Science Fiction

Science, Technology, and Speculation

Science fiction and fantasy, as genres, utilize the constraints and opportunities of setting and time in ways that spur readers' interest in a mythical past or the mythical future. Fantasy's near universal circumstancing in medieval European-type worlds is differentiated from other period literature by the existence of fantastical creatures whose properties defy what is scientifically viable in the present and in our historical expectations of the Middle and Dark Ages. On the other hand, science fiction's setting in the future has no historical expectations and is limited in its speculative technologies only by imagination and an author's preference (and perception of reader attitudes) as to whether such technologies can be explained or justified within known theoretical scientific frames. And it is that choice, by the author, that sets apart narrative fiction that can take place on a spaceship or in a castle from fiction that takes place on a spaceship but one whose movement and possibility are accounted for scientifically in the text.

An author's choice to explain the means whereby progressive science might create future technology likely plays a part in the generational interest in mathematics and science and provides a way to explore humanistic scientific consequences. Although adult reality and unforeseen controversy can be harsh obstacles to the youthful dreaming of hovering vehicles, miles of moving sidewalks, and robot-created meals, many of the fictional technologies depicted in classic science fiction, as well as in The Jetsons cartoons and Star Wars films, have close representations in modern society. Added to the similarity between cell phones and Star Trek's communicators, video games' resemblance to Aldous Huxley's “holidays,” or various fictional descriptions of cloning, past science fiction indelibly influences current technology in the form of ideas from past literary conjecture and in the form of technological labels, as Don and Alleen Nilsen identified in comparing 1990s computer terminology to terminology in science fiction texts. The importance of fiction in furthering scientific ideas, even if wildly speculative, is therefore immense. [Page 704]Without those writers who imagine the seemingly impossible (time travel, hyperspace) or frightening (alien invasion, robot takeover, Frankenstein's monster) or liberating (teleporting, climate-controlled clothing), the motivation to enter scientific fields and the modernist ethic to improve human existence might well subside.

Not all science in fiction is speculative, however, and although science fiction is sometimes dismissed as not being serious literature, highly considered fiction frequently, as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, notices technology. Much literature communicates science through a blend of technical and human skill in accomplishing daily tasks or life-long passions. Philip Roth describes the making of a pair of leather gloves as requiring a scientific understanding of leather properties as well as an artist's touch in American Pastoral. Victor Hugo addressed, with scant connection to the narrative, the science of warfare and sewer design in Les Misérables. Architecture, both its science and high art, plays a central role in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Herman Melville whaling descriptions in Moby Dick, images of beekeeping in The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and Ernest Hemingway's sparse but pointed explanation of the calming of a bull by steers prior to bullfighting contests in Pamplona, Spain, in The Sun Also Rises all constitute scientific or technical knowledge put forward through fictional narrative.

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