Engineering Infinity

“
Malak
” copyright © 2011 Peter Watts.

“
Watching the Music Dance
”
copyright © 2011 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

“
Laika’s Ghost
” copyright ©
2011 Karl Schroeder.

“
The Invasion of Venus
”
copyright © 2011 Stephen Baxter.

“
The Server and the Dragon
”
copyright © 2011 Hannu Rajaniemi.

“
Bit Rot
” copyright © 2011 Charles
Stross.

“
Creatures with Wings
”
copyright © 2011 Kathleen Ann Goonan.

“
Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone
”
copyright © 2011

Damien Broderick & Barbara Lamar.

“
Mantis
” copyright © 2011 Robert Reed.

“
Judgement Eve
” copyright ©
2011 John C. Wright.

“
A Soldier of the City
”
copyright © 2011 David Moles.

“
Mercies
” copyright © 2011 Abbenford
Associates.

“
The Ki-anna
” copyright © 2011
Gwyneth Jones.

“
The Birds and the Bees and the
Gasoline Trees
” copyright © 2011 John Barnes.

An anthology is not assembled by
one person, neatly and tidily, working in idyllic isolation (at least, not in
my experience). Rather it’s the incredibly fortunate outcome of the efforts of
a small village of talented and extremely generous people.

Engineering
Infinity
would not exist without the efforts of Jonathan Oliver and the
remarkable team at Solaris, my indefatigable agent Howard Morhaim and his
assistant Katie Menick, and the wonderful Stephan Martiniere who has done
another remarkable cover - I am grateful to them all. I am also grateful to
each and every one of the book’s contributors who have been far kinder and more
patient than I had any right to hope.

Finally, as always, I would like
to thank my wife Marianne and my daughters Jessica and Sophie, who allow me to
steal time from them to do books like this one. It’s a gift I try to repay
every day.

Beyond the
Gernsback Continuum...

Jonathan Strahan

I was in a bar. I think it was in
Calgary in Canada. And it was the middle of winter. Or it might have been the
bar in Denver in the United States, a little earlier in the same winter.
Wherever it was, it was the winter of 2008 somewhere in North America and
George Mann and the Solaris team had asked me to join them for a drink. I don’t
drink often and I don’t drink heavily, but I do drink at science fiction
conventions, especially when publishers have invited me to join them. It seemed
that Solaris would like me to edit an anthology, a hard science fiction
anthology or something similar, the book that has become the one you now hold
in your hands:
Engineering Infinity
. I was
flattered, delighted in fact, and given that I had some experience editing such
stuff, I agreed readily to the idea.

At the time, and in the several
months following that trip to Canada (it was Canada, I’m sure) we went back and
forth a little about titles and about which writers might be involved, but
oddly, in retrospect, what we didn’t discuss was what hard science fiction was,
or what it might be in the 21st Century. The reason for that, I think, is what
I now think of as the “Gernsback continuum.” Science fiction readers love
taxonomy - classifying, arranging and defining things - and what we love to
taxonomise the most is science fiction itself. The Gernsback continuum is the
slice of science fiction history that starts with Hugo Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories
, progresses to John W. Campbell’s
Astounding Magazine
and the Big Three of Science Fiction
(Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), and then on to the New
Wave and its descendants). It’s a mostly male worldview, a mostly white one,
and it holds at its heart “hard SF.”

The term “hard SF” or “hard
science fiction” was first coined in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller to describe
science fiction stories that emphasize scientific detail or technical detail,
and where the story itself turns on a point of scientific accuracy from the
fields of physics, chemistry, biology, or astronomy, although engineering
stories were also commonly described as hard science fiction in the early days
of SF. The great early works of hard science fiction - James Blish’s
Surface Tension
, Hal Clements’
Mission
of Gravity
, Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” and Arthur C. Clarke’s
A Fall of Moondust
- are some of the best and most
enduring works of science fiction our field has seen. They all exemplify the
hard SF approach: emphasizing science content, linking it directly to the
narrative, and maintaining a rigorous approach to the science itself. They also
meet the most important requirement for the true hard SF story: they all are as
accurate and rigorous in their use of scientific knowledge at the time of
writing as was possible.

Hard science fiction has remained
a constant throughout the history of science fiction. In the 1950s it was where
the best tales of space exploration were forged; in the 1960s it was the heart
of near-Earth science fiction; in the 1980s it was the radical centre for the
British drive to the new space opera; and in the 1990s, with the arrival of
both quantum mechanics in science fiction and the singularity, it was the basis
for Kim Stanley Robinson’s meticulous and demanding
Mars
trilogy,
Greg Egan’s explorations of human consciousness, and Charles Stross’s
post-scarcity space operas.

