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Rubber Sciences

Written by Norman Spinrad

Science fiction and politics are, in theory, arts of the possible, just as fantasy and religion are arts of the impossible. In actual practice, however, politics usually turns out to be the art of the all-too-probable, whereas science fiction usually turns out not to give much of a damn about probability at all. In fact, a case could be made that the more improbable science fiction is, the better it is as science fiction. Until it crosses the line between improbability and impossibility and becomes fantasy.

This, then, will be a chapter about precisely that murky area between “hard science fiction” and “hard fantasy” in which most science fiction writers work most of the time.

Indeed, it’s rather difficult to come up with a definition of “hard science fiction” that doesn’t end up being somewhat self-contradictory. “Hard scientific content” in science fiction is usually defined (at those rare moments when anybody bothers to define it at all) as known scientific fact. “Hard science fiction,” then, is science fiction written around known scientific facts or at least not-unproven theories generated by “real” scientists. But is it? All fiction is lies—if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage. Science fiction or speculative fiction is a form in which at least one element of the reality in which the imaginary characters move is also imaginary. Not impossible but not a fixture in the universe of the writer and reader either. The speculative element, it’s usually called. Where does that leave “hard science fiction”? If there is no speculative element, it isn’t science fiction; and if there is a speculative element in the so-called scientific background, we’re then into measuring “degree of hardness” on some kind of technological peter-meter.

Larry Niven, for example, is generally considered a writer of “hard science fiction.” J. G. Ballard is not. Niven’s stories are full of two-headed aliens, telepathic powers, various flavors of time-travel, galactic cataclysms, hyper-drives, tractor beams, and so forth. Most of Ballard’s novels have been rather tight extrapolations of a world drastically altered by one reasonably plausible meteorological change, and even his later more stylistically dense works don’t ask the reader to swallow very many scientific improbabilities whole. Hal Clement’s alien creatures are part of the hard science fiction canon, but Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople are not. Aficionados of hard science fiction accept Poul Anderson’s medieval space cultures without a murmur but eschew the future worlds of Mack Reynolds which are worked out with a much more sophisticated and rigorous knowledge of economics and politics.

On the other hand, it’s easy enough to recognize the diametric opposite of hard science fiction—full-bore space opera, which is really straight fantasy in science fiction drag. Jockstrap-clad superheroes swinging their swords through hyperspacial extensions of time-probability worlds while planets ricochet off the cushions of the cosmic pool table in three-corner bank shots from the übercues of beings from the 27^th dimension with a perverted lust for brass-bound boobs and human pain, opposed only by our blaster-armed hero, his positronic robot horse Trigger, and the Galactic Overmind, who in reality is Lamont Cranston, playboy energy creature from the center of the sun. We’ve all read that one, and too many of us have written it as well.

But somewhere between the Scylla of Jungian archetype opera and the Charybdis of the kind of rigid Gernsbackian “scientifiction” that is hardly written anymore lies the great main current of science fiction. Including, I would submit, most of what is called “hard science fiction.”

Indeed, if there is any meaningful definition of hard science fiction at all, it is that science fiction which convinces the reader that its scientific content is as sound, metallic, and conservative as a Swiss franc. It’s really a matter of technique more than content, a technique explored elsewhere in this book.

Here we will discuss other techniques for achieving the same basic end: an illusion of verisimilitude around imaginary content. Isn’t that what science fiction is all about?

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Having to some extent pooh-poohed the possibility of writing real science fiction based on real scientific fact, I should hasten to point out that scientific illiteracy is by no means a prime qualification for a science fiction writer. In fact, the kind of science fiction I’m going to talk about probably requires a firmer grounding in the Weltanschauung, philosophy, history, and psychology of science and technology than what is usually called hard science fiction.

After all, a reasonably intelligent writer can read a piece in Time about quasars, black holes, organ transplants, or the latest model space capsule and write a story with this material as trappings or setting. No different from reading a good book about the American West or Timbuktu and setting a story there.

But when you really head for the wild blue yonder there are no road maps or almanacs to crib from. When you get down to essences, descriptive knowledge is not enough—you must really understand. And that, of course, is a deeply scientific attitude in itself.

When you’re writing about tomorrow’s technology, it’s enough to be accurate, to more or less faithfully describe the gizmos, theories, and discoveries that scientists and engineers are speculating about in their own magazines and bull-sessions. But when you’re writing about scientific discoveries, technological innovations, scientific theories or even whole new sciences that you’ve made up yourself, you can’t rely on accuracy to give the reader a sense of verisimilitude. There’s nothing anywhere in the reader’s world or your own for you to describe accurately.

Instead, you must be plausible, which is a bem of a different color.

To give an example of what I’m herein calling “Rubber Science” as opposed to straightforward pseudoscientific doubletalk, let us consider the granddaddy of them all, FTL, hyperspace, overdrive, spaceships exceeding the speed of light.

As we all know (we do all know, don’t we?), in our current Einsteinian picture of the universe, a mass traveling at the speed of light becomes infinite, and it would therefore take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate it to that speed and a transfinite amount of energy to accelerate it beyond that speed. Which is why faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible within Einsteinian parameters.

