corresponding branches of the biology or psychology of the future (general systems theory). For that matter, we might attain the synthesis in yet another way, as the cyberneticists envision it: the synthesis would come about, not on the level of particular sciences, but on the next higher level of abstraction, with the discovery of the constants common to all the branch sciences.
Science fiction is reminiscent of neo-positivism’s aggressive reductionism in that it acts as if the miserable repertoire of the detective story and the adventure novel were sufficient for structuring any phenomenon in the whole spectrum of the infinite universe, regardless of its time, place, and degree of complexity, and all the situations in which human civilization may ever find itself. Thus science fiction designates its problems (contact with aliens, the spirit in the machine, the instrumentalization of values, etc.), but it does not embody them in narrative structures.
In summary, it is clear that among the criticisms leveled against existing science fiction, the most important is this matter of opportunities systematically squandered. We must deem it a serious flaw of the genre that it has no independent, rational, and normative criticism that is neither destructive nor apologetic and that is committed not only to science fiction, but also to the more encompassing relations between culture and literature on which the fate of both depends. For this reason, my intention has not been so much to write the definitive monograph on science fiction, but, instead, to prepare the outline of a rational, internal critique.
Translated from the Hungarian by Etelka de Laczay and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
COSMOLOGY AND SCIENCE FICTION
These remarks owe their existence to a suggestion of Dr. R. Mullen, of Science-Fiction Studies, who received a review copy of Cosmology Now, edited by Laurie John, but felt the book too peripheral to the journal’s concerns for an ordinary review. The title, too, is Dr. Mullen’s choice. Therefore my remarks are addressed to the readers of Science-Fiction Studies, and they were written in German because my English is insufficient for the task.
1. Cosmology Now was written by several British scientists for the BBC in 1973. The American edition, the one on hand, appeared in 1976. A reviewer both well versed in the subject and malicious could claim with some justification that the book would be better called Cosmology Yesterday. If the cosmos is the most durable of things, this durability doesn’t extend to the science that deals with its exploration. Even the best cosmological reference works written some seven or eight years ago are today totally out of date. The three life-years that Cosmology Now has now had have seen much change in cosmology. Since I don’t have to write a “regular review,” I will list only the most important innovations. The age of the cosmos is today estimated to be some twenty billion years. The experiments of Weber, who claimed to have registered gravitational waves, have been discarded, since his apparatus was of insufficient sensitivity. The health of the “steady state” theory, which denies the evolution of the universe from a zero point, has deteriorated noticeably. Scientists are inclined to award the palms of victory to the theory of the Big Bang. Moreover, many of the things described in Cosmology Now have lost their former, beautiful simplicity. For instance, there is now a whole “family” of black holes. In addition to the ones postulated originally, which were supposed to be the final stage of a collapsing neutron star, there have been new ones — for instance, partially reversible black holes. These may not be assumed to be “gravity graves,” invisible for all eternity. And there are, especially, the black micro-holes. As the new theory of Stephen Hawking, of Cambridge, will have it, these are objects with the diameter of a proton and mass of a mountain range. Quite a lot of them are said to have been created at the time of the Big Bang. I mention the theory of Hawking, first, because it introduces the method of quantum mechanics into the field of the general theory of relativity, and, second, because it implies consequences that cannot be overlooked and may change our whole outlook. Although there are so far no irrefutable (empirical) proofs for the existence of any black holes, we cannot imagine any possible technological utilization of the big black holes, whereas one may consider the micro-holes as energy sources that can surpass the annihilation of matter by several million times, the so far energetically most potent reaction. Such a micro-hole is supposed to contain the energy of several million hydrogen bombs. Sapienti sat. There are other important discoveries, but I cannot enlarge this short aside into a “regular book review.” Therefore — finis.
In our times, scientific works grow old very fast. The Internal Constitution of the Stars by A. Eddington enthralled me when I read it forty years ago, and it is still a magnificent book, but it must be read now as (genuine!) science fiction, because nothing in it corresponds any more with our present knowledge. In my opinion the same may happen with Cosmology Now: please take this remark as an hommage. This volume will remain readable, indeed exciting, but very little of its aesthetically appealing, lucid simplicity in its development of the model of the universe will survive the changes to come. I say this as a dilettante and a heretic who knows more about the history of science than about cosmology. The first conquerors of new knowledge always find it easier to proclaim that “God may be subtle, but He is not malicious” because the biggest hurdles are discovered by the next generation of scientists. But it seems to me that one of the main theses of Cosmology Now will remain valid: that the universe is a continued explosion extended over a time of twenty billion years that appears as a majestic solidification only to the eyes of a transient being like man. The question whether we are living in a rhythmically pulsating universe or in a cosmos that will finally dissolve into vacuum still remains to be answered. The pendulum of mutually exclusive opinions goes on swinging.
2. Now then, what is the relationship between cosmology and science fiction? The facts are clear: both universes, that of the writers and that of the scientists, grow ever more apart. The estimations of the “density of cosmic civilization” show this most evidently. The scientists, even the founders of CETI (Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligences), feel compelled to attribute ever smaller figures to the psychozoic density in the cosmos, because the accumulating negative results of the “sky listening” (for signals) force them to do so. Science fiction takes not the slightest notice of such changes. Therefore for science fiction one of the biggest riddles of contemporary cosmology, the silentium universi, doesn’t exist at all. But it would be totally wrong to reduce the divergence of the two universes to only one parameter, the one mentioned. Science fiction started its escape from the real cosmos even before the question was formulated why the universe remains silent so stubbornly. This flight has by now evolved into a “steady state”; science fiction has encapsuled itself so much against the space of cosmology that it is unwilling to receive any signals; that is to say, any news from the field of science, with the exception of what manages to make the front pages of the newspapers (such as the tale of the black holes). This encapsulement took place when the authors got hold of two fantastic, very convenient inventions: unlimited travel in time, and unlimited travel in space. Thanks to time travel and faster than light the cosmos has acquired such qualities as domesticate it in an exemplary manner for storytelling purposes; but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty. Science fiction doesn’t know of the cosmos of colliding galaxies, the invisible stars sucked in by the curvature of space, the pulsating magnetic fields. Nevertheless, there is in science fiction not a single one of the civilizations of the “third stage” postulated by CETI, the civilizations that are, thanks to their applied science of astral engineering, able to control stellar energies. As far as their content is concerned, most of the civilizations in science fiction correspond to the state predicted for earth in 2000 or 2300, although structurally they have remained arrested instead in the nineteenth century, with their colonizatory tactics of conquest and their strategies of war, whose magnification is due only to the principle of “Big Bertha,” the German supergun that shelled Paris during the First World War. Science fiction has not the slightest idea what could be done with a power of the magnitude of a sun, if it isn’t used exclusively for the destruction of inhabited planets. And in science fiction, cosmic civilizations have no intellectual culture at all, because a future-oriented movement that claims to probe into the farthest future, and makes its home in a realm of naively contaminated, amateurish ideas on “primitive slave societies,” must be held totally lacking in credibility. Science-fiction criticism often talks of a “sense of wonder” that the field is supposed to generate, but upon close examination that “wonder” divulges its close relationship to the tricks of a stage magician. As popular fiction, science fiction must pose artificial problems and offer their easy solution. The astonishing results of contemporary cosmology, which border on paradox, are of no use to science-fiction writers, because they cannot be tucked into the narrow fixed frame of the artificial cosmos.
