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Monday, November 24, 2008
Science vs. SF
Over there (or is it back here around the corner?) at ScienceBlogs John Wilkins, philosopher of biology, argues that the science in most SF is worthless:
...the sole virtue that SF might now have is that it introduces one generation after another to the value of science. So, does it?
Almost never. Few novels are accurate, but even fewer show science in a good light. Frankenstein is the model of the SF scientist, meddling where he (usually a he - SF was very masculine for a long time) had no right to meddle. Arthur Clarke, despite the woodenness of his characters and dialogues, at least stood out in that respect - scientists were the good guys for him (and for a number of Eastern Bloc SF writers like Lem). But most SF showed science in a very apocalyptic and dangerous aspect, as befitted the post A-bomb era.
He goes on to observe:
In fact, if SF led me to anything, it led me to religion, through the loss of which I entered philosophy. Mysticism in SF is widespread (Dune anyone?), and rational thinking is mostly honoured in the breach. But the dystopias of 1984, Brave New World, and the epic traditions Wells began, these are of lasting value, mostly for the reason that they do not involve science except as a deus ex machina (or should that be, as a McGuffin?) to get the story going. They are about class, political control, censorship, interference, freedom, and the classic concerns of literature.
Comments
"but even fewer show science in a good light”
I was going to charitably suggest that John Wilkins and I may simply have had different experiences of SF, but then I read the rest of the piece ("inadvertent acts of literature”, right) and decided that he’s pretty much full of shit.
I posted over there too, as follows:
Ihave a particular dislike of science fiction using scientized time travel motifs. There are various ways you can tweak thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum theory to make time travel in some sense seem possible, but even with the most favorable tweaks I don’t see how you could move a living organism to a past world. Or to put it differently, you’d have to run the whole world backward into the past while leaving the organism unchanged, in its present state.
I say this because I run into people, and even authors, who believe that that kind of time travel is in some way really possible, at least in some theoretical sense.
Time travel is still OK as a story premise, just like goblins and monsters and Satan.
What the heck SF has he been reading?
If the science were wholly plausible, it wouldn’t be science FICTION. I think SF works best when it does contain some spiritual meaning, but this only works when the human beings in it are themselves psychologically plausible. SF at its best is less about the gadgets, gimmicks, and exotic settings than about the potential for self-transformation.
Until I get my personal rocket pack, I’m not reading any more science fiction. Fuck it. I want a rocket pack.
If Wilkins is correct, then most scientists will not have been drawn to science through SF, but through other means; and SF fans in academia will be more common in the philosophy and theology departments than in the science faculty, because their early encounters with SF will have put them off science - just as happened to Wilkins.
So, for example, you could go into a physics department coffee room with a large box marked “FREE SIGNED COPIES OF NEAL STEPHENSON NOVELS!” and find very little interest. If you walked into a seminary with the same box, however, the seminarians would be terribly excited and swarm all over them.
This makes me think that a) Wilkins hasn’t really thought through the implications or b) he went to a rather odd university.
see Bacon’s New Atlantis for an easy refutation of the idea that sci-fi is wary of science!
It’s funny: every decade or two, SF undergoes a crisis of identity and purpose and foments all sorts of internal conceptual revolutions, but as soon as the dust settles, people still manage to paint the whole genre with a single brush. The authors in the genre invariably locate the problems before the critics do: Asimov was already fighting back against the Frankenstein conception of the mad scientist before anyone who wasn’t into Czech stage plays had ever heard the word “robot”.
Granted, some people read SF for the plausibility of the science and feel miffed when it doesn’t serve that purpose (I think Wilkins is in that crowd). Some authors, too, set total plausibility as their first priority. But the “hypothetical engineering goals” element of SF speculation - regardless of how we are to get there - is pretty representative of the intuition/imagination/stumbling in the dark that inspires scientific progress.
