Science Fiction Recent Reads

I could not do better than this myself, which is why I do not write fiction. If real science were not difficult enough imaginative science is more challenging because you cannot just look up the answers. Science fiction has rules and one of them is that you cannot violate known science without an explanation (however thin it might be). Most often that invention or discovery is the basis for the story. Sometimes, it can be slid in behind the story, just another element in a wonderful new future or very different planet. The hyperspace that modern writers must now belabor, Cordwainer Smith only tagged “the up and out” – and that’s where the dragons were. That was acceptable in 1955 and 1963. Now, we demand more than wonderment. 

The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4

Edited by Allan Kaster

An unabridged collection spotlighting the best hard science fiction stories 

and novellas published in 2019 by current and emerging masters of the genre.

Infinivox

Post Office Box 418

Barker, Texas 77413

https://www.infinivoxsf.com/

Cynicism and pessimism can be antidotes to chronic optimism but in our time, the expectation of success is the cure we need and are not getting from science fiction. Most of the stories in this anthology center on severe climate change or some other disaster not well defined. Nuclear war or bionic plague would be explanations, but a cause would suggest reasonable responses and in “At the Fall” by Alec-Nevala-Lee nothing like that is offered. The reader can cheer for the plucky robot, but ultimately, we never learn the reason for the complete demise of our civilization. 

 

Global warming sets the backdrop for the effects of corporate-controlled genetically-modified crops in “Winter Wheat” by Gord Sellar. I never got to the end of the story to find out if the off-camera hero, the father of the narrator, actually developed a strain of wheat to compete with the GMO. 

 

This is Not the Way Home by Greg Egan opens the anthology and sets the context for undefined disasters on Earth that our viewpoint characters must overcome. In this story, Earth stops responding to the Luna colony. Some of the members take off in a rocket home. (We never learn what happens to them.) In that event, the viewpoint character’s husband is killed (meaninglessly). Then, she cleverly builds a plan to bring her new baby and herself back to Earth. The ending is not quite clear. I think they made it. Regardless, the reader never finds out what happened on Earth to cause the story.

 

We create experiments at colonization by locking people in biodomes. (Prisons should also be highly informative here.) And it is no surprise based on experiences at sea (and under the sea) that extended periods of close quartering requires some insightful management. So, it is predictable that in ”Sacrificial Iron” by Tom Kosmatka the two people launched into deep space to carry a cargo of genomes to a new world learn to hate each other. Death was anti-climactic. But the mechanism of FTL was interesting. 

The ship drive worked on a simple principle. You can’t travel faster than the speed of light, but the speed of light can change. No longer 299,792,458 m/s, but something else, governed by the field-state of the space-time through which light propagates. The engines didn’t change the shape of space, only shifted its internal calculus. … Since the Big Bang, particles have precipitated out of the vacuum as the Universe inflated, bleeding out excess field density into the real while the speed of light slowed over billions of years—if only slightly. But what if you could reverse it? Sublimate matter into the system, increase the field-state of the local vacuum. Invert the trendline. Spacetime would have to shed the extra energy back somewhere. It sheds it back into the speed of light.

 

Science fiction has always depended on intellectual sleight of hand. But I also have read that the Universe does not “expand” as particles at the “edge of space” stream out into nothing. Nothing is not a different kind of something. Nothing is nothing. Rather, the Universe expands between particles, the spacetime that separates processes that we call “particles” is what expands. So, Tom Kosmatka offered an interesting interpretation from modern physics.

 

The idea in “Ring Wave” by Tom Jolly is that when Earth is struck by an asteroid some people can survive in pods placed at the circumference of the strike zone because those capsules will be ejected into space. Jolly imagines a cut-throat struggle before and especially after the strike. And that conflict includes guns. I do not know if Tom Jolly ever fired a gun here on Earth, but if you imagine firing one in space, you have to visualize the conservation of energy, of momentum, of angular momentum. You will spin about your center of mass impelled by the moment-arm of the reaction. In addition to centering the gun on your center of mass (rather than extending your arm as you would here on Earth), you have to be cognizant of how you are pointing the gun. The velocity vector in reaction must balance the shot you just fired. And in this story, there’s a lot of firing and no reactioning. 

 

As compelling as was the premise of a story of mating between spiders, Sarina Dorie’s “A Mate Not a Meal” left me insensitive about halfway through. 

 

On the Shores of Ligeia by Carolyn Ives Gilman offered a lot. I might not have followed the author’s logic. The story is about the exploration of Titan by a virtual experience through enhanced vision from remote mapping. The time lag must be about 80 to 160 minutes and the author writes for that most of the time, but I am just not clear on that. Not all of the action suggests evidence that time lag. Also, at the end, without any explanation of the evolution of international politics the deus ex machina is a global crowdsource of school children who were empowered by China’s freely given project in VR and ER. 

