet like Hal Clement’s Mesklin, inhabited by an intelligent alien race, then if humans were to visit they might plausibly find that gravity, geology, chemistry, and the alien race itself resembled with some precision and in some detail Clement’s description of this hypothetical place—according to what we know of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology at present.
Hard SF relies, at some point in the story, on expository prose rather than literary prose, prose aimed at describing the nature of its particular reality. The reality that is the case is usually not literally true but at the same time adheres to the principles by which science describes what is known. Originally this exposition was merely a device for achieving verisimilitude (in Poe), as it still is often in non-genre writing; but by the advent of 1920s “scientifiction” it had become of central interest and by the 1940s the essential point or turning point of a science fiction story.
Because hard SF is a literary form demanding of both its writers and its readers significant amounts of scientific knowledge as well as previous reading in the genre, it has continued to yield a disproportionate number of the central images common to all forms of science fiction and to generate new translations of scientific ideas into literary contexts through which they can then become the devices and ultimately the clichés of many other stories. Stories such as Clifford D. Simak’s “Desertion” and James Blish’s “Surface Tension,” in which humanity is physically transformed to live in alien environments, contain the seeds of many other stories in the genre. If it served no other function this would still preserve its critical importance.
It is a commonly held opinion of the writers who write hard SF, and the perception of the readers who prefer to read it, that hard SF is the core of all science fiction. It is as well a body of works set apart from the large body of run-of-the-mill SF throughout the modern period. Its heroic figures are H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Gregory Benford. Hard SF is SF with “the right stuff.”
However, hard science fiction is an acquired taste and a special pleasure. Devoted readers of hard SF know the real thing when they see it, the way readers of poetry are able to distinguish real poetry from greeting-card versifying: by the way in which the text fulfills an implied contract between writer and reader. Even work by a great poet that is (arguably) imperfectly executed can nevertheless be important and influential. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats with its “purple noon” might serve as an example. Or, in descending order, much of Rudyard Kipling’s or Robert W. Service’s poetry. Nevertheless, we know it as authentic: the real thing.
An essential condition of this recognition (of “the right stuff”) is experience gained from reading in the genre. (We acknowledge the difficulty of using the word “genre” to describe both poetry and science fiction but intend to use it to refer to any body of literature with distinct reader expectations and reading protocols that distinguish that body from other genres.) Also useful is technical knowledge of the rules by which the particular literary game is usually played. In the case of hard science fiction one must be able to summon up a basic knowledge of the scientific laws and principles by which our contemporary world is believed to operate. Sad to say, this last condition prevents enjoyment of the work by many otherwise educated and experienced readers, but there is enough of a spectrum of striking imagery, startling and innovative ideas, and a generally high level of literary execution in the corpus of hard science fiction that most readers of contemporary fiction new to hard SF could survive the initial shock to their habitual reading protocols as long as they are aware of the attitudes and preconceptions native to it and experience the excitement of this vigorous, lively, and influential branch of science fiction.
The primary pleasures of hard science fiction do not reside in its stylistic effects. One can summarize a hard SF story and communicate its essential spark without reference to its execution. It is normally a conservative literature, traditionally told in clear journalistic prose eschewing consciously literary effects: the prose of scientific description. Historically this is one of the main techniques for achieving verisimilitude in a literature which is in fact radically distanced from the here-and-now in a majority of the stories. It is also an advantage for the main body of writers and readers who come from a scientific or technological background and often read and write mostly in this prose style. Many of them harbor a deep suspicion of the self-consciously literary, together with an ingrained belief in the efficacy of scientific know-how to solve problems in the real world (and in any imaginable world). This last assumption underlies all hard science fiction. Even those stories that appear to be antithetical to this attitude or written in conscious reaction to it (J. G. Ballard’s “Cage of Sand” and Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” respectively) take this attitude as their starting point.
