Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (463 page)

And asshole. Um.

But…

Was he about to do the same thing she had done? Get excited about nothing much?

* * * *

Ralph came into his office, tossed his lecture notes onto the messy desk, and slumped in his chair. The lecture had not gone well. He couldn’t seem to focus. Should he keep his distance from Irene for a while, let her cool off? What did he really want, there?

Too much happening at once. The phone rang.

Harkin said, without even a hello, “I squeezed in some extra observing time. The image is on the way by email.”

“You sound kind of tired.”

“More like…confused. ” He hung up.

It was there in the email.

Ralph stared at the image a long time. It was much brighter than before, a huge outpouring of energy.

His mind seethed. The Fanti result, and now this. Harkin’s 4.8 Ghz map was earlier than either of these, so it didn’t contradict either the Fantis or this. A time sequence of something changing fast—in days, in hours.

This was no neutron star.

It was smaller, nearer, and they had watched it go to hell.

He leaned over his desk, letting the ideas flood over him.
Whoosh.

* * * *

Irene looked dazed. “You’re kidding.”

“No. I know we’ve got a lot to talk through, but—“

“You bet.”

“—I didn’t send you that email just to get you to meet me.” Ralph bit his lip and felt the room whirl around.

“What you wrote,” she said wonderingly. “It’s a…

star ship?”

“Was. It got into trouble of some kind these last few days. That’s why the wake behind it—” he tapped the Fantis’ image—“got longer. Then, hours later, it got turbulent, and—it exploded.”

She sipped her coffee. “This is…was…light years away?”

“Yes, and headed somewhere else. It was sending out a regular beamed transmission, one that swept around as the ship rotated, every 47 seconds.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re sure?”

“Let’s say it’s a working hypothesis.”

“Look, you’re tired, maybe put this aside before jumping to conclusions.”

He gazed at her and saw the lines tightened around the mouth. “You’ve been through a lot yourself. I’m sorry.”

She managed a brave, thin smile. “It tore me up. I do want a child.”

He held his breath, then went ahead. “So…so do I.”

“Really?” They had discussed this before but her eyelids fluttered in surprise.

“Yes.” He paused, sucked in a long breath, and said, “With you.”

“Really?” She closed her eyes a long time. “I…always imagined this.”

He grinned. “Me too. Time to do it.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”
Whoosh.

They talked on for some moments, ordered drinks to celebrate. Smiles, goofy eyes, minds whirling.

Then, without saying anything, they somehow knew that they had said enough for now. Some things should not be pestered, just let be.

They sat smiling at each other and in a soft sigh she said, “You’re worried. About…”

Ralph nodded. How to tell her that this seemed pretty clear to him and to Harkin, but it was big, gaudy trouble in the making. “It violates a basic assumption we always make, that everything in the night sky is natural.”

“Yeah, so?”

“The astronomy community isn’t like Hollywood, y’know. It’s more like…a priesthood.”

He sipped his coffee and stared out the window. An airplane’s wing lights winked as it coasted down in the distance toward the airport. Everybody had seen airplanes, so seeing them in the sky meant nothing. Not so for the ramscoop ship implied by his radio maps.

There would be rampant skepticism. Science’s standards were austere, and who would have it differently? The angles of attack lived in his hands, and he now faced the long labor of calling forth data and calculations. To advance the idea would take strict logic, entertaining all other ideas fairly. Take two steps forward, one back, comparing and weighing and contrasting—the data always leading the skeptical mind. It was the grand dance, the gavotte of reason, ever-mindfull of the eternal possibility that one was wrong.

Still…when serendipity strikes…let it. Then seize it.

“You need some sleep.” Her eyes crinkled with concern. “Come home with me.”

He felt a gush of warm happiness. She was here with him and together they could face the long battle to come.

“Y’know, this is going to get nasty. Look what happened to Carl Sagan when he just argued there
might
be intelligent life elsewhere.”

“You think it will be that hard to convince people?”

“Look at it this way. Facing up to the limits of our knowledge, to the enormity of our ignorance, is an acquired skill—to put it mildly. People want certainty.”

He thought,
If we don’t realize where the shoreline of reasonably well established scientific theory ends, and where the titanic sea of undiscovered truth begins, how can we possibly hope to measure our progress?

