Science in science fiction _The_following_the_following_is_a_transcription_of_a_discussion_held_at_ConFuse_91_about_science_in_science_fiction._The_text_is_transcribed_word_for_word_except_in_a_few_places_where_sentences_has_been_cut_because_they_did_not_terminate_in_a_sensible_way_or_were_rephrasings_that_did_not_contribute_anything_to_the_discussion.__Some_corrections_have_been_made_to_make_the_language_correct_and_more_readable.__The_discussion_was_transcribed_by_Hans_Persson._ AB: Andreas Björklind, RH: Roland Hjerppe, BS: Brian Stableford. AB OK, welcome to this panel, science in science fiction. We have just two panelists for this panel, but I think it will be quite enough. Brian Stableford, our guest of honor, who some of you have certainly seen on other program items yesterday and today, and we have Roland Hjerppe, who is a guest here at ConFuse who is, well, let him make his own, short introduction about who you are and your interests. RH Well, I am lab leader at the department of computer and information science, for one of the labs which is called LIBLAB, and LIBLAB is an acronym, sort of, for library and information science laboratory, so we are doing research into the problems of how to find information. Libraries seen then more as organized collections of documents in whatever form they might take. I have a varied background, having spent some years at the Royal Institute of Technology building up a big information service then some years among others in Tanzania, some years administrating research, rather than doing it, and then going back to research. I've been reading science fiction on and off for more than thirty years now, so I have some kind of perspective, but it's as I suppose most of you a very sort of fragmented picture, I mean what we read and we perceive it is very much different for different people, so whatever I say will of course be very much formed, by the science research background and by what I have been reading in science fiction and will hence... Well, my reading of science fiction has been less in the last decade than it was before, which is of course a problem in some senses, but still... I haven't made very much of a ... sort of statement, but since Andreas talked to me, I've been giving this matter some thought, science in science fiction, but I don't know where I should...AB Thank you. So this panel will mostly consist of these two gentlemen, saying things about science in science fiction, from whatever viewpoint they like to put it, because this is such a vast subject, so forty-five minutes isn't enough, even though we have a structured panel. What I'd like to ask you first is: Do science have anything to do with science fiction? BS Well the answer is yes, I think. RH The statement that I want to make is that it is actually rather little science in science fiction. BS Yes, that's true, and it's true by necessity in a way, science fiction has to compete in a literary marketplace, where a great many readers, perhaps the majority of readers, are virtually scientifically illiterate. That people, certainly in Britain, I'm not sure what the situation is like in Sweden, but in Britain a great many people are not educated in science beyond very elementary matters. It is quite easy for people in school in Britain to abandon all science subjects at the age of thirteen or fourteen. Now, this means that publishers, looking for books that are marketable --- in any genre --- will not wish to exclude large populations of readers and thus publishers for very obvious reasons, are more interested in science fiction which doesn't actually require any level of science fiction acumen to be read and enjoyed than they are in science fiction which from as it were the definite idea of what science fiction ought to be about is demands, so you do get a tension between people's expectations of science fiction ought to be responsible to science, it ought to make use of scientific premises and what publishers actually want to do. And thus, there is a constant series of compromises, which mostly result in favor of the publishers, because at the end of the day, the writer has to make money of it too, and thus one does feel a certain amount of pressure not to be too scientific, not to deploy too much actual scientific knowledge designed to get information into the story. RH I would like to continue on that and say that it is more of science and technology and especially technology very often, rather than science. BS Well that's true, and it's a consequence of what you can predict, I mean Carl Popper in his classic work on points out that it's logically impossible to predict the future of knowledge. If we knew today what we were going to find out tomorrow .... We cannot possibly anticipate what we will not discover 'til tomorrow. But, there is a sense in which you can sensibly say: Well I can't fill in the scientific background, which will explain how a machine of this kind will work, but I can imagine that if a machine of this kind were possible, I can see what we might do with it. Thus it was possible for science fiction writers in the eighteen-nineties to write abundant fiction about flying machines, even though they did not know the physics which would eventually allow fixed-wing machines to fly. A lot of their flying machines have moving wings, because a lot of the scientists who were trying to invent flying machines assumed that what they had to do were to imitate birds, because birds could