As a result, we are forced to strive for integration, to pretend that the work is a coherent whole.
Another factor in this context is that literature makes general use of the structures of indirect description or allusion. Whenever something is completely known — i.e., when it is fully rooted in a given culture — it can be understood or deduced from a single sign or allusion, and because of this, any given state of affairs can be made vividly present for the “culturally practiced” reader even through the remotest circumstantial reference. This indirect description is a method of structuring a work by “remote control” guidance of the reconstructive efforts of the reader’s imagination, not only in space, but also in time. Every description of a situation taken from the repertoire of culturally known situations invokes the repertoire of possible issues appropriate for it, and these issues are what the reader will anticipate. Within the framework of this structured anticipation, he will make his decisions by following directions given in the text, even when they are few, or barely present. (For instance, we can speak of blatantly erotic situations, or others which have hidden erotic content held in constant suspension.) Indirect, “remote control” description is dictated either directly by cultural norms (as, for example, the prohibitions against expressly naming and presenting what the culture considers too drastic), or by the author’s individual choices and thought. In the latter case the descriptive structures are generally full of gaps; they are either incomplete, or they are dim mirror images of completely different, unnamed, unarticulated, and thus merely intuited, structures. This displacement of description into circumscription can happen gradually, and, furthermore, either discontinuously or continuously. To transform circumscription into description, one can either move over into the as yet unnamed, untouched center of the problem by offending cultural prohibitions (by speaking plainly of things that had been previously forbidden, or by introducing obscene words into the vocabulary); or one can go in the opposite direction and attach to the culture’s generalized structures of reference still other references, whose proper territories are even further from the concrete events.
Because of this systematic refusal to speak plainly, the reader begins to feel unsure whether he or she really understands what the description is concretely about, and this gives rise to the semantic wavering that characterizes the reception of contemporary poetry. (Not all poetry, certainly: there is randomly composed poetry, but we can discern a high level of “systematic indirection” in the finest poems of Grochowiak, for example.) All these approaches have a common origin: as the level of the reception’s indeterminacy rises, the reader’s own personal determinations begin to waver. In practice, it is often impossible to determine whether a given narrative structure is only very indirect and elliptical, but essentially homogeneous, or one deliberately damaged by “chance noise,” or even perforated, softened, and bent by another, discordant structure. Furthermore, since one can also create multilayered structures, even the concrete quality of the described object or situation can be transformed beyond recognition and reshaped from one level of articulation to another. Thus, it is often impossible to determine categorically whether the basic structure of description is an image of order or of chaos. We cannot always distinguish the consequences of chance intrusions from the planned transformations of a particular creative design.
How do these methods and vocabulary bear upon science fiction?
In the first place, we consider the primary unsolved problem of science fiction the lack of a theoretical typology of its paradigmatic structures. Since writers of science fiction do not even recognize the existence of this problem, the structures they use most frequently are neither aesthetically nor epistemologically adequate for their chosen themes. An example of aesthetic inadequacy is the practice of authors who attempt to write mimetic (pseudorealistic) works, and yet model such phenomena as “contact with another civilization” or an invasion from outer space after the relationship between detective and criminal. (Two aliens in Hal Clement’s The Needle — a criminal and a detective — “hide” in the bodies of two humans; and the detective, the “symbiont” on the boy who has become his “host,” searches for the criminal “concealed” in the body of an unknown man.) This cognitive process results in antiempirical narrative. In the closed ecological system of Isaac Asimov’s story “Strike-Breaker,” the director of the planet’s sewage system is essential for the life of all. He is unexpendable, yet precisely because of his low social position he is the object of general contempt. The basic structural assumption is obviously antiempirical. Those who were of low status long ago, such as butlers, maids, or housekeepers, are today worth their weight in gold — and the relations between the housekeeper and her “masters” have changed radically. Nowadays, the housekeeper is almost the ranking member of the family; she is indulged, her caprices are respected, her whims attended to. Therefore, if we simply extrapolate this transformation of social conditions, we can see that, in Asimov’s society, the strike-breaker cannot be a man on whom the life of the whole community depends and still be treated as a pariah.