No, we probably shouldn’t use SF, particularly dated SF, to teach modern science… but we don’t. And antiquated SF has a lot of value as a historical indicator of how the scientifically informed imagination has evolved.
Hell, I’m happy to read an enjoyable story. If it’s SF, fine. If not, fine. If it’s great, that’s great.
My favorite part of Adam Robert’s _Polystom_ is the beginning before all the scientific implausibilities were framed in a plausible manner.
I’m with those of the commenters who think Wilkins has been reading different SF than we have. Is this more evidence of a difference between North American and UK (and Austrialian) science fiction? I have more here.
Might it not also be the case that the SF with broader popular appeal (and academic/literary cred) is that which is less, uh, science-y?
I’m thinking of Herbert, the *2001* OF Kubrick, Delany, Butler, Le Guin, Dick, Ballard, and others who have cross-over appeal and literary pretentions. It’s true that these writers, moreso than the “hard” sci fi figures, tend to get noticed by non-sci-fi fans as well as by literature teachers.
1) SF may be better expanded as speculative fiction.
2) Campbell famously said that 90% of what he published was really fantasy.
3)It is about the alienation and displacement, maybe a specific kind of displacement that is not the kind a Yankee gets from Faulkner or a Southerner from Updike. A “different world” The difference need not be complex or coherent, see Dick, but is essential.
4)Haggard and Burroughs are as much founders of genre SF as Wells & Verne. Clive Cussler is probably writing SF.
I was going to comment along the lines that Wilkins and I have different things in mind when we think of science fiction. But actually I think my problem with this piece is that Wilkins and I have different things in mind when we think of science. He seems to think science is a rigidly certain body of facts and rules. I’d take it in a more Feyerabendian sense.
So: I don’t think he’s really objecting to the ‘science’ in SF, although he says he is: he’s objecting to the technology; the techne, ‘The Question of Technology’, the ... I could go on.
@ Adam again: Actually, re-reading your comment carefully, I’ve just noticed that we were saying the same thing. It’s to the techne that Wilkins objects; and to be fair, the extrapolated consequences of science are what a lot of authors do explicitly aim to examine.
I see he’s a philosopher of biology, so it’s no wonder he’s less than impressed with the state of science in science fiction, as biology tends to be the much abused stepchild of sf, forever explaining away mysterious bruises at school, so to speak.
I really like that last comment, and will steal it sometime…
FWIW, a decade or three ago I read a remark by some worthy (whose name I’ve forgotten) to the effect that the philosophy of science seems to have taken physics as its paradigm science and that that’s (deeply) unfortunate because not all science is like physics in that it is centered on small sets of laws (e.g. Newton’s laws of motion) which can be used to account for a wide range of circumstances. This worthy noted that biology, in particular, is not like that; hence a philosophy of science that’s fine and dandy for physics is not so good for biology. Perhaps it is the same with SF?
Maybe. This has been a claim since (I think) Jack Smart made it in 1959. A distinction has been made between the “general” sciences like physics and chemistry, with the laws and universal properties, and “special” (no short bus jokes, please) or contingent sciences, with not so many laws and so on. Hence, in those sciences an attention to detail is expected, as they are largely defined by detail.
But to make a dramatic story in most domains (and especially in biology, which tends to be rather static on human scales) one is almost forced to do harm to the science - hence FTL drives, wormhole portals, sudden “evolution”, apocalyptic scenarios and so on. Moreover, the idea that science is the vector sum of an ensemble working together as a community over many decades turns people off - consider the response to Anathem. Me, I found that the most interesting thing about it. So it probably depends on the personality of the reader rather than some objective set of facts about SF itself.
I think what you are trying to say is that what matters more than the genre is the significance of the themes of the work. Is that right?
Perhaps this view might be related to the fact that when I saw the name “Campbell” mentioned in the comments, I thought they were referring to Joseph Campbell.
I don’t agree. Science and SF are two different things, all “almost” needed in our lifes.