David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

This is the introduction to a reprint anthology of hard sf stories of the late 1980s through 2001 (Tor, fall 2002). Kathryn and I assembled the anthology it to continue the discussion of hard sf we initiated in our The Ascent of Wonder. This essay introduces the main ideas considered in the book, ideas that are covered in more detail in the story notes. There are nearly forty writers in the anthology.–DGH

The hard sf tradition is continuous from at least the late 1930s. In our 1994 hard sf anthology, The Ascent of Wonder, we argued that "There has been a persistent viewpoint that hard sf is somehow the core and the center of the sf field." But while hard sf was never entirely out of fashion, since the 1940s it has not been as central to popular sf, nor as fashionable, as it became in the 1990s.

The term "hard sf" was coined by P. Schuyler Miller in 1957, and has always been to some extent nostalgic, in that it describes fiction that measured up to the "real" sf of the past. But it has also always signified sf that has something centrally to do with science, and it is this latter aspect of the term that we choose to emphasize, the aspect that is most evident in the renaissance of hard sf in the 1990s.

The big names in hard sf in the 1990s, based on the number of stories published, were Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, G. David Nordley, Paul McAuley, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Sheffield, Brian Stableford, Allen Steele, Bruce Sterling, Robert J. Sawyer, etc. Many of them wrote a number of stories in other genres or subgenres but also made significant contributions in hard sf. The big names of this and earlier generations–Poul Anderson, David Brin, Greg Bear, Hal Clement, Ben Bova, and Larry Niven, Jack Williamson, and so forth–wrote significant novels, and published fewer than ten stories each in the whole decade, although some of those stories were certainly important. And Arthur C. Clarke, following the deaths of Heinlein and Asimov, became the standard-bearer for the old ideals of hard sf unmixed with overt politics and remained a bestselling writer.

Those old ideals–of vision of the future distant in time and space, and filled with wonder far removed from the politics of today–did not disappear in the 1990s. But they began to seem old-fashioned, because many of the main ideas of hard sf had become politicized in the real world, associated with either the right or the left–near-future space travel and weaponry with the right, nuclear dangers and the environment with the left, and so on. Many writers such as Ted Chiang, Catherine Asaro, Paul Levinson, Michael Flynn, Alexander Jablokov, David Langford, Ian MacDonald, Robert Reed, George Turner, and James Patrick Kelly, also came into prominence (some after decades of publishing) as hard sf or space opera writers, each with several highly-regarded stories.

Clearly something exciting happened in hard sf in the 1990s that signaled a change in the course of the development of the genre, and that something was associated with science and with writing styles. And with political attitudes, too. There seem to have been two main sub-genre threads to follow in the literature to illuminate these changes: hard sf and space opera.

There were other significant threads, and significant works by important writers, that are not part of this argument; this is not intended as a comprehensive literary history of 1990s sf. Many popular, talented, and award-winning sf writers such as Connie Willis, John Kessel, Jack Womack, Howard Waldrop, James Morrow, Terry Bisson, Tim Powers, Harry Turtledove, Karen Joy Fowler, and Neal Stephenson, wrote in other areas in the 1990s. The 1990s was also the decade of the rise of Alternate History as a main form of sf.

In this anthology we present representative examples from among the significant sf writers and hard sf stories of the decade and try to point out linkages and relationships to give some clearer understanding of how hard sf, often mixed with space opera (or vice versa), has evolved in recent years, escalating into the new century. This book focuses on what has been called "The New Hard SF," "Baroque Hard SF Space Opera" (or "Baroque Space Opera"), "Hard Character SF," and a number of other unwieldy terms. The New Thing of the 1990s was broader than just hard sf, but there was certainly a hard sf renaissance.

No consensus has emerged as to what to call it; a lot of diverse things happened. It is sometimes called "radical hard sf," and that is the term we will trace because it illuminates certain interesting things about the evolution of the field in the last couple of decades.

This term originated in an Interzone editorial by David Pringle and Colin Greenland (in Interzone #8) and was then preempted by Bruce Sterling in his polemical fanzine Cheap Truth as a description of what Sterling wanted the nascent movement to be. And of course neither cyberpunk nor the stories in Interzone turned out as anticipated in the various calls for radical hard sf. But seeds had been planted. It was clear that radical hard sf opposed a perceived trend in American sf in the 1980s toward militarist, right-wing, or libertarian space war fiction marketed as synonymous with hard sf. The pages of Cheap Truth were filled with attacks on that stuff.

Some issues in the evolution of space opera need to be addressed before we can fully understand what happened to hard sf.

Over the last twenty years, the Hugo Awards for best novel for the last twenty years have generally gone to space opera or hard sf–from David Brin and C. J. Cherryh to Vernor Vinge, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Orson Scott Card–while the shorter fiction awards have been distributed much more widely over the range of sf and fantasy styles and possibilities. It is arguable that the novel Hugo has always gone primarily to space opera, as currently defined, though many of the earlier winners, up to the end of the 1970s, would have been mortally offended to be identified as such. Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating the worst form of formulaic hackwork.