The experience of reading all science fiction generates a feeling of radical distance or escape from the real world, but paradoxically the experience of reading hard science fiction adds to that a need to bring external knowledge to the story—knowledge that exists only in the real world and is accessible to the reader through education and general knowledge of science. Hard SF uses spectacular images envisioned according to plausible scientific extrapolation in order to isolate us from ordinary life and confront us with the ideal universe of science. This isolation can produce extraordinary intellectual and emotional effects, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (with its vision of the dead solar system after a supernova linked to the birth of Christ) or Rudy Rucker’s “Ms. Found in a Copy of Flatland” (in which the central character is literally trapped in a two-dimensional universe).
Hard SF then always depends upon scientific knowledge external to the story. “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven, for instance, depends for its finest moment upon basic knowledge of the relative position of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun in the solar system: high school astronomy. “Stop Evolution in Its Tracks” by John Sladek is funny only if you know the most basic facts of evolutionary biology. “Chromatic Aberration” by John M. Ford is based on the theory of paradigm shifts—without knowledge of said theory it is still a creditable emulation of magic realism but not recognizably hard SF.
Science fiction as a whole comes in many varieties, but overall it tends to depend more on a knowledge of the body of hard science fiction written in the genre over the past few decades than upon science. SF as a whole ranges from Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, or Ray Bradbury, brilliantly literate at their best, to a spectrum of journeyman works by category writers. Ordinary science fiction adventure in particular—the works of Jack Vance serve as a distinguished example—tends to exist only in reference to earlier SF. It could arguably not exist without the tropes and cliché locutions (spaceship, time machine, space warp, blaster) developed with rigorous logic and strict adherence to scientific principles in past hard SF stories. Even Ray Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles takes place on the sandy habitable Mars of earlier SF writers, not the known planet of the time Bradbury wrote the stories (the late 1940s and early 1950s).
And even though interstellar travel may have been invented in the creaky visionary space adventures of E. E. “Doc” Smith, Ph.D., hard SF writers then went to work on the problems his inventions presented and used his devices in other stories wherein they were reconceived with plausible scientific rationales. The hard SF discussions that took place in the stories, in frequent speculative nonfiction articles, and in the letter columns of the SF magazines from the late 1920s to the present have been the forum for establishing and maintaining standards of plausibility in hard SF, and in all SF. One sense in which hard science fiction is the core of the whole genre is that the rest of the literature is in this real sense secondary to it—exists primarily in implied reference to its prior logical developments, ideas, and specialized terms—all assumed by writers as being known and familiar to the genre audience.
Texts in all genres fulfill an implied contract between writer and reader: This story will exist within the recognizable boundaries of the genre conventions and will deliver the pleasures expected of a text in this genre. Since genres are by nature interactive, in the sense that writers read in the genre and readers, in addition, interact with the writers (who are public figures—and in the science fiction field, with its fanzines and hundreds of conventions a year, this interaction is frequent and constant), the re-use of good ideas, with innovative variations, is common. One might compare this to the way sonneteers in literary history gained reputation by innovation within the form, or more recently, mystery writers became the darling of genre connoisseurs by building a better locked-room story. Thus Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity generated a whole body of “world-building” fiction over several decades, which includes Frank Herbert’s Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, and Larry Niven’s Ringworld.
In reading hard SF you are participating in an experience that involves you in the tension between the story’s radical distance from the real world and its similarity to real-world scientific principles upon which the imagined world also operates, and through which the imagined characters perceive their experience. James Blish’s “Surface Tension,” for instance, in which tiny genetically-engineered descendants of humans living in a large mud puddle on an alien planet develop enough scientific knowledge to build a wooden spaceship in which to explore the airy spaces above the surface of their puddle-world, is a paradigm. This tension generates in experienced readers an intense involvement in the innovative content (ideas) of the fiction, since the new and different ideas are still familiar through being based on known principles. The elements of fiction (story, characterization, plot, thematics, etc.) draw you in emotionally while the necessity of applying knowledge of science distances you intellectually—asking you, at the same time, to become emotionally involved in the problems of the characters in the fiction and to follow and understand in an intellectual sense the scientific grounding of the fiction. Hard SF, then, requires a double consciousness in readers, an intense involvement coupled paradoxically with (at least at the crucial points of exposition) great aesthetic distance.
