Peter Watts began publishing science fiction with a paper in the Journal of Mammalogy in 1984. He continued to write throughout the eighties, but while his statistical fiction proved successful amongst marine mammalogists, he was unable to sell any stories containing actual characters and plot. During this time he acquired an impressive collection of personalized rejections, notably from Analog, the bastion of hard SF. These letters frequently described Watts's stories as "awfully negative," although they encouraged him to persevere in his efforts. Over the years, however, Analog's rejections became increasingly terse (suggesting that Watts, always one to buck a trend, was actually getting worse with practice). In 1990 he submitted "A Niche," an uplifting tale of sexual abuse, deep-sea ecology, and career counseling. He was rewarded by his first-ever form-letter rejection from Analog.

Realizing that he would never achieve fame or fortune in the US, Watts submitted "A Niche" to the less-lucrative Canadian market hoping to at least recoup the cost of his printer ribbon. The story sold immediately, won an Aurora Award, and has been reprinted several times (most notably in Hartwell & Grant's 1994 Canadian-SF showcase Northern Stars from Tor Books).

Recognizing a Good Thing when he saw it, Watts immediately padded an additional 90,000 words onto the narrative and sold Starfish (1999), his first novel, to Tor. Starfish was an unexpected critical and commercial success, netting a "Notable Book of the Year" nod from The New York Times, an honorable mention for John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and rejections from both German and Russian publishing houses on the grounds that it was "too dark". (Being considered too dark for the Russians remains one of Watts's proudest accomplishments.) Starfish was universally praised for its evocation of the deep-sea environment. The sequel, Maelstrom (2001, Tor), takes place almost entirely on land: It therefore avoids the elements that readers most loved about the first book, replacing them with a sprawling entropic dystopia in which Sylvia Plath might have felt at home, if Sylvia Plath had had a graduate degree in evolutionary biology. Maelstrom may mark the first time that the NY Times used the terms "exhilarating" and "deeply paranoid" to describe the same novel. These novels, despite Watts's best efforts, have turned into the first two-thirds of a trilogy. Watts is presently working on the final volume B[beta]ehemoth), and a first-contact novel exploring the evolutionary value of sentience. He still hasn't sold a short story to the American mags; his collected short fiction (originally released in a variety of Canadian publications) is available in Ten Monkeys Ten Minutes, a skimpy trade paperback from Tesseract Books (Edmonton). He continues to live a double life as a biologist (albeit far from a cutting-edge one), and has also dabbled in computer-game script writing. Peter Watts is generally a lot more optimistic than you might expect, considering.

Let's start by throwing away that hoary old question, what is hard SF? We've been around the block a few times; challenged for a definition we need only say, we know it when we see it.

Ask instead, what is hard science fiction for?

It's been said that science fiction exists as an array of possible futures, a Gumpesque box of chocolates from which we can choose our course. This interpretation assumes some baseline level of real-world credibility, of course -- if you're shopping for a real future, you don't waste time with Unicorn Truffles -- so hard SF is often distinguished from its softer, inferior cousins by virtue of adherence to rigorous -- or at least, plausible -- science.

Plausible, is it? Okay, then: Goodbye Niven, goodbye Herbert and Vinge. Begone with your genes that code for luck, your spaceships piloted by psychics, and your galactic Slow Zones. Goodbye Brin: A Ph.D should've known better than to resort to ftl. You're not plausible enough for this sandbox.

But of course I'm attacking a straw man here -- because as we all know, it's not the math that counts, it's the attitude. Those guys over there with the elves and the wizards are just a bunch of New Age mystics, glorifying irrationality. They tell us to have faith, to believe in magic. They insist we pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. We, on the other hand, are missionaries of rationalism. We reject pixie-dust outright: We may not have the blueprints for a warp engine handy, but you'd better believe that our future technologies have sprung from the same empirical science that gave us Teflon and chemotherapy. Our tales abide by the spirit of science, if not the letter.

Ignore for the moment people like Tolkien, who -- without even having the password to our secret clubhouse -- created perhaps the most rigorously consistent virtual world in English literature. There's a more serious point at which our arguments start to come off the rails: The science in science fiction may not, when we get right down to it, be all that important after all.

Science fiction explores the interface between humanity and technological change. That's what fundamentally defines the genre: Its human face distinguishes it from the technical journals, and its technological side distinguishes it from other kinds of fiction. Yet this balance is profoundly (and necessarily) uneven. Want to explore the societal impact of immortality? It's a poor writer who'd devote half a novel to telomeres and mitochondrial membranes. Much better to gloss over those details, assume the result, and focus on the human consequences. In other words, there may be little intrinsic correlation between the "hardness" of science fiction and its value as an exploratory device.

So, are the naysayers right after all? Does this whole end of the spectrum amount to an escapist pastime for geeks more interested in toys than people? Is it not about technology at all, but politics? (And are you as sick as I am of the endless debate over whether "The Cold Equations" was a heart-wrenching lesson on the wages of ignorance, or just a chrome-plated misogynist excuse to toss some uppity chick out an airlock?)

What is hard SF for?

I can only tell you what is to me, personally: It's a gauntlet. A self-imposed challenge to Watts the biologist to keep the science plausible, no matter how unimportant that seems in a genre full of humanoid aliens and ftl. A challenge to Watts the writer, to tell a story without breaking the scientist's rules.

It's a bit like rewriting the Old Testament in iambic pentameter. It's an arbitrary goal, and there are easier ways to get the message across. The constraints chafe: prose would be so much simpler. Even if one succeeds on technical points, the final product can be graceless and ugly: an essay posing as narrative, a killer idea tarted up with paper-thin characters and stuffed to bursting with exposition. We have our share of failures.

But what if you not only succeed despite those constraints, but actually produce better work because of them? What if the end result, miraculously, doesn't seem forced and contrived, but soars? Then you've wandered onto the battlefield with one hand tied behind your back, and done more than survive. You've triumphed.

That's why I write hard science fiction. I don't know how close I've come to that goal, but after all I'm just starting out.

And I've got time.