 

I was rewarded and pleasantly surprised by an unpleasant idea about colonizing outer space and other planets: What do you do with the dead? In “The Menace from Far Side” by Ian McDonald, life on the Moon requires recycling. Why would it not? But I never heard of it in that way before. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Mycroftxxx  says that despite recycling, Luna must run out of water. This mainly because they are exporting grain to Earth, but the deeper logic cannot be ignored, hence the happiness at the realworld discovery of water on the Moon. (NASA here: https://science.nasa.gov/moon/moon-water-and-ices/ ) But as for the dead, no one speaks of them. In McDonald’s story, the revelation is scary, the stuff that youngsters tell each other. But it is something to consider. And I have to confess to not actually reading the story. I started it, then skimmed it and found this, but the writing style alienated me. The story has a glossary at the end; for myself, if you need a glossary at the end of the story, each entry admits to a failure of narrative. 

 

I mentioned Greg Egan’s Slipway in the post before this one. Other stories in the anthology are:

• Cyclopterus by Peter Watts
• The Ocean Between the Leaves by Ray Nayler
• Cloud-Born by Gregory Feeley
• The Little Shepherdess by Gwyneth Jones
• By the Warm of Their Calculus by Tobias S. Buckell
• Soft Edges by Elizabeth Bear

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction 

Monsters from the Id 

Forbidden Planet 

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights 

Recent Reads – Science Fiction: Questionable and Trash

At least it makes you think—but not too much.  

 

For the second time in my life, I threw out a book because it was not good enough to pass along. Commune 2000 AD by Mack Reynolds was disappointing on many levels, but not too many because it did not have many. I bought the book last year at ArmadilloCon 45. It was clearly a period piece from 1975. As it happened, I later received The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin, as a door prize in return for my judging half a dozen flash fiction entries from the convention’s Writers’ Workshop.  Le Guin complained often about capitalism and the lack of socialist science fiction. So, I googled for “socialist science fiction” and along with Edward Bellamy, Jack London, and others, I found Mack Reynolds. 

In his autobiographical sketch appended to Commune 2000 A. D., Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) tells of being raised in the culture of socialism. He dropped out of high school to volunteer for the Socialist Workers Party. Indeed, at one point in Commune 2000 A.D., Reynolds uses the

word “chauvinism” in a gender context. It is only in passing because the bulk of the book is about the hero having sex with an array of “mopsies.” Not one character with agency is a woman. Tasked by the equivalent of the CIA and FBI (for whom his academic post-doctoral advisor is fronting) to investigate independent countercultural “communes” neither the hero nor Reynolds writes much sociology while visiting only three or four within a day’s drive of New York City. And they are all pretty much alike. The key to their very existence and a basic fact of this future is that the guaranteed annual income created stiff competition for any job that offered surcease from leisure. Intriguing as that is, we spend more time in bed with blondes, natural and bleached, ten or 15 years our junior. And the best part is that the hero rants against the CIA, FBI, and Academe to their faces in a small room and then walks away, The End. I was disappointed that he was not shot dead by lasers in the doorway.

My incentive to read Ursula K. LeGuin came from the movie version of The Jane Austen Book Club. The male in the group, a young tech entrepreneur, eventually introduces his match-up to science fiction and Le Guin is one of his favorites. Already knowing The Lathe of Heaven, I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Much of  The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin was beyond my ken because she was writing for voracious readers and some of these essays came from acceptance speeches for awards at conventions. I found much of the content here open to question and counter-argument. 

 

Le Guin was not the feminist she claimed to be. She could not be because at some level, we are all products of our environments. In this collection of essays written between 1967 and 1977, LeGuin rarely uses the indefinite “she/her” versus “he/him” to stand for any human being. She was born in 1929. A writer on her own as a child and youth and into her adult years, publication success came at age 40. Early habits form deeply. So, she defaults to a “a person … he.”   

Similarly, her rants against the Establishment are stuck in the 1960s. “From a social point of view most SF has been incredibly regressive an unimaginative. All those Galactic Empires taken straight from the British Empire of 1880. All those planets—with 80 trillion miles between them!—conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by the benevolent Imperium of Earth toward self-development—the White Man’s Burden all over again. The Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri, that’s the size of it.” (“American SF and the Other”)

Le Guin’s imperium in The Left Hand of Darkness is not much different, only vaguer, less well-defined. Limited by the distances between the stars, it has no choice but to balance benign neglect with heartfelt helpfulness. 

 

She advocates mildly for socialism (“American SF and the Other”): “Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten.” However, that denies Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. In Jack London’s The Iron Heel fascism is in the past; the story is told from the socialist present of the future. Le Guin might not have known about Octavia Butler, but could not have missed Mack Reynolds, neither of whom appears in this anthology. 

 

I suggest that the reason that SF generally does not present a successful socialist society is that it seems less plausible than FTL and time travel. That being as it may, I did find these resources for those who steer to portside. 