SF readers nevertheless expect to be surprised at some point by a sudden perception of connection to things they know or observe in daily life. If the revelation is of the inner life, as in Daniel Keyes’s well-known Flowers for Algernon, then the story is not hard SF; if the revelation is of the functioning of the laws of nature, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Transit of Earth” or Isaac Asimov’s “Waterclap,” then the story is hard SF. In a hard SF story, the expectation is both escape and surprise: The conjunction between them should entertain and inform our view of the nature of reality.
Hard SF achieves its characteristic affect or stimulation of feeling essentially through informing, by being, in fact, didactic. One is taken a great distance in time and space only to learn something possibly or plausibly true in the here and now. To a greater or lesser extent most science fiction escapes the limits of a real world to somewhere else in time and space, a setting radically distanced (not days or weeks in the future but hundreds or thousands or millions of years; not in another country but far away in space). But hard science fiction uses the distance to bring us home again in an apparently intellectual way, not usually through insight into human character but through insight into the mechanics of the universe, true in all times and places. Thus a story such as Larry Niven’s “The Hole Man” teaches us little about the character of scientists but a lot about its idea: the nature, and possible misuse, of a tiny black hole; James Blish’s “Beep” opens up a myriad of possibilities for new levels of complex information transfer; Hilbert Schenck’s “The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck” gives us information about hurricanes.
Furthermore, the world of the hard SF story is deterministic, ruled by scientific law: It is inimical to all life and especially dangerous to anyone who does not know said law or how to figure it out—scientific method facts. This is the world of J. G. Ballard as well as the world of Hal Clement. “Somebody had asked me,” said Clement in a recent interview “why I didn’t have bad entities—villains—in my stories, generally speaking, and my point was that the universe was a perfectly adequate villain!” The universe is enough of an antagonist. So it follows that the villains of hard SF pervert science or are ignorant of it. The assumption that knowledge is good is essential to the hard SF affect, even when it is being undercut, as in Kate Wilhelm’s “The Planners,” or Vernor Vinge’s “Bookworm, Run!”
Because human characters nearly always survive in the face of an environment that is inherently inhuman, hard SF gained a reputation for optimism. But “The Cold Equations,” in which a responsible space pilot is forced to kill a sweet and ignorant stowaway because otherwise the mathematics of space travel say that all will die, is a title freighted with deep and complex meaning for the hard SF reader—it symbolizes the cold, inexorable, inhuman forces of universal law.
Traditionally—although this was not so much a conscious literary strategy as a response to pulp-magazine publishing and editing, which dictated that central characters be heroic or likable or both and get on with the action of the story—there is not fully rounded characterization in hard SF, because that would reduce the impact of the general (mankind versus the universal) structure that underlies all hard SF. In a hard SF story the universe is external to character, and the character must interact with that universe and in so doing achieves or validates his identity. Hard SF characters tend not to achieve validation through gaining knowledge of their own inner life but rather through action in the external environment. Knowing oneself or feeling better about oneself is far secondary to having accomplished something important (such as saving a life or the world) for the SF protagonist. The external universe in all SF is distanced from the here and now in part to emphasize that this fiction is not about the specific human condition of any individual today but about a bigger, wider view of all humanity. Robert A. Heinlein plays sophisticated games with ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances in “It’s Great to Be Back!” as does Gregory Benford in “Relativistic Effects.” But the characters in both stories are relatively flat (vs. rounded) and represent or symbolize ordinary people: Everyman. Thus the human condition in hypothetical circumstances is illuminated. It is frequently a surprising literary experience and one of the ordinary pleasures of all SF.
