What's the root of my discomfort over the hard SF label? It's simply this: I feel that the "two-culture war" of Science/engineering vs. the humanities is alive and well in SF itself. It tends to take the form of a perceived distinction between fantasy writing and 'big-S' Science fiction. Much of my work is about seeing beyond the two-culture war, and describing its resolution.

Here a quote might be in order. This is from The Nonlocal Universe by Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos; the book is marketed as a popularization of scientific ideas, but it's more a philosophical essay. Anway, in discussing the two-culture war, they end this way:
The philosophical postmodernists were correct in assuming that scientific knowledge exists in human subjective reality and wrong in assuming that this knowledge is not privileged in coordinating our experience with physical reality. Conversely, members of the scientific community were correct in assuming that the mathematical description of nature is privileged and wrong in assuming that this description exists in some sense prior to or outside of human consciousness.

What this means is that as an artist doing SF, you cannot ignore either the factual bedrock of reality, or the prismatic effect of human consciousness on how the real presents itself. My discomfort with hard SF as a distinct category is identical to my discomfort with fantasy as one; the dichotomy is an atavism, a relic of the two-culture war (although it remains an effective marketing distinction). I am trying to look past to a different brand of SF that accepts the richness of both the subjective and the objective.

Whew! Doesn't that sound pretentious! I suppose it might be. On the other hand, if the work of 20th century ideas was to step past the Newtonian worldview, implicitly ending the two-culture war, I believe the work of the 21st is to translate that victory into cultural fact--to live it. And there's nothing pretentious or abstract about that. It means abandoning some fears and worries about how we live; it means relaxing and accepting what we are and what world we live in: both the reality of electrons and hard science, and the reality of our own passions and values. I don't think people are going to find it hard to get with that programme.

So, as I work, I will be striving to maintain a balance: between adventure and thoughtfulness, between ideas and characters, between science and fiction. You can let me know how well I do.

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