The Unique Strength of Science Fiction

March 9th, 2008

Why do people read science fiction, and why do people write it?

And in a related question, why do some look down on it or feel ashamed to admit to loving it?

The answers I feel lie in what science fiction does that other forms of fiction don’t do as well. Here’s what I think are the strengths of science fiction:

It’s a great escape. The real world is filled with long stretches of boredom, or worse, pain. Fiction in general lets us experience a different place, a different persona, with every moment intensely interesting (at least in the hands of a good writer). Science fiction in particular lets us escape further, faster. The challenges are less likely to be the terrifying ones of our lives, such as cancer or foreclosure.

It’s educational, permitting us to learn about technology and science vicariously through characters who need to understand how the world, the universe, works, in order to achieve their goals. For instance, you’d better understand gravity and Newton’s Laws, or you die in space. You’d better understand tidal forces, eclipses, seasons, and many various technological tools, or various terrible calamities may be suffered. This sort of science fiction can be straight up education, imparting a traditional educational lesson, or it may be metaphor for how our entire society must understand science and technology in order to wend our way through the maze of invention and changing circumstances. More specifically…

It’s preparation for the opportunities of the future and how they may change our cultural environment. A long history of stories about human cloning should have prepared us better for this technology, but not enough people read science fiction. We had a lot of ridiculous statements coming from unqualified thinkers, from scientists to priests, who hadn’t really thought much about the consequences of cloning in a serious manner. At least not nearly as much as science fiction writers and readers had. I thought the public “debate” was embarrassing for the human species considering that some of us had already spent decades working through the ideas involved. For instance, the creator of Dolly the cloned sheep suggested human cloning was a bad idea because if a couple cloned the husband, the wife might later become sexually attracted to the son.

It’s preparation for the dangers of the future and how they may threaten us. In grossest terms, it’s the original science fiction story, Frankenstein. I usually object to this in science fiction because it often borders on fear mongering. The cautionary tale has its place when it acts as a warning, but not when it is just mindless sensationalism masquerading as entertainment. We should beware the dangers of unregulated nanotechnology, nuclear weapons, advertising, and multinational corporations, but we shouldn’t reject out of hand technological advance because it’s difficult to predict what will happen. Reading most Michael Crichton novels would have the average reader think that every new technology is uncontrollable and will lead to deaths and worse. This sort of speculation makes for exciting reading, but doesn’t, I think, give much credit to the ingenuity and instinct of humanity.

Finally — and here is where I think we find the greatest strength of science fiction — it’s a unique way to explore the human heart. There are those who like to say that there are no new stories, and those who like to say that Shakespeare already said everything and we’re just rehashing what he already did, but not as well. I reject those statements outright, and believe that science fiction allows us to ask questions — important, meaningful ones — that may have intrigued Shakespeare but that he couldn’t even imagine. Is a perfect simulation of a person a person? What are we in the reflection of alien intelligences? What is the human experience when life spans not decades, but eons? What does it mean to be human when we control our own genome, or can merge ourselves with our technology? What kind of world emerges from instant global communication the likes of which we’ve never had available before? And so on. The questions, literally, are endless.

I think that those who look down on science fiction have a failure of vision or experience. They look down on what they consider lesser goals of fiction, like escapism, and see how even bad science fiction satisfies those needs. They may also be language snobs who look for sparkling prose and turn of phrase foremost in fiction, and fail to recognize that there are other equally worthy (and more worthy, in my opinion,) points to reading a story. Most generalizations are poor form for any thinking person, and I tend to look down upon those who do that when it’s unwarranted. Science fiction at its best is the only form of literature bringing us truly new insights to what it means to be human in the face of what we’re becoming, given our power to change our environment and ourselves. It may be one of the few meaningful ways that we as a species take to examine what we’re doing before we’ve already done it.

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