The characters in all hard SF, regardless of their individuality, have something of the Everyman about them. Sometimes they have to get past their own psychology to survive, or survive precisely because of their psychological quirks, but traditionally they act upon the environment and affect it. The implication is that any other man (who knows what the character knows) would do precisely the same. Hard SF tries to have it both ways: The character is at the same time exceptional (described and portrayed as a unique individual) and typical (acts and solves the problem using reason and knowledge). This is another of the qualities of hard SF that puts it at the core of the SF genre: It is only truly of interest to people with faith in science, faith that knowledge has meaning. Faith tells them that the universe is ultimately knowable and that human problems (the human condition) are solvable through science and technology; that although science can be misused, if used properly it will lead to the improvement of the human condition, implicitly to heaven on earth. This faith in improvement in the long run (combining images of evolution with the idea of progress) is a kind of bedrock Darwinism that underlies scientific and engineering culture in the Western world in this century. Science fiction is one of the most interesting and eloquent expressions of this faith. Look for a moment at the titles of some of the classic novels: Men like Gods, Childhood’s End, Mission of Gravity, The Stars My Destination on, and at the themes of immortality and transcendence that underlie so very much of the literature. Hard SF is a dream of winning against the house, beating the ultimate laws of the universe that constrain us and finally kill us, at least before the end of time. Hard SF validates this belief system in a way that other literature does not.
And (as Karl Popper said of philosophical Marxism) it is a system that cannot be disproved by any conceivable historical event, even the end of the entire universe (which has been transcended in many stories, for instance Poul Anderson’s classic novel Tau Zero, or James Blish’s The Triumph of Time). It has frequently been noted that science fiction is often about catastrophes nuclear or cosmic, but almost always then about a small band of hardy survivors. Science fiction affirms the future. Human life, albeit often transformed, persists in science fiction in spite of the inimical universe. The optimism is, however, more cosmic than individual. Compare H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (in which the Martian victory is stopped by disease, not the actions of inferior humanity—nature rights the balance) to Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides (wherein superior alien invaders win, and the hardy survivors are reduced to the status of vermin living inside huge alien farm plants until they wander off to die as pests—nature doesn’t right any balances) for an eloquent contrast in affect and attitude between hard SF and its post-Gothic opposite. Belief—individuals die, the race lives on—vs. unbelief—given the circumstances everyone dies.
The whole argument might then seem a distraction blinding us to the real issue of affect and faith versus ironic distance and individual failure. The body of hard SF makes readers take the god’s-eye view. This is the ultimate meaning behind the aspect of hard SF that requires great aesthetic distance. Hard SF is in fact at base a neo-Platonic literature referring implicitly or explicitly to the forms behind external reality, which the readers are expected to know and identify as the laws and principles of science and mathematics. And believe in.
II. History and Development: The Persistence of the Anti-Modern
In the early years of this century a perceived divide developed between high art and popular culture under pressure from the Modernist movement. SF fell into the paraliterary or popular category, particularly since there was a long and bitter aesthetic battle between H. G. Wells (whose work is a major repository of ideas and techniques for all writers in the SF genre) and Henry James that for all practical purposes Wells lost—becoming the most popular and successful writer of his era at the price of losing literary influence and prestige to James. All this is well-known literary history. The other principal sources for the new genre were pulp fiction and boys’ books—low-class popular origins indeed. The case of science fiction is, however, complex and rather more interesting than has usually been credited.
