Microworlds

distinguish the consequences of chance intrusions from the planned transformations of a particular creative design.

How do these methods and vocabulary bear upon science fiction?

In the first place, we consider the primary unsolved problem of science fiction the lack of a theoretical typology of its paradigmatic structures. Since writers of science fiction do not even recognize the existence of this problem, the structures they use most frequently are neither aesthetically nor epistemologically adequate for their chosen themes. An example of aesthetic inadequacy is the practice of authors who attempt to write mimetic (pseudorealistic) works, and yet model such phenomena as “contact with another civilization” or an invasion from outer space after the relationship between detective and criminal. (Two aliens in Hal Clement’s The Needle — a criminal and a detective — “hide” in the bodies of two humans; and the detective, the “symbiont” on the boy who has become his “host,” searches for the criminal “concealed” in the body of an unknown man.) This cognitive process results in antiempirical narrative. In the closed ecological system of Isaac Asimov’s story “Strike-Breaker,” the director of the planet’s sewage system is essential for the life of all. He is unexpendable, yet precisely because of his low social position he is the object of general contempt. The basic structural assumption is obviously antiempirical. Those who were of low status long ago, such as butlers, maids, or housekeepers, are today worth their weight in gold — and the relations between the housekeeper and her “masters” have changed radically. Nowadays, the housekeeper is almost the ranking member of the family; she is indulged, her caprices are respected, her whims attended to. Therefore, if we simply extrapolate this transformation of social conditions, we can see that, in Asimov’s society, the strike-breaker cannot be a man on whom the life of the whole community depends and still be treated as a pariah.

The choice of narrative structures can often be antiempirical even in works that otherwise pose interesting problems, such as Flowers for Algernon. The structure of such works, reminiscent of the curves of normal distribution (or the inverted letter K), originates with a certain type of tale. In the action of Flowers for Algernon, a retarded young man’s intelligence at first expands to an extraordinary degree, but no sooner does he experience the joy of intellectual creation than he regresses back to idiocy with terrible speed. The work is interesting psychologically, but it poses the problem of “intelligence expansion” as a “rise and fall” paradigm — which is not very plausible, precisely because its origin is in fairy tales; but, more important, it prevents the author from examining the socio-cultural dimensions of his hypothesis about the artificial increase of intelligence. He requires his newly intelligent hero’s sudden restupefaction for dramatic effect (for this curve of the action presents a personal drama, the tragedy of an individual’s fall from the heights of wisdom, arduously and barely achieved, and at the same time it creates the closed structure of events that automatically shapes the whole progress of the action). This extremely simple model would not be adequate to show the consequences of intelligence augmentation for the whole culture; and yet these consequences would be well worth treating. A university professor is a universally respected figure with a high social status, both because it is hard to become a professor (certainly not everyone who wishes to can become one) and because such specialists have a very important role in the culture (they are the ones who pursue creative research, and educate the host of specialists that make up the foundation of civilization). If, however, the augmentation of intelligence permitted anyone to become a university professor, and if this happened to become the easiest and most desirable solution for everyone, then society would have to defend itself against the destructive consequences of the situation. All those who would still be willing to be drivers, sewer workers, builders, or milkmen — in spite of the fact that it is within their power to attain the highest level of creative intelligence — would have to be generously compensated. They would come to be surrounded by the halo of noble renunciation of their innate potential for development for the sake of the community. If such a novel were written as a grotesque, the sewer worker would be the admired, respected, outstanding personage, the lofty spirit, whereas the professor would be merely a mediocre little man, a tiny gear in the great mechanism. (There would be, of course, many other consequences of such a “geniusification” process that we cannot consider here. They can be deduced with the proper reasoning. But an arbitrarily chosen closed structure of events, such as the paradigm taken from fairy tales, is certainly not appropriate for the task.)