• Science fiction and Socialism from Solidarity website https://solidarity-us.org/p2137/
• “50 Sci Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read” https://portside.org/2017-11-18/50-sci-fi-fantasy-works-every-socialist-should-read
• Socialism and Science Fiction from Workers Liberty https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-05/socialism-and-science-fiction (or read online at https://workersliberty.org/node/35385).
• Le Guin is recognized for her socialism in “How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism” by Nick Hubble at Jacobin dot com. https://jacobin.com/2020/12/utopian-science-fiction-socialism-history and https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-05/socialism-and-science-fiction
• See also, the Comments following Socialist Futurism: Sci-Fi for Reds and Greens at https://solidarity-us.org/p2137/Comments

 

As for Le Guin’s essays on writing, remove the dross and what’s left is gold. Le Guin’s best critiques center on the lack of style in language among writers who mechanically produce fantasy (“sword and sorcery”) and she contrasts poor efforts against J. R. R. Tolkien E. R. Eddison, and Kenneth Morris. (Tolkien I know; the others I do not.) Her complaint is not just against the fake medieval grammar which is often erroneous, but that the conversations could have taken place in Poughkeepsie rather than Elfland. I believe that the word  that she was looking for was “gravitas.” The best stories are important to the reader because they are important to the writer and language delivers that inherent sense of value. 

Those books transcended their authors. Le Guin says in “The Book is What is Real” that as a child she was often unaware and uninterested in the author even as she re-read her favorite books. Reading a book is an interaction. “As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note in the creation, the coming-t0-be, the existence of the music. And as you read, and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” 

 

In “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” Le Guin places science fiction within the realm of fantasy. It is a cogent suggestion from someone who wrote both successfully. We perhaps too easily set the genres apart as we separate Westerns from Historical Romance. I long ago lost the citation, but I read a critical essay by a science fiction author who said that science fiction is the appropriate literature for our modern culture whereas so-called mainstream fiction is really historical fiction set in the present. Le Guin says that fantasy is subjective and inward while science fiction is what comes from giving fantasy “the power and intractability of the object.”

 

Overall, I like the language in the stories from mathematician Greg Egan. I found his “Slipway” in The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4 edited by Allan Kaster. I then requested The Best of Greg Egan from my local library and of those, the ones I remember are “Dark Integers,” “Bit Players,” and “Axiomatic.”

 

I had to read “Slipway” twice to understand the narrative. I liked it because it opened with an amateur astronomer terminally ill with cancer. From there, the story went to professionals trying to understand a phenomenon that seems to be swallowing space and the Earth, which it does: we apparently pass through it  or it around us – and we are transported 65,000 light years farther toward the edge of the Galaxy. However, for this story and the others, one criticism summed up my lack of enthusiasm for someone who writes like I do (and why I do not write fiction).

 

RocketStackRank by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2019/06/The-Slipway-Greg-Egan.html had this to say about the downside.

Con: It’s a pretty low-stakes story. The only thing that’s really lost here is the view of the night sky and humanity’s ability to get to the nearest stars. The protagonist has nothing at stake at all, other than the prospect of a better job in a different country.” 

 

And she apparently had the job before the story started but only had not yet been offered it. So, this was truly low stakes for the heroine. That said, though, It did not bother me that no one died or became a better person. It was just a technical story about something that happened. All of his works are like that. “Bit Players” is one of three in a series from the viewpoint of artificial characters in a gaming universe. They are non-playing characters (NPCs gamers call them). They are trying to figure out who they are and what their world is, but they are warned by other characters that if they show too much awareness, they will be deleted. Their situation was depressing and I lost interest in the outcome. As far as I can tell, Egan is in the mainstream of the dystopian present. It was cute when it was cyberpunk in the 1980s and 90s. Now, it is just tiresome.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Books Read and Not Read in 2023 

Dealers Make the Show: ArmadilloCon 41 Day 3 Part 2 

Monsters from the Id 

ArmadilloCon 45 

 

NGC 6207 in Hercules

Andromeda is easy enough. I logged M81/M82 using the NASA OWN remote telescope (9 July 2021). The Austin club's dark sky site is south of the city, so at star parties the Messier objects in Ursa Major are problematic with a smaller refractor. From my backyard, I have never had any success with the Virgo Cluster or the Leo Triplet. So, I made a list of 10 Spiral Galaxies to pursue and last night I found NGC 6207 in Hercules. (These comments appeared first in the Cloudy Nights forum for Deep Sky and the Observation Log Continued). 

Last night and this morning, I found NGC 6207 in Hercules. 

Nominally in a “suburb” the sky here is too white. Last night, I used a binocular (10x42) to search for the Milky Way, but no joy. I have a hospital one mile to my north with a gas station between us. I think that NGC 6207 was successful because it is near the zenith.

I was viewing with the Astro-Tech 115 mm triplet. With focal length F=805mm its theoretic limits are Magnitude 12.8, Resolution 1.01 arc-sec; Magnification 230X. I was unable to see Messier 101 magnitude 7.9 low in the north but found NGC 6207 magnitude 11.6 near the zenith, and the magnifications were 57X and 115X. Sky conditions are more important than aperture and magnification. Anyway, I was happy to have seen something new and very far away (30 million LY). 

Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 6207 from 
Wikimedia Commons. 
My view was more like a globular cluster: 
a small white circular array of very close dots.
The spiral was not evident at all.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Observing with NASA: An Open Platform for Citizen Science 

(Not) Observing with NASA and Harvard 

Messier 13: the Hercules Cluster 

An Online Class in Astrophysics