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Quarks to Quasars:The Science of Science Fiction

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Why Science Fiction?

Written by Ben Bova

You know you’re getting old when you’re tempted to start an article with, “Back in the old days.” But here goes anyway.

Back in the old days, science fiction was a genre that contained stories that dealt with science. Oh, sure, there were fantasy tales out there, too, and the two genres were usually lumped together under the “science fiction and fantasy” rubric.

In today’s publishing world, science fiction is a tremendously wide category that includes “hard” science fiction, softer stuff, fantasy, distopian visions of the future, horror, and almost any kind of story that isn’t firmly set in the here-and-now.

But I want to talk about science fiction. The kind of stories that I enjoy reading. The kind of stories that I write.

So I’ll define what I mean when I say “science fiction”: Science fiction stories are those in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that if you remove that element, the story falls apart.

Think of one of the earliest science fiction stories, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Take away the scientific element and all you’ve got left is a brooding German medical student.

That’s what I mean when I say “science fiction.” Not fantasy, not distopian forebodings, not monsters or actors in heavy makeup pretending to be aliens. Science fiction. The hard stuff.

Like most science fiction lovers, I first got turned on to the field when I was a preteen. In fact, a good definition of “the golden age of science fiction” is “about the age of thirteen.”

I was a little precocious. I was about eleven years old, growing up in the narrow streets and row houses of South Philadelphia. (Think Rocky.) Our class was hauled out on a mandatory school trip to Philadelphia’s excellent science museum, the Franklin Institute. (In Philadelphia almost everything is named after either Benjamin Franklin or William Penn.) Attached to the museum was the Fels Planetarium (named after the man who made a fortune selling Fels Naptha soap).

They sat us in this strange, round room with a dome above and a big black machine in the middle that looked like a giant ant. They turned off all the lights. They turned on the stars. And that turned me on. I fell in love with astronomy at that moment.

This was in the early 1940s. In those days there were visionaries who dreamed of someday flying rockets to the Moon and Mars and beyond. I became fascinated with rocketry and astronautics.

Then I found that there were stories, wonderful exciting tales, about what it would be like to live in the future and fly into space.

I had discovered science fiction. I’ve devoted my life to reading it, writing it, even (for a while) editing it. I’ve also helped, in a small way, to make some of it come true.

Why this fascination with science fiction? To me, science fiction deals with the real world, more than any other branch of contemporary literature. To those who think of science fiction as escapism I offer Isaac Asimov’s dictum: “Science fiction is escape—into reality.”

Because it deals with science and the technologies that spring from scientific research, science fiction has the capability of dealing with the most powerful driving engines of modern society: science and technology.

Other forms of literature either ignore science and technology or show an active distrust of them. The subject matter of science fiction is the realm of scientific advances and technological breakthroughs that change the lives of individuals and the course of whole societies.

How does this make science fiction different from other fields of literature? Is science fiction inherently better, more worthwhile, than other kinds of fiction? Or does this preoccupation with science and technology doom science fiction to an inherent inferiority vis-à-vis other forms of literature?

I think there are two major differences between science fiction and other forms of literature.

The first difference, of course, is the subject matter. To the uninitiated, it might seem that focusing on science or technology would be terribly limiting for an author of fiction. Yet just the opposite is true. For science is an open door to the universe, and technology can be the magic carpet to take us anywhere we wish. Properly used, science and technology are the great liberators that allow the writer’s imagination to roam the length and breadth of eternity.

Human beings are explorers by nature. The descendants of curious apes, we have something in us that thrills at new vistas, new ideas. By using scientific knowledge to build the backgrounds for their stories, science-fiction writers can take us to places no human eye has seen. The excitement of discovery, what science-fiction aficionados call “the sense of wonder,” is both primal and primary in science fiction.

John W. Campbell Jr., the most influential of all science-fiction editors, fondly compared science fiction to all other forms of literature in this way: He would spread his arms wide (and he had long arms) and declaim, “This is science fiction! All the universe, past, present and future.” Then he would hold his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart and say, “This is all other kinds of fiction.”

All the other kinds of fiction restrict themselves to the here and now, or to the known past. All other forms of fiction are set on Earth, under a sky that is blue and on ground that is solid beneath the characters’ feet. Science fiction can deal with all of creation, of which our Earth and our time is merely a small slice. Science fiction can vault far into the future or deep into the past. In my own work I have written stories of interstellar adventure and of time-travelers who go back to the age of dinosaurs.

Is this mere tinsel, nothing more than cheap stage props to make a dull story seem more interesting? I don’t think so. The best works of fiction—any kind of fiction—are those in which the human heart is tested to its limits. By stretching the artist’s canvas from one end of the universe to the other, by spreading it through all of time itself, science fiction allows the artist to test the human spirit in crucibles of new and tougher make, in fires hotter than anything planet Earth can provide.

Yes, at the core of every good science-fiction tale is a story of human emotion, just as in any good story of any genre. In science fiction, though, the characters may not always look human; they may be tentacled alien creatures or buzzing, clanking robots. Yet they will act as humans do, if the story is to be successful.