Thus, science fiction takes flight from the models and methods of reasoning we have sketched here to the rigid, simplistic structures derived from fairy tales and detective novels. Because of this, the system of narrative structures generally used is muddled, and is inadequate for the futurological thematics of science fiction. In their choice of narrative structures, most science-fiction writers fail to consider any criteria of empirical adequacy for and the best possible arrangement of the objects and situations they wish to describe. They try to conceal the “dubious origin” of such structures (the detective novel, romantic stories, fairy tales), which leads to the unintentionally grotesque style characteristic of most science fiction.

The second problem of science fiction is the unresolved relationship of the narrative to phenomena that are as yet not associated with appropriate descriptive structures, since they are the first of their kind. Meetings with such unknowns at first lead inexorably to semantic-descriptive paralysis. At such times, the greatest dilemmas that humanity has, over the centuries, conquered in the course of its “natural gnoseological evolution” surface all at once. I am thinking here of the problems of categorizing and articulating new phenomena — and thus of their inclusion in the established schemes of identification and recognition — all the decisions that together give a final definition of what, precisely, a new phenomenon is, what it means, how it can be described, what ethics it implies, and so forth. Judging from the popular output, science fiction is completely unaware that such problems exist, that they must be considered and consciously and concretely resolved. If the new phenomenon is of a qualitatively different scale — contact with “aliens” in outer space, for example — it is all but certain that the repertoire of received, ready concepts will not be able to accommodate it without considerable friction. In all likelihood, a cultural, perceptual, and perhaps even a social-ethical revolution will be necessary. Thus, instead of the assimilation of the new, we must imagine the reordering and even the destruction of fundamental concepts, the revaluation of truths that were previously indisputable, and so on. To refer such phenomena to slick, closed, and completely unambiguous structures we must simply consider a flaw. We can learn which structures and methods are the most appropriate from the history of science—by examining, for instance, the vicissitudes of physics, with its whole series of conceptual-categorial revolutions. (In this sense, the completely fantastic, one-hundredpercent invented history of the “new cosmogony” would still be true to reality, at least structurally, since the succeeding conceptual orders were “turned inside out” and reordered either precisely in this way or similarly in each science’s actual course of development.)

Science fiction can thus learn from science as well as from other forms of literature, such as experimental prose. But it cannot learn through the kind of passive imitation characteristic of the English new wave of science fiction. Experimental literature, as we noted, introduces into the creative process different forms of “noise” (the chance generator), and the criteria for selecting structures created in this way are purely aesthetic. Science fiction should add to these another and separate set of criteria for cognitive adequacy. (Some equivalent to “noise” — the significant dispersion of opinions, or the contradiction arising simultaneously from the same sources — arises whenever a particular science confronts a new and unfamiliar phenomenon, and enters the phase of rapid conceptual reorganization. At the same time, this “noise” is never pure nonsense; science has not simply slipped into chaos.) Authors of science fiction must therefore draw upon the paradigmatics of transformations.

Clearheaded “internal” critics of science fiction have long been displeased with the genre for its flight from the real problems of civilization. But criticism must deal not only with the text’s relations to the external world. It must evaluate not only the structure of the things described, but also the structure of the description itself. The former generally determines the choice of themes, whereas the latter determines the sum total of the rules governing the treatment of the material — and these rules are not automatically defined by the chosen theme.

Science fiction remains mired in a stage of theoretical self-reflection similar to the aggressive, extreme reductionism of neo-positivism (“every science, from biology to psychology, must be reduced to the language of physics!”). When asked whether such a reduction is practicable or not, the enthusiastic neo-positivists answer yes, their opponents no, and that usually puts an end to the argument. The neo-positivists, amazingly, have not recognized the simple fact that the reductionist program is based on a fallacy. They wish to posit a logical dichotomy by way of exclusion of the middle, whereas the historical nature of scientific understanding does not allow such a conceptualization. Biology and psychology certainly cannot be deduced from modern physics. At the same time, we cannot be sure that the physics of the future (which cannot, in principle, be reduced to the physics of the present, just as Einstein’s model of the universe cannot be reduced to Newton’s, nor the indeterminacy of quantum physics to Laplacian determinism) might not create transitional branches that will intersect with