Hardfought
By Greg Bear
4/5
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About this ebook
Humans have been engaged in a long war against an advanced alien race, the Senexi. But the possibility for peace may finally exist, thanks to a young girl who learns of the enemy’s larger role and humanity’s opportunity to evolve, in this award-winning story by the author of Darwin’s Radio and many other highly acclaimed works of science fiction.
Greg Bear
Greg Bear was born in San Diego, California. His father was in the US Navy, and by the time he was twelve years old, Greg had lived in Japan, the Philippines, Alaska – where at the age of ten he completed his first short story – and various other parts of the US. He published his first science fiction story aged sixteen. His novels and stories have won prizes and been translated around the world.
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Reviews for Hardfought
33 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5First off. Dear Bookworm; I really really hate you for stamping yet another book with your idiot logo. Greg Bear and Tim Zahn have always been amazing, and this Tor Double is no exception. Both authors write believable stories, with characters that are not cardboard cutouts. Greg writes compelling openings, and I nearly got caught up, just now, even writing this brief review.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bear’s ability to imagine and portray an alien mind and a humanity vastly different from ours is remarkable. He takes the opportunity encountering the question of how the two might finally communicate after eons of interstellar war to unveil his insight into the meaning and importance of history and self knowledge. The tragic end gives Bear’s fable an elegiac quality.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very imaginative and very well written, but a bit too nihilistic for me
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Some reactions on my reading this book in 1990. Some plot summary and spoilers follow."Hardfought" combines some fairly good characterization with stylistic techniques (mainly in choice of nomenclature) that convey the alienness of the future and of the ostensible humans in it. There are some old, but nevertheless valid, themes here: that you have to see your enemy as something other than yourself in order to emotionally handle killing them and that in fighting the enemy you become more like them. Bear adds the additional corrollary that to really defeat the enemy you must understand them, and this can also mean reaching an agreement. Here the humans develop a mandate much like the brood mind of the alien Senexi, and clone individuals who lose their personal identity. Aryz the Senexi becomes more a creature of his own by studying his captive humans. There is something compelling about its dual study of the confusion wrought by the conflict of love and duty, the struggle of the individual against group regimentation (here ultimately lost), studying and becoming like your enemy. The alienness of the language cleverly highlights the strangness of this future war while obscuring (delibrately) some of its details. I found the most interesting element of the story what I took to be its use of the concept of information theory. Individuals are the bits of information that convey the message of history. According to information theory, if all the bits become the same (as all the humans become Clevas and Prufaxs and other types) the message -- history -- is lost. The same holds true if a sequence is repeated as seems to be the case at story's end when Aryz's experiment is destroyed by humans (all of a identical type). It is implied the humans and Senexi have become so formulized, so inflexible, so unvaried that the end scene of the story has happened many times. "History", as one Prufax says, "is killed." The Prufaxs of the experiment never get a chance to assert their differences, introduce information into the system again. A clever use of a rather (for dramatic purposes) abstract concept. Since I often think award voters make strange choices, I'm not going to ponder long why "Cascade Point" won a Hugo. The description of the central technology, the Collotton drive and resulting Cascade Points, seemed to be vague and so much double talk (There's nothing wrong with that -- sf authors often use technique to give a veneer of technology and science to an arbitrary concept -- it just means the story doesn't, to me, have a compelling scientific idea at its heart). The idea of Cascade Images being part of alternate universes wasn't, to my mind, deeply exploited. The best part of the story was the characterization, particularly of the narrator/captain, and the interaction of crew and passengers that enables the spaceship to find its way back to the proper universe. Nevertheless, I didn't find that aspect of the story exceedingly well-done just a little better than the usual Analog standard, the magazine where the story was first published.
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Hardfought - Greg Bear
Hardfought
Greg Bear
Open Road logoContents
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In the Han Dynasty, historians were appointed by royal edict to write the history of Imperial China. They alone were the arbiters of what would be recorded. Although various emperors tried, none could gain access to the ironbound chest in which each document was placed after it was written. The historians preferred to suffer death rather than betray their trust.
At the end of each reign the box would be opened and the documents published, perhaps to benefit the next emperor. But for these documents, Imperial China, to a large extent, has no history.
The thread survives by whim.
Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Watery black flecked a central core of ghoulish green. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula’s magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of stars-and disputed territory.
Whenever Prufrax looked at the nebula in displays or through the ship’s ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother showing an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some in the fibs.
At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the Mellangee’s mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship years of indoctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red and white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. Zap, Zap,
she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldn’t think her thoughts were straying.
The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all focusing somewhere around the tellman’s spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. How many branch individuals in the Senexi brood mind?
he asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. Pru?
Five,
she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves.
What will you find in the brood mind?
the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoulders. Some of the fems thought tellmen were attractive. Not many, and Pru was not one of them.
Yoke,
she said.
What is in the brood mind yoke?
Fibs.
More specifically? And it really isn’t all fib, you know.
Info. Senexi data.
What will you do?
Zap,
she said, smiling.
Why, Pru?
Yoke has team gens memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the team’s five branch inds.
Zap the brood, Pru?
No,
she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class’s inception. Hold the brood for the supreme overs.
The tellman did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern.
Fine,
said the tellman. You tell well, for someone who’s always half journeying.
Brainwalk, Prufrax thought to herself. Tellman was fancy with the words, but to Pru, what she was prone to do during Tell was brainwalk, seeking out her future. She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four.
Zap, Zap,
she said softly.
Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Medusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branch mates, who along with the all important brood mind comprised one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety three orbits, each orbit—including the timeless periods outside status geometry—taking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence when the Senexi plan would finally mature.
The Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during the time of the starglobe when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of generations, and not just because of their material handicaps. In those times elements heavier than helium had been rare, found only around stars that had greedily absorbed huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and blue and exploded early, permeating the ill defined galactic arms with carbon and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas giant worlds had developed with a much smaller palette of chemical combinations in producing the offspring of the primary Population II stars.
Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seedship were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced. The Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryz’s perspective was expanding with each day of his new assignment.
In the early generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility had made them avoid contact with the Population I species. They had never begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life forming worlds; the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had retreated for three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, conserving, holding back for the inevitable conflicts.
As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had found need of even the aging groves of the galaxy’s first stars. They had moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mutability of organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways, evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi.
Aryz raised the upper globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the forward surface. He had