David Brin - The Crystal Spheres

To wait for that day, the races who came before us sleep at the edge of their timestretched black hole. Within, they abide to welcome us; and we shall sit out, together, the barren early years of the galaxies.

I felt the last shreds of the old greatdepression dissipate as I contemplated the elegant solution of the Nataral. For so long we had feared that the Universe was a practical joker, and that our place in it was to be victims—patsies. But now, at last, my darkthoughts shattered like an eggshell… like the walls of a crystalcage.

I held my woman close. She sighed something said in dreamthought. As sleep finally came, I felt better than I had in a thousand years. I felt so very, very young.

Sometimes the borderlines between science and fiction seem fuzzy. This has never been more true than in the topic of exobiology or SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence .

To most students of the subject it now appears that we are alone, that the Earth has never been visited by beings from other stars. (Erich Von Daniken’s fables, and those of UFO enthusiasts, describe beings who ore said to behave in ways that could hardly be called “intelligent.”)

The new hypothesis, called the Uniqueness View, contends that aliens cannot exist, for if they did, they would have filled the galaxy long ago. A leader of the Uniqueness View, Frank Tipler, of Tulane University, claims that people who still dream of contact suffer from an innate human fear of loneliness, a fear that the courageous rise above in order to contemplate a universe that our descendants will fill .

Carl Sagan, a Contact defender, counters that Tipler and his kind suffer from an innate human fear of the alien, which the courageous rise above… you see how it goes .

I have participated in this debate in the astronomical journals. Earning no love from either side, my papers have said, “Stop! You both may be right!” For now, we gain more by careful thought and data collection than by yelling at each other .

Some hypotheses, however, are too weird even to be included in speculative scientific papers. The theme behind “The Crystal Spheres” is one such idea. I dared not insert it in my upcoming non-fiction book on SETI, but I did think it might make a nice story .

A final note on the short story as a sub-genre. About half of the professionally published short fiction in the English language is science fiction, because of the thriving SF magazines. For a novice, such markets as Atlantic or The New Yorker are nearly inaccessible. Not so Analog, or Asimov’s Magazine, or F&SF. These publications are where much of the exciting short fiction of our time is being presented .

Science fiction is friendly to beginners, I’m very glad to say. “The Crystal Spheres” was awarded the 1985 Hugo Award for the short story category .