Pseudoscience-fiction
May. 21st, 2008 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersLast night I reread Michael Levy's introduction to the Wesleyan edition of A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (1919). Amongst other things, Levy writes at length about the ideas Merritt borrowed from Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists. As I've written elsewhere, it appears that Edgar Rice Burroughs may also have borrowed a few ideas from Theosophy in the world-building of Barsoom. I was reminded again by Levy's essay how closely science fiction has been related to the occult and -- a somewhat different category -- the crackpot all along. In fact, you could say that science fiction has been a great refuge for the crank and the autodidact who has problems with one or another aspect of consensus reality, or who simply has very strong and eccentric ideas about the true nature of the world.
Levy gets at a fascinating aspect of this in a passage about Merritt's mixed attitude toward science in The Moon Pool:
I've joked before that science fiction is best defined as stories involving fictional science, and I'm not sure the joke is far off the mark. There are of course other branches of science fiction -- often called hard SF -- that attempt, in Greg Benford's phrase, to play with the net up -- that is, to avoid contradicting known science. But even there, one has a lot of room to essentially make shit up, not to mention that the patron saint of hard SF, John W. Campbell, was notoriously susceptible to belief in pseudosciences such as psi powers and Dianetics and crank inventions such as the Dean Drive. From another angle, hard SF writers like Benford and Arthur C. Clarke often evoke a mystical reverence for the universe, as in Benford's In theOceanic Feeling Ocean of the Night. The sense of wonder itself has an occult or mystical aspect to it.
Leigh Brackett is pretty upfront about all this in an interesting essay she wrote about the science fiction field for Writer's Digest in 1944. She begins with a defense of the field in comparison to other genre fiction: "Anyone who has taken the trouble to read a good science-fiction yarn, and read it honestly, knows that the field is no more worthy of contempt than the detective, adventure, western, or any other -- in fact, less, since pseudo-science books lure very bright brains indeed, and names with strings of degrees flying like tails on so many kites." Here I'm reminded that pseudoscience-fiction was an early name for the field -- although only one amongst many -- in the Teens and Twenties, before science fiction was settled on. Interesting to see it still cropping up this much later, although then again she also uses the abbreviation "stf" to refer to the field -- short for "scientifiction". She goes on, in this piece aimed at young writers considering the market, to explain what the "science" in science fiction really entails:
What's the trick? After covering the conventional wisdom that one must not contravene known science, she gets to the punchline:
This takes me afield from where I started out, which was a consideration of science fiction's affinity with pseudo-science, but perhaps not too far afield. There has always been a tension in the genre between those who wish to unleash their imaginations using half-understood science to tear down old orthodoxies and those who want to train the imagination with real scientific concepts. There seems to be something built into the what-if approach to story-telling that attracts those who think in unorthodox ways about the world. Nothing is taken as certain, everything is seen to be subject to change and evolution, the world is malleable, and therefore all manner of ideas and thought experiments are encouraged, whether scientific or not.
Well, no conclusions here, just some unfocused thoughts raised by recent reading. There's something in all this, too, about how the science in science fiction doesn't have to be real, it just has to be sciency. Science as talisman, rather than practice or theory. I can't remember who it was that argued that science is like religion in that it's ultimately about phenomena that can't be observed with the naked eye. There's little doubt that science fills the niche of religion in the belief system of many a person who has rejected the Church.
