Greg Laden's Blog

First, the benign angle. I once read an interview with Arthur Clarke (possibly by Jeremy Bernstein?) in which Clarke answered this question in a way that I think anyone interested in either science fiction or science would love to read. Clarke was, of course, involved in the British Interplanetary Society, and personally was involved in research on such important technologies as RADAR. In the interview, Clarke talks about the interesting oddities of directionality in science and science fiction.

By the way, one of the directionalities he speaks of may surprise you. In the interview, which I cannot cite or locate so you've got to take my word for it, Clarke claims that he and Kubrick wrote the screenplay for 2001 prior to Clarke writing the book on which it was based. But I digress.

So, Clarke, in his reminiscence of his own past, talks about how science fiction led science through possible, imagined futures, especially with respect to space travel and rocket technology. I think Star Trek and other later TV shows, movies, and related literature did the same at a more immediate and day to day scale. Not only does science fiction potentially inspire science and technology, it also gauges science and technology. If you don't know what I mean, just sit down and watch three or four episodes of the original Star Trek and pay special attention to the technology itself, and its use in day to day life (on a Starship) and see how that washes in relation to day to day technology today.

On one hand, modern flip phones are star trek communicators. On the other hand, no modern space craft has a cathedral ceiling and a giant movie screen on which we pull up images of aliens, or for that matter, images of anything. We have barely begun to develop intelligently interacting vocal computers, but our portable storage media are at least as sophisticated and cool as the glow in the dark floppy disks used on The Enterprise. And so on.

The other angle is a little less obvious, and this is about making science and scientists sexy, or at least, interesting. Or at least, not total dickheads or hopeless nerds. And here I'll credit as a my former benefactor (for one semester of my graduate study), the recently deceased Michael Crichton. Crichton himself interacted with science and science fiction. Eaters of the dead is fiction that derived from his senior honors project with physical anthropologist Bill Howells. The Terminal man came out of his side interests in medical training. Congo was partly inspired by stories he heard from the people who worked on the Harvard Ituri Project (a scientific expedition) in Zaire (the project I worked on).

Indeed, for me it was quite an interesting experience to fly into the Ituri Forest on my second or third trip there while actually reading Crichton's Congo. Most people will not realize this, but many of the over the top absurd claims made as part of that work of fiction are actually pretty accurate representations of reality! (Except the treasure, the strange apes with the ping pong paddles, the talking lab ape, the camp technology. The rest of it is totally spot on...)

Japanese morality Sci Fi blames scientists. Fifties post nuke Sci Fi blames scientists. Most pre Crichton and pre Star Wars Sci Fi at best makes scientists appear to be totally nerdy, non sensible, non sexy characters who need to be trained or tamed or guided in some way. That interacts with science in a negative way, over the long term. If a particular profession is always depicted a particular way, it becomes perceived in that way, and may in fact eventually become that way.

So, despite the dislike of Crichton, by many scientists, due to certain things he has written or claimed, he is also owed a debt, along with other more recent writers, writers and producers who have made the scientists interesting. And thus, maybe the science will be more interesting as well to some audiences.

Now, I recognize that much (most?) Sci Fi does not have scientists in it, so perhaps I'm speaking here of one or a small number of genres. But never mind. I know that many of you know light years more than I do about Science Fiction .... So have at me ...