The choice of narrative structures can often be antiempirical even in works that otherwise pose interesting problems, such as Flowers for Algernon. The structure of such works, reminiscent of the curves of normal distribution (or the inverted letter K), originates with a certain type of tale. In the action of Flowers for Algernon, a retarded young man’s intelligence at first expands to an extraordinary degree, but no sooner does he experience the joy of intellectual creation than he regresses back to idiocy with terrible speed. The work is interesting psychologically, but it poses the problem of “intelligence expansion” as a “rise and fall” paradigm — which is not very plausible, precisely because its origin is in fairy tales; but, more important, it prevents the author from examining the socio-cultural dimensions of his hypothesis about the artificial increase of intelligence. He requires his newly intelligent hero’s sudden restupefaction for dramatic effect (for this curve of the action presents a personal drama, the tragedy of an individual’s fall from the heights of wisdom, arduously and barely achieved, and at the same time it creates the closed structure of events that automatically shapes the whole progress of the action). This extremely simple model would not be adequate to show the consequences of intelligence augmentation for the whole culture; and yet these consequences would be well worth treating. A university professor is a universally respected figure with a high social status, both because it is hard to become a professor (certainly not everyone who wishes to can become one) and because such specialists have a very important role in the culture (they are the ones who pursue creative research, and educate the host of specialists that make up the foundation of civilization). If, however, the augmentation of intelligence permitted anyone to become a university professor, and if this happened to become the easiest and most desirable solution for everyone, then society would have to defend itself against the destructive consequences of the situation. All those who would still be willing to be drivers, sewer workers, builders, or milkmen — in spite of the fact that it is within their power to attain the highest level of creative intelligence — would have to be generously compensated. They would come to be surrounded by the halo of noble renunciation of their innate potential for development for the sake of the community. If such a novel were written as a grotesque, the sewer worker would be the admired, respected, outstanding personage, the lofty spirit, whereas the professor would be merely a mediocre little man, a tiny gear in the great mechanism. (There would be, of course, many other consequences of such a “geniusification” process that we cannot consider here. They can be deduced with the proper reasoning. But an arbitrarily chosen closed structure of events, such as the paradigm taken from fairy tales, is certainly not appropriate for the task.)
Thus, science fiction takes flight from the models and methods of reasoning we have sketched here to the rigid, simplistic structures derived from fairy tales and detective novels. Because
of this, the system of narrative structures generally used is muddled, and is inadequate for the futurological thematics of science fiction. In their choice of narrative structures, most science-fiction writers fail to consider any criteria of empirical adequacy for and the best possible arrangement of the objects and situations they wish to describe. They try to conceal the “dubious origin” of such structures (the detective novel, romantic stories, fairy tales), which leads to the unintentionally grotesque style characteristic of most science fiction.
The second problem of science fiction is the unresolved relationship of the narrative to phenomena that are as yet not associated with appropriate descriptive structures, since they are the first of their kind. Meetings with such unknowns at first lead inexorably to semantic-descriptive paralysis. At such times, the greatest dilemmas that humanity has, over the centuries, conquered in the course of its “natural gnoseological evolution” surface all at once. I am thinking here of the problems of categorizing and articulating new phenomena — and thus of their inclusion in the established schemes of identification and recognition — all the decisions that together give a final definition of what, precisely, a new phenomenon is, what it means, how it can be described, what ethics it implies, and so forth. Judging from the popular output, science fiction is completely unaware that such problems exist, that they must be considered and consciously and concretely resolved. If the new phenomenon is of a qualitatively different scale — contact with “aliens” in outer space, for example — it is all but certain that the repertoire of received, ready concepts will not be able to accommodate it without considerable friction. In all likelihood, a cultural, perceptual, and perhaps even a social-ethical revolution will be necessary. Thus, instead of the assimilation of the new, we must imagine the reordering and even the destruction of fundamental concepts, the revaluation of truths that were previously indisputable, and so on. To refer such phenomena to slick, closed, and completely unambiguous structures we must simply consider a flaw. We can learn which structures and methods are the most appropriate from the history of science—by examining, for instance, the vicissitudes of physics, with its whole series of conceptual-categorial revolutions. (In this sense, the completely fantastic, one-hundredpercent invented history of the “new cosmogony” would still be true to reality, at least structurally, since the succeeding conceptual orders were “turned inside out” and reordered either precisely in this way or similarly in each science’s actual course of development.)