This, however, is the 21st
century and I think things are becoming more complicated and complex. Science
fiction no longer subscribes readily to a single view of its own history. There’s
far more to our past than the Gernsback continuum, or indeed more recently the
Gibson continuum (the past and future history of cyberpunk), and science itself
seems to be an ever more wriggly and complex beast as we come to better
understand the universe in which we find ourselves. Frankly quantum mechanics
often sounds indistinguishable from magic. We’re also well into the Fourth
Generation of science fiction: the genre has been born, passed through
adolescence, into adulthood, and is moving into a post-scarcity period of
incredible richness and diversity. That impacts on everything in our field,
from the diversity of the people who write science fiction to whom and about
what they choose to write. We’ve also long since accepted that science fiction
writers aren’t back-room nostrodamusses reading tealeaves and predicting the
future. They’re people using science fiction as a tool to interrogate and
extrapolate from our present for what we can learn about the human condition.

All of this became increasingly
clear to me as
Engineering Infinity
came together.
Slowly drift set in, we moved away from pure hard SF to something a little
broader. Yes, each and every story here has at its heart a piece of scientific
speculation. Yes, there’s a real attempt not to break any known laws of
physics. But far more importantly, I think, the writers here who are some of
our finest dreamers turned away from Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” and
towards the promise embedded in the title of this book itself: the point where
the practical application of science meets something without bound or end - our
sense of wonder. There’ll be times as you read the stories collected here -
encountering everything from a mirror that makes us ask who is real and who is
not to a cannibalistic zombie cyborg - when you might ask,
how
is this story hard SF?
My answer, the best answer I can give you, is
that some of the stories are classic hard SF, some are not. Some hold at their
heart a slightly anachronistic love of science fiction’s days gone by or simply
grab some aspect of science fiction and test it to destruction and beyond, but
all are striving to be great stories.

I should add,
Engineering Infinity
is not the last statement in an
evolutionary taxonomy of hard SF. For all that I’d love to see such a book, it’s
neither a definitive book of hard SF nor an attempt to coin a new radical hard
SF. Instead, it is part of the ongoing discussion about what science fiction is
in the 21st century. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed compiling
it, and that maybe, just perhaps, it inspires you to look forward at what’s
coming next.

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Western Australia

July 2010

Peter Watts

Peter Watts (
www.rifters.com
) is an uncomfortable hybrid of biologist and science-fiction
author, known for pioneering the technique of appending extensive technical
bibliographies onto his novels; this serves both to confer a veneer of
credibility and to cover his ass against nitpickers. Described by the
Globe
& Mail
as one of the best hard SF authors alive, his
debut novel (
Starfish
) was a
NY Times
Notable Book.

His most
recent (
Blindsight
) - a philosophical rumination on
the nature of consciousness which, despite an unhealthy focus on space
vampires, has become a required text in such diverse undergraduate courses as “The
Philosophy of Mind” and “Introduction to Neuropsychology” - made the final
ballot for a number of genre awards including the Hugo, winning exactly none of
them (although it has, for some reason, won multiple awards in Poland). This
may reflect a certain critical divide regarding Watts’ work in general; his
bipartite novel
?ehemoth
, for example, was praised
by
Publisher’s Weekly
as an “adrenaline-charged
fusion of Clarke’s
The Deep Range
and Gibson’s
Neuromancer”
and “a major addition to 21st-century hard SF,” while being
simultaneously decried by
Kirkus
as “utterly
repellent” and “horrific porn.” (Watts happily embraces the truth of both
views.)

His work has
been extensively translated, and both Watts and his cat have appeared in the
prestigious journal
Nature
. After a quiet couple of
years (he only published one story in 2009, although he managed to publish it
five times thanks to various Best-of-Year anthologies) a recent foray into
fanfic, and a more recent foray into the US judicial system, Watts is back at
work on
State of Grace
(the sidequel to
Blindsight
) and another project he’s not quite allowed to talk about just
yet. He does, however, feel a bit better about his life since winning the Hugo
in Melbourne for his 2009 novelette “The Island.”

“An ethically-infallible machine
ought not to be the goal. Our goal should be to design a machine that performs
better than humans do on the battlefield, particularly with respect to reducing
unlawful behaviour or war crimes.”

- Lin
et al
, 2008,
Autonomous Military
Robotics
:

Risk,
Ethics, and Design

“[Collateral] damage is not
unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military
advantage anticipated from the attack.”

- US Department of
Defence, 2009

It is smart but not awake.

It would not recognize itself in
a mirror. It speaks no language that doesn’t involve electrons and logic gates;
it does not know what
Azrael
is, or that the word is
etched into its own fuselage. It understands, in some limited way, the meaning
of the colours that range across Tactical when it’s out on patrol - friendly
Green, neutral Blue, hostile Red - but it does not know what the perception of
colour
feels
like.

It never stops thinking, though.
Even now, locked into its roost with its armour stripped away and its control
systems exposed, it can’t help itself. It notes the changes being made to its
instruction set, estimates that running the extra code will slow its reflexes
by a mean of 430 milliseconds. It counts the biothermals gathered on all sides,
listens uncomprehending to the noises they emit -

--

-
hartsandmyndsmyfrendhartsandmynds
-

- rechecks threat-potential
metrics a dozen times a second, even though this location is secure and every
contact is Green.

This is not obsession or
paranoia. There is no dysfunction here. It’s just code.