Edge of Infinity - By Jonathan Strahan

WELCOME TO THE Fourth Generation of science fiction.

A year or so ago I was working on Engineering Infinity, a collection of stories intended to interrogate what hard science fiction means in the second decade of the 21st century. In the introduction to that book I made passing reference to the ‘Fourth Generation of Science Fiction,’ where I suggested that science fiction, having been born, had passed through adolescence, into adulthood, and then moved into a post-scarcity period of incredible richness and diversity.

My intention, in coining the term, was simply to highlight the depth and variety of science fiction today, both in terms of who reads and writes it, and in the breadth and complexity of what the field now encompasses in terms of style, topic, theme, setting and so on. Things are good, and the laboratory is bubbling! However, once Engineering Infinity had gone to press and the time had well and truly arrived to move on to other projects, it occurred to me that the “Fourth Generation” was a good descriptor for something else happening in science fiction.

Science fiction publishing is a somewhat morbid sub-culture. It is rather obsessed with the death of SF and SF publishing. It is so obsessed with its own death that it feels honour bound to report that it is dying, will die, or in fact has already died rather a long time ago with monotonous regularity. I’ve not checked, but I’m fairly confident that my good friend and colleague, Gardner Dozois, has reported this fact in the introduction to almost every one of his nearly three dozen ‘best of the year’ anthologies published between 1977 and the present day. This isn’t because Gardner is a particularly depressive fellow, or that he relishes the aforesaid death of our field. It’s because science fiction, I realised, is being killed by science.

Not just today, but always. How? Well, every day scientists go to work developing new hypotheses, publishing new papers, and uncovering new facts. The bedrock of information upon which science fiction writers work is constantly shifting and changing, as it should. This is a fine and wonderful thing, and I doubt a single science fiction writer on the planet would complain about it. However, this constant barrage of fact can be the enemy of romance, and science fiction needs romance to survive.

Take Mars as an example. Percival Lowell, fascinated with drawings by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, fell in love with and helped to popularise the canals of Mars. That view of the world, scientifically reasonable for its time, formed the basis of Edgar Rice Burrough’s novel A Princess of Mars, which imagined the sweeping dead sea bottoms of Helium, populated by thoats and tharks and the setting for the sword-fighting, gravity-defying adventures of John Carter. By 1964 that image was dead, swept away by the tide of facts collected by the space probe Mariner, and by the late 1970s Mariners, Vikings and Voyagers had turned images of Helium forever to dust, and left us with images that looked nothing like nothing more than a stretch of washed-out desert that really wanted to kill you.

Not that science fiction hasn’t risen to the challenge set by science. It did and it continues to do so. A rash of novels in the 1980s, most prominently from Kim Stanley Robinson, with his austere, magisterial Mars trilogy, took on the challenge of making Mars a human place – a dangerous one, but a place where romance and adventure could flourish and where we could see a way back to the future. Others took up the cudgel, Greg Bear in Moving Mars, Terry Bisson in Voyage to a Red Planet, and many more.

How does all of this connect to the Fourth Generation? Well, bear with me. It’s been said that with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, co-incidentally published around the same time the Mars revolution was happening, moved science fiction from an outwards-focussed technological SF to an inwards-focussed look at cyberspace; innerspace, even. Cyberpunk came from the street, but its talk of uploading into cyberspace was also a turning away from the physical world and from science fiction’s journey to the stars, something that would have been unimaginable just a few decades earlier. As the years passed, and as more fact accumulated, travelling to the stars began to seem harder and less likely, and even leaving our planet seemed so fanciful that SF briefly spawned a Mundane movement to challenge it.

And it’s not hard to see why. The flush