Irene frowned. Somehow, after long knowledge of her, he saw that she was glad of this chance to talk about something larger than themselves. She said slowly, “But…why is it that your greatest geniuses—the ones you talk about, Hawking, Feynman, Newton—humbly concede how pitifully limited our reach is?”

“That’s why they’re great,” he said wryly.
And the smaller spirits noisily proclaim the certainty of their conclusions. Well, here comes a lot of dissent, doubt, and skepticism.

“And now that ship is gone. We learned about them by watching them die.”

She stared at him. “I wonder…how many?”

“It was a big, powerful ship. It probably made the plasma ahead of it somehow. Then with magnetic fields it scooped up that plasma and cooked it for energy. Then shot it out the back for propulsion. Think of it as like a jet plane, a ramscoop. Maybe it was braking, using magnetic fields—I dunno.”

“Carrying passengers?”

“I…hadn’t thought of that.”

“How big is it?…was it?”

“Maybe like…the Titanic.”

She blinked. “That many people.”

“Something like people. Going to a new home.”

“Maybe to…here?”

He blinked, his mind cottony. “No, it was in the plane of the sky. Otherwise we’d have seen it as a blob, head on, no tail. Headed somewhere fairly near, though.”

She sat back, gazing at him with an expression he had not seen before. “This will be in the papers, won’t it.” Not a question.

“Afraid so.” He managed a rueful smile. “Maybe I’ll even get more space in
National Enquirer
than Andy did.”

She laughed, a tinkling sound he liked so much.

But then the weight of it all descended on him.
So much to do…
“I’ll have to look at your idea, that they were headed here. At least we can maybe backtrack, find where they came from.”

“And look at the earlier maps, data?” she ventured, her lip trembling. “From before…”

“They cracked up. All that life, gone.” Then he understood her pale, tenuous look.
Things living, then not.
She nodded, said nothing.

He reached out and took her hand. A long moment passed and he had no way to end it but went on anyway. “The SETI people could jump on this. Backtrack this ship. They can listen to the home star’s emissions…”

Irene smiled without humor. “And we can send them a message. Condolences.”

“Yeah.” The room had stopped whirling and she reached out to take his hand.

“Come on.”

As he got up wearily, Ralph saw that he was going to have to fight for this version of events. There would always be Andys who would triangulate their way to advantage. And the chairman, Gossian…

Trying for tenure—supposedly a cool, analytic process—in the shouting match of a heated, public dispute, a howling media firestorm—that was almost a contradiction in terms. But this, too, was what science was about. His career might survive all that was to come, and it might not—but did that matter, standing here on the shores of the titanic ocean he had peered across?

* * * *

Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Benford.

How much of the science in science fiction is science? And how much is fiction?

Jules Verne, after reading
First Men in the Moon
by the
other
great father of science fiction, complained:

“I sent my characters to the moon with gunpowder, a thing one may see every day. Where does M. Wells find his cavourite? Let him show it to me!”

Ever since, writers and readers have argued over the veracity of the science in SF—and its necessity. Indeed, famed SF author and editor Ben Bova defines science fiction stories as “those in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that if you remove that element, the story falls apart.”
¹
But the lines are not always easy to draw.

Consider the three giants of the Golden Age, Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, all of whom trained in science or engineering. Of the three, Clarke, a physicist, paid the most careful attention to the science and its ramifications, in the exploration of the alien spacecraft in
Rendezvous with Rama
, the engineering of the space elevator in
The Fountains of Paradise
, and most famously in the space voyage in
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, but the science in his stories was mostly hand-waving and jargon: psychohistory and the positronic brain. Heinlein had a background in math, physics, and engineering but nonetheless paid the least amount of detail on the science, often using juvenile or working-class protagonists who simply accepted technology as given.

All three were, however, deeply concerned with how people react to scientific and technological changes, in line with critic James Gunn’s description of science fiction as the ‘literature of change.’ Many of Clarke’s novels (adding
Childhood’s End
to the above cited) revolve around how meeting alien species would change human self-conception. Asimov explored the interaction, for good and for ill, of humans with their robot servants. Heinlein pondered social disruptions brought about through accident, war, immortality, and, in
Stranger in a Strange Land
, new and alien cultures.