fly, and they moved their wings. But I think it is a sensible project in some way, for science fiction writers to say, well I don't know how this would work, in terms of theoretical background, but I know that if we could do this then these would be the social consequences. RH Yes. This is my feeling also, that actually, science fiction is in some senses , and for these reasons I think should be concerned with consequences of science and technology. One way of doing science fiction is to take away some present limitation and ask yourself: What if something were different? What would consequences of that be? The problem you have is that you can only do this in incremental steps, because you need to retain some kind of background that is common to us, as readers, to what you present in this "what if"-hypothesis. So you could say that in some sense, all of the fantasy genre, in some sense is concerned with the question: What if magic were possible? What then would be the...BS Curiously enough, fantasy doesn't tend to concern itself with that question, that's an essentially science fictional kind of question. Fantasy books just take for granted that magic works. Their's no inquiry as to what would be the logical consequences of that assumption. RH It seems to me that they do, because even in most of the fantasy worlds there are limitations to what you can do with magic. BS My strong impression is that most fantasy writers do this on a strictly ad hoc basis. Whatever the plot demands, at any particular point in time, will turn out to be possible. And when it's necessary to wind the whole thing up, you know, a spell will turn out to be possible which does exactly that. Magic is subsidiary always to the ...RH I don't think so, because you wouldn't have a story if everything were possible immediately. There always have to various kinds of limitations --- even to magic, otherwise you don't have a plot. BS Yes, but they're not worked out in any coherent and logical fashion by the writers. BS What happens is that you do have a plot, and then you assume that whatever magic is necessary to move that plot works, and you just don't go beyond that. Fantasy does, quite consistently cheat in this regard, that it never does spell out the extent of it's premises or their consequence. Audience I can point at least to one magic system and that is the one used by Tim Powers, where there is a sort of lightly technological backgrounds. It goes to some lengths to give the magic system some kind of basis. BS You give it a jargon to back it up, but I think if you are going to regard magic as a kind of science with it's laws, then you are really writing a kind of science fiction, as Randall Garrett, who has written a series of murder mysteries, set in this alternative world where there is a technology based on magic which takes Frazer's supposed laws of magic as is they were real scientific laws. Randall Garrett's stories really are a kind of science fiction, because they do try to explore logical consequences of these premises, but most fantasy does not work that way. It doesn't presuppose laws and then try to find what all corollaries of these laws would be. RH The reason why I raised this is that neither does science. BS Well it's true there is a lot of science fiction that is just magical fantasy in disguise. There is a lot of science fiction, for instance, which simply takes advantage of the apologetic jargon which just translates all the old magic powers into a kind of paraphychological framework, and I think science fiction which deals with ESP and telepathy and psychokinesy and precognition is of that kind. But, I mean, what is scientific about science fiction. It is that the author does feel under some compulsion to examine the consequences of his hypothesis, that is, what is authentic about genuine science fiction, is that the science fiction writer should not stop with just saying: Well, the plot needs this to happen, therefore I'll just do it and I'll invent an excuse for it being able to be done. Proper science fiction ought to require people to begin to explore the consequences of what they've invented. And thus, I think that science fiction is, in a real sense, capable of being scientific. Not in the sense that it can foresee the future of science, but it can adopt a kind of variation of the scientific method itself, it does feel compelled to explore the consequences of hypotheses and the way things fit together. RH Yes, but... One of the problems was having in discussing the science in science fiction is that the term science fiction is very loose. There are enormous amounts of fiction that just use the term science fiction or the genre as a pretext for telling a story, rather than doing what you and I have been discussing. BS Of course. A publisher will will slap science fiction on anything which he thinks help it to sell, I mean the publisher doesn't care about matters of definition. I think a more interesting thing is the readership, an enormous number of readers who does not really discriminate between fantasy and science fiction, who aren't at all sensitive to the purely science fictional aspects of science fiction. And that's odd, because in a sense the ideology of the fantasy genre and the science fiction genre are mutually exclusive, I mean science fiction defines itself as not being fantasy, and yet there is an enormous number of readers who really don't discriminate, and what they find in science fiction