Genre SF [historically] manifested two different attitudes to the "human sciences." The part of the field that yearned for literary respectability took them at their own evaluation, and imported them. . . .Freud was emphatically welcomed into the field in such novels as The Demolished Man and More than Human. The New Wave of the '60s accepted mainstream ideas of character (and its indictment of genre SF for ignoring them) wholesale, as did the influx of female writers in the '70s. . . .

But the Campbellian strain of the field, which gave birth to hard SF, always had a different attitude. It was always (and rightly) suspicious of Freud, and rather than standing in awe of the "human sciences," it sought to reform them, making them over into true, rigorous sciences. . . . Even the notorious Dianetics of L. Ron Hubbard was trumpeted as Freud made scientific. The '40s and '50s saw many more stories attempt to harden the softer sciences.

But the state of the art to support such fantasies and hopes was lacking, and the action and excitement in the field went elsewhere, as described above, until the '80s, when cyberpunk, via Bruce Sterling/Vincent Omniveritas's manifestos, explicitly called out the humanists to duel for the soul of SF, while in the background, a more traditional Campbellian hard SF, better equipped than its predecessor, enjoyed a slow, quiet renaissance. In the '90s, these two streams have flowed together. . . The brash, confrontational willingness of Egan to "burn the motherhood statement" (Sterling) and cheerfully mock humanist pieties comes from cyberpunk. But it is the science, fifty years wiser, feeding the other stream that promises a hard SF that can finally take on the humanists on their own ground and win: "hard character SF."

And here at last, we see the return of the Campbellian dream in its entirety: not only the new, truly scientific vision of ourselves, as in Bear and Benford, but also the challenge to traditional and Modernist literature alike. . . That is the promise of hard character SF."

. . . the nature of a person seems, on our reading of [this story], to involve necessary qualifications of either a scientific or philosophical description. Mark. . . is at pains to make it clear that he has not been delusional at any stage. He is, if you will, "in his right mind," except that the mind in question has had a basic part of its affective structure destroyed. Before and after, Mark is clear that the way he feels has nothing rational about it in relation to the external world. The cognitive aspect of his person is still functioning well enough for that. But however we parse the psychological and physiological elements of his situation, the reality of it is conveyed -- perhaps can only be conveyed -- by the language of value, of self-worth, and of feeling. Because he learns the mechanism of happiness the hard way, he has no confidence in language that merely suggests the phenomenon to be a mental one, though that is how he has experienced it, and continues to experience it; and for the purpose of telling, he is obliged to deploy the very language that no longer seems adequate. The alternative is exclusively to use words that, while empirically satisfactory, convey nothing of his experience. Whatever remains of Mark the person depends, for self-understanding, on two quite different, seemingly incommensurable descriptions of itself.