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John M. Ford
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 John M. Ford is equally adept at fantasy and science fiction, but is known more for the variety
and richness of his works than for his rigorous use of science. He is impatient, it seems, with conventional
approaches; in such stories as this one, he applies the techniques of and exploits a conventional setting of
the school of magic realism to embody the idea of paradigm shifts (from contemporary philosophy of science).
He is also writing an "alternate universe" sf story.
The idea of shifts in the basic physical nature of reality have been part of the playing field
of hard sf from Campbell's "Atomic Power" and Latham's "The Xi Effect." In contemporary works such
as Benford's "Relativistic Effects," on the one hand, and Grant's "Drode's Equations" on the other, a writer
can draw from hard sf tradition (up to, for instance Poul Anderson's novel,
Tau Zero [1970]) or from Borges and Nabokov (and perhaps Philip K. Dick). But the stories of the 1970s and 80s generally used the reality shifts
as metaphors of dislocation or alienation. Ford takes a new tack.
"Chromatic Aberrations" depends upon the reader's knowledge external to the story of the concept
of paradigm shifts (a concept invented in the 1970s by Thomas Kuhn -- those synthetic scientific insights into
the physical nature of reality that contour our whole notion of how the universe operates -- Newtonian
physics, Einsteinian relativity, Quantum physics, each one yielding greater knowledge). It does not literally deal
with them in the story.
It also demands, by implication, some familiarity with the tradition of "alternate universe" sf -- which
is usually not hard sf. This tradition, currently very much in fashion, uses the rigorous methods of hard sf to
create a setting in the past or present (infrequently in the future) in which some important event caused
history to branch off in a direction that did not (will not) lead to our contemporary reality. Since this need not
involve either science or technology, this has become as useful to writers out of the genre as in, resulting in a
blurring of genre boundaries. There have been a number of popular bestsellers based on, for instance, the Germans
and Japanese having won World War II, such as Len Deighton's
SS-GB (1978), that are not intended as works in
the genre, as well as the genre classic, The Man in the High
Castle (1962), by Philip K. Dick. And there
are romances and mysteries and stories in other genres that use the device nowadays. What we have here is a
story at the very fringe of science fiction that teases at genre definition, yet plays by the rules as Ford
perceives them.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.