A journalist who is interviewing
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amend_locke has asked the GSFWC to comment on the relationship between science and SF. He posted some questions. Here is what I have sent him.
(Some people who know me might recognise that I am quite hot on what is actually science and what isn't, and just how the scientific method works.)
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This isn't particularly sound-bite-able, but I wanted to put forward a point of view from an actual once-practising scientist (just like Ken) on SF.
> Name, age, vague address, job and level of science education and science fiction publishing.
Mike Gallagher; 40; Glasgow; environmental consultant - previously forensic scientist, research physicist, measurement systems architect; BSc applied physics, MSc space engineering, never wrote up my PhD (applied physics), MSc environmental management; one short story published, been a member of GSFWC for three years and reading SF since primary school.
Do you need a knowledge of science to fully understand SF?
No, but depending on the SF it can add a level of appreciation, much like knowing the context of a good cartoon. The story won't work as a story if you need to be, say, a string theory specialist to understand it, so the science has to be presented and if necessary explained (part of the art is to make this not boring). But if the author gets the science right it can add drama with unusual real-world limitations (the extra mass of the stowaway means that the aid rocket doesn't have the fuel to land so she has to go out the airlock - a famous classic, The Cold Equations) or add a wow factor (our galaxy is going to crash into another one - Alastair Reynolds), depending on the aim of the author.
Also, most of the science in most SF is either incomplete, out of date, misunderstood by the author, exaggerated for effect or just plain wrong. It doesn't matter, really, if the story is a good one. Most of what SF is about is how people act in situations that are out of the ordinary, and the science part of SF is about setting up extreme situations or 'what-if?' scenarios. The ones that are the most about science are often really just puzzle stories.
On the other hand, many stories use SF furniture like ray guns and space ships to tell stories that have nothing to do with science. Star Wars, for example, is a classic fairy tale where the brave farmboy goes off to rescue a princess from a dark castle guarded by an evil knight. He is aided by a couple of comedy servants, a pair of rogues, and a wizard who gives him a magic sword.
Has writing SF piqued an interest in science?
I'm always interested in science. And politics and philosophy and art and music. I will note down ideas to use in stories, and notice unusual situations, especially. The needs of a story might lead me to read up on something that I wouldn't otherwise (I have no background in biology, for example) but I might just spot an interesting concept and play with it (see above - ...misunderstood or exaggerated for effect...)
What aspects of science are the most intriguing from a SF writer's perspective?
From this SF writer's perspective, it is the fact that scientific advances and advances in technology (they are not the same) offer new ways for people to do things (including getting into novel sticky situations) or new things to do. Advances in cosmology, for example, offer new places to put people to act out old stories in a new setting, and to see what differences the new setting makes to the old story. Advances in biology offer new things for people to do to themselves and their bodies and what then? Are they still people? Who gets to decide? How do you define a 'person'? What if people's definitions differ? Like that.
Also there's the perspective that there's a whole big and very strange universe out there and a lot of the area of our own world is still being explored. This is a concept to either elate a person (Arthur C Clarke) or terrify them (H P Lovecraft). I go with elation most of the time, but I like to have a healthy respect for the unknown. What you don't know can kill you, and there's a LOT not to know.
Did SF bring you to an interest in science or was it vice versa?
It was definitely science that brought me to SF. I was a fan of space exploration from the age of three, when my father explained to me that the man was wearing the funny suit so that he could breathe, because he was on the moon and there was no air there. (In modern terms - WOW! WTF! Imagine a three-year-old's mind expanding to encompass more than one world) Later I found that people actually wrote stories about the things I was interested in - all aspects of the natural world, I was by then the kind of child who would read encyclopedias - and then I started writing my own stories.
Can science fiction help people understand science?
In certain circumstances and done with a certain aim in mind, then, a qualified yes. Abbott's 'Flatland' is a case in point. It's a didactic book that presents the concepts of higher mathematical dimensions as the situations experienced by the two-dimensional resident of the surface of a sphere. This, while it is SF, isn't what most people point to when they say 'that's SF'. And it's dull.
Most of the time, I would say that 'Hard' SF, that SF that takes its scientific (mostly physics) background most seriously, is more a literature for people who understand the science already, or are willing to read outside the stories. The kind of people who would already be reading New Scientist and Scientific American. That said, hard SF stories can be riveting, but I personally am riveted by the story that arises from the scientific background rather than the attention to detail of the science.
I don't think SF is for getting people to understand science, no matter what Hugo Gernsback thought. What I think SF is good for is to present thought experiments about the present day, which, will-we or nill-we, include issues that arise from things that scientists tell us, as well as the things that philosophers, politicians and demagogues would have us believe. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a prediction of the way that the real world would be twenty-four years ago; it is a dissection of fascism, communism and various other unhealthy authoritarianist developments that Orwell saw occurring in Nineteen Forty-Eight.
Postscript - if you want to understand science, and everyone should understand science because it is the basis for how everything works in the modern world, then there are various good popular science books available including those by John Gribbin. I recommend his History of Science. I also recommend the Science of Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
This is probably as long as the interview that you were probably planning to submit with Ken, and I dare say that he has probably hit many of the same points, but I feel strongly about the perception that SF seems to get from journalists who are not SF readers, which your questions make obvious that you are one.
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On second thoughts I might have been more politic with that last sentence.
edited -that's
Jack Cohen, of course
chipper
pensive