Since the Golden Age of the 1940s, science fiction blossomed into a bewildering tangle of subgenres. Many stories perceived as SF have little or no science, while in others the science is central and crushingly dominant. It is to the latter stories, often termed ‘hard’ science fiction, that Bova’s definition more closely applies. But how important is the science, and the accuracy of the science, to hard SF? To answer this, I must first discuss in depth some examples and counter examples.

The author of
Timescape
(1980), Gregory Benford, is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and the novel is one of the most accurate and passionate representations of scientific discovery. Much of the action occurs in laboratories; the protagonist, Gordon Bernstein, a young assistant professor at UC La Jolla (later San Diego), works on nuclear magnetic resonance and is faced with irritating noise in his experiment. Slowly, methodically, he eliminates potential sources of noise, until he finally realizes it is not noise at all, but a message in Morse code from the future.

Although there are of course improbably speculative elements, namely tachyons that can be used to send messages back in time, and the consequences for quantum mechanics and causality, Benford’s science is mostly solid.

More importantly, however, Benford’s characters reflect the motives and thought processes of working scientists:

“He loved this thinking, correcting, and searching for the unseen flaw that could destroy the whole effect he wanted.”

“There might be a new structure hiding behind the data like big game in a dense thicket. He was going to find out; he was sure of that.”

“Every result in science has to stand up to criticism every day. Results have to be checked and rechecked… are they going to try to cut me off at the knees.”

Benford is careful to include the human side of scientists as well:

“It wasn’t a cool intellectual discourse between men of reason, as the layman so often pictured… They were arguing over ideas, but beneath the surface personalities clashed.”

“…all that about [scientists] suppressing emotion is mostly a convenient legend.”

Ursula LeGuin’s
The Dispossessed
(1974) also revolves around a scientist’s journey. Her hero Shevek, who invents a means of faster-than-light communication, is a vividly memorable character, and the book, encompassing emotional, scientific, and political arcs, deserves its place among the great SF novels. But the physics in it is, frankly, gobbledygook:

“…the Saeba variables and the theory of infinite velocities and complex cause…”

There is almost no reference to experiment. LeGuin bravely tries to imagine alien science, science in a non-Western mode, full of philosophy and ethics. On one hand I applaud her attempt. On the other hand, she misses that leaving out philosophy is the key step that made Western-style science exponentially successful. (I should mention, however, that the novel is a brilliant thought-experiment in political and social science, offering a new lens on old arguments over economic philosophies.)

Not all cases are so easy to classify. Larry Niven is considered a quintessential hard SF writer, and many of his stories, in particular his early stories, appear heavily informed by science.

In “Neutron Star” (1966), an explorer travels via hyperdrive to a neutron star in a ship with a ‘General Products’ hull, guaranteed to be impervious to radiation and all sorts of hazards. At the last moment he realizes the General Products hull is nevertheless not impervious to gravity and barely escapes from being torn apart by tidal forces. The narrator of “Wait It Out” (1968), trapped on Pluto with rescue years away, decides to flash-freeze himself on the surface. But instead of the dreamless stasis he expects, his brain has turned superconducting, and he has to wait a near eternity, awake but immobile.

Both stories are deft and fluent with their science, but also shallow and glib. The mechanism that allows a General Products hull to shield from radiation is never explained, so ultimately the fact that gravity gets through (while entirely plausible) seems arbitrary. And even in 1968 biologists knew that neurons transmit signals, including thoughts, not by straight current but through a bucket-brigade of neurochemicals.

Niven’s most famous work is his novel
Ringworld
(1970), a rip-roaring novel about an utterly strange world, a ribbon of land stretched all the way around a sun. The book is full of futuristic technology: faster-than-light hyperspace drives, teleportation disks, impenetrable stasis fields, automatic medical machines, immortality drugs, and more alien species than you can count. At first glance it seems the very essence of hard SF.

But Niven’s technology is all smoke and mirrors. It is based not on known science, but on the assumption that science is a miracle worker; most of his technology, in fact, violates known science.

Contrast this with Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Mars
trilogy (
Red Mars, Green Mars
, and
Blue Mars
), about the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Robinson is a premier humanist SF author, with a Ph.D in literature and novels obsessed with history and the foibles of human nature.

