The Ascent of Wonder [antikvár]

real science,maginary worldsGregory BeRfordcig)I , ''The great simplicity of science will only be seen when we understand its strangeness.John WheelerI have found that "hard" science fiction writers share a camaraderie that is unusual even for their close-knit genre.In my experience, writers of "the hard stuff" produce more collaborations than other types of science fiction authors, they hold in common the internationalist idealism of scientific bodies, and in their free trading of ideas often behave like scientists. Modem science itself shares many hard sf genre featuressteadily, communally developed ideas; a "family" feeling; and open discourse, especially in a time when papers in scientific, leamed journals can have fifty authors.Hardness in fictionfidelity to facts, whether in sf or in a police procedural novelis a cultivated taste. In a nation of declining science-related skills, written hard sf may reach a shrinking audience, though its taste for high-tech imagery may continue to be widely influential. The principal contribution of the visual arts to hard sf has been in concrete backgrounds, from the serene surfaces of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the cluttered techno-trashscapes of Blade Runner. The hard sf aesthetic goals may still occupy the center of the fieldthough much recent sf has returned to the old styles, in which scientific accuracy and worldview are subordinated to conventional literary virtues of character or plot, style or setting. Alas, in this sense hard sf may be a paradigm more often honored in the breach than not.Still, seeking its cachet, some have tried to appropriate the hard sf name for any narrative which nods however slightly toward science at all. (J. G. Ballard, Ursula K. LeGuin and Gene Wolfe, for example, do not feature on the hard sf fan's list, but they have been enlisted in the corps by some.) Fresh writers slinging tough prose are almost routinely blurbed as purveying a new kind of hard sf. This, too, is an indirect tribute to its slow, silent success.We can describe hard science fiction as that varietya quite small fraction which highly prizes faithfulness to the physical facts of the universe, while building upon them to realize new fictional worlds. But how crucial should this bethat is, how central is science to science fiction?Many think it's peripheral. They could easily argue that, after all, science stands for Truth in our culture, the way of knowing which knocked over conventional religion in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, fiction really describes events which didn't happen. Fiction is (let's be frank) liesbeautiful lies, maybe, intoxicating, uplifting, enormously suggestivebut lies, nonetheless. So "science fiction" is a contradiction. Is it Lies about the Truth? Or the deeper Truth about Lies?tZi<:rt