Anti-science fiction
From The Guardian:
If pseuodoscience proponents can be criticised for distorting complex science for their own ends, then the same argument could be applied to science fiction writers, Simon Dunn argues
. . . .
They take a vague, science sounding idea, and bolt it onto their product in order to give it some validation. Or they ignore the science altogether. Or they cast science as the bogeyman.
Fiction writers do this all the time.
Think of all the technobabble spouted on Star Trek to help the characters overcome their latest plot hurdle. For every Heisenberg compensator, there’s a dozen polarity reversals and a sprinkling of field dampening plasma vents.
At least they make some effort I suppose. Back To The Future has a scientist in a white coat and mad hair say Flux Capacitor and One Point Twenty One Gigawatts whilst falling off a toilet. But it works. In fact, it works much better than the technobabble. And if it works, writers will do it.
. . . .
And to be honest, as a writer, I used to have no problem with this abuse of science. If it serves the story, that’s all that matters. I don’t even have a problem with it as a reader or a viewer. All I care about is being swept along by a great plot.
But it does beg the question; do we have a responsibility as artists to respect the scientific method?
. . . .
For every Scully, there’s a Mulder with a more compelling story of aliens, implants, conspiracies and cover ups.
Let’s tell better stories. Stories that promote the scientific method. Stories that entertain. Stories that excite. Stories that reflect the real world as much as they explore the magical and the mystical. Stories where science is the hero.
Link to the rest at The Guardian
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I am perfectly cool with magic. I am perfectly cool with what I call “ultratech,” which is magic described as science (e.g. jetpacks. Jetpacks are not feasible. Personal flying technology is feasible. Jetpacks are not.) I like the “one impossible thing” guideline, but I consider it a guideline, not a rule.
What I am not cool with is inconsistency. Even in my trashy stroke books I insist on consistency. If I say magic can’t do X, then magic can’t do x, and if I have it later do something that either directly contradicts that or implies that it could be made to do it, I have failed as a writer creating a believable world.
Of course, a notable exception to this rule is that the universe is not required to operate the way the characters think it does. The whole plot of one of my books revolves around the fact that everyone thinks magic can’t do x, when in fact it can if you know how.
Marc,
Unless I’m misinterpreting your definition, jetpack technology has been in existence since at least the mid 1960s. A stunt double flew a real one developed by the U.S. military in the opening sequence for “Thunderball.”
Don’t forget the one used in that Lost in Space episode!
I stand corrected: I meant “practical jetpacks.” As in, strap it on and fly around for a while, Rocketeer style. You’re quite correct in that a working jetpack has been built (the one in Thunderball is often assumed to be a fake because of the visible wire: the wire is there but it’s not a lift wire, it’s there to stop the pilot flying off out of control if the pack malfunctions!)
IIRC the pack in question had less than two minutes of flight time. That’s why they’re infeasible: they can’t carry enough fuel.
Until we discover Dilithium Crystals… then WATCH OUT!
I’m not a writer, or a great consumer of science fiction (although I don’t despise the genre, either), but I think the suggestion–which seems to underlie his “respect the scientific method”–that if it can’t be shown at this time that the science in a story would work, it shouldn’t be used, misses the point. Science fiction (unlike alt-med) is explicitly story, and is /speculative/ story, at that. If someone had described semiconductors, or microchips, to someone considered a scientist in 1912, would the scientist have said “oh, yes, the current state of scientific knowledge shows that is entirely possible,” or would he have said “Nonsense, man, that can’t be done”? Developments in science involve imagination as well as method, and they create both understanding and technology that did not previously exist, and might well have been dismissed as impossible not long before the development occurred. This is not to say that everything anyone can imagine can in fact be brought into being; but to constrain science fiction within the limits of current scientific understanding constriction on imagination.
Sigh. “is an absurd constriction,” of course. No matter how carefully one proofreads …
And science fiction often inspires scientific progress. Novelists imagined space travel a century before it happened. The methods eventually used may bear little resemblance to the science eventually used, but how long would it take to happen if no one popularized that image of the impossible.
Not to mention all those iPads that the Star Trek bridge crew did their reports on… (Okay, they were probably closer to oversized Newtons, but…)
While being Just Plain Wrong about things is irritating… Being ultra-conservative about it all the time is just annoying, too, and cripples the What If glands.
Two terms need to be emphasized to the article’s author: FICTION and ARTISTIC LICENSE.
Pseudo science is often used to manipulate public opinion and/or influence public policy in a deceitful way. Science Fiction on the other hand has one primary purpose which is to entertain readers. BIG DIFFERENCE.
The true danger is not a more realistic representation of science in a fictional manner, but the potential failure to teach children/adults the ability to know the difference.
I’m perfectly fine with a variety of approaches, from Ray Bradbury’s imaginative and fanciful technology to Dr. Who’s “sonic screwdriver” to Wylie/Balmer’s nuclear rocket engines in “When Worlds Collide” to Crichton’s technology-taken-further explorations.
Those all suspend disbelief for me and allow me to enjoy a story.
What gives me pause are when I encounter stories that are *too grounded* in current technology and stretch disbelief in improbable ways.
I’ve been working my way through Justin Cronin’s “The Passage,” for instance. I like his approach on the vampires – tying in viruses and a reactivated (actually hyper-activated) thymus via an extremely common viral incubator/vector (bats) works well.
But the technology aspect just…keeps making me pause and breaks the story for me.
