hard sf

Most hard science fiction isn’t about science at all. Instead it’s really engineering fiction, concerned with building, creating and problem-solving, rather than pure science. To be sure, the two disciplines get blurred in the popular mindset: Heinlein, the field’s patron saint, was an engineer rather than a scientist; so too is one of the most prominent defenders and promoters of science in American popular culture, Bill Nye. Rocket science is as much engineering — materials science, propulsion — as it is physics, and many of the Giant Objects of hard science fiction, such as Dyson Spheres and Larry Niven’s Ringworld, are essentially engineering challenges in novel form (Niven himself described the Ringworld as a suspension bridge without endpoints). And let’s be honest: the holy text of hard sf, Analog, often reads as comfort fiction for engineers, a kind of escapism that reassures the reader that all problems, no matter how big or intractable, can be solved.

I’m probably being more than a bit unfair. Not every hard sf story requires a problem-solving engineer as its protagonist. Certainly that’s not the case with Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity Project anthologies, the fifth and most recent iteration of which, Bridging Infinity (Solaris, November 2016) is all about that hard sf tradition of engineered solutions to future problems. As Strahan writes in the introduction,

Science fiction, or at least the sort of science fiction that was typical in American pulp magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s was founded on a belief that problems are solvable, and that those problems are solvable using technical or engineering solutions. When faced with a problem in a story in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, our engineering hero wouldn’t quail before the challenge, but would instead “science the shit out of it” (as Andy Weir so elegantly put it) and come up with an engineering solution to the problem. And sometime it would take a big solution, a Hoover Dam or maybe moving a planet or two.

While previous volumes of the Infinity Project focused on interstellar futures, or limited themselves to the Solar System, Bridging Infinity‘s stories are about or are set in engineering projects at large — sometimes very large — scales, and the problems they aim to solve. But — and this is important — setting is not story. The fifteen stories by eighteen authors (there are three collaborations) are a good mix of perspective, character and setting.

The characters are as often adventurers and troubadours (for the latter, see “The Mighty Slinger” by Tobias S. Buckell and Karen Lord) as they are engineers; the marginalized are as present as the managerial, and the problem they’re trying to solve is sometimes their own survival. The settings themselves are fairly diverse as well: they range from cities, ships and installations to massive geoengineering projects on Earth (engineered responses to climate change is a recurring topic) and Venus to Dyson-grade megastructures. Some of the settings are familiar — with “Parables of Infinity,” Robert Reed presents us with another of his Great Ship stories, and Allen Steele returns to the setting of his novel, Hex, with a story that addresses a design flaw in that novel’s setting, a “not-quite Dyson sphere composed of trillions of hexagons.” Others, like the gravity wave generator in Benford and Niven’s “Mice Among Elephants,” are utterly uncanny. And sometimes the scope of the story is as vast as the built environment: see, for example, the multigenerational viewpoints of “The Venus Generations” by Stephen Baxter or Ken Liu’s “Seven Birthdays.”

I’ve long been a fan of Strahan’s Infinity Project. The stories have been of high caliber — Strahan’s a great editor, one I nominate for a Hugo each year — and I’ve made a point of buying and reading each installment as it comes out. But while Bridging Infinity is a solid and diverting collection of stories — it does what it says on the tin — it’s possible that after five spins of the wheel the returns are beginning to diminish. I can’t point to any single story and say, this is utterly amazing, whereas I could do that with many of the stories in the first book, Engineering Infinity. In the end, my sense of wonder ought to have engaged more than it did.

I received an electronic review copy of this book via NetGalley.

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