And yet, his
Mars
books are full of science. Most of his characters, and certainly his heroes, are scientists and explorers. The novels are meticulously researched and full of detailed information about the Martian environment, about how one would live on Mars, how one would change Mars. In any point-by-point analysis of accurate and realistic science, Robinson’s
Mars
novels would win over Niven’s
Ringworld
hands down. Yet most readers would identify Niven, not Robinson, as the ‘hard SF’ writer.

Now we get to the central issue. The point is not to chastise Niven (or LeGuin for that matter) for `bad’ or `wrong’ science, but to realize that hard SF stories are not
really
about scientific content, that is about valid or invalid scientific facts and theories, but rather about narratives
about
science.

Let’s put this a different way. Fiction is not a cold intellectual argument, but a kind of machine to provoke an emotional response in the reader. In most fiction, including in ‘soft’ SF, the response is to the characters and their situation.
In hard science fiction the emotional response is primarily to the science and technology in the story. This concept seems paradoxical, and is sometimes hard to tease out because the emotion provoked is often subtle: the sense of relief and surprise as the solution to the puzzle is revealed (much the same as at the punch line of a joke), or the sense of wonder and awe that is a hallmark of much of science fiction. For such stories to provoke a strong response they need a plausible verisimilitude of science, but the simulation of science itself is only a secondary concern and only needs to be sufficient to transport the reader to accepting the punch line.

Now let’s go back and look again at our examples.

Clarke was arguably the “hardest” of the Golden Age giants; what we retain from his novels are the spaceships and vast engineering projects, while virtually the only Clarke character anyone remembers is the homicidal computer. Heinlein, who soft-pedaled the details of the science, wrote the most vivid and memorable characters.

Nonetheless, all three Golden Age giants wrote powerful narratives on science. In particular they helped pioneer the classic theme of the unintended consequences of technology and choices, one used countless times by later generations of hard SF writers. Niven showcased it in “Wait It Out,” where the reader feels horror at the fate of the trapped astronaut. And “Neutron Star” is about the dangers of making unwarranted assumptions (in this case that a General Products hull will shield against gravity as well as electromagnetism), and the reader feels relief when the answer to the puzzle is revealed—or self-congratulation if she figured it out in advance. While the characters of Ringworld are colorful, they are ultimately dispensable; the true protagonist of his novel is the Ringworld itself, a massive, awe-inspiring artifact that demonstrates both the triumphs and drawbacks of high technology.

Robinson’s mission in his
Mars
trilogy, for all his careful research, is not about
how
we would colonize Mars, but rather about how we make history and our identities. The Martian colonists are divided into two camps: the Greens, who terraform Mars and who psychologically wish to reinvent themselves; and the Reds, who wish to keep Mars pristine, and who subconsciously hope to discover their ‘true selves.’

Even though LeGuin’s protagonist Shevek is a physicist,
The Dispossessed
is more about his attempts to find political and personal meaning in his life. “Even pain counts,” Shevek tells himself, after spending years separated from his lover Takver, and throughout the novel we share in his pain and his passion.

Finally, in
Timescape
, the central concern is the tension between the joys of discovery and the positive and negative effects of science. Even Ian Peterson, the womanizing politician who backs the desperate effort to send a message back in time, is seduced by science:

“He wondered for a moment if this was what it was like to be a scientist, to make a discovery, to see the world unlocked, if only for an instant.”

This gets to the true essence of hard SF. While good, successful hard SF will attempt to make its science at least
sound
plausible (and Niven, for example, is very good at making the most outlandish and unlikely technology sound very reasonable), the most important characteristic of hard SF is that
science and technology play the most prominent role
and that the central theme of the story is a
narrative about science
; not the content of science but how science works, and how we, as readers, respond to science.

Many science fiction readers and writers enjoy spirited debates about the plausibility of science in SF stories, and indeed this is one of the pleasures of hard SF. But as molecular biologist, essayist, and author of
The Biology of Star Trek
, Athena Andreadis quips, “
Hard SF is mostly sciency and its relation to science is the same as truthiness to truth
.”
²
While many authors and fans would feel slighted by this statement, it gets at the heart of how hard SF works: even as it bowdlerizes the content of science, hard SF is primarily concerned with how we think, how we feel
about
science and technology.

Exercise

When you read a story you think is hard SF, afterwards ask yourself: why did you think this was hard SF? Upon reflection, did the science content seem very plausible? Why or why not? And, most importantly: what was the narrative
about
science, and how did that narrative make you feel?)