In the Modernist era, rather than remaining merely low art, SF evolved in opposition to the Modernist aesthetic of style as information and came to privilege innovation in the content rather than in style. Hard SF (at least from the time of science fiction’s genrification in the 1920s as a separate and self-conscious body of fiction with a separate audience) might best be seen as anti-Modern (or as the pop culture shadow of the continuing Realism of Dreiser with his chemical theories of human behavior or the pulp shadow of Ezra Pound’s utopianism). Modernism was rationalist and scientific in its attitude and method. But it generally averted its gaze from technological knowledge. The Jamesian aesthetic was embodied in the phrase “art for art’s sake.” The concerns of the scientific community interested in problem-solving, reproducible results and methods, clarity and logic, the nature of external reality, the world of action, cause, and effect—the whole external universe—became the meat of science fiction. Science fiction arose and thrived by validating this technological culture, by addressing its concerns and manifesting its values. Poe, Verne, and Wells all affirmed science as our essential hold on external reality, as giving us rules by which to interact and live. Their attitude differed from the earlier Gothic attitude toward science in literature, as represented by Hawthorne (and Mary Shelley, and later Stevenson), in that their point was what science could reveal and/or do, not particularly about human character but about humanity’s relation to the universe.
Early in his career, Wells identified himself as writing in the genre of “Scientific Romance.” Hawthorne, too, exercised much effort to establish that he was a Romancer, not a novelist. Although there is a specific distinction from other Romances (as revelations of character) that Wells was affirming, still both writers felt a difference from the novel as it was understood in their day. The practitioners of proto–science fiction felt for decades a sense of being in opposition to fashionable art and literary forms. Not until the creation of the SF genre in 1926, out of the materials and conventions of the earlier genre of Scientific Romance, did the actual genre coalesce and begin to take form. The Wellsian stream persisted well into the 1930s and beyond, as the “literary” (e.g., Yevgeny Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell) form of which the “low art” pulp genre was the paraliterary shadow. It was not until the 1940s that all the strains blended.
It is only a start, however, to observe the influence of Poe, Verne, and Wells (and the later philosophical novels of Stapledon) on the founding of the science fiction genre. Hugo Gernsback had the inspiration to put them all cheek by jowl in one publication and call it “scientifiction.” He described it as part “charming Romance” and part “scientific fact” in the founding issue of Amazing Stories (April 1926), the first genre magazine. Genre definition, however, began to reach a level of clarity and consensus only with the advent of John W. Campbell, Jr., more than a decade later.
Campbell was the editor of modern science fiction. When in the late 1930s he took the helm of Astounding Stories, the highest-paying market for SF, he set about establishing a model for SF through a process that Alexei and Cory Panshin have elucidated in their award-winning study, The World Beyond the Hill. Campbell wrote editorials that pointed to stories written by L. Sprague de Camp (and in part conceived in discussion with Campbell) as examples of what he wanted science fiction to be. Campbell had already had a reputation as a popular space-adventure writer and had then begun to experiment with more ambitious hard SF under a pseudonym (Don A. Stuart). So his aesthetic position had both literary authority and economic force on writers. In this manner, Campbell privileged what came to be known as hard SF as the only true, pure, and real science fiction—all the rest, he later maintained, is fantasy.
What he in fact did was set up a class system within the science fiction field that reflected the worldview of U.S. technological culture in that period, in opposition to the dominant literary culture. It was a thinly veiled version of the social Darwinism exemplified in Wells’s “The Land Ironclads” and Kipling’s With the Night Mail, with scientists and engineers, the people who know and can manipulate the physical universe, at the top. The values of this system derived from the axiom that knowledge is power and that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge.
At the top of the scientific hierarchy are physics, chemistry, and astronomy, whose knowledge and laws are mathematically verifiable. On the next level are the biological sciences, because they are in part descriptive or impure (dealing with living creatures); then the social sciences: anthropology, economics, political science—and experimental psychology. All of these are the meat of hard science fiction. But below them, one finds the humanities: theology, philosophy—and clinical psychology(!)—to which Modern science fiction is opposed (although it was always fair game to try to invent a way to reform these disciplines into true sciences—which led among other things, to Scientology). In general, hard SF still disdains theology, politics, and Modern art in all its manifestations.
