SF Realism
Fellow Pyr author Chris Roberson has a post over on his journal about how realistic to make his next SF project. Now for the uninitiated, so called SF 'realists' are called 'mundanes'. They tend to write hard SF, the stuff where the nuts and bolts that hold their spacecraft together have all been geometrically measured, weighed and analysed to make sure it's all technologically feasible, within the rules of physics and science as we understand it. Much of the SF that doesn't conform to those understandings of the possible, get dismissed as fantasy.
I rarely read it. In fact, I'm not all that familiar with the debate itself, because it all seems rather pointless to me. You see, if we pick up the story in the sixteen hundreds, there was this guy called Galileo. He had this crazy idea that went completely against any rational understanding of the universe, that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. Previous to that, some equally stupid, misguided people had postulated that the Earth was actually round, and not flat as rational people knew for a certainty. Then there came this total nutter called Newton, who had some lunatic notions of an interlocking set of predictable physical rules that dictated all motion in the universe, and then the worst offender against logic of all -- Albert Einstein, who tried to inform us that time and space were all RELATIVE? I mean seriously.
Mundanes try to understand the universe on the assumption that our present understanding is if not perfect, then more or less complete, at least in its basic foundation. For example; no spaceships traveling faster-than-light, because it's 'impossible'. Now don't get me started, or I'll go on about those OTHER crazy idiots, like the Wright Brothers who reckoned they could fly, and Yeager who broke the sound barrier, and Gargarin who got into space... etc. To suppose that our present understanding of the universe is any more fundamentally complete than was, say, the Vatican's when they were threatening to burn poor Galileo at the stake, strikes me as a little silly. We know better than the Vatican did about planetary orbits, sure. But light, time and gravity? The more they discover, the more they realise how much they don't know.
I think that it's far more risky to go around supposing that things aren't possible than to suppose they might be, innovation and discovery have a way of making nay-sayers look silly. Worse, negative assumptions imply a concrete, total knowledge of the subject matter. 'Impossible' is a very final word. I much prefer 'maybe'. It's not so arrogant, for one thing.
The other thing the mundanes miss is that science fiction, even when it's at its most far fetched and silly, is not entirely about the future -- it's about the present. Take a very familiar SF character -- say Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's an android, he has no emotions. The purpose of Data as a character, and the reason he works for a modern audience, is not because he raises interesting speculations about future technology -- he might do that, but it's beside the point. No, the purpose of Commander Data is that by being what he is, he makes us reflect on what WE are.
This for me is one of the great strengths of SF as a genre, and no other genre can do it. The function of aliens in most dramatic SF is not to speculate about aliens, but rather to use the contrast they provide to examine ourselves -- human beings. You'd never wonder why we have two eyes until you imagine a creature with one, or a million. We'd never wonder why we are like we are unless we imagined something different. And human storytellers have been doing this for ages -- previously it was elves, gods or monsters -- and still is, with fantasy literature. With SF, it's aliens and androids. But in all of them, we are the subject... and for me, that's a very valid, very rational subject to explore.
Anyhow... back to Chris's problems with his spaceship. For me, if you want to read a terrific mix of un-mundane fantasy technology (faster-than-light) combined with hard-edged realism, you can't go past CJ Cherryh's space stuff -- Rimrunners, in particular, is just an amazingly cool book. In her world, faster-than-light is the new mundane.
I rarely read it. In fact, I'm not all that familiar with the debate itself, because it all seems rather pointless to me. You see, if we pick up the story in the sixteen hundreds, there was this guy called Galileo. He had this crazy idea that went completely against any rational understanding of the universe, that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. Previous to that, some equally stupid, misguided people had postulated that the Earth was actually round, and not flat as rational people knew for a certainty. Then there came this total nutter called Newton, who had some lunatic notions of an interlocking set of predictable physical rules that dictated all motion in the universe, and then the worst offender against logic of all -- Albert Einstein, who tried to inform us that time and space were all RELATIVE? I mean seriously.
Mundanes try to understand the universe on the assumption that our present understanding is if not perfect, then more or less complete, at least in its basic foundation. For example; no spaceships traveling faster-than-light, because it's 'impossible'. Now don't get me started, or I'll go on about those OTHER crazy idiots, like the Wright Brothers who reckoned they could fly, and Yeager who broke the sound barrier, and Gargarin who got into space... etc. To suppose that our present understanding of the universe is any more fundamentally complete than was, say, the Vatican's when they were threatening to burn poor Galileo at the stake, strikes me as a little silly. We know better than the Vatican did about planetary orbits, sure. But light, time and gravity? The more they discover, the more they realise how much they don't know.