But in the early and mid-1980s, space opera completed a redefinition process begun in the late 1970s, underpinned in particular by the efforts of influential editors Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey, and by the 1990s space opera had become synonymous with popular science fiction adventure fiction. It was also the term most often used in the US to describe Star Trek and Star Wars fiction. It is clear that both films and television helped promote this redefinition. And finally, it is evident that this redefinition was intended to conflate hackneyed work with ambitious sf adventure fiction, to blur distinctions in order to sell more books and to make media tie-in-writing-for-hire fiction seem more respectable.

In the 1980s, the traditional optimistic, problem-solving kind of hard sf was marginalized by the advent of cyberpunk (originally the Movement: radical reformers of hard sf) and by the ascendance of the Humanists (originally–and self-parodyingly–the Boffos of Sycamore Hill: the "boring old farts" of the Sycamore Hill writing workshop in North Carolina, who were actually the same age as the cyberpunks). Both groups, and their outer circles of imitators and followers, rejected space opera and the common forms and styles of hard sf, and the politics of the right, in favor of new attitudes and approaches, new dress codes and new critical value systems, and left-leaning politics. The standard essay on the subject is Michael Swanwick’s "User’s Guide to the Postmoderns."

The real attention in the 1980s and the early 1990s went to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and their cohorts and emulators, on the one hand, and to Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, and Orson Scott Card on the other. Lois McMaster Bujold (published by Baen Books and serialized in Analog) became prominent, and Dan Simmons, too. Orson Scott Card’s two-volume anthology of 1980s sf–Future on Fire (1991) and Future on Ice (1998)–is the best available selection of ’80s writers. There is no comparable anthology for the 1990s. But Card’s long and judgmental story notes must be read along with and in juxtaposition to the general introductions to Gardner Dozois’s annual Year’s Best Science Fiction, in which the fashions and prevalent attitudes are clearly presented, sometimes in very different terms than in Card’s books.

Promoting hard sf in the 1980s was left primarily to Analog and to influential editor Jim Baen, first at Tor Books, and from 1983 on at Baen Books. Examples of what Baen was promoting and what the Movement was attacking included the Libertarian fiction of Vernor Vinge, the late work of Robert A. Heinlein, and the There Will Be War anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle. Hard sf, it seemed, was narrowing to a subgenre concerned primarily with military fiction and political attacks, usually from the right, on liberal causes and politicians, and with artificially-set-up problems solved by stereotypical characters. Neither of its venues valued literary style.

In The Ascent of Wonder, an anthology we felt was a necessary corrective to this apparent narrowing, we examined the historical origins of hard sf and tried to tease out what hard sf had actually to do with science. The book had three introductions, one each by Gregory Benford, Kathryn Cramer, and David G. Hartwell. Benford argued for hard sf’s "fidelity to facts": "Hard sf plays with the net of fact up and strung as tight as the story allows." Cramer remarked that in the decades since John W. Campbell’s death, "the hard sf attitude became a saleable commodity of its own, separable from scientific content. Particularly during the Reagan years, hard sf evolved into right wing power fantasies about military hardware, men killing things with big machines. . . ." She invited the reader instead to explore the myriad ways science could be used in hard sf. Hartwell described hard sf as being about the "beauty of truth" and "the emotional experience of describing and confronting what is true," portraying hard sf as a literature of faith in science, in opposition to literary modernism.

Some fine and popular writers emerged from Baen Books and Analog (Lois Bujold at Baen Books, Michael Flynn at Analog), but with these and a few other significant exceptions, Baen Books and Analog didn’t get much serious attention, nor many award nominations in the field, through the beginning of the 1990s. Nor were many of their stories selected for reprint in prestigious Year’s Best anthologies, despite the fact that Analog was, and always has been, the magazine with the highest circulation in the sf field. A bunch of the Analog writers, whose fiction was published nearly exclusively therein, got together in the ’90s as a booster group and had themselves photographed on several occasions at conventions, along with editor Stanley Schmidt, as the "Analog Mafia." But they did not succeed in appearing as a hip, young, cutting-edge group.

It was among the British writers in particular that a new space opera (which was the most obvious UK response to the call for "radical hard sf") conspicuously flowered in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. British sf critic Paul Kincaid wrote in 2001 an essay on 1990s sf, "The New Optimism," saying:

There are no neat divisions and clear boundaries; we merely observe large groupings and general tendencies. And new literary forms do not replace older ones, but coexist with them. There are examples of all forms of space opera, all the way down to the crudely executed TV tie-in romances or westerns couched in sf clothing to be found in publications of the 1990s and today. And all the forms of hard sf still appear, even the Gernsbackian idea story and the Campbellian problem-solving story, sometimes in rudimentary journalistic prose. The new did not drive out the old, but neither did the bad old overwhelm the good new.

What did happen was that significant attention began to focus in the early 1990s on new writers, such as Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Paul J. McAuley, Iain M. Banks, Ian McDonald, and Gwyneth Jones, who were doing striking new things in sf, most often with a left-wing (or at least certainly not right-wing) political bent, and most of them in hard sf or space opera. Most of them are British writers, not American, and by the mid- and late 1990s they had been joined by many others, both British and American, in advancing hard sf and in bringing new energy and variety to space opera. It was the decade of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and also of many other Mars novels. It was the decade of Bruce Sterling's hard sf novels and stories of cultural criticism. It was the decade that Australian and Canadian sf writers became significant groups in sf, and particularly in hard sf, rather than remain a few disparate talents of generally unknown nationality.