Stressing the Fiction in Science Fiction

Science fiction has been the "buzz" in the past few days, starting with PZ's post on how biology gets snubbed by SF authors and followed by thoughts from Chad, Razib, Rob and Janet. The consensus? Science in general gets snubbed by most SF authors.

Why? As many of the commenters correctly point out, SF is still fiction and fiction has its own rules that are usually more important than the science. Bending the laws of physics (arguably the most abused section of science in SF) is not just a playful extrapolation of existing knowledge, it is a tool for the author to further the story. Without faster than light travel, how does one have an interplanetary romp? Without a universal translator, how do species from across the galaxy communicate? Without exploiting energy from entropy, how would Trevize and Pelorat have found Earth without making thousands of stops for fuel? No chase through the asteroid belt in Empire Strikes Back? Psh...

Janet, as usual, is on point (Rob's post about starfighter physics in Star Wars is awesome as well, read it):

...when the makers of science fiction go into a lot of detail about the wild new capabilities in their fictional world, trying to show us how very smart they are with the scientific grounding for these gizmos, they tend to lose the suspension of disbelief I was prepared to spot them at the beginning. It's often more effective, in my view, to just specify that in this story, people can do X, rather than trying to sell us on the plausibility of an explanation for how they can do X.

Jack Vance is one of my favorite SF authors. There was very little hard science in his works, but his ideas - characters, planets, technology, situations, etc. - were always original, colorful, often insane metaphors for society and culture, past and present. He once told an interviewer:

It would take us lifetimes under prison conditions to get from one star to another. It's so impractical I doubt that anyone will try to get from here to any star. Unless we get a quicker way. So most writers, they just assume there are ways of hopping through space so fast to get from one star to another in some reasonable time, so that's just one of the conventions of science-fiction writing, which has several conventions. Oh, [there are] a whole gang of conventions that aren't very reasonable.

Another convention is that everywhere you go people are using the same language, which in the case of the Gaean Reach would hardly be logical. People, after being isolated for thousands of years, would have developed dialects that wouldn't be comprehensible to strangers. But just in order to make it possible for us people to come to a world and communicate with the people that live there, you have to assume that they all use the same language. It's a convention of science fiction that we all blandly pretend is feasible.

The science in SF is not nearly as important as it's cracked up to be. The greatest science fiction writers are great because of their storytelling, not because of their ability to accurately extrapolate and apply scientific conventions to a narrative. We read them because the story engages us, because we care about what happens to the characters above all; their novel ideas about speculative astrophysics and evolutionary biology add to our respect and love for them, but are not necessarily integral.

That said, imagination has its boundaries. When we create a situation, a city, a world, a universe - we should be prepared to realistically address the consequences of our actions. Contrary to the popular cliché, the imagined place, time and people have limits; if they don't, the story will fall apart, as Tim O'Brien explains at the end of Going After Cacciato:

Even in imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligation cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

SF should be entertaining above all, because, at its core, it is still fiction. It should be an escape, a place to hide when the real world becomes monotonous and frustrating. It should open minds and feed our imagination, give us an inkling of what could be and what we are, for better or worse.

Beyond the specs of SF, it comes down to personal preference, that infuriatingly post modernist cling-to. We read and watch what we like, no matter its credibility, and all the arguing in the world will not convince anyone otherwise.

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I have to say I've always preferred the term speculative fiction to science fiction, for just this reason. The best authours who create the most convincing alien societies, such as Vance, Vinge and C.J. Cherryh, spend much more time on character than on science, in my opinion providing a much better read.

By Tim Elliott (not verified) on 07 Jul 2007 #permalink

Absolutely! The "science" in science fiction is usually just a plot device - the classic example being the Star Trek teleporter, which was invented purely as a means of getting the characters into the action as quickly as possible, and of course is conveniently unavailable for whatever reason when the story demands it.

One of the things I really liked about Farscape was that they made absolutely no attempt to "explain" any of the "science". None of the characters actually understood how any of it worked - they just knew that it did.

I always found that Heinlein played pretty fair by science. In "A Time for the Stars", he describes earth's first push to inhabit other planets, and while he invents a telepathy that allows people to communicate, their travel is more or less properly relativisitic.

Well, that was kinda the point of my post as well, clothed as a review of VInge.

There's science fiction and then there's science fiction. The "hard" science fiction authors at least make an effort to integrate the science of the day into their writing but science has a way of making SF obsolete pretty quickly. Robert Heinlein's early novels depicted Venus as a lush jungle planet because that was what it was seen as back in the day. Ditto with the "canals" of Mars and depictions of intelligent life on other worlds in this solar system. Keeping pace with science was always a tricky business for SF writers.

Jeez, how did I miss your post, Bora? Sorry...

Thanks for the link btw. Too bad I don't have a subscription. :-(