[Note: the title means what it says. These are a few random thoughts that occurred to me while I was reading yesterday, because there seemed to be a congruence between what I was reading and thoughts about science fiction that have been troubling me for some time. I have not attempted to turn this into a coherent essay, nor do I know whether I will try to do so in future.]
I have been troubled for some time by science fictions that involve god as an active participant in the events of the story. This occurs in books as varied as Forever Free by Joe Haldeman and Mainspring by Jay Lake. In this, I am making no complaint about the appearance of religion in a science fiction novel, since religion is part of the experience of being human. But the idea that a god, a supernatural being, might play a direct and practical role in human affairs seems to me to run counter to something intrinsic in science fiction.
I have the same troubled feeling when I encounter stories that feature a timeless war between the forces of good and evil. It feels out of place in something that presents itself as science fiction.
And yet I have never been able to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes me uneasy about this.
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I have, for a little while now, been reading The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt. It is the story of how the Latin poem, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius, was rediscovered in 1417 by a former papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, and the effect this one work had upon the shaping and course of the Renaissance.
Lucretius’ poem was an expression of the philosophical position first laid out by Epicurus. In the first century BC it described the constitution of the world as being made up of atoms, and from this drew out a consequent moral philosophy that the greatest duty of humankind was the pursuit of pleasure.
These ideas seem to have been fairly marginal in the Roman world, but with the rise of Christianity they were seen as anathema and were deliberately and systematically suppressed. The rediscovery of On the Nature of Things in the fifteenth century came at a time when papal power was being challenged, politically, philosophically and scientifically. Lucretius’ ideas, therefore, fed directly into the scientific thinking that was developing at that point. Greenblatt cites Machiavelli, Bruno and Galileo among those directly influenced by Lucretius, and it is clear that Epicurean atomism lay behind the thinking that would eventually develop atomic theory.
On the Nature of Things can therefore be seen as one of the ancestors of our modern scientific world view.
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In the chapter I was reading yesterday, Greenblatt itemises some, though by no means all, of the ideas expressed by Lucretius that would have been a direct challenge to the Catholic church of Poggio’s time (and indeed, I suspect many of them would still challenge the teachings of the church today). According to this list:
- Everything is made of invisible particles (atoms)
- The elementary particles of matter – ‘the seeds of the things’ – are eternal
- The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size
- All particles are in motion in an infinite void
- The universe has no creator or designer
- Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve (by which we might understand some force like magnetism or gravity)
- The swerve is the source of free will
- Nature ceaselessly experiments
- The universe was not created for or about humans
- Humans are not unique
- Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival
- The soul dies
- There is no afterlife
- Death is nothing to us
- All organized religions are superstitious delusions
- Religions are invariably cruel
- There are no angels, demons or ghosts
- The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain
- The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion
- Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder
Is it just me, or does this list not scream science fiction? Clearly there are ideas here that underlie scientific thinking from Bacon to Darwin, and philosophical thought from Descartes to Wittgenstein. (Greenblatt must surely have had Wittgenstein’s ‘Death is not an event in life’ in mind when he characterised one aspect of Lucretian thought as ‘Death is nothing to us’.) But surely, this world view is also the world view of science fiction?
I am not sure yet how to develop this vague perception.
One thought that occurs to me, for instance, is that the Lucretian world view suggests that morality is a human invention. But works that present an eternal, extra-human war between good and evil suggest that there is an absolute morality, an understanding of what constitutes good and evil that is inherent in the structure of the universe, and is outside of the moral understanding of humankind. Therefore the moral universe is not a human invention, and so is not a part of the Lucretian world.
If the science fiction world view is congruent with the Lucretian world view, then perhaps we are beginning to find a way of distinguishing science fiction from fantasy?
I’m not sure of this, I’m not sure I want to take these thoughts in that direction, but it does hang there temptingly.
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One intriguing aside. Epicurian atomism was quickly established as a part of European intellectual life, but British thinkers and writers seem to have first encountered it when Royalists were in exile during the interregnum of 1649-60. This circle of British amateurs of science included Thomas Hobbes, John Evelyn and Margaret Cavendish. Indeed it seems that Margaret Cavendish was the first writer to introduce Epicurian atomist ideas into England in her Poems and Fancies of 1653, which appeared a year before the pioneering work of William Charleton in 1654.
Atomism would, of course, constitute a core element in Margaret Cavendish’s rather eccentric scientific thinking, and clearly forms part of her science fiction, The Blazing World of 1666. So this is another way in which Lucretian thought frames the development of science fiction.
A quicker, less lucid more rambling thought than yours:
From the summery here, Lucretian thought seems broadly in-line with anti-humanist thinking in that it decenters the importance of human beings in the universe & presents a disenchanted view of the world, but this seems to be counter to what I understand is the normal philosophical stance within science fiction, which understands humankind as having a unique scientific dominion over nature.
I think that if the scientific viewpoint is congruent with the Lucretian then there’s orders of magnitude less science fiction than fantasy. It’s an interesting line of thought to explore, but one that would turn a lot of people who thought they wrote very serious science fiction into people who’d wrote elaborately justified fantasy. Would this, if it had those consequences, be an acceptable definition of science fiction in place of a fuzzier definition, or is this side-effect too severe?
