The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a
ScienceBlogger question, and this one’s right up my alley:
What do you see as science fiction’s role in promoting science, if any?
If you look over in the left sidebar, you’ll see a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which
is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on…
The short version of the answer is that there is no short version
of the answer. Or, rather, there isn’t a single well-defined role for
SF in promoting science, because both science and science fiction are
too big for the question to be well formed.
It does seem like there ought to be a connection between the two,
though. And there is, but it’s a complicated issue. A large number of
scientists and engineers are or were science fiction readers. It’s a
little hard to sort out what’s cause and what’s effect, though– are
these people drawn into science because reading SF inspired a love of
the subject, or are they drawn to science fiction because it provides
an appealing literary option for people who are into math and
science?
I suspect there’s a little of both. I know a number of scientists
who are fond of science fiction, but I know at least as many who have
no real interest in it at all. I also know a lot of fans, and even
some writers of science fiction who have no technical or mathematical
aptitude to speak of.
Personally, I was interested in science before I became someone who
read primarily SF (as opposed to just reading whatever I got my hands
on). The science aspect was definitely a draw, but I think the real
attraction was a little more mundane– science fiction books were
books in which Really Cool Things Happened– space battles and alien
encounters and gateways to different dimensions– as opposed to boring
mainstream stories about people with relationship problems and beloved
pets who die in the last chapter. There’s a strain of fandom that
constantly hypes SF as a “Literature of Ideas,” but honestly, I got
into it because it was a Literature of Explosions.
As I’ve gotten older, and become a professional scientist, I find
that I’m less likely to read “Hard SF,” the subgenre that is most
consciously about Science, and prides itself on being all rigorous and
technical. This is largely because as I’ve learned more about science,
I’ve become more able to spot the places where the author really
doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and I frequently end up being
irritated by the results.
This is not to say that I’ve become one of those humorless dorks
who takes grim pleasure in pointing out that there’s no air in space,
and thus you wouldn’t be able to hear the Death Star exploding. On the
contrary, I’m much more likely to read the pulpier Space Opera side of
the genre, where I will happily shut off my brain and ignore all the
ridiculously implausible things that happen, provided the plot moves
along quickly and the Good Guys win in the end.
But that’s getting away from the question at hand, which is about
the role of SF in promoting science. I think there is a role there,
but it’s not a direct link. SF’s role in promoting science has little
to do with concrete facts, and more to do with inspiration and
aspiration.
Science fiction, for the most part, does a really lousy job of
teaching science. I’m sure that I’ll get a couple of
comments from people who learned everything there is to know about
orbital mechanics from reading old Hal Clement stories, but the
science in most science fiction tends to be
href="http://io9.com/5092284/science-fiction-is-making-you-more-clueless-about-science">pretty
shaky. It’s often dated, almost always distorted, and frequently
warped to serve dramatic purposes. When the science is correct, it
usually comes at the expense of the story– you get two-dimensional
characters holding forth at great length about scientific principles,
speaking in ways that no real, live human would ever do, and stopping
everything dead for pages at a time.
The real power of SF, it seems to me, is to show people,
particularly younger kids, a world in which science really matters,
and Knowing Stuff is cool. The occasional disaster novel aside, the
heroes of most science fiction books and movies succeed because they
know things, and more importantly, they remain calm and think their
way through the problems that get in their way. If you look at really
good Young Adult novels in SF– Steven Gould’s
href="http://www.steelypips.org/library/0402.html#040202">Jumper,
say– that’s one of the main things they do. The heroes succeed not
because of the power of their unstoppable awesomeness, but because
they think things through, figure things out, and make plans. That
sort of systematic approach to the world is the essence of
science.
Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have the occasional spectacular
extrapolation from some current “what-if” to connect things back to
specific areas of science. Plenty of young people are pushed toward
physics by stories that riff off various odd quantum phenomena, or
talk about black holes and curved space-time, and all that
astrophysical stuff. They’re a little like the students who take
archaeology because they really loved the Indiana Jones movies, in
that they need to have some misconceptions beaten out of them (that’s
what vector calculus is for), but that inspiration is not to be
sneered at. If even a fraction of the students who were turned on by
reading SF survive to become real physicists, that’s a net gain for
the profession.
