Science & Fiction
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay What is science fiction and what can the genre give us that other genres cannot? This, of course, is to assume that science fiction is a ‘genre’ – something that has been identified, labelled and samples put in a glass jar alongside many other jars in the laboratory of literature. This however is far from the case. There are many definitions of science fiction, but there is none universally agreed upon[i]. The cynics usually refer to it as a marketing label, while enthusiasts call it by many names depending on which species of science fiction they find most sweet. Considering moreover that the term ‘science fiction’ is not in common usage until the 1930s, although coined as far back as 1851 by William Wilson, might make us a bit suspicious of the pretensions of a genre to emerge suddenly and find its niche in the genre tree. There are no “emergences” in literature – movement of language is a productive process and mutation is law. Genres can at best be perceived as mutable mobiles – they have antecedents, precursors, share family resemblances and are perpetually in transformation; even the most exemplary genre object texts are small pins on the charts and tables of literary influence. Note for instance Hugo Gernsback’s definition of ‘scientifiction’ in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, which is often understood to have launched the genre: “By scientifiction I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (Gernsback 1926: 3) Like the narrator in Borges’ Pierre Menard, it is necessary for the reader of the new genre to know who begat who. What makes the retrospective labelling tick is not merely the pedigree, however important that might be in considerations of canonicity, but that it allows the identification of a preformation within which even the most qualitatively new becomes less bizarre. Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” relies equally on the balance between the estranged and the quotidian – for the radically new cannot be understood except by means of a reference to the old. While one may indeed be sympathetic to such claims, and also the attempts to give science fiction a long history going back to Ramayana and Lucian’s True History[ii], it is the specific character of the literature labelled as science fiction that is of interest to us. We might take 1851 as a watershed moment – a label first and then the genre that may be understood to fit that label. Such a model solves certain problems, such as that of chronology: anything prior may be classified as part of the same family but belonging to a different genre. It does not however resolve completely however the problem of definition. For instance, can we call Ibsen’s Ghosts or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart novels as science fiction, simply because they deal with the now disregarded, but in the late nineteenth century regarded as ‘scientific’, theory of degeneration? There is science and there is a whole lot of fiction. But are they science fiction? Conversely, do we include theories now regarded as unscientific as science fiction? There are in fact two nested problems in the question of definition. The first is the proliferation of subtypes in science fiction, which makes it possible to label some texts as science fiction from certain perspectives and some other texts from other perspectives; a problem of inclusion and exclusion. The other problem lies in the nature of the alignment between science and fiction, insofar as the definition of science itself is unclear, which makes it impossible to label what is and what is not science fiction[iii]. By resolving (if possible) these two problems we can find the answer to our framing questions. Instead of providing an answer however, this short piece is a less ambitious attempt to identify a possible way of answering these questions. The first I believe can be addressed by means of a classificatory principle, namely that of ‘speculation’, and the second by a methodological principle that clarifies the nature of the science of science fiction. To begin with the second, constructivism or the sociological approaches to scientific knowledge provide an entry point because these focus on the manipulation of the categories of subjective and objective in the framing of scientific activity. Constructivist approaches, such of Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor and Barry Barnes, highlight the ‘theory ladenness of observation’, that is, what is observed in scientific activity is overdetermined by the theoretical perspective that one utilizes to explain the observation. The Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman’s invisible ball metaphor[iv] for scientific activity illustrates this – it is not that the explanation for the invisible ball is not a plausible one or has no connection with the observation, or that the observation itself is dubitable, though any of these is possible depending on the context, but that the explanation is a contingent one. As Bloor explains, reality as perceived through the senses is not denied by the sociologist; however, reality is under-determined by such perception: “because the area of reality being inspected under-determines the scientists understanding, an analysis of their knowledge must further assume the role of organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere…scientists need their sensory experience of the world, and their natural inductive and deductive tendencies, but these always work through and with their culture, and that is the professional concern of the sociologist” (Bloor 1996: 841). Moreover, there is a continual attempt to establish a static picture of science in which experience and theory form a closed circle of knowledge, with one reflected in the other. Bloor argues that while empirical data does furnish experience and that the reliability of sense data is a precondition for sociological analysis, this experience alone is not knowledge. What gives experience its meaning is a theory, the “organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere”, which is a social production, and not given along with the