Carbide Tipped Pens

In a world where Science Fiction has been rather watered down, I was really excited to stumble upon Carbide Tipped Pens. This anthology promised hard SF which, if you're not familiar with it, is the purest form of this genre. Essentially the science or technology portion of the story is the story. Without it, everything else around it falls apart. I love reading stories like these. They are full of potential ideas, full of things that could someday be, and I was thrilled to be given a whole series of them.

The anthology started out strong! The first story, “The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever” was one of my favorites. The perfect length to draw me in, this scientific tale of the end of the world was chilling. Stories that plausible always are. “Thunderwell” was another of my favorites. This brilliant story shared the possibility of travel to Mars, and so much more. Followed by “The Circle”, a story of ancient mathematics, and “Old Timer's Game”, a story that highlights what artificially enhanced sports players may someday become, the first half of the anthology was brilliant. I was lost in a new world. One full of well thought out possibilities, and I couldn't have been happier.

Towards the middle, however, I was no longer as invested. A lot of the stories from the mid-point on were just too concentrated on the science/technology aspect. It made the characters shells of themselves, and therefore made it hard for me to focus. I absolutely understand that the basis of these stories is, in fact, science and technology. When too much jargon is being thrown about though it's tough to stay on track. Readers like myself, who take pleasure in reading these but aren't formally trained, are locked out of appreciating the story. If I had been a scientist in a former life, perhaps they would have been more enjoyable. I just felt lost.

The one notable exception was “SIREN of Titan” which was what kept me reading on to the end of this anthology. Dealing with Artificial Intelligence, it was absolutely fascinating and extremely well written. So, don't fret. If you choose to read this anthology I can assure you there are some definite gems in here! If you're a fan of SF, specifically of hard SF, this is a compilation you need to add to your reading list. Overall, I'm rather impressed. I hope there's more around the corner.

reviews.metaphorosis.com

3 stars

A collection of stories focused on new hard science fiction.

I like to believe that I used to be a scientist, and I do retain a faint memory of that period, along with some leftover jargon. When I started to read science fiction, hard SF was a key part of it, and no doubt bolstered my feeling that this was serious stuff, not just escapism. Along, probably, with everyone else, I've noted a decline in hard SF over the last decades. I don't write any myself. It sometimes seems like Stephen Baxter and Ben Bova are the only one waving the flag. So it was nice to see Bova and Eric Choi put together an anthology aimed at addressing the deficit.

The anthology starts strong, with a series of well written, credible stories that show off the strengths of hard SF. Unfortunately, just over halfway through, the quality dips, and we run into hard SF's traditional weakness - stories with credible science, but characters so cool and distant that it's hard to care about them, which makes reading the story more academic exercise than pleasurable. I can go to New Scientist to read articles; I want something different from a story. Perhaps attempting to display its breadth, the anthology also displays newer, more modern weakness stolen from other genres: the apparent belief that an opaque (almost incomprehensible) story peppered with technology is innovative, when in fact it's just bad writing (even from a known author).

Some of the stories give a certain wanna-be hard SF feel - for example mixing imperial and metric units. Clearly that does happen (recall a certain Mars orbiter), but I'd hope that in the future we're not mixing the units in a single sentence (or using imperial at all, actually). Similarly, there's occasionally a laziness in calculation or extrapolation. When I read hard SF, I expect the background calculations to work. In this book, they usually do, but not always. It's one thing to imagine implanted cells that create and deliver drugs, but jumping from that to built-in radio transmitters is a big leap.

It may be that not all readers find fault with this, but I found some of the stories to be too overtly opinionated with regard to current politics. It's one thing to extrapolate global warming policies; it's another to complain about funding for Osama bin Laden missions. SF is not just about escapism, but there is an element of getting away from mundane tribulations.

All that said, the stories in the anthology were largely good, with one or two very good, and a few not so good. Some of the best were:

The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever by Daniel H. Wilson. An astrophysicist comforts his daughter when he spots an imminent disaster. A counterpoint to the flat-character flaw noted above, this one is all about people, and a strong opener for the collection.

The Circle by Liu Cixin (translated by the ubiquitous Ken Liu). An imperial advisor proposes a way to investigate life's secrets. The writing in the story is in the “good, but not great” category, but it's good enough to support a very interesting concept - using people for calculations. This is an idea that's been covered by others (e.g., Sean McMullen's Eyes of the Calculor), but not quite in this way. I've got Liu's Three Body Problem (which this is an excerpt from) on my list as well, and I'm curious to see whether he can make it work as well at novel length.

She Just Looks That Way by Eric Choi. A young man with a crush looks to surgery to relieve his obsession. This is another of the stories carried more by an interesting idea than by the writing. It could have been shorter and simpler, but after some treacherous ground in the middle, Choi pulls it out in the end.

SIREN of Titan by David DeGraff. A goal-driven robotic rover begins to act up. Despite the title, there's only a faint, conceptual link to the Kurt Vonnegut book. This story is in some ways the antithesis of the Liu and Choi stories; that is, the idea is relatively thin, but the story is so well written that it just doesn't matter. Possibly the best story in the book.

Overall, a good collection, but not really one that is likely to turn the tide for hard SF. I would have hoped for a stronger collection that more consistently avoided the sub-genre's traditional flaws.

NB: Received free copy from Net Galley.