to enjoy, is precisely the same as they find in fantasy to enjoy and thus they read the two without really paying any attention to the more scientific aspects of the science fiction. This has resulted in the growth of an entire sub-genre of slightly disguised fantasy which is written by people like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey. I know Anne McCaffrey, if you ask her, will always insist very hard that she is a real science fiction writer, but it's a lie, her work is just pure fantasy jargonized into an imitation of science fiction and that kind of work is very popular and it's very interesting to ask why readers who are not at all sensitive to the science in the science fiction do like the pretense. What do they value about the pretense that's science fictional, given that it's such a light veil? Audience Yes, I wonder call science fiction, like Greg Bears latest novel Queen of Angels, that's science fiction, it's some parts scientifical I don't know, but he does a psychic that mirrors the psychology of the characters in the book, the society isn't built as an ideal: How could it be in the future, but it's built as a mirror of the psychology of the characters Would you say that is not at all scientific technical but comparable to Anne McCaffrey's writings, for instance? BS I shall actually have something to say about that later, when I do my talk, but it is true that a literary work by its very nature does tend to have in these metaphorical references, these ways in which bits of the story relate to other bits, not because of any logical foundation, but because that is part of the aesthetical patterning, and it's true that that happens in the best hard science fiction, because one of the reasons we think it is the best hard science fiction is precisely because it does have these literary qualities as well as the rational extrapolative qualities that are in it too. So there is a sense in which the fictional nature of science fiction does drag in these extra association. The other thing, I think, in Angels worth noting is that it has relatively few attempts to treat psychology as a hard science. Greg Bear wishes to use psychology as a basis for speculation the same way as he is using the physics, and that's a very daring thing to do, and it's also a very very difficult thing to do, because it is very difficult to find any kind of hard bedrock in psychology which you can use in the same way as you can use the laws of physics to set a limitations. RH This is one of the points that I wanted to bring in next, but I just want to finish and say, in the literary marketplace, obviously what counts is what readers enjoy, and hence, usually, if you have a choice between something which is scientific but boring in various ways and badly written, and something which less scientific but better written; more easy to enjoy, then obviously that thing which is better written, which is better fiction will have more of a success than the one which is just better science. But when you mention this psychology thing, and the attempts to make that a basis, this is one of the things I wanted to bring up, namely what is the image of science, and what sciences are being used in science fiction, and obviously the images of science, the sciences that have been used have been the so called hard sciences, especially physics, and its cousin technology very much, and as a result of this obsession with technology once we have got into the stage where we have have flying machines, cars and so on, the next step is of course space and hence much of the obsession with space I think, also because once the Earth had become properly documented, there were no areas where you could place things unseen, et cetera, some basis for your imagination, you have to put them out into space, but if we think about science, and here we have a problem in that in English science is limited to natural sciences, whereas in German for instance when you say wissenschaft it includes humanities, has a much broader scope, so even the sort of terms science, science fiction, in English limits the scope of science fiction in some sense you might say. But I would like to point out that it's only rather recently that things such as biology, computer science, a number of sciences have been used in science fiction, and I wonder whether you have any...BS That's true. In English one can talk about social sciences, but it does tend to be a slightly ambiguous term and people are very ambivalent about it and one must also recognize that as well as softer sciences, the social sciences, there are also pseudo-sciences, things which try to mimic science, but which have no sensible theoretical basis. There is to some extent a difficulty in defining exactly what we mean by science or saying in what tense the social sciences are sciences if they are. I, having taught sociology for many years, having taught the philosophy of social science, I'm quite prepared to argue very vehemently that, yes, social sciences are and can be scientific in the genuine sense, but then that doesn't mean they look like physics, it doesn't mean to say they have these hard and fast mathematically stable laws. Physics, in a sense, is a very lucky science for its practitioners because it does have these hard and fast laws and it does have these quantifiable terms and all these universal constants, which enable the physicist to reason from relatively few things that he knows very well to all