Campbellian SF privileges the outer life over the inner life, skills over feelings. Thought is associated with action. Intensity is generated through the macrocosmic or microcosmic scale of the settings that lend importance to the action of the stories. It also privileges exposition as a primary element of the fiction and therefore privileges the third person past tense as the dominant mode of hard SF (following the practice and influence of Wells and Kipling) because it allows for ease of exposition, and for the omniscient narrative voice that speaks for the values of the Campbellian system. SF today is still more often told in the third person than other contemporary fiction.
Campbell’s own technological optimism (he was educated at M.I.T. and Duke in physics) led him to extend the domain of science over all literature. He often argued that science fiction is larger (better) than all other literature because its domain, all times and places in the universe, is larger. True science can predict events in the real world in Campbell’s system, and he encouraged his writers to attempt to predict real inventions, real science, and future events. In this way, science fiction would become more like science. Although Damon Knight, the leading SF critic of the 1950s, pointed out that including prediction in the aesthetic was absurd, leading to the logical necessity of waiting until the end of time to judge the relative merits of SF as literature, Campbell collected examples of successful predictions to enforce his point. Most writers did not take him entirely seriously but many readers of Astounding did, and in his heyday looked for story elements to come true in their lifetimes.
Character in this literature is in a sense only a series of conventional stock characters with minor variations meant to display the natural superiority of intelligence over irrationality and emotions. Generally the central characters of hard science fiction are winners (the competent man, the engineer, the scientist, the good soldier, the man who transcends his circumstances, the inventor—the “Heinlein individual” who was for decades the model for the Modern SF hero). One needs to know no more than the basic qualities the author has presented of the character of, for instance, the surviving clone in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” or the nun in Poul Anderson’s “Kyrie,” for each story to achieve full impact. What happens is more important, even in these two stories that are richer, deeper in characterization than most hard SF.
What has been most undervalued by observers of SF is that it invents hypothetical human experiences and privileges them over real experiences. While these experiences may be interpreted metaphorically (the interaction between a human and an alien as a metaphor for a sexist or racist encounter, for example), sometimes with depth and richness, still there is a literal hypothetical experience that must be taken into consideration to read the experience as an SF reader. Thus “Dolphin’s Way” by Gordon R. Dickson requires an adjustment of our perception of humanity’s position in the natural world, Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” confronts us with the true strangeness of a far-future environment, and David Brin’s “What Continues, What Fails” forces us to reconsider what is eternal versus what changes both in human nature and in the universe.
Hard SF embodies the fantasies of empowerment of the scientific and technological culture of the modern era and validates its faith in scientific knowledge as dominant over other ways of knowing. And during the height of Campbell’s reign in the 1940s and 1950s a lot of it was also xenophobic, elitist, racist, and psychologically naive. For the most part that is not the literature we still read from that period today, but strains of it persist. Consider Raymond F. Jones’s “The Person from Porlock” or James P. Hogan’s “Making Light” as having grown out of Campbell’s social and political attitudes. The influence for good and ill of Rudyard Kipling’s jingoism (both in his proto–science fiction such as With the Night Mail and his other poetry and fiction) on Campbell, Heinlein, and other masters of the Campbellian “Golden Age” should not be ignored in considering the later evolution of hard SF.
All that having been said, many of the best writers, for instance Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Clifford D. Simak, either broke with Campbell quite early or often wrote in reaction to his dominant views. Others such as Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, and Alfred Bester had to wait a decade or more to flourish, until the 1950s, when other markets appeared to publish new styles and approaches. This aggregation of fiction was called “speculative fiction” in its day by Judith Merril, Damon Knight, and other powerful critics and editors (who were also SF writers) and was happily and sometimes blindly published in all the other SF magazines and by the newly formed paperback book publishers of the day, as science fiction. It was at that moment in the late fifties that the term “hard SF” was coined by P. Schuyler Miller in his book review column in Astounding.