Which may be tidy for cosmologists and astrophysicists but which is a pain in the neck to science fiction writers. The literary necessity for faster-than-light travel is all too obvious. Without it, we could have no stories of galactic empires, not much anthropological science fiction, few pictures of alien cultures or outré planets, a dearth of first-contact stories—in short, science fiction writers would be pretty much confined to our own solar system. Of course many fine stories have been written about just this light-speed limitation problem, but science fiction is the literature of multiplex realities, and to confine it within a strict relativistic straitjacket would simply be literarily unacceptable.

Thus hyperspace. Or overdrive. Or whatever it takes to get our literary spaceships from star to star in literarily usable time. Given FTL as a story necessity, the question then becomes how do you get the reader to accept it smoothly, how do you make what is currently a scientific impossibility seem plausible?

One obvious and frequently successful method is simply to ignore the problem. “He switched on the hyperdrive and five minutes later they arrived at Epsilon Bootes.” After all, if you’re writing a story set in the present, you can have your hero drive from Hollywood to Pasadena without pausing to explain the internal-combustion engine.

However, if you choose this method, you must really be consistent. If you’re not going to offer an explanation of hyperdrive, then you’d better not explain any other futuristic technology in your story, because what you’re really doing is writing from the viewpoint of the people in your future time. And you’d better not have any element of your plot dependent on the hyperdrive. “He switched on the hyperdrive and five minutes later they arrived at Epsilon Bootes, beating out the space pirates by a good twelve parsecs due to the superior juxtaposition of their frammis-wrap to the space-time matrix” is dirty pool.

Also, even if you’re not explaining your hyperdrive, you still have to make the rest of your universe consistent with known scientific facts unless you want to point a big red finger to the fact that you’re not explaining it because you’re an ignoramus. Further, even an unexplained hyperdrive must operate according to at least internally self-consistent rules. It can go from anywhere to anywhere in five minutes, or it can propel a ship at a hundred times the speed of light, but not both interchangeably. The point is that you want the hyperdrive to seem scientifically plausible whether you attempt to explain how it works or not, which means that the logic of its operation must seem reasonable, must feel scientifically correct. Internal consistency is a necessity no matter how much or how little you choose to explain. Rule One of the Rubber Sciences.

Of course it’s more of a challenge to try to actually explain your hyperdrive. Moreover, if you do explain the thing consistently and establish its parameters at the outset, you can use its workings and properties for later plot points. If, for example, you establish that a larger mass moves faster in hyperdrive than a smaller one, you can have your hero’s ship beat the space pirates to Epsilon Bootes by dragging a small asteroid into hyperspace with it. But this property of hyperdrive must have been established long before it is used, otherwise it becomes the equivalent of “With a superhuman effort, he leapt out of the pit.” Rule Two of the Rubber Sciences: any pseudoscientific fact or principle that is going to be used for plot purposes must be planted in the reader’s mind near the beginning of the story and long before it surfaces as a plot element.

Okay, so rather than gloss it over, you’re going to invent a hyperdrive. Right away you are faced with a fundamental choice. Current best scientific knowledge says that faster-than-light travel is impossible, so you must either come up with a “bugger factor” in Einsteinian relativity, or forthrightly state that by the 25^th Century Glockenspiel proved that Einstein was wrong.

I wrote a story called “Outward Bound” using the first method, and it worked well enough at least to convince John W. Campbell, Jr. Here I accepted Einsteinian relativity and had a theoretical mathematician talk about “transfinite substitutions in Einstein’s equations.

“… if you accept the Special Theory of Relativity, the reason that the speed of light cannot be exceeded is that mass is infinite at the speed of light, hence it would take an infinite force to accelerate it to that speed.

“But, if there were a drive whose thrust was a function of the mass it was accelerating, then, as mass increased, thrust would increase, and at the speed of light, theoretically, where mass was infinite, thrust would also be infinite. And if the thrust-mass equation involved a suitable exponential function … thrust could become transfinite.

“Making it possible to go faster than light!”

What kind of drive has a thrust which is an exponential function of the mass it is accelerating? Are you kidding? If I knew that one, I’d be writing my Nobel acceptance speech, not this chapter.

Rule Three of the Rubber Sciences: you are not Albert Einstein—know when to stop explaining.

Here I have pointed to a possible hole in relativity through which an FTL ship might sneak, but I have not succumbed to the hubris of trying seriously to design the actual hyperdrive. I’ve contented myself with establishing a theoretical basis for the thing in something like the Einsteinian universe, so that later on the artifact will seem plausible. The same principle applies to tachyon drives, black hole gates between the stars, and other “bugger factors” in relativity. If you think you can explain the whole thing from bugger factor to actual hardware, you may find yourself in a funny farm having long conversations about it with Napoleon.

