Written for a Boscon program

GUEST OF HONOR: STEPHEN BAXTER

By Terry Bisson

Like Poole, who “fell into the future,” I fell into SF.

In those days, the 1950s, it was a small, dark planet, and its gravity well only snagged you if you came too close.

I came too close.

I was a skinny kid in a small town, and by the time I was 12 I had gorged myself on clever stories, and learned the vast pleasures of Future History, primarily through Clifford Simak’s masterpiece, CITY. Here was a book that dared to take on big subjects (if not always in a big way). I was ready for the poetry of High SF.

I’ll never forget the night I finished AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT (the original version of THE CITY AND THE STARS. It was about a kid, and that helped. But it was a kid at the End of Time, and that was a perfect topic for an adolescent who naturally assumed that the first chapter in Human Existence had ended with his birth, and that a second and more glorious chapter was about to begin.

My folks were asleep by the time I finished Clarke’s novel, reading under the covers with a flashlight, which was how I defended my privacy against my little brother, who shared my room.

The house seemed awfully small after Shalmirane, so I sneaked out and walked a few blocks to the tobacco fields that edged our new suburb. There I stood in the long straight rows, under the distant, beckoning stars, repeating the final coda over and over to myself: “In this universe, night was falling—”

     Now I knew what I wanted to read. And more, I knew what I wanted to write.

     But by the time I had grown up, so had science fiction.

It was the 60s and SF was now a gas giant, almost a star. Literary values had taken root, and the language and the plots were such that might pass muster in the rarified salons of literature. We had always had Bradbury; now we had LeGuin as well, and Delany, and Zelazny, and Spinrad and Herbert.

SF was staking out new territory, much of it closer to home. Once written by scientists who became writers, SF was now written by English majors who picked up a little science on the side. They used the machinery of SF to work changes on politics and human experience. It was a new, if not golden, then at least a silver age.

This new literary sensibility led directly to William Gibson, one of the finest writers to ever work in the genre, but one who hardly ever went off-planet. As the 60s scrolled into the 70s and 80s, SF looked inward.

Much had been gained, but something was missing. The new attention to actual human experience had taken a bite out of the “sense of wonder” that was, to me and many others, the heart and soul of SF. We had lost a strain of poetry. Not in the language, for sure, but in the subject matter.

Poetry, I might add, had been though the same lens. It had become confessional. It was no longer heroic, no longer grand. It, too, was no longer about Destiny and Tragedy, but puttered “around the house and out in the yard.”

Not that I’m complaining. I was one of the English majors who had been welcomed into the field. Earth orbit suited me fine. But though I wrote SF, I felt I could no longer read it with the same expectations.

I was wrong. Slowly, while I wasn’t watching, a change had been taking place. SF was leaving Earth orbit again, beginning to explore the shimmering, shifting paradigms of a new science: quantum physics.

It was called Hard SF but I always thought that was a bad call. To me it was High SF. Turning science into poetry, and lofting us far beyond the limits of our consciousness into startling new territory.

Central to this was Stan Robinson, with his magnificent Mars Trilogy. Benford and Bear and Brin had been there all along, of course; but alas, I wasn’t paying attention. Then, suddenly, I was.

I encountered Baxter via THE TIME SHIPS, an audacious, plattnerite-powered remix of Wells that looped all the way to the end of Time and back, again and again.

Infinities and Eternities galore.

Wow, I thought, when I put the book down. My heart was pounding. I was back in the tobacco patch, under a sea of stars.  THE TIME SHIPS was too long (disclosure alert: I think all books are too long) but it was clearly made of what Lafferty once called “the high old-time stuff.” Baxter wrote with Clarke looking over one shoulder, and Wells and Stapledon looking over the other.

Approvingly, I was sure.

SF had, by leaving the Earth behind, come home.

Baxter’s other works confirmed my suspicion (or was it a hope) that the original DNA of SF was still intact and active. The books poured out of him like photons from a supernova, all grounded in the real magic of modern physics: dark matter, superstrings, neutron stars, black holes, nanobots and strange attractors, Kern metrics and singularities without end.

The star stuff was back.

Another element had returned as well. In the old days SF was a didactic literature, teaching readers (boys, most of us) the hard Newtonian facts of high vac and zero G and escape velocity. Today, Baxter’s Xeelee and Manifold tales perform the same function, helping us comprehend the grand uncertainties of quantum physics--or at least behold them in all their puzzling splendor.

And not just physics, but evolutionary biology as well: all the way to the final days of our primate destiny, when humankind’s legacy is reduced to a few bright plastic bits in the sand.

 Even Baxter’s more Newtonian imaginings are epic in scope, finding the woolly mammoth a new home on the red planet, or planting footprints in the Mangala Valles regolith via a closely-reasoned NASA that might have been. And who knows? The hopeful vision of VOYAGE might be coming true at last, now that President Bush has announced his plans to send the Democratic National Committee to Mars.

Congratulations, Stephen Baxter, on your role as Guest of Honor at one of America’s most distinguished gatherings of SF readers, writers and fans.

No one has done more than you to restore SF’s sacred Plattnerite. No one deserves this honor more.