The last year that Campbell’s magazine won the popular vote for the Hugo Award as best SF magazine of the year was 1965, the year the serial publication of Frank Herbert’s Dune concluded. After that came the revolutionary spirit of the New Wave, which got all the media attention for the rest of the decade in both its British and American forms, reacting strongly against Campbell, Analog, and the traditions of science fiction, especially hard science fiction. Everyone had agreed that poorly written and conceived SF in the pulp adventure tradition was obsolete at least since the advent of Campbell in 1937. In the late sixties and early seventies a serious attempt was made to declare all hard SF before about 1965 as literary history, no longer a living part of the genre, and the hard SF enterprise as dead.
This literary political tack did not entirely fail. Campbell’s prestige and influence were diminished, and hard science fiction became only one variety of a larger genre body still called science fiction but with less genre coherence than ever. This is the situation that stabilized in the 1970s and lasts into the 1990s. But while the social and political attitudes of Campbell began to lose their hold in the 1950s, the idea that science used in the Campbellian way was the ideal of hard SF never disappeared. It is still evident, for instance, in recent stories that concentrate entirely on presenting neat ideas such as Robert L. Forward’s “The Singing Diamond.”
The advent of J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss at the end of the fifties can be seen in retrospect as the first harbinger of the return of the Hawthornian (Aldiss was later to characterize himself and all SF as Mary Shelleyan) Gothic mode, concerned with the inner life of character, as an influence on SF. Ballard’s first story, “Prima Belladona,” is a recasting of Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”
The implied argument of the Ballardian stream of hard SF, written in reaction to the main tradition is: Campbellian hard SF said that if you know you may survive; Ballard says knowing is not enough to survive. Ballard is medically trained, clinically detached. His characters live ordinary lives in extraordinary landscapes. Even when they are scientists they tend to be obsessives fixated upon their own inner lives. Ballard’s stories thus feel radically different from other hard SF even when he uses science rigorously.
The situation now is that hard SF has been removed from the center of attention in the SF field by a number of forces, including literary fashion, competing modes, and marketing. Yet in the past decade hard SF has never been more popular and has in addition become more self-conscious of the “specialness” of its nature and of its literary position as the generator of paradigms, tropes, and conventions for the genre. Such leading younger writers as Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin have become vigorous defenders of hard SF. The most recent reformers of hard SF, the cyberpunks (most especially Bruce Sterling and William Gibson), have attempted a fusion of the Gothic mode, with its stylistic sophistication and noir atmosphere, and the heavily technological concerns and essential metaphysics of hard SF. The fallout from the work of in particular Sterling (see Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, with its polemical introduction) and Gibson (whose novel Neuromancer is the primary cyberpunk literary text), who adulate respectively Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, has yet to become clear. But their work has been instrumental in bringing the argument about hard SF to the forefront. And cyberpunk is always referred to in discussions of contemporary hard SF, if only to deny that the movement had any lasting effect. Today the main body of science fiction results from a mixture of literary influences (having more or less absorbed the Wellsian and integrated many of the techniques of the Modernists) and paraliterary or extraliterary influences (films, comic books, and popular science writing, to name three) and can profitably be viewed as Postmodern SF—the shadow of Postmodern high-culture literature—just as Modern SF was the shadow of Modernist literature.
Yet hard SF remains a vital current flowing through significant contemporary works in the genre and preserves its position as the repository of new ideas and images drawn from new science and technology. And it retains its anti-Modernist spirit. It is still SF with “the right stuff.” The best of it is still a model to which the rest of the genre may aspire.
Perhaps it will in the end be forced aside by a postmodern successor, or trivialized into military SF nearly exclusively (and therefore successfully marginalized), or simply steam-rollered into the ground by the hordes of character-driven young writers on the make to whom science is irrelevant. No one, in the end, will defend bad writing over good. But we agree with Frederik Pohl’s aphorism: “Good style is the problem solved.”