Another of the golden age hard-SF authors has passed on. (Link via Jerry Pournelle).

Hal Clement, the pen name of Harry Clement Stubbs, began writing science fiction in the 1940s. He blazed the trail of science fictional world-building that was both scientifically accurate and internally consistent in his best-known work, Mission of Gravity (1954), which was first serialized in Astounding Stories magazine (the forerunner to today's Analog).

According to editors David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF), Clement's Mission of Gravity "redefined the game of hard sf as an exercise in interrelating the sciences to achieve a created world that would plausibly withstand rigorous examination from many angles."

His was a well-lived life. He graduated from Harvard with an astronomy degree in 1943 and went into the US Army Air Corps where he piloted and copiloted B-24 Liberators for the remainder of World War II. He taught for more than 38 years. He is survived by his wife, three children, and a grandchild. Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei.

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Robot go go!

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And that should go without saying, pretty much regardless of the topic. He sums up perfectly my feelings about science fiction thus:

If you headed to the past and wanted to find someone who could truly understand the world 50 years hence, look for the clerk who goes to the drugstore for his lunch break and reads Tales of Mars, not the guy who reads
the New York Times.

Read the whole thing.

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Glenn Reynolds has an interview up with Neal Stephenson today at Tech Central Station.

Glenn wrote a column last week reflecting on Stephenson's Quicksilver and the renewed interest in the 17th century, which was the hatching ground for the Enlightenment ideals that helped form our liberal, capitalist, secular society.
Many of the criticisms I have seen of Quicksilver are aimed at the multiple narrative asides into the minutiae of 17th century life. But it was exactly those kinds of asides in Cryptonomicon that really turned me on to his writing.

I thoroughly enjoyed Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash and look forward to plowing my way through Stephenson's latest.

I'll have more comments on the Enlightenment in a later post on the separation of church and state.

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Interesting synchronicity between Bruce Sterling's "top ten" list I discussed below (and which Prof. Hall discussed here) and the classic Star Trek episode "The Naked Time," which I am currently viewing on DVD (#10 on Sterling's list). At the beginning of the episode, Spock and Lt. Tormolen beam down to Psi 2000, where the lieutenant idiotically removes his glove, exposing himself to the contaminant that releases everyone's inhibitions and nearly leads to the destruction of the Enterprise. Starting at 10:21 into the episode (and shortly before his death), Lt. Tormolen waxes eloquent about the futility of manned exploration of space (#6 on Sterling's list):

"What are we doing out here anyway?. . . [We] leave men and women stuck out on freezing planets to die. . . What are we doing out here in space? Good? What good? We're polluting it. . . destroying it. . . we've got no business being out here, no business. If a man was supposed to fly, he'd have wings. If he was supposed to be out in space, he wouldn't need air to breathe . . . We don't belong here. It's not ours."

You can guess where I stand on this. I believe we do belong in outer space. As Heinlein said, the earth is just too small and fragile a basket for humanity to keep all of its eggs in. We are one asteroid impact, one script-kiddie nanobot or custom-sequenced doomsday virus from extinction. Now, whether the "manned exploration" should continue to be done by NASA is a debatable point. I am not too happy with the way NASA ended the USAF's approach best exemplified by the X-15 of incrementally expanding the flight envelope. I think there is still a valid military role, but the "scientific" value of the whole "civilian" space enterprise has been way oversold, as Rand Simberg has so much more eloquently put it elsewhere (again and again).

But now we see private enterprise picking up where the X-15 left off. Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne follows the same principle as the X-15, except that he had to design and build his own B-52 (the stunningly beautiful White Knight) to launch it from.

We also now find out that the SF idea of a space elevator may not be so farfetched given reasonably foreseeable implementations of current materials science.

So perhaps we'll see settlement (not just "exploration") sometime in the near future.

Charming Star Trek anachronisms in this episode: At 28:18, you can see Spock using a slide rule to calculate the Enterprise's orbital trajectory. Also, check out the analog clock at 47:05.

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Kirk versus Picard. Who wins? You decide. (Via the Corner).

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Texas science fiction author Bruce Sterling has a new article up at "http://www.technologyreview.com."

When I went through my cyberpunk phase, I was a big fan of Sterling's. I drifted away from him for several years but greatly enjoyed his Holy Fire, which examines the effects of life-extension technologies on humans in the classic hard-SF tradition.

Now he has come out with a list of technologies that "deserve to die." While I think the goal of identifying obsolete technologies that should be phased out is a noble one, I don't agree with the general thrust of this particular list. It begins with Nuclear Weapons and ends with DVDs. It also contains Manned Spaceflight (#6) and Incandescent Lighting (#4). (His views on the latter are not likely to win him any rave reviews from Virginia Postrel).

Getting rid of nuclear weapons is a pipe dream. I agree with Sterling's point that we have in fact honed our precision technology to the fine point that nuclear weapons are no longer "necessary." But the main value of nukes remains their strategic deterrent power, not their tactical utility. I think we need to preserve the legitimate threat that we can vaporize Mecca, or Pyongynag, or Tehran, (or even Moscow or Beijing) to preserve the stability of our current international system. Instead of destroying nuclear weapons, I would prefer to see a gradual swords-to-plowshares transition to their peaceful use to power Orion starships.

Sterling's views on manned spaceflight also reflect a strange lack of vision in an SF author. First, his argument is against a straw man: "Thanks to decades of biological research, it [is] now quite clear that flying around the solar system is bad for ones health." I'm not sure which alternate history he is looking at, because so far we haven't done any manned "flying around the solar system." In this he fails to anticipate what many SF authors and speculative engineers propose, namely, the use of centripetal/centrifugal forces to simulate gravity on extended missions. Second, and perhaps more important, Sterling seems to see space exploration as something that can be "destroyed" as though it were nothing more than a government program. But with each passing day, I am more optimistic that we will see the development of commercial, manned space travel thanks to private pioneers such as Burt Rutan and my neighbor (of sorts) John Carmack.

I'll be posting more on these items later, but some good links to explore space news and policy in general are: Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings, Keith Cowing's NasaWatch and SpaceRef pages, and Professor Hall's Spacecraft blog.

Update: I should make it clear that I don't consider flying circles in LEO, or even the seven manned missions to the moon (with six landings) to be "flying around" the solar system. Heck, Kubrick's and Clarke's 1968 vision of our future in space had us arriving at Jupiter two years ago.

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