kinds of other things, but that in a sense is just luck. There's nothing about science which says that the universe has to be that way. We could still have science if the universe wasn't that way, if there was no universal constant, the science would be different, but the essence of science is the scientific method, not the particular things that are discovered, and that's why I think science fiction can, you know, have a genuinely scientific component to it as long as it has a science fictional conscience, as long as it has this methodical, rationalistic attitude to things. I mean, having pointed out that we live in the real world, and what readers demand is going to determine what publishers publish, I do feel quite strongly that writers should not simply regard themselves as pandering to the largest possible taste. I think it is incumbent upon writers to take a pride in their work and try to do the job properly. I don't think it's an excuse for a writer to say: Yes I know what I wrote was a pack of lies, but it sold millions. I admit they're rich, but I feel there is a failure in that, and I do get distressed with writers who deliberately, not just fudge issues, but deliberately lie about them, they deliberately put wrong information in their books, because that's what's popular, and I think that's a case of bad conscience and I don't approve it and I don't think that you should let people get away with arguments that.... They write books which are explicitly based on pseudo-science which doesn't matter because they're popular. I get annoyed with people who are prepared to claim: Yes of course my books are based in Jungian psychology, but that's just as much a science as physics is, I mean that quite honestly is nonsense. There are people who believe in faeries, but that doesn't make their faeries science fiction. I would want to add that little bit of propaganda. You'll hear more about it later. AB Well, we've seen then that you think the science in science fiction really is the method, the methodological...BS It's the scientific method which is the definitive criterion of the science, yes. AB So, whether it's physics or whatever, nuclear science or biology, it doesn't matter? BS I think that there are science fiction stories based in social science, which is nevertheless thoroughly good science fiction stories based on an honest appraisal of the capacity of their sciences, yes. Audience Many authors, at least some authors, claim that literature has a fundamentally different way of describing the world and ourselves from science, that science and literature are, in a sense, incompatible ways of describing the universe. Like I took the example of Queen of Angles, it wouldn't work if he didn't have these connections between psychology and , which is fundamentally sort of magical almost, at least they're not all together logical, they're literature, they're close in context to describe something which isn't logical in a sense of the world around it. Is there a ...BS There has been in social sciences of late a strong trend for people to be able to say, well, science is only just one more world view which doesn't have any particular priority, and that all world views should be treated equally, they're all just different ways of looking at things. Personally, as a scientist, I think that's utter nonsense and very dangerous nonsense. I do think that science has a privileged view of the world, the scientific method is a way of trying to find out if things are true or not. I mean it may not be able to manage it, but at least it cares whether things are true or not. Now, if people are going to mount an apology for literature, on the grounds that it's incompatible with science 'cause it doesn't care if things are true of not, then that in my view would blight literature. There would then be nothing to be said in it's favor. Audience You think so? BS Yes I do. Audience Can't it be true of course that the same time, that literature...BS No, I think if literature has to say something to us, then it must be in some sense responsible to the truth, I mean you cannot make out a case for literature unless it is telling us something that we need to know. It's true that its method may be very different from a scientist work in a laboratory, but nevertheless it must be responsible in some way to standards of truth and I think that you can accommodate such thinks as metaphor and allegory and all kinds of things like that without necessarily having to throw overboard the commitment in the end to being in some sense realistic and I think it would be stupid for someone to try and claim for literature that its merits were entirely apart from its ability to perceive things and see things and say things that were true, because if that were the case, then literature would be quite worthless. RH I would like to make a slight sort of modification and say what could be true than rather is true. Which in some sense is again is sort of the essence of science fiction what could be true, rather than what is true. It seems to me that what in some senses you are talking about is more of internal consistency, rather that mapping to the real world. BS Yes, perhaps I'm giving a wrong impression here. I wouldn't want to say that fantasy is implicitly bad because it's talking about things that don't exist. It would be, if one had to assume that in order to read a fairy story, one had to believe in fairies. If that were true, then fantasy would