I think that it's far more risky to go around supposing that things aren't possible than to suppose they might be, innovation and discovery have a way of making nay-sayers look silly. Worse, negative assumptions imply a concrete, total knowledge of the subject matter. 'Impossible' is a very final word. I much prefer 'maybe'. It's not so arrogant, for one thing.
The other thing the mundanes miss is that science fiction, even when it's at its most far fetched and silly, is not entirely about the future -- it's about the present. Take a very familiar SF character -- say Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's an android, he has no emotions. The purpose of Data as a character, and the reason he works for a modern audience, is not because he raises interesting speculations about future technology -- he might do that, but it's beside the point. No, the purpose of Commander Data is that by being what he is, he makes us reflect on what WE are.
This for me is one of the great strengths of SF as a genre, and no other genre can do it. The function of aliens in most dramatic SF is not to speculate about aliens, but rather to use the contrast they provide to examine ourselves -- human beings. You'd never wonder why we have two eyes until you imagine a creature with one, or a million. We'd never wonder why we are like we are unless we imagined something different. And human storytellers have been doing this for ages -- previously it was elves, gods or monsters -- and still is, with fantasy literature. With SF, it's aliens and androids. But in all of them, we are the subject... and for me, that's a very valid, very rational subject to explore.
Anyhow... back to Chris's problems with his spaceship. For me, if you want to read a terrific mix of un-mundane fantasy technology (faster-than-light) combined with hard-edged realism, you can't go past CJ Cherryh's space stuff -- Rimrunners, in particular, is just an amazingly cool book. In her world, faster-than-light is the new mundane.
5 Comments:
Exactly. There was a big "mundane" debate in the blogosphere a while back, in which several of us said something very similar. It's like that (apocryphal) story of the patent office closing down because "everything had already been invented." I once talked to a very talented physicist who believed we already knew 99% of what there was to know, only to completely change his tune one year later after he looked into cosmic string theory.
Hi Lou
I read your earlier post on your website about mundanes, and felt that immitation would be the sincerest form of flattery!
Believing that we, at this moment, have reached some kind of final point or understanding about the universe, seems to be a recurring human condition that each new generation is doomed to repeat for hundreds of thousands of years. And the greatest irony is that it's exactly the kind of thinking that scientists have frequently accused religious people of... which is one reason I'll never share the scientific athiest view that theology is irredeemably flawed, because many of those flaws seem to pop up in scientific thinking as well.
I seem to recall yet another Arthur C Clarke dictum that goes along the lines of -- 'Anything that you can't conclusively disprove, is possible'. Which includes just about everything, God, time travel, faster-than-light, all of it.
HI Joel,
I have not heard that Clarke dictum. Wish I'd had that when writing my Mundanes blog!
Hey, if it turns out Clarke didn't say that, maybe we can just call it the 'Shepherd Dictum'?
Joel
Four hundred years ago Newton laid down a foundation of mathematics and basic rules which almost precisely described the motions of the planets and gravitational forces on the surface of our own. Einstein's theory of relativity contradicted some of the orbital solutions of Newton’s equations and later was shown to have a more accurate description of the universe, but this does not mean that a SF story written based on the concepts of Newton’s laws three hundred years ago would be inaccurate. Yes there is a great deal that we do not understand about our universe, but that does not mean that we don't understand anything at all or that the knowledge we have gained can be outright excluded because someone "invents" the "spin deezil drive" in their story. It doesn't work that way, we refine our model to more closely exemplify the universe, that doesn't mean that the previous model was wrong, simply less accurate.
We do know enough about the inner working of the universe to know certain facts; the speed of light is impenetrable as long as you intend to pass through every point in between the source and destination. Alternate universes would not conveniently make everyone evil and grow goatees. Size relations are not scalable, people can't shrink or grow without disastrous effects.
I know I'm writing about the more extreme examples of SF absurdity but these do show that science is the foundation of science fiction, and to suggest that just because we don't know everything we can make up the rules for ourselves isn't creating a future universe, it is creating Fantasy worthy of the dollar bin along side Robert Jordan's latest 2000 page roach killer.
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