Can science be anti-fiction?
I can’t find it online, but I read an introduction to Rose for Ecclesiastes in which Roger Zelazny was quoted as saying that he knew he had to hurry up and write the last of his Mars stories because he knew that new developments in science would make them impossible.
(Or possibly, he hesitated to publish that story because he already knew that science had outpaced him. Either way, it’s a fabulous story and you must read it.)
Rose was published in 1963, and Mariner 4 sent back the first close-up photos of the Martian surface in 1965.
Nope, no beautiful Martian dancers living there.
By now we know the surface of Mars better than we know the surface of Earth (those pesky oceans, you know.) But Zelazny’s fears aside, that hasn’t stopped the popular conception of Martians from appearing regularly in popular culture. (Yes, I enjoyed John Carter. Did you?)
The portrayal of Mars in more science-minded science fiction, though, has changed greatly as new information became available about the planet. Where Edgar Rice Burroughs and Roger Zelazny couldn’t have told their stories after 1965, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ben Bova couldn’t have written theirs earlier.
This leads me to two questions for you all: first, how much does it matter? Does science fiction have a place for both the most accurate possible science and for things we know aren’t true but love anyway? Is the answer different if the story used the best science of the time it was written, but knowledge has moved past that?
What kinds of stories are likely to become obsolete in the very near future? If you are a writer, are there ideas you love that you will never get to write because they are already past, or will you use them anyway? If a reader (and the two categories are by no means exclusive), are there topics you hate to see in SF because you know they’re already obsolete?
If the story is well-written, that fact that the science is no longer accurate or never was accurate isn’t necessarily important. Think of all the stories that require faster-than-life travel. I’m still a huge fan of Burroughs John Carter of Mars stories.
If science fiction were locked in to just the science we know, I think it would be too limiting. And the best science fictions asks “what if” questions, then tries to answer them. What if artificial wombs freed women from having to be pregnant? What if time travel were possible, but only in one direction? What if there were devices that could read and decipher brain waves at a distance?
The science in science fiction is certainly important, but good science fictions stories can be written even when they purposely violate know scientific principles.
Isn’t the elephant in the room when you’re talking Mars stories Mr. Bradbury’s opus? If you want to call Martian Chronicles “science fiction” because that’s what the publisher put on the spine, I mean? (You can obviously call the stories “fantasy”.) And Bradbury didn’t even really care too much about following the science of the time he wrote the stories, which had long passed the science/fancies of his boyhead and the observations/crazed fancies of the astronomer Percival Lowell; he pretty much just said, “Enh, screw it,” and wrote about canals and dessicated cities and older-than-old Martian souls, etc.
Maybe the limitation is with the “science fiction” label itself, y’know? We could take a strictly Campbellian approach (John, not Joseph) and say that science fiction stories have to be scientific, yeah, but then what do we do with all these other stories we’ve been calling “science fiction” that are/were/will be as scientific as phrenology? This is why I’m getting happier and happier as I get older (and hopefully wiser) with the generic “spec fic” label because it kind of moots silly arguments about whether Star Wars is or isn’t “science fiction” because while it has spaceships, it also has wizards in it. And your speculative fiction story can be as scientific as anyone would like it to be, then. And everybody gets to live comfy under the same roof.
And here’s another question your piece implies but might not quite get to: if we’re stuck with the “science fiction” label, what do we do with pieces consciously written with the best expired science of a bygone era; i.e. (or e.g., perhaps) plenty of writers have now written steampunk stories that rigorously adhere to the best pre-Michaelson-Morley physics available before Relativity came along and finished off the luminiferous aether for good; are those stories science fiction? That’s the easiest example, but you could write a story scrupulously following the principles of alchemy or set in a universe where phrenology works or whatever; are these fantasies, even if they’re consciously scientific in their treatment of ascientific and obsolete areas of knowledge? Hrm.
Food for thought, anyway. Thanks!
Er… “boyhood”, not “boyhead”….
/…plenty of writers have now written steampunk stories that rigorously adhere to the best pre-Michaelson-Morley physics available before Relativity came along and finished off the luminiferous aether for good; are those stories science fiction?/
Can you recommend me some of these stories if they exist?
Those are excellent points. Thank you both for taking the time to think about this.
Vince, I agree that “science we know” is potentially too limiting, but what about “science we don’t know is impossible”?
Eric, The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950, before we knew for certain that Schiaparelli was wrong about those canals, so it falls in the same class as Rose.
There are plenty of near-future SF authors (Williams, Stross, Buckell come to mind) who’ve agonized over whether reality is going to catch up with their novels too fast, making them unpublishable, or possibly even unwritable. I was thinking about that while I wrote the essay, though I didn’t explicitly include it.
I think that consciously choosing a set of rules differs qualitatively from falling afoul of the progress of science, both in intent and effect, but it’s an interesting thing to contemplate.
A Rose for Ecclesiastes reminded me why I find Zelazny both enticing and infuriating. He is amazingly literate and poetic; he knows his sources well and can mingle them effortlessly; but all his examples are of men (all the Earth poets he lists, for example), the female characters are either vessels or crones (though at least the latter have some agency) and the “man from the skies saves declining race” was a lousy Gary Stu device even when Zelazny wrote the story.
Not so incidentally, I detested John Carter, which also propagates the Messiah trope (not the only one of its almost infinite number of faults, as I discuss here in a coda to a more positive view of the film).
Schiaparelli called the features on Mars “canali” which means “channels”, not “canals” — it was Lowell who got wedded to the idea of a dying Martian culture. On the larger picture, I agree that SF need not be scientifically accurate: the fiction component is always the more important one. At the same time, SF authors do need to know enough science to make informed decisions about how to treat scientific concepts in their stories. Otherwise it becomes fantasy, which is fine, but a different member of the speculative fiction family (Star Wars being a prominent example, though a very poor one in either subcategory).