Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Monday, December 03, 2007

 
Bryan Appleyard sets out to rehabilitate science fiction:

"The truth is," Aldiss has written, "that we are at last living in an SF scenario." A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant...

A new book, Different Engines by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook ... (shows) how closely SF follows scientific developments. The Copernican revolution that displaced the earth from the centre of the universe produced 17th-century space fantasies by Kepler, Godwin and Bergerac... the rise of the computer-inspired "cyberpunk" SF, most famously in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that preinvented the internet in, of course, 1984.

But Brake and Hook go further. They suggest this is a two-way street: SF also influences science. Brake points out to me that it was Wells who invented the atom bomb in The World Set Free, in 1914, in spite of the fact that two of the leading nuclear physicists of the day, Rutherford and Soddy, had said it was impossible. Leo Szilard read Wells’s book in 1932. A year later, Szilard discovered the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for the traffic lights to change on Southampton Row, in Bloomsbury. "Wells’s fictional bomb led straight to Hiroshima," write Brake and Hook. I would add that Astounding magazine led to the cold war. Werner von Braun had the magazine smuggled in while working on rockets for the Nazis. His V-2 – a pointy cigar with fins – was plainly inspired by an Astounding cover.

SF writers are free to speculate in a way that scientists aren’t, and this can suggest the path ahead. Perhaps the best example of this process is the way the idea of the alien has moved from fiction to reality. The Nasa historian Steven Dick has pointed out that the billions spent by the agency on investigating the possibility or likelihood of alien life is a direct result of the invention of the extraterrestrial in fiction. Furthermore, there is now an entire scientific discipline – astro- or exobiology – that exists to study a so far entirely fictional entity, life beyond the earth."


The point about the predictive value of science fiction is interesting, but poorly related to the broader questions of literary merit; if the value of a science fiction novel diminished when its predictions are proved hopelessly inaccurate? Does it matter? Does Wells purported role in the invention of the nuclear bomb translate into something we should praise him for? Does Astounding Stories come off any the better for being read by Werner von Braun? As Tom Lehrer put it; "the widows and cripples in old London town... owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun."

In any case, at a time when David Mitchell, Michel Houellebecq, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham and Kazuo Ishiguro have all written science fiction novels, it seems a little moot to complain of the genre being marginalised. This is in some ways a new Edwardian age, with more than its fair share of works like King Solomon's Mines and War of the Worlds. I feel more interested in the prediction from Brian Aldiss about the demise of science fiction. It generally seems to me that science fiction is governed by a paradox; it must depict aspects of contemporary society, but must also distance (or defamiliarise to use the Russian phrase) itself from that reality. The utopian and dystopian tradition in literature depends upon the principle of trying to advocate or forestall certain social outcomes; far from being escapist, it is a politically engaged form of writing. Almost by definition, it cannot be too close to contemporary events; Orwell and Huxley were extrapolating and disproportioning certain trends, not documenting them. By contrast, I recall watching the film of Children of Men and wondering whether this was science fiction or realism; low fertility rates, terrorism, social unrest, authoritarian government and xenophobia all struck me as the stuff of newspapers, not of the distant future.

Update: An interview with Kim Stanley Robinson makes a similar point:

"Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that."


Ballard himself makes much the same point:

"the problem is that at the heart of science fiction was novelty: it was predicting the new all the time. I remember reading science-fiction magazines from the 1950s and one was constantly excited by the vision of the future dominated by television, advertising, space travel — the modern world, in short. As far as I can see, science fiction has lost that sense of the new, because its vision has materialised around us. We take it for granted. The future envisaged by science fiction is now our past, and the result is it’s probably come to a natural end. That doesn’t mean that one can’t continue writing it: one just has to move into a different terrain."

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posted by Richard 8:54 pm