Levy gets at a fascinating aspect of this in a passage about Merritt's mixed attitude toward science in The Moon Pool:
The Moon Pool contains numerous references to a wide range of what were recent scientific theories -- among the well-known scientists whose names appear in the book are Becquerel, Beebe, the already mentioned Arrhenius, Eddington, and others -- yet Merritt, as often as not, misuses the scientific theories he invokes. Even more to the point, he tends, like Blavatsky, to conflate serious science with the occult. His narrator, Walter Goodwin, supposedly a world-famous botanist, serves as the voice of reason in the novel. One of his functions, shared with the villainous communist Marakinoff, is to offer both the less well-educated characters and, of course, Merritt's readers a series of scientific (or in fact pseudoscientific) explanations for the wonders of Muria. Sometimes Goodwin's explanations serve to "desupernaturalize" what appear to be occult manifestations. When faced with the marvelous, both he and Marakinoff tend to explain it away through a reference to relativity, x-rays, or some other scientific theory which Merritt may or may not truly understand. Looking at the other side of the coin, however, what Merritt is essentially doing in the novel is accepting many of the theories of occultists like Blavatsky but giving them a pseudoscientific rationale.
I've joked before that science fiction is best defined as stories involving fictional science, and I'm not sure the joke is far off the mark. There are of course other branches of science fiction -- often called hard SF -- that attempt, in Greg Benford's phrase, to play with the net up -- that is, to avoid contradicting known science. But even there, one has a lot of room to essentially make shit up, not to mention that the patron saint of hard SF, John W. Campbell, was notoriously susceptible to belief in pseudosciences such as psi powers and Dianetics and crank inventions such as the Dean Drive. From another angle, hard SF writers like Benford and Arthur C. Clarke often evoke a mystical reverence for the universe, as in Benford's In the
Leigh Brackett is pretty upfront about all this in an interesting essay she wrote about the science fiction field for Writer's Digest in 1944. She begins with a defense of the field in comparison to other genre fiction: "Anyone who has taken the trouble to read a good science-fiction yarn, and read it honestly, knows that the field is no more worthy of contempt than the detective, adventure, western, or any other -- in fact, less, since pseudo-science books lure very bright brains indeed, and names with strings of degrees flying like tails on so many kites." Here I'm reminded that pseudoscience-fiction was an early name for the field -- although only one amongst many -- in the Teens and Twenties, before science fiction was settled on. Interesting to see it still cropping up this much later, although then again she also uses the abbreviation "stf" to refer to the field -- short for "scientifiction". She goes on, in this piece aimed at young writers considering the market, to explain what the "science" in science fiction really entails:
Perhaps you like stf and want to write it, but are scared off by that word "science." You're no PhD, and aren't likely to be, and you are thrown into a panic of inferiority by casual references to discontinuous functions in a four-dimensional space-time grid. Well, brother, you'd be surprised how many top-notch stf writers don't know any more about it than you do. That same terror of ignorance held me off, too, although I was crazy to write the stuff, until a certain young man who was already big-time material in the game confided in me that all the science he knew could be put into a quart bottle and still leave room for a fifth of Scotch. Then I began to perceive that there's a trick to it.
What's the trick? After covering the conventional wisdom that one must not contravene known science, she gets to the punchline:
There's a wide range of material in stf, from the frankly juvenile on up. And the readers, barring a few heavy-science fanatics, look for the same things you look for when you read -- entertainment, release, an emotional punch, a stimulus to the imagination. If you can give them that, let the four-dimensional space-time grids go hang. Most of us fans skip that part anyhow, so we can get on with the story.
This takes me afield from where I started out, which was a consideration of science fiction's affinity with pseudo-science, but perhaps not too far afield. There has always been a tension in the genre between those who wish to unleash their imaginations using half-understood science to tear down old orthodoxies and those who want to train the imagination with real scientific concepts. There seems to be something built into the what-if approach to story-telling that attracts those who think in unorthodox ways about the world. Nothing is taken as certain, everything is seen to be subject to change and evolution, the world is malleable, and therefore all manner of ideas and thought experiments are encouraged, whether scientific or not.
Well, no conclusions here, just some unfocused thoughts raised by recent reading. There's something in all this, too, about how the science in science fiction doesn't have to be real, it just has to be sciency. Science as talisman, rather than practice or theory. I can't remember who it was that argued that science is like religion in that it's ultimately about phenomena that can't be observed with the naked eye. There's little doubt that science fills the niche of religion in the belief system of many a person who has rejected the Church.
