Book Review : S-F Collection in Need of Rocket Boosters

Hard Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Southern Illinois University: $21.95)

Never having learned an honest trade, I make my living in journalism. While engaged in this dodge, over the years I have attended a fair number of academic conferences. Many of them are informative and stimulating, but I come away from some of these confabs shaking my head and thinking, “These people have the best racket of all. They talk about nothing in an incomprehensible way, and they spend hours or days exchanging information that could be conveyed in five or 10 minutes.”

The present volume, “Hard Science Fiction,” is a collection of 16 essays presented in 1983 at the fifth annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on science fiction. The essayists include writers, scientists and scholars, and for the most part, the conference proceedings fall into the second group. The papers are arcane and boring.

Speculative and Imaginative

Hard science fiction, for those who may be wondering, is science fiction that is scientifically accurate, or at least, that does not violate any known laws of science. It can be and usually is speculative and imaginative, but though the story may occur millions of years in the future in a far-off galaxy, it must be consistent with our understanding of how the universe works. Readers take great pleasure in finding mistakes in hard science fiction stories.

In addition, as the editors, George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, state in their introduction, “Science must ultimately seem to outweigh the fiction. . . . The method of the hard SF story is logical, the means technological, and the result--the feel and texture of the fiction itself--objective and cold.”

David Brin, an astronomer and science-fiction writer, in one of the few engaging essays in the book, offers a slightly different definition. “In a hard S-F story or novel,” he writes, “the ‘science’ itself--the body of knowledge which encompasses verifiable, predictable patterns in our universe--is a major character. . . . While science or a scientific question need not be all there is to the plot of a hard SF story, it must participate substantially in motivating the characters to do what they do.”

To an advanced technological society, science fiction is an important literary genre. It speculates about where science is going--sometimes with surprising accuracy--and it explores, in Isaac Asimov’s words, “the impact of scientific advance on human beings.” But whether hard science fiction is or is not a genuine subgenre of science fiction is a question that rates little more than a shrug. In any event, the essays in this book shed little light on the answer.

Stanislaw Lem Essays

At least there are two essays on Stanislaw Lem, the Polish writer who is one of the most challenging, creative and metaphysical of contemporary science-fiction practitioners. The essay on Lem by George R. Guffey gives a very good account of what Lem is up to in his novel, “The Investigation.” Guffey shows how Lem’s recurring themes of cybernetics, information and chance are woven through the book.

The other essay on Lem, by Robert M. Philmus, is virtually incomprehensible. Philmus writes of Lem: “Purposing to disconnect words from the ‘reality’ to which they speciously refer, he cannot deal in fictive worlds that mimetically reproduce (more or less) the constrictive universe which word-concepts, so to speak, conceive of.” This is English?

And then there are this volume’s multitude of purely technical mistakes. Long ago I gave up worrying about misspellings and grammatical errors in hardcover books. It’s a losing battle, on a par with trying to maintain the distinction between which and that.

But this book seems to have had no copy editor at all. Richard Feynman’s name is twice spelled Feynmann. Fifth Avenue in New York is called Fifth Avenue on one page, Fifth Street on the next. Accommodate is twice spelled with one m . Verisimilitude is misspelled. Richard Dawkins’ book, “The Selfish Gene” is called “The Selfish Genes.” Berserk is spelled beserk. A novel by Fred Hoyle is called “The Black Cloud” in the text (correct) and “The Black Hole” in the index (incorrect).

For $21.95, they really should do better.

Speaking of money, I got paid to read this book. I don’t know why anybody else would.