Then there is the alternative: simply postulating a future cosmological viewpoint that supersedes Einsteinian relativity. Simple? Yes and no. Einstein, after all, didn’t knock Newton into a cocked hat; he created a new cosmological paradigm of which Newtonian physics was a still-valid special case. That’s the way sciences seem to evolve, at least at this late date. You can’t simply state that in 2394 A.D. Glockenspiel showed that magic in fact worked and that in the 25^th Century faster-than-light starships zip through the ether on ectoplasm. If you want a new cosmological paradigm, you must construct it along lines consistent with the way sciences evolve. The chance that 20^th-Century physics will later be shown to have been a complete crock is nil. You have to try something like the notion that our four-space universe is really a bubble in five-space, or that black holes are hyperspacial tunnels between points in our own continuum, or that objective time can somehow to contracted as well as subjective—paradigms that contain Einsteinian relativity but transcend it, rather than contending that it’s all pure baloney.

Rule Four of the Rubber Sciences: when creating a new science or a new master-theory for an established science, pay attention to how sciences evolve; don’t just wave your magic wand and produce magic with scientific mumbo-jumbo trappings.

I’ve spent all this time on faster-than-light drives because they are surely the most pervasive example of Rubber Science in science fiction and because they most easily and clearly illustrate many of the basic rules. But FTL, most often, is an example of first-order Rubber Science: something you create for plot or setting purposes. Beyond lies a higher order of Rubber Science—scientific speculation about the nature of the universe, life, culture, and the mind of man.

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No doubt the best example of a “science fiction science” that we have is one that strictly speaking was never a fictional science at all: Scientology. But since Scientology is the creation of L. Ron Hubbard, a full-time science fiction writer at the time he created it, since the history of the Scientology movement reads like a science fiction novel, and since Scientology so beautifully illustrates so many of the principles of Rubber Science creation, it’s still worthwhile to consider it for a moment.

Basically, Scientology is a kind of crossbreed of simple Freudian psychology with even simpler computer theory. “Traumas” become “engrams” and “neuroses” become “engram chains.” Instead of “complete abreaction” as the ultimate goal, we have the “state of clear,” in which all engrams have been cleared from the mind, much as old programs are cleared from a computer. Instead of a patient free-associating or relating his dreams on a couch to an “analyst,” we have an “auditor” running a “clearing program” and the patient clutching the handles of an “E-meter.” The E-meter, or Engram-meter (actually a simple skin galvanometer, a piece of a lie detector), supposedly tells the auditor when his question has hit an “engram.” He then bores in until the E-meter shows him that the engram has been “cleared” or eliminated and continues to run his program until all such engrams are cleared.

For the purposes of this chapter, the question of whether or not Scientology actually works in the real world is irrelevant. The point is that it would surely work beautifully in a story. It has plausibility, and it does raise some interesting speculations on the workings of the human mind.

From whence this plausibility? For one thing, Scientology is based on two existing sciences, psychoanalysis and computer theory. The new Rubber Science is created by interfacing two existing sciences which had not been cross-disciplined before. This gives it some genuine content, which not only creates plausibility but even raises true validity as a genuine askable question.

Isaac Asimov did much the same thing when he created “psychohistory” for his Foundation series; here the interfaced sciences were history and statistics. Various writers have done it with “psionics,” most often by interfacing psychic research with brain physiology and/or bioelectronics. I myself have done it with pharmacology and various psychological sciences and produced things like “psychedelic pediatrics” and “psychedelic design.” I’ve also (in a nonfiction piece) interfaced pharmacology, brain physiology, systems analysis, psychology, holography, and a handful of other existing disciplines and created “psychesomics,” the science of the mind-matter interface itself.

Rule Five of the Rubber Sciences: interfacing two or more existing sciences will generate a plausible (if not necessarily valid) new science.

Another lesson in Rubber Science plausibility that can be gleaned from Scientology is the use of terminology, or, if you will, jargon. Fiction, after all, is word magic, and a well-crafted system of magic words in itself has a certain intrinsic reality, as witness law, religion, philosophy, criticism, and advertising. Too often, the coined words in science fiction stories exist in isolation, both from the actual Rubber Science material to which they refer and each other. In Scientology we can see how it should be done. Words like “engram,” “clear,” and “auditor” all have both specific meaning pertaining to specific elements of the pseudo-science and metaphorical overtones relating the word system to the general body of human knowledge. They can be put together or qualified in ways that extend their meanings in a reasonably self-evident manner. Once “engram” is explained, “engram-chain” has real meaning; once the state of “clear” is explained, “clearing program” becomes self-explanatory. The terminology holds together as a system, which lends plausibility to the Rubber Science as a system.

How much more solid Scientology seems than fuzzy Van Vogtian psionics or even Asimovian robotics! One can discuss it beyond the bounds of Hubbard’s books and in Hubbard’s own terminology. Some psychotherapists have even picked up “engram” and apply the concept to other psychological systems. Rule Six of the Rubber Sciences: systematize your terminology and relate it to the rest of human knowledge by choosing some of the words for their metaphorical resonance in the reader’s mind.

Finally, notice how Hubbard has given plausibility to a “soft” Rubber Science by inventing a piece of hardware, the E-meter, which