The second difference between science fiction and other forms of fiction lies in science fiction’s relationship to the real world around us. While pretending to amuse us with stories set in the future, the best science-fiction stories are really examining facets of the world that we live in today. I don’t believe anyone actually writes about the future; writers use futuristic settings to throw stronger light on the problems and opportunities of today.

My basic assumptions are: (1) science and technology are the driving forces in modern society; and (2) because science fiction deals with science and technology it can—and often does—have something important to tell its readers.

More than that. In the best of science-fiction stories the scientific element can be used as a metaphor that reaches into the heart of the human condition.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, for example, the desert world of Arrakis is carefully presented as a metaphor for the environment of Earth. At one level of this complex novel Herbert is telling his readers, subliminally, not only that human actions can change the nature of an entire planet, but that these changes will have effects that will be both good and bad, simultaneously, inescapably.

Robert A. Heinlein touched on this truth in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. His phrase TANSTAAFL, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” is actually a slang restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can’t get something for nothing; never, no time. The universe simply isn’t built that way, and we human beings are part of the universe, like it or not.

Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey speaks to humankind’s relationship with its tools, and asks whether our increasingly sophisticated technology is making us more human or less.

Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” takes a sociological observation—poor people have more babies than rich people—and extrapolates it into a ghastly future that becomes truer with each passing generation.

I can give a more detailed explanation of how deeply science and technology is used by referring to one of my own works, The Kinsman Saga.

The central science/technology idea in this novel is the possibility that defenses against ballistic missiles can be developed—and that such defenses will dramatically alter world politics.

In the 1960s I was employed at a research laboratory where the high-power laser was invented. I helped to arrange a top-secret briefing in the Pentagon in February 1966 to reveal to the Department of Defense that such lasers now existed. It quickly became apparent that lasers capable of megawatt-plus power levels could shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles within minutes of their being launched.

I had been a published science-fiction author for nearly ten years. I cast this very real technological breakthrough into a novel set in the year 1999. First published in 1976, the novel’s title was Millenium. Later it was put together with a “prequel” under the title The Kinsman Saga.

The novel’s central figure is an American astronaut who realizes that if the small band of Russians and Americans living on the Moon dared to take control of their respective nations’ antimissile systems, they could end the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Russia.

Science as metaphor. By creating a fictitious but technically plausible Moonbase, I was able to place the pivotal characters in isolation, away from the world yet in daily communication with it. In the dangerously hostile lunar environment, both the Americans and the Russians can clearly see the need the need to cooperate rather than fight. By postulating a technological means of enforcing peace the novel was able to emphasize the central political problem of our age: national governments do not want to give up their sovereign right to make war. And more. The novel shows that the tools for war can be also be used as tools for peace. The tools are morally neutral. The people who use them are not.

The story hinges on the personality of the American astronaut, Chester A. Kinsman. Like many other science-fiction protagonists, Kinsman becomes a messiah figure, with all that that entails.

In the mid-1970s such a story was science fiction. As the years unfolded, though, the United States did begin to develop missile defenses. The mere possibility of such a breakthrough helped to destroy the Soviet Union and end the forty-year-long nuclear stalemate of the Cold War.

Which brings us to another question: Do science-fiction writers try to predict the future? And, whether they do or not, should their stories be taken as serious social commentary?

No, to the first question. Yes (with reservations) to the second.

I don’t know of any science-fiction writer who deliberately sets out to predict the future. Most of us, I’m sure, don’t believe that there is the future for us to predict. The future isn’t immutable, preordained. It is created, moment by moment, by what we do now—and what we fail to do.

What science-fiction writers are trying to do is to examine the possibilities that might unfold in the future, given a particular set of starting conditions. What would happen if it became possible to shoot down ballistic missiles? What would happen if intelligent aliens sent us unmistakable evidence of their existence? What would happen if an abrupt shift of the global climate flooded coastal cities and collapsed the electrical power grid?

There are thousands of science-fiction stories that deal with such possibilities. They offer a sort of kaleidoscopic view of many, many possible futures. Most of these scenarios will never come to pass. But those that do will have already been examined in science fiction.

That is why Alvin Toffler recommended science fiction as an antidote to “future shock.” All the major thrusts of recent history—world wars, nuclear power, biomedical advances, civil rights, space flight, the computer revolution(s), and more—have been examined in some detail in science fiction decades before they reached the awareness of the general public.

Science fiction is the literature of change. That’s why it is important, because change is the one constant of our lives.

This is not to say that all of science fiction is elegantly written, or even that all of it is worth the time it takes to read. Long ago, Theodore Sturgeon coined what is now known as Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of science fiction is crap. But then, ninety percent of everything is crap.”

Yet that good ten percent of science fiction is as good as contemporary writing gets. And the subject matter is exciting, exalting, mind-expanding. The relationship to here and now is strong and very real. Don’t let the alien settings and futuristic backgrounds fool you; most of those stories deal with ideas and problems that will change your life, for better or worse.

One final point: Like science itself, science fiction is fundamentally an optimistic field. Scientists believe that the human mind can understand the workings of the universe. And what we can understand we can eventually control and shape to our own ends. Science fiction shares that optimistic faith.

That’s what makes it so important. That’s what makes it so much fun.

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Ben Bova is the author of more than 120 books of science fiction and fact. He is a former president of Science Fiction Writers of American, President Emeritus of the National Space Society, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.