ideas, the ideas have to work.
I had the same kind of disquieting feelings many years earlier on reading Verne’s description that weightlessness on a lunar voyage occurred only at the point in space where the Earth’s and the Moon’s gravitational pulls canceled, and in Wells’s invention of the antigravity mineral cavorite: Why should a vein of cavorite still be on Earth? Shouldn’t it have flung itself into space long ago? In Douglas Trumbull’s technically proficient science-fiction film Silent Running, the trees in vast closed spaceborne ecological systems are dying. After weeks of painstaking study and agonizing searches through botany texts, the solution is found: plants, it turns out, need sunlight. Trumbull’s characters are able to build interplanetary cities but have forgotten the inverse square law. I was willing to overlook the portrayal of the rings of Saturn as pastel-colored gases, but not this.
I have the same trouble with Star Trek, which I know has a wide following and which some thoughtful friends tell me I should view allegorically and not literally. But when astronauts from Earth set down on some fardistant planet and find the human beings there in the midst of a conflict between two nuclear superpowers-which call themselves the Yangs and the Coms, or their phonetic equivalents-the suspension of disbelief crumbles. In a global terrestrial society centuries in the future, the ship’s officers are embarrassingly Anglo-American. Only two of twelve or fifteen interstellar vessels are given non-English names, Kongo and Potemkin. (Potemkin and not Aurora?) And the idea of a successful cross between a “Vulcan” and a terrestrial simply ignores what we know of molecular biology. (As I have remarked elsewhere, such a cross is about as likely as the successful mating of a man and a petunia.) According to Harlan Ellison, even such sedate biological novelties as Mr. Spock’s pointy ears and permanently querulous eyebrows were considered by network executives far too daring; such enormous differences between Vulcans and humans would only confuse the audience, they thought, and a move was made to have all physiologically distinguishing Vulcanian features effaced. I have similar problems with films in which familiar creatures, slightly changed-spiders thirty feet tall-are menacing the cities of the Earth: since insects and arachnids breathe by diffusion, such marauders would asphyxiate before they could savage their first city.
I believe that the same thirst for wonder is inside me that was there when I was ten. But I have learned since then a little bit about how the world is really put together. I find that science fiction has led me to science. I find science more subtle, more intricate and more awesome than much of science fiction. Think of some of the scientific findings of the last few decades: that Mars is covered with ancient dry rivers; that apes can learn languages of many hundreds of words, understand abstract concepts and construct new grammatical usages; that there are particles that pass effortlessly through the entire Earth so that we see as many of them coming up through our feet as down from the sky; that in the constellation Cygnus there is a double star, one of whose components has such a high gravitational acceleration that light cannot escape from it: it may be blazing with radiation on the inside but it is invisible from the outside. In the face of all this, many of the standard ideas of science fiction seem to me to pale by comparison. I see the relative absence of these things and the distortions of scientific thinking often encountered in science fiction as terrible wasted opportunities. Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood.
But the best of science fiction remains very good indeed. There are stories so tautly constructed, so rich in accommodating details of an unfamiliar society that they sweep me along before I even have a chance to be critical. Such stories include Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. You can ruminate over the ideas in these books. Heinlein’s asides on the feasibility and social utility of household robots wear exceedingly well over the years. The insights into terrestrial ecology provided by hypothetical extraterrestrial ecologies as in Dune perform, I think, an important social service. He Who Shrank, by Harry Hasse, presents an entrancing cosmological speculation which is being seriously revived today, the idea of an infinite regress of universes-in which each of our elementary particles is a universe one level down, and in which we are an elementary particle in the next universe up.
A rare few science-fiction novels combine extraordinarily well a deep human sensitivity with a standard science-fiction theme. I am thinking, for example, of Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon, and of many of the works of Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon-for example, the latter’s To Here and the Easel, a stunning portrayal of schizophrenia as perceived from the inside, as well as a provocative introduction to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
There was once a subtle science-fiction story by the astronomer Robert S. Richardson on the continuous- creation origin of cosmic rays. Isaac Asimov’s story Breathes There a Man provided a poignant insight into the emotional stress and sense of isolation of some of the best theoretical scientists. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God introduced many Western readers to an intriguing speculation in Oriental religions.
One of the great benefits of science fiction is that it can convey bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader. Heinlein’s And He Built a Crooked House was for many readers probably the first introduction they had ever encountered to four- dimensional geometry that held any promise of being comprehensible. One science-fiction work actually presents the mathematics of Einstein’s last attempt at a unified field theory; another presents an important equation in population genetics. Asimov’s robots were “positronic,” because the positron had recently been discovered. Asimov never provided any explanation of how positrons run robots, but his readers had now heard of positrons. Jack Williamson’s rhodomagnetic robots were run off ruthenium, rhodium and palladium, the next Group VIII metals after iron, nickel and cobalt in the periodic table. An analogue with ferromagnetism was suggested. I suppose that there are science-fiction robots today that are quark-ish or charming and will provide some brief verbal entree into the excitement of contemporary elementary particle physics. L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall is an excellent introduction to Rome at the time of the Gothic invasion, and Asimov’s Foundation series, although this is not explained in the books, offers a very useful summary of some of the dynamics of the far-flung imperial Roman Empire. Time-travel stories-for example, the three remarkable efforts by Heinlein, All You Zombies, By His Bootstraps and The Door into Summer-force the reader into contemplations of the nature of causality and the arrow of time. They are books you ponder over as the water is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods in an early winter snowfall.
Another great value of modern science fiction is some of the art forms it elicits. A fuzzy imagining in the mind’s eye of what the surface of another planet might look like is one thing, but examining a meticulous painting of the same scene by Chesley Bonestell in his prime is quite another. The sense of astronomical wonder is splendidly conveyed by the best of such contemporary artists-Don Davis, Jon Lomberg, Rick Sternbach, Robert McCall. And in the verse of Diane Ackerman can be glimpsed the prospect of a mature astronomical poetry, fully conversant with standard science-fiction themes.
Science-fiction ideas are widespread today in somewhat different guises. We have science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke providing cogent and brilliant summaries in nonfictional form of many aspects of science and society. Some contemporary scientists are introduced to a vaster public by science fiction. For example, in the thoughtful novel The Listeners, by James Gunn, we find the following comment made fifty years from now about my colleague, the astronomer Frank Drake: “Drake! What did he know?” A great deal, it turns out. We also find straight science fiction disguised as fact in a vast proliferation of pseudoscientific writings, belief systems and organizations.
One science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, has founded a successful cult called Scientology-invented, according to one account, overnight on a bet that he could do as well as Freud, invent a religion and make money from it. Classic science-fiction ideas are now institutionalized in unidentified flying objects and ancient-astronaut belief systems-although I have difficulty not concluding that Stanley Weinbaum (in The Valley of Dreams) did it better, as well as earlier, than Erich von Daniken. R. De Witt Miller in Within the Pyramid manages to anticipate both von Daniken and Velikovsky, and to provide a more coherent hypothesis on the supposed extraterrestrial origin of pyramids than can be found in all the writings on ancient astronauts and pyramidology. In Wine of the Dreamers, by John D.