be bad. Mercifully, not even the most stupid child in the world thinks that in order to read a fairy story you have to believe everything it says. There are ways in which you can talk about the real world by dealing with entirely unreal things. But nevertheless, at the end of the day there has to be some intelligible relationship between the world of the story and the real world. There has to be some kind of connection which is meaningful in some way. I'm perfectly happy to defend fantasy as a genre, I don't think it has the same merits as hard science fiction, but nevertheless, it has considerable merits on its own. It is not an opponent of reason. Tolkien says fantasy does not attempt to insult reason, that the merit of fantasy is that one can't properly see the real in its true context unless one can appreciate genre as well. You know, you can't see the real just from within, you have to be able to see it from without, and appreciation of what the world contains also has to include appreciation of what the world might contain and it doesn't. RH We seem to be condemning some kinds of literature, and continuing that I would like to make --- for our discussion, really --- a distinction between science fiction-fantasy and what you might call horror stories where the author never tries to explain. Where he provides you with various kinds of unexplainable things happening, and horrifying you but without leaving you with any proper explanation for the things. I've been reading a number of books by Stephen King recently, and it seems to me that he somewhat carefully tries to leave a door open for a rational explanation of most of the horror stories. I mean, he doesn't sort of just say in the Lovecraft tradition, we say that there are horrible things. BS Lovecraft's horror fiction is science fiction of a kind, yes, everything there is fully explained, all the things that go on have an explanation and that's the science fictional explanation...RH If you look at a lot of the horror movies and horror fiction, they don't give you a proper explanation. BS Well, that's partly because of what they are, I mean, what's horrific about a horror story, by and large, is the breakdown of normality. I mean that's where the horror comes from. It's the fact that the things you thought you could rely upon, things that you knew about don't work. The things are coming apart. There is a sense in which the inexplicable is at least one of the strategies for building that effect. RH The reason why I bring it up is because that as another type of strategy in the science fiction sense. BS That's right, I think it's perfectly sensible to talk about the erosion of the sense of the normal and the emotional consequences of that and I wouldn't want to condemn horror fiction...RH No, but what I wanted to do is to make the, well.... In science fiction, we try to use the same thing, but in a different way for different purposes. BS Yes. RH We try to make the incompatible to normal or to use it as the background for doing things whereas in the paranormal horror et cetera, we have the normal as the background. BS Yes. I must admit that I in my horror fiction I always tend either to naturalistic or science fictional explanation, not necessarily contained in the story. I find it very difficult to be content simply with a disintegration . But that's the way my mind works, but one can see the point in terms of their being a commentary of the real situation, of psychological horror stories which do just show the disintegration of the normal expectation. It's a perfectly viable strategy for writing interesting stories. Audience I just want to ask one thing: when you talked about fiction that lies, you seem to be letting everything back in again now kind of fiction is lying romances or D.H. Lawrence or...BS I'm perfectly prepared to argue that D.H. Lawrence is a very bad writer because D.H. Lawrence has lots of psychological theories which are flatly ridiculous --- they're simply not true. Audience BS I certainly worry about the perniciousness of D.H. Lawrence. Audience Romantic fiction is lying about the world? BS If I thought that people who read romantic fiction believed in it, then I would think of it as pernicious, but I don't think that anymore than I believe that children believe fairy stories. I'm not necessarily even sure it's bad. I think it depends on how you assume that it's being read. It could be bad if it was being read in a particular way, but I don't believe it's being read in the naïve way that critics of the genre often assume. And there is a tendency of people who don't like genres to assume that the people reading it are all stupid... BS ... and I'm slightly reluctant to do that; in fact, I'm far more ready to believe that the readers of D.H. Lawrence are too stupid to know that the man's a madman than I am about the readers of Milson Boon, because of the attitude of mind of the people in English literature departments who really like D.H. Lawrence, I mean I think it makes them vulnerable to actually falling for it and because none of them has been educated in science beyond the age of seven, they're not really capable of bringing together the correct critical faculties, but I think the readers of Milson Boon must know that the world's not like that and that the ready assumption that they're just being fooled by this, that they think that that is the way the world is, it's very difficult to adopt to as a hypothesis. Audience D.H. Lawrence BS He knows what the words mean and he can string them together in an elegant fashion. Audience ... can be good just in terms of style? BS I think that is a merit, but that's not the only thing that one should pay attention to. Audience You say that you don't believe in the psychology of D.H. Lawrence writings, and therefore it's false, but we never describe the whole world, the whole universe when we write a book. We never describe a full viable psychology, we just describe some fantasies, some ideas, some twistedness in ourselves and they might not be complete. Everybody understands that. This is not a completed world. This is an idea, this is a twistedness, a quirk, a fancy that could tell you something about me. BS In a way, I mean... We do not know the entire truth and probably never will and never can, but the merit of science as an intellectual exercise is that it tells us that something is false and once science has told us that, once we know certain things are false, we know they're false beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now, what I'm worried about is these stories which contain blatant falsehoods and try to pretend they're true. And I think that is dangerous, that is pernicious. Later this afternoon you will hear much more of it. BS ... but I'm not being.... I'm trying not to be very crude about this, I'm trying to say there are all kinds of ways of writing stories which relate to the real world in all kinds of subtle ways Audience And ways of reading them. BS Yes, and there are ways of reading them. Your attitude to particular genres or particular stories depend heavily on how you assume they are being read. And of course you don't know that everybody in the audience is reading in the same way. If you're in a cinema watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, how do you know, how can you know what percentage of the audience is identifying with the victim, what percentage of the audience is identifying with the killer and what percentage of the audience is just sitting there as voyeurs, having a jolly good time watching the circus? Your opinion of the merits of the film and your opinion of the worthiness of that genre will depend to a large extent on what assumptions you make about how the people are relating to it, and there probably isn't a simple answer to that. I mean you probably couldn't split the audience up in three camps like that, there's probably something of each attitude, people's reading behaviour is very complicated and much more sophisticated than even they think it is. AB OK, we have just a couple of minutes left now, so I'll just ask the last question and let each one of you answer it in whatever way you want to, and then we unfortunately have to finish this panel. My question is: What has science fiction to do with science then, what's the possibilities for science fiction in science? Anyone? BS You take that first, or shall I? RH Well, cyberpunk is a very good example I think of science fiction actually having a kind of impact on research. BS That's true. RH ... where, of course, the early precursors to virtual realities were very early in computer science, but William Gibson and the others gave an impetus to a lot of research into what is now called virtual reality, cyberspace and so on, so I think that science fiction can give seeds in the best of cases. There is also the famous example of the stationary satellites, which were an invention by Arthur C. Clarke. BS In a scientific paper, let's remember, not in a science fiction story. RH But still. BS Yes, I think you're quite right that science fiction does have an inspirational effect on some scientists and the cyberpunk influence on research and information technology is one. The other thing is that all rocket scientists always got their inspiration from reading science fiction in their youth. That's a very clear example; every rocket scientist whose ever been asked said he became a rocket scientist because he really liked reading stories about space travel. But as well as that inspirational effect, I think there is one more thing we have to bear in mind, and that is that the practice of science itself does involve things like thought experiments, it does involve things fictions, and our modern separation of fiction from non-fiction is more recent than we think. There was a day when the standard form of what we would today think of as a scientific paper was the dialogue where someone writing up a philosophical experiment if you like, or even an account of scientific discoveries, would do so by having half a dozen characters who would sit and talk to one another and would debate the significance. Galileo's research report is cast in the form of a dialogue. A dialogue which is fiercely combative, because he's under pressure from one side to say one thing, and on the other hand he knows damn well that what the church wants him to say ain't so, and therefore the dialogue is fiercely competitive. Scientific text books are full of fictions, you know, physics text book are full of ideas like frictionless pulleys. All kinds of entirely imaginary concepts, the language of science is shot through by hypothetical ideas, by adventures of the mind, and I don't think we should forget that. There is a role which fiction plays in science, as well as an inspirational role the science fiction stories play in inspiring particular scientists to do particular kinds of work. AB OK. We thank you both.