The Campbellian notion of sf insisted that man should emerge the victor in any contest with the non-human, and thus made human skill and ingenuity special. But that doesn’t, I think, constitute a unique scientific dominion over nature.
As to whether this would leave orders of magnitude less science fiction than fantasy. I honestly don’t know whether that would be the result. Certainly more works would be more clearly identified as fantasy, but orders of magnitude?
And whether this would necessarily be a bad thing, I just don’t know. As I said, this is work in progress, a set of ideas that occurred to me but which I have not yet chased down to any sort of conclusion.
For years I’ve said that what distinguishes science fiction from fantasy is that the former depicts a universe consistent with the scientific worldview: a mechanistic universe whose workings can be understood through the scientific method. This seems to me a far more useful diagnostic than the “possible vs impossible” distinctions that have been commonly applied.
I always felt that there were problems in equating sf with a scientific worldview, and yet I can’t quite get away from the idea. It seems to delineate some underlying assumptions within the genre better than anything else I know.
I don’t claim it’s perfect, although I’d be curious to hear what specific problems you have in mind.
I also think it explains why SF is, for the most part, a modern phenomenon. Fantastical stories of various stripes have existed for much of human history, but fantastical stories consistent with a scientific worldview weren’t common until the scientific worldview was widely held.
Ted, my problem is the same problem I have with every attempted definition of science fiction: there are always individual works that you want to identify as sf but which don’t quite match the paradigm. But, as you say, the scientific worldview does at least establish sf as a modern phenomenon.
Coming in late, the other interest of Campbell was ESP etc. I see a line from the Society for Psychic Research onwards of scientific evaluation and thought ie naturalisation of the supernatural. _Star Maker_, _Jack of Eagles_, _Immortality Incorporated_, and Q in Star Trek etc are all science fictional in attitude. And there are “scientific moral realists” floating around too eg S Harris.
Just because something is labelled fantasy doesn’t mean it is any less scientifically accurate then a Sci-Fi Novel. Agreed lots are but it’s not a way of labelling them, someone jumping in their space ship and going through a warp tunnel, or using their FLT Drive is not really scientifically sound in comparison.
Steph, it’s not a question of scientific accuracy. I’ve said before that scientific content is no way of judging whether a book is or is not science fiction. But I think it is something to do with the scientific worldview, the underlying sense that the universe is solvable through logic rather than through the magical or supernatural. Because, yes, there are many excellent fantasies that have a rigorous approach to magic, and there are many science fictions that have only the most tenuous relationship to any science that might actually make sense.
What about Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories? The universe is solvable through logic and the scientific method – only they’re consistently applied to magical and supernatural phenomena. Even in the real world, magic has always been understood by its practitioners as a form of science – with its own laws, rules and correspondences. If we accept a universe in which magic is real (which can always been reframed as a parallel universe/dimension with different physical laws- and a few authors, like Pratchett, have done it, having their cake and eating it), its study becomes a science by default.
Ah, yes. This takes us into interesting areas, so thank you. I hope you don’t mind if I think aloud, as it were, as I work through this.
Yes, there are stories that present as fantasy (they employ the tropes we normally expect of the genre) but are perhaps best read as science fiction. Just as, to quote Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. So there are stories that present as science fiction but are best read as fantasy. And, of course, there are stories that ‘bi-present’, as it were; stories like Asimov’s Caves of Steel that employ the tropes of science fiction and the tropes of crime fiction.
I’m sort of torn here. Part of me thinks that we identify genre by how the story presents itself, by which tropes it puts on for the world. But another part of me thinks that what is important is not what the tropes are, but how we read them.
Yet in the end I don’t want to define science fiction. I don’t think that is possible, and I’m not sure that it would serve any purpose. There are inevitably stories in which genres overlap. These are generally the works that I find most interesting, but they are clearly the works that play most havoc with any attempt at definition. Actually, when we simply read a story, I’m not sure that which side of the line we choose to place it would have that much effect on the act of reading. It is afterwards, when we think and talk and write about it that such matters come into play. And at that point, whether we choose to put the story in genre a or genre b isn’t a matter that affects the story per se, but is a question rather of which generic approach is best suited to the things we want to say or write about the story.
This is getting complicated. Let me try and run through it again for my own clarification. Take, as an example, Jo Walton’s novel Lifelode (which I happen to rate rather highly). It presents itself as fantasy, that is, it employs the standard fantasy trope of magic. But there is an underlying structure to the story (drawn from Vernor Vinge’s zones of thought) that provides a science fictional feel to the piece. Now when I read the book I am simply reading a story in which all of these things (and very much more) come into play. It is only in aftermath, when I want to talk or write about the novel, that the question arises of how I might approach it. And here, I might choose to approach the book as fantasy in order to explore or point up certain aspects of the work; or I might choose to approach it as science fiction in order to bring out a different aspect. The generic identity, in other words, lies in what best suits my retrospective analysis of the work.
Hmm, this requires further thought.
[...] it was so antithetical to Christian thinking. I gave a summary of what was so radical about it here. In brief, Epicurus and his followers believed that the universe was made up of an infinite number [...]