Hard SF on Deck

 

Over the past year or two I’ve found myself consuming lots of fantasy, historical, and horror fiction, in about that order of volume. All well and good. I enjoy my forays into fantasy, such as my travels in the Malazan Empire over the summer, my evenings spent in Victorian London on Baker Street, or the nightmares I’ve spent with Dr. Warthrop monster hunting.

But now that I’ve got a skeleton of an outline and fourteen pages of ideas to adorn it, I’m going to have to switch to hard SF. Science fiction that’s just as heavy on the science as it is on the fiction. It’s like a boxer getting ready to enter the ring again, or a football team advancing to the league championships. You gotta watch tape of your next opponent, to know where you stand. What needs to improve, what weaknesses need to be attacked, what’s been done to death and where advantages lie.

The genre this new idea I’ve been infatuated and on fire with since October 1 will be hard science fiction, and some things I’m going to have to address are such things as cultures and societies of different planets at war with each other, as well as how that war will be waged and what futuristic weapons will be waging it.

The last two books I put away since Thanksgiving past helped orient me to a proper frame of mind: The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl and As on a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova. To read over the next three months I picked five other paperbacks off my shelf as I’m completing my outline and my characters and plot and produce the rough draft:

Red Mars (1993) by Kim Stanley Robinson. Won Nebula Award for Best Novel, book one of a trilogy.

This one’s been on the shelf for nearly 20 years. I remember forging in 50 pages back around the time of 9/11. Then that whole thing happened and my interest in the book dropped overnight. A couple of jobs followed, then the wife and I bought a house, had children, I took other jobs, and all the while this book of man’s attempt to terraform the Red Planet gained dust on the far end of the bookshelf.

Count to a Million (2011) by John C. Wright

This book, on the other hand, I picked up six weeks ago, purely on the basis that the author has one of the greatest blogs on the Internet. I – and those whose blogs I read – have been reading him for years, but only now, unfortunately and to my shame, have I purchased a ticket into his SF world. Not sure what it’s about, exactly, though the back cover talks about gunslingers and apocalypses, cryosuspension and alien artifacts. Hmm. Sounds intriguing.

Nexus (2013) by Ramez Naam, book one of a trilogy

Picked this up Saturday purely on a whim and a quick scan of the summary. Could be crap, could be the Next Big Thing. Certainly it seems to be the exact type of story Hollywood would greenlight: a new drug sweeps society, allowing humans the mind meld with each other, and nefarious things are afoot once an innocent researcher comes across evidence of such afooted things of nefariousness. Seems a bit Crichtonesque, too, and I went through a late-90s phase were I read everything of his.

And a pair by Alan Dean Foster:

Voyage to the City of the Dead (1984)

Alan Dean Foster gained fame and fortune through SF movie novelizations – I first read him in the Alien novelization. Later I realized I had read him earlier, as a pre-teen, as he had ghost-written George Lucas’s Star Wars novel. Over the years I’ve read a bunch more, plus, and this is important, a very, very involving, suspenseful and original work, Midworld. My enjoyment with that book inspired me to pick this one up, a study of three alien cultures interacting on a river world. I bought it on vacation down in Hilton Head six years ago and read 40 or 50 pages, but put it down upon returning home and never picked it up again. Until now.

Phylogenesis (1999), book one of a trilogy

Not entirely sure what plot this one follows, but it involves a limited relationship between humans and an insect race in the years first contact. Both species find the other repulsive. But two misfits, a human and a Thranx, meet and momentous adventure ensues.

So that’s 2021 Q1 reading, so to speak. If I buzz through them I have a trio of Heinlein as backup – Between Planets, Citizen of the Galaxy, and a possible re-reading of Time for the Stars.