The variety and complexity of technology that still remains functioning 90-something years after an apocalypse (and conveniently is easily understood, maintained, cobbled-together or rebuilt by a few people who are a few generations removed from the last modern society) just doesn’t convince me.
Computers, batteries of all kinds (including automotive), ammunition, vehicles, solar and wind farms, diesel, etc. all continue to be usable or quickly repairable after almost a century of non-use and being left as they were last used. Apparently corrosion of batteries and electronics doesn’t exist in the novel (despite descriptions of decrepit roads and buildings), diesel remains viable for a century, some rubber parts crumble and the ones necessary to the continuance of the plot don’t, unknown transmitters can be soldered to memory chips of random motherboards to “read” what’s on them, and so on.
I’d rather the story to have either dispensed with the excessive re-activation of current technology, or else limited it more, or begun the whole story a bit further into the future using proposed new advances in a few key things that might make their longevity more believable. As it stands, there’s simply too much technology and complex systems that are too conveniently usable.
The story itself is engaging, and the opening chapter was a real gem at developing backstory, pretty reminiscent of the way Stephen King often approaches developing his initial characters and worlds.
As a card-carrying Mad Scientist I would be gratified simply by SF writers embracing the scientific method. Ecstatic joy would greet any effort to base their extrapolated science on the real world as we know it. (E.g. sound waves do not carry in a vacuum, momentum should be conserved, and if you can’t crossbreed an Earth snake and an Earth mountain goat without a major biology lab you aren’t going to create any human-alien hybrids with merely a winsome smile and romantic music *either*.)(Sorry James T…)
Where was I? Oh yes, respect for the medium. Detective novel writers are expected to bone up on DNA analysis, time-of-death determinations, and so on. If a writer wishes to write hard science fiction, they should know basic science, and enough about the history and process they can create their own entertaining versions of what-could-be. And for the love of Ghu, please don’t put a lab coat on some dweeb and call them a scientist. I never wore a lab coat in 10 years of research. And, much like lawyers, we are ALL good-looking
Um, it’s science FICTION.
Pseudoscience proponents are not criticized for making stuff up, they’re criticized for making stuff up and claiming they didn’t — claiming it’s real.
No matter how hard the science in science fiction is, it’s still always fiction. It’s a work of the imagination. If the pseudo-science folks would admit that’s what they are doing, I’d have no problem with them.
Totally agree with you, Camille.
I’ve come in close contact with this kind of debate recently too, whether science-fiction writers have a duty to be accurate or not. I believe it’s a two-fold answer.
If the science is already established and well proven (like arithmetic, known laws of physics and chemistry, basic principles of biology and medicine, etc.) than a science-fiction writer must be accurate in applying them, otherwise what he writes is science-fantasy, or fantasy altogether. (nothing against them)
If the science he uses does not exist yet but it could in time & in other circumstances, or if it’s a device that can’t be physically created now but there’s no currently known law that would prevent it if we had the necessary technology, etc. — if the science used is even remotely possible, then he’s most definitely allowed to use it and be rightly called a science-fiction writer. Most hard sci-fi writers write this way. We’d have no science-fiction otherwise.
Science is important, very important actually, and critical thinking is crucial to evolution, but demanding of other human occupations—especially art—to be scientific, is an unjust and limiting endeavor.
So is science-fiction supposed to be scientific or fictional? Ultimately, I believe writers create fiction, they don’t prove facts. That’s the job of scientists.
I still think microwaves are an impossible miracle. Open the box, put the food in, press a button, ten seconds later, HOT FOOD!! The ridiculous foolish unbelievable ideas of today will be the realities of tomorrow. The world was flat for a few thousand years or whatever. As far as I’m concerned, anything goes. Even magic. All I ask is that your entertain me.
Seconding you, Elle, on the magic of microwaves! Heck, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of radios, in spite of having it explained to me a million times by my live-in geek. I’m also still gobsmacked by the idea that you can record sound with a sprinkling of rust on some masking tape. For someone like me, ALL science sounds like fiction, and magic.
And many of us still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Aaaaaand you win the thread.
In a way, ‘scientific method’ can be whatever I say it is. That is what many scientists have done for decades, millenia… then hundreds of years later, another ‘corrects’ the first ‘scientist’ which holds weight– until the centuries roll over and over and another ‘corrects’ both previous… and onward and onward.
If one insists on the science of the moment only… that doesnt seem very ‘science fiction-y’.
just my .02
The author of this article appears to be No. Fun. At. All.
Of course, I tend to use the phrases space fantasy and space adventure over science fiction since my stories have a lot of whimsy and far-future tech that at this point in our understand appears to be fantasy…just as rocket scientists in the 1930s and 1940s believed flying to the Moon was just a foolish fantasy since it would be impossible to get a rocket there.
I think science fiction authors are held to unrealistic standards and it’s showing in what we are seeing on the shelves. (Has anyone noticed how many Hugo and Nebula awards have gone to fantasy novels in the past 20 years?)
If Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and a host of others were kept to many of the standards described above we wouldn’t *have* science fiction. In their time though, it was assumed that they were all out to lunch. Until of course we saw things like microwaves, computers, DNA sequencing and such. Then they become prophetic.
It seems over the past two decades that we have been holding fiction writers to ideals that constrain them so tightly that we no longer see much science fiction. When it must be imaginable, according to science as we know it, then we are loosing the “magic” of the genre. And maybe seeing the end to science fiction entirely.
Feel free to air your views at http://www.sciencefiction-lit.com