Necessary Facts: 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: