The Necessity of Science Fiction: by Brian Stableford

_This_speech_was_given_by_Brian_Stableford_as_his_Guest_of_Honour_lecture_at_ConFuse_91._

While I was in China recently, attending a meeting of the
international organization of sf professionals, World SF, I heard it
reported that a group or committee representing the Swedish cultural
elite had declared that science fiction is not intellectually
respectable, and hence is ineligible for any kind of subsidy to assist
its publication. I was not entirely surprised to hear this ---
literary snobbery is something which afflicts all nations --- but I
was appalled by it, as I always am when I hear such opinions being
voiced. The judgment is, of course, based in ignorance, but that can
hardly excuse it.

I know that what happens here at this convention is never likely to
become known to the people who have made this ridiculous declaration,
but it nevertheless seemed to me to be appropriate to use the platform
which you have kindly offered to me to answer the charge as vehemently
as I can, by insisting that science fiction is not merely
intellectually respectable but vitally necessary as a mental
instrument which can and will enable us to deal more effectively with
a future which seems more threatening with every year that passes.
There is, of course, much that is published under the science fiction
label which is trivial, and does not warrant any such claim, but the
best contemporary science fiction is of a very high standard, and
fully deserves to be acknowledged as one of the most interesting and
admirable cultural products of our time.

If we are to address the question of why science fiction is necessary,
we must first address the question of why any kind of fiction is
necessary. Why is it that we do not and cannot concern ourselves only
with matters of fact and probability? Why do we feel compelled --- for
it is a compulsion, and no mere self-indulgence --- to make up stories
for ourselves, and tell them to one another?

We all know that stories are exciting, and moving. They have the power
to thrill us, to frighten us, to make us happy, or to make us weep.
Why is this? Why do we care so much about what happens to characters
who do not exist? Why does it make us joyful when an imaginary
character in a story achieves his heart's desire, and why can we
experience such a sharp sensation of sorrow when, instead, the
unfolding logic of events within a story brings its protagonist
inexorably to destruction?

We must remember, of course, that we only care about some imaginary
characters in such a way that we can rejoice in their successes and
weep over their frustrations and failure. There are other characters
to whose fate we remain indifferent, and there are some --- the
villains of the piece --- whose successes will cause us pain and whose
ultimate destruction will give us tremendous satisfaction.

What is it about those characters with whom we identify which makes
them sympathetic, seducing us into caring deeply about their fortunes,
and hoping fervently for their ultimate success? It is not that they
are like us --- at least, not in any simple sense. Anyone who has sat
in an audience watching Walt Disney's film BAMBI, or Steven
Spielberg's film E.T. or J. M. Barrie's play PETER PAN will
have seen large numbers of people reduced to tears by the plight of
imaginary characters who bear very little physical resemblance to us
--- so little, in fact, that the part of E.T. is played by a plastic
doll and the part of Tinkerbell in PETER PAN by a spotlight.  The
converse is equally true; we do not hate villains because they are
alien --- indeed, the hunters who shoot Bambi's mother, the men who
hunt for E.T. and Captain Hook in Peter Pan are all far more closely
akin to us than their exotic victims.

The reason why we have such considerable sympathy for these non-human
characters, while we righteously loathe the all-too-human foes who
threaten them, clearly has nothing to do with biological similarity.
It is purely a matter of moral compatibility. We identify with them
because they are nice: friendly, utterly innocent of any intention to
do harm, and willing to help others. By the same token, we hate their
persecutors because they are not nice: they are violent, uncaring or
frankly malevolent. The simple fact is that we love the good guys,
whoever and whatever they may be, and we hate the bad guys. The nature
and utility of stories is intricately bound up with our ideas of
morality.

The universe in which we live does not distribute its rewards and
punishments according to any discernible moral order. As St. Matthew
and everyone else has observed, the rain falls on the just and the
unjust alike. The wicked are no more likely than the good to be struck
by lightning or devoured by cancer, and the virtuous are in no way
protected by their innocence from suffering and misfortune.

This is a prospect so horrific that one of the principal occupations
of the human imagination throughout history has been to support the
pretence that the absence from the world of moral order is mere
appearance and not reality. The human mind is strongly attracted to
the notion that there exists behind and beyond the world of
appearances a good God --- albeit one who moves in very mysterious
ways --- and that there will be another life after death where the
moral account-books will be belatedly balanced and we will all get
what we really deserve. This occupation of the human imagination is
really only a special, and arguably rather silly, subcategory of a
wider and generally more sensible occupation: the making up of
stories.

The world of fiction is intrinsically and necessarily different from
the world in which we find ourselves. Virtuous and the wicked
characters are creations of an author, who is in sole charge of what
happens to them, and who can distribute rewards and punishments within
his story exactly as he wishes. If, in a story, the virtuous suffer
and the wicked flourish, that is no mere accident --- it is because
the author has determined that things turn out that way. This is not
an absence of moral order, but a refusal.

There is no way that an author can avoid moral responsibility for his
fictional world and its characters. He may decide to throw dice to
decide what happens next, and to whom, but that too is a refusal --- a
deliberate abandonment of moral prerogative. This is why the reader of
a story can and does expect that the ideal movement of a narrative
will be towards the success of the sympathetic characters, and knows
that when this success is refused, a calculated violation of moral
order has been committed, which calls upon him to recognise and lament
the horrors of misfortune and wickedness. When such a calculated
violation is committed by an author, we call the result
"tragedy".

Once we have recognised all of this, we are in a better position to
understand some of the commonplace aspects of reading behaviour. We
can understand, for instance, why most people would rather read
stories with happy endings than downbeat stories. Pain is good for us,
while it functions as a warning, but no one wants an unrelieved diet
of it; we can, by contrast, stand any amount of joy and reassurance.
We can also understand why it is that so many readers like to read the
same kind of book repeatedly, even though they know exactly what to
expect. What these readers are doing is participating in a ritual of
moral affirmation whose force depends on repetition, and which is akin
to other kinds of affirmative rituals maintained in our society and
others: religious, legal and magical rituals are mostly of this kind.
We should also be able to understand that when an audience rises to
its collective feet and cheers wildly as the villain in a story goes
bloodily to his destruction, it is not because its members are latent
sadists, but simply because they recognise a ritual moral propriety in
what is happening. This fact is unfortunately overlooked in most
discussions about the role and effects of violence in the media, which
is why most of those discussions are futile.

At a more fundamental level, these observations about the relationship
of fiction to morality help us to understand why stories exist at all,
and how vital they are to life in human communities. The arts of
story-telling were the first tools which people acquired for exploring
the question of how we ought to use such limited power as we have to
make our lives and our world better; they still remain vitally
important tools for use in that way. Stories are all the more
important if we are prepared to recognise, as we ought to be, that
there is no moral order already laid down for us as if engraved on
stone by a careful creator. Moral order is something which must itself
be created, decided and continually refined, and stories are part of
the instrumentality of that creation and refinement. People who
believe otherwise are, of course, hostile to story-tellers.

The problematic relationship between the intrinsic moral order of
fiction and the apparent moral neutrality of the universe has an
interesting parallel in terms of meaning. Human rationality depends
upon our powers of foresight; it is because we can anticipate the
probable outcomes of different courses of action that we can make
intelligent choices. Our powers of foresight are, however, limited.
Events in the world are bound by scientific laws, and can be analysed
in terms of cause and effect, but this does not mean that we can
predict the outcome of every situation, because the information
available to us is almost always incomplete. In the vast majority of
situations, we only know some of what we would need to know in order
to calculate accurately what the outcome of the situation will be, and
must guess the rest as best we can. Life is therefore a kind of
gambling game, in which we try to estimate the probabilities as well
as we can, but in which much must be left to chance.

It is so uncomfortable to live under the dominion of chance that we
are ever avid to improve our predictive skills. This gives us an
intense interest in practical science, but it also gives us an intense
interest in various kinds of divination. Human beings are forever
trying to predict the unpredictable, to discover patterns and trends
even where none actually exist. People have always searched their
environment for omens, and have been relentless in their quest to
discover trustworthy oracles.

0pt
Even when we know better than to put our trust in omens and oracles it
is difficult to avoid fascination with them; it is not really
surprising that astrology, tarot reading and various other kinds of
fortune-telling continue to survive and thrive alongside science. Nor
is it surprising that we should constantly be trying to interpret our
dreams, as determined to find some hidden


meaning within their
apparent confusion as we are to discover the covert laws which
underlie the mysteries of the material world.  In exactly the same way
that events in stories cannot be free of moral weight, because the
author is the sole
governor of what will happen, so events in stories
cannot be free of hidden meaning. If a character in a story has a
dream, it is entirely up to the author to decide what the events of
the dream symbolise, and whether or not the dream will be in some way
prophetic. If a character in a story has a tarot reading, it is
entirely up to the author to decide how much and what kind of meaning
can be attached to the cards which are displayed. If the dream, or the
displayed cards, turn out to mean nothing, that is a refusal, not an
absence. The overwhelming probability is, of course, that in a story
the dream or the tarot-reading will be meaningful; if it were not,
there would be no point in its inclusion. In stories, in fact, all
kinds of events can take on symbolic significance, and everything that
happens in a story is likely to be meaningful.

In spite of Freud's best efforts, we still have not the slightest
idea whether real dreams are meaningful or not, or what they might
mean if they are; but literary dreams are a different matter. In
stories, dreams are always significant of something, they are always
intrinsic parts of the pattern which we call the plot. The world of
fiction is full of meanings which are absent from the real world, just
as the world of fiction is full of moral rewards and punishments which
are absent from the real world.

In certain respects, of course, science fiction is no different from
any other kind of fiction in terms of the moral order which it
represents and the meanings which it contains. Indeed, much of what is
labelled science fiction is simply other kinds of fiction in disguise,
and its futuristic or otherworldly trappings are no more than fancy
costumes. Nevertheless, true science fiction --- which is to say,
fiction which which attempts to build logically coherent imaginary
worlds based on premises licensed by the world-view of contemporary
science --- does exhibit some unique and interesting features in its
relationship to moral order and questions of meaning.

Stories, as I have pointed out, cannot help but be fundamentally
engaged with questions of moral order, but different genres of fiction
--- by virtue of the specific apparatus of ideas, characters and
settings which each deploys --- can and do engage different questions
of moral order, and engage them in different ways. If we examine the
particular kinds of moral question which science fiction typically
raises and explores, we will see that it is capable of getting
forthrightly to grips with certain problems in moral philosophy which
other kinds of fiction can confront only with difficulty, if at all.
Indeed, it seems to me that if we look at science fiction from this
viewpoint it is quite obvious that science fiction writing is a very
important kind of literary enterprise, which does not at all deserve
the contempt in which it is held by many literary men.

One of the most fundamental questions of moral philosophy is how a
moral community ought to be defined. To which other entities do we owe
moral consideration, and why? In their involvement with this question
most stories are hamstrung by their attachment to mundane
circumstance. Mundane fiction can ask whether animals have rights and
it can present case studies relating to the welfare of the unborn, but
it cannot do what moral philosophers have increasingly found
themselves forced to do, which is to move beyond mundane examples and
ask questions about hypothetical cases.

Fantastic fictions --- and it is worth noting that most of the fables
and parables produced in the ancient world to encapsulate moral wisdom
are fantasies featuring non-human characters --- are far more
flexible. But magical fantasy, which typically addresses moral
problems in a fabular or allegorical fashion, is still restricted by
comparison with science fiction, whose vocabulary includes a wide
spectrum of sentient machines and alien beings which may be, and
sometimes are, developed and employed according to a fairly rigorous
logic.

The question of whether, or under what conditions, we would owe moral
consideration to an alien or an android may seem to the everyday
moralist to be lacking in practical relevance, and of course it is ---
but if we are to work out of proper definition of what is moral and
what is not, and to decide what it is that entitles other entities to
moral consideration, then we must get to grips with such hypothetical
issues. If we are properly to pose the question of what it is which
determines whether another entity should or should not belong to our
moral community, and if we are properly to explore the feelings which
we could and might have towards potential candidates for membership in
our moral community, then we cannot do so without reference to
sciencefictional constructs like intelligent machines and alien
beings. It is no surprise to find that modern exercises in moral
philosophy are frequently rich in sciencefictional imagery, because
the questions which they address demand it. I do not say simply that
science fiction stories are useful in this regard, I say that they are
necessary.

Another moral question --- one of considerable importance in political
philosophy --- with which science fiction is uniquely fitted to deal,
is the question of what we can or ought to mean by the word
"progress".

The characters in stories with whom we identify, and to whose causes
we attach ourselves, usually have ambitions which transcend the merely
personal. Even when their sole purpose within the plot is to unravel a
murder mystery or to find true love, their eventual success is
symbolic of something larger, affirming some vital principle of
justice or some deeply-felt belief about what is worthwhile in human
existence. The protagonists of most stories are, therefore, not to be
reckoned as mere individuals at all, but as heroes.

A protagonist becomes a true hero when the problem with which he (it
may equally well, of course, be she and my use of the masculine should
not be taken to apply otherwise) is faced is not merely his own, but
that of a larger group. A hero operates on behalf of others; his
projects have moral weight for the whole community. In the days of the
first stories, a hero operated on behalf of his family or his tribe;
more recent heroes usually do the same, although the possibility now
exists that they may act on behalf of their nation, or even some
vaguely-constituted international community.

The change of state which a hero attempts to bring about is, at least
by implication, collective rather than individual, and a successful
change of state is one to which we can legitimately attach the label
of "progress". One can speak of "progress" in respect of the
individual, the tribe or the nation, but nowadays progress usually
means the project of mankind taken as a whole --- the reconstruction
of the entire society of mankind. Although the hero of a story does
not often accomplish such a reconstruction, his own endeavours may
serve as a model for it, and as an affirmation of its possibility.  We
do not cheer for the hero because he achieves success for himself, but
because his exploits exemplify a kind of success which we desire
collectively --- because we have glimpsed through the hero the
possibility of a better way of life for all.

Just as those philosophers who have tried to determine what it is that
entitles an entity to inclusion in a moral community have been
inexorably drawn to the deployment of hypothetical entities, so
political philosophers who have tried to determine what projects human
beings ought to undertake for their collective betterment have been
inexorably drawn to the deployment of hypothetical societies --- to
the imagery of Utopia. At one time such discussions focused entirely
on matters of political order and justice, but the idea of moral
progress has in the last two hundred years become intricately involved
with the idea of technological progress, and it is this involvement
which makes science fiction so important as an instrument for the
investigation of questions of progress.

The hypothetical societies of the future, and the heroes who embody
their dynamic aspects, are impossible to reach through the media of
mundane fiction and magical fantasy; only science fiction can confront
the myriad hypothetical futures which are conceivable outgrowths of
the present. For this reason, the moral questions implicit in the
political task of steering the human world into a future replete with
threats and opportunities --- questions which have become desperately
urgent in recent times because of the rapidly-accelerating pace of
technological development --- are routinely addressed in science
fiction. What the heroes of science fiction do, whether their project
is to save or to destroy, or merely to survive within the hypothetical
societies in which they move, always has implications for the
collective decisions real people must make about how to use the
technologies which are emerging and evolving around them. There is no
more urgent question facing the people of a world which is changing
very quickly, and which faces many threats, than the question of how
best to foster progress, how best to make use of the opportunities
which the advancement of science will open up for us. Again, I do not
say simply that science fiction stories are useful in this regard; I
say that they are necessary.

As I have already said, I cannot believe that there is any moral order
already built into the universe; in fact, I believe that the time has
come when we must be prepared to give up that dangerous illusion. I
think that it is necessary that we should now recognise that the
bounds of our moral community and the proper direction of progress are
decisions which we have to make, not discoveries which we may make by
consulting the appropriate scripture or stone tablet; there may have
been a time when that illusion was convenient, but the time has now
past. In a fast-changing world --- a world where progress is not
merely possible but absolutely vital if we are to survive --- we
cannot afford the kind of moral tyranny which most religions are avid
to impose upon us...

Not all religions are equally pernicious in terms of the extent to
which they try to short-circuit moral debate, but insofar as religion
has served as a generator of dogma and moral absolutism, the hijacking
of moral philosophy by religion has been a terrible catastrophe ---
arguably the worst catastrophe in human history. Attempts to justify
notions of good and evil by attaching them to the commandments of
imaginary gods have certainly succeeded to some extent in holding
moral anarchy at bay, but any apology for religion mounted on those
grounds must also take into account the fact that wars of religion and
crusades aimed at the extirpation of heresy have created suffering on
a scale so frightful that it hardly bears contemplation.

There are, of course, many stories which have been written in order to
support one religious dogma or another, and the scriptures of various
religions are heavily seasoned with exemplary stories. All fiction,
though, by virtue of its very nature, stands in a problematic
relationship to religion, because religion's main line of defence
against scepticism is an insistence on absolute truth. Faith, as one
philosopher has defined it, is believing in what you know damn well
ain't so; fundamentalism, to similarly define a
recently-fashionable term, consists of asserting and defending to the
death the unchallengeable truth of bare-faced lies. The idea of using
fiction as an instrument of moral investigation does not fit in well
with fundamentalist views, a fact luridly dramatised by the late
Ayatollah Khomeini's response to Salman Rushdie's novel THE
SATANIC VERSES.

Science fiction stands in a more problematic relationship to religion
than other literary genres, not so much because individual science
fiction stories present a rigorously secularised view of the universe
--- that ambition is, alas, very frequently compromised --- but
because when science fiction is viewed as a genre it cannot help but
deny and defy the disease of faith. No matter how many individual
science fiction writers may fall prey to that disease, becoming
would-be prophets instead of speculators, science fiction taken as a
whole will always declare that there is a multitude of possible
futures, and that the past of actual history is one of a multitude of
alternative histories-that-might-have-been.

By virtue of its multifariousness, science fiction is intrinsically
antithetical to the kind of closed thinking which is enshrined in
religious fundamentalism. The moral order of science fiction as a
genre is logically incompatible with the kind of thinking which
declares that there is only one virtuous path for the individual and
for mankind, and that adherents of other ways are blasphemers who
should be put to death. This is a virtue, and it is a virtue which we
desperately need in a world where religious and tribal intolerance
generates war, terrorism, hatred and misery on a huge scale. For this
reason too, science fiction should be seen not merely as something
intellectually respectable, but as something entirely admirable.

It is convenient here to supplement discussion of moral order with
that of meaning. Here too there is a significant different of emphasis
and attitude between science fiction and mundane fiction, and a
radical difference between science fiction and magical fantasy.

In fiction, as I have pointed out, dreams and divinatory devices have
a symbolic significance and an authority which, in the real world,
they lack. Mundane stories which feature elaborately-symbolic dreams
or prophetic tarot-readings do not necessarily tend towards the
supernatural; the author's motives for including them are usually
to do with aesthetic patterning, and they often have the status of
ironic coincidences rather than metaphysical claims about the
workability of magic. The same is true of all the other symbolic
devices which stories routinely employ. In fantastic fiction, however,
matters of ironic coincidence are not so easily distinguished from
metaphysical claims, because the limits of possibility are flexible.
In magical fantasies and horror stories the supernatural is accepted
at a fundamental level, which allows it to be taken for granted by the
reader that dreams and oracles will be meaningful, and that all kinds
of literary symbolism may be significant of magical connection.

Science fiction stories occupy a curious position which is
intermediate between those of mundane and supernatural fiction. In a
science fiction story, the meaningfulness of a dream or a prophecy can
neither be immediately set aside as a mere literary device, nor taken
for granted as something acceptable without further question. in
science fiction, if it is written with a good conscience and serious
intent, the question of how the dream or prophecy comes to be
meaningful ought to be asked and explored, and wherever there are
coincidences and connections between the events of a narrative there
is a question as to whether or not the connections may be in some way
real. Science fiction is inexorably drawn into speculation about the
kinds of universe in which strange things could happen, and the kinds
of individuals who could do strange things.  Whenever science fiction
is written with a good conscience, it cannot take matters of meaning
for granted, one way or the other; it is always required to probe, to
explore, to speculate, in a way that other genres are not. The climax
of a good science fiction story is never a final closure of the ideas
raised within it: the sense of wonder always leads on to further
questions, further investigations.

As in the case of contemporary moral philosophy, we frequently find
modern philosophers who are interested in the problem of mind
employing the vocabulary of science fiction to pose questions about
the competence of various models of the mind, and about such notions
as "identity" and "self-awareness". This is not
surprising. Science fictional ideas are necessary as instruments of
this kind of philosophical investigation. Again, it is worth pointing
out that in so far as it concerns itself with these kinds of
questions, the science fiction genre --- unlike the genre of
Tolkienesque fantasy --- is fundamentally at odds with the majority of
dogmatic religions, which usually sidestep such questions by
centralising some notion of an immortal soul whose properties are
taken for granted.

We must not forget that in spite of our sophisticated scientific
understanding of the world at large, we are still very much a mystery
to ourselves. We have competent working models of the universe, but
not of our own inner selves. The private world of sensation and
thought is very difficult to describe, and it has much in it which is
strange and threatening: emotions, dreams, neurotic obsessions. If
these exotic territories are properly to be explored, we cannot
neglect the hard questions, which ask: if this were the cases, what
would it imply about the nature of mind, and the nature of reality. In
getting to grips with such questions, science fiction is invaluable,
and we should not underestimate the work which has been done by sf
writers intent on exploring such notions as the possible nature of
machine intelligence.

The business of making up and telling stories is an aspect of human
life whose importance can hardly be underestimated. It is by means of
stories that we can best address, explore and familiarise ourselves
with questions of moral order, and begin to investigate the enigmas of
mind and matter. If we look at the nature and concerns of the earliest
stories which we know about, this is manifestly obvious; it is only
the great and confusing profusion of modern stories which has allowed
it to become less than obvious. Science fiction is a recently-evolved
instrument whose value in these respects should not be underestimated,
and to which a great disservice is done by those who think of it only
as one more kind of costume drama in which people run around fighting
one another. Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which
people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting
imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of
pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently.

If we are to come to a proper understanding of the kind of beings we
are, and the kind of universe we live in, and what opportunities we
may have for shaping our place within that universe, we cannot do so
without appropriate fictions. Many of those appropriate fictions do
and will belong to the genre of science fiction, whose ideas and
images are as significant in contemporary moral philosophy as they are
in serious speculation about the future of human society. In a world
which is changing as rapidly as ours is, we desperately need kinds of
education which will make the imagination more flexible and more
adaptable. Science fiction stories are, or could be, an invaluable
resource in providing such an education. Only by paying serious
attention to stories of this kind can people hope to improve their
chances of learning to live in the strange and alien future world
which the flow of actual events will precipitate out of the great
spectrum of present possibility.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with stories which deal only in
ritual and repetition, as most popular genres do; such stories fulfil
a valuable social and psychological function. But there is also work
to be done by science fiction stories, which boldly go where other
stories fear to tread. The most valuable stories of all are surely
those stories which aspire to go where no other stories have ever been
before, and which attempt, in their own particular fashion, to add to
the heritage of our moral and imaginative wisdom.

-- Brian Stableford --