Gibson’s Hinterlands is a short story from 1980-something. The story revolves around astronauts who pilot a small vessel to a point in space between Earth and Mars. Once they reach that point the astronaut hope to be taken by an advanced alien race. If they are taken, they disappear as if through a worm hole. The people then come back, maybe years later, often brining back some object (the first object was a sea shell).

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It’s a good story with an interesting final twist. Something worth pointing out, however.

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Gibson’s whole career is undisputably a reaction to 1950s optimistic Sci-Fi. He thinks that the gee whiz sci-fi is bullshit and that comes through in his famous cyberpunk stories, but also in his non-cyberpunk stories like Hinterlands. The Hinterlands of the title is our solar system and the effect of that is anti-human. “We’re not special! There is a civilization more advanced than us!” Gibson is saying. Very different from Captain Kirk whizzing from star system to star system.

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Nothing inherently wrong with that but it is worth pointing out the internal inconsistencies of the “1950s were bad” people.

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One inconsistency that strikes me is when he writes about the first astronaut that came back and how medical science took various samples of her skin/body so that the astronaut was “spread thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine.” You can only write that in a culture where religion actually means something. You would have to know that a Saint’s relics include the Saint’s body parts and not just personal belongings. You would have to know that these relics are actually venerated. You would have to actually believe a reasonable person would find some sort of meaning in these relics. You would have to not be grossed out by someone praying to an old Saint’s dead body parts. These beliefs are all incompatible with the current culture, a culture that Gibson helped build.

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Of course, this was really just a throw-away line and not really relevant to the story. So you could read this and say that I am making too much a few lines in a single short story. But I think it is instructive not only of how writers work generally (we are all products of a culture – even when we’re writing to change that culture) but also how current sci-fi devolved into its current state. I can respect the current generation of sci-fi, despite how nihilistic it is, more than Gibson’s sci-fi because it is more honest and doesn’t attack the very thing that sustains it. It doesn’t saw off the tree branch that it’s standing on.

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Of course, Gibson’s sci-fi was a lot better than the current sci-fi, but Gibson’s works were not without its flaws and reading his early stories some things really stick out.