Science fiction can thus learn from science as well as from other forms of literature, such as experimental prose. But it cannot learn through the kind of passive imitation characteristic of the English new wave of science fiction. Experimental literature, as we noted, introduces into the creative process different forms of “noise” (the chance generator), and the criteria for selecting structures created in this way are purely aesthetic. Science fiction should add to these another and separate set of criteria for cognitive adequacy. (Some equivalent to “noise” — the significant dispersion of opinions, or the contradiction arising simultaneously from the same sources — arises whenever a particular science confronts a new and unfamiliar phenomenon, and enters the phase of rapid conceptual reorganization. At the same time, this “noise” is never pure nonsense; science has not simply slipped into chaos.) Authors of science fiction must therefore draw upon the paradigmatics of transformations.
Clearheaded “internal” critics of science fiction have long been displeased with the genre for its flight from the real problems of civilization. But criticism must deal not only with the text’s relations to the external world. It must evaluate not only the structure of the things described, but also the structure of the description itself. The former generally determines the choice of themes, whereas the latter determines the sum total of the rules governing the treatment of the material — and these rules are not automatically defined by the chosen theme.
Science fiction remains mired in a stage of theoretical self-reflection similar to the aggressive, extreme reductionism of neo-positivism (“every science, from biology to psychology, must be reduced to the language of physics!”). When asked whether such a reduction is practicable or not, the enthusiastic neo-positivists answer yes, their opponents no, and that usually puts an end to the argument. The neo-positivists, amazingly, have not recognized the simple fact that the reductionist program is based on a fallacy. They wish to posit a logical dichotomy by way of exclusion of the middle, whereas the historical nature of scientific understanding does not allow such a conceptualization. Biology and psychology certainly cannot be deduced from modern physics. At the same time, we cannot be sure that the physics of the future (which cannot, in principle, be reduced to the physics of the present, just as Einstein’s model of the universe cannot be reduced to Newton’s, nor the indeterminacy of quantum physics to Laplacian determinism) might not create transitional branches that will intersect with corresponding branches of the biology or psychology of the future (general systems theory). For that matter, we might attain the synthesis in yet another way, as the cyberneticists envision it: the synthesis would come about, not on the level of particular sciences, but on the next higher level of abstraction, with the discovery of the constants common to all the branch sciences.
Science fiction is reminiscent of neo-positivism’s aggressive reductionism in that it acts as if the miserable repertoire of the detective story and the adventure novel were sufficient for structuring any phenomenon in the whole spectrum of the infinite universe, regardless of its time, place, and degree of complexity, and all the situations in which human civilization may ever find itself. Thus science fiction designates its problems (contact with aliens, the spirit in the machine, the instrumentalization of values, etc.), but it does not embody them in narrative structures.
In summary, it is clear that among the criticisms leveled against existing science fiction, the most important is this matter of opportunities systematically squandered. We must deem it a serious flaw of the genre that it has no independent, rational, and normative criticism that is neither destructive nor apologetic and that is committed not only to science fiction, but also to the more encompassing relations between culture and literature on which the fate of both depends. For this reason, my intention has not been so much to write the definitive monograph on science fiction, but, instead, to prepare the outline of a rational, internal critique.
Translated from the Hungarian by Etelka de Laczay and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
COSMOLOGY AND SCIENCE FICTION
These remarks owe their existence to a suggestion of Dr. R. Mullen, of Science-Fiction Studies, who received a review copy of Cosmology Now, edited by Laurie John, but felt the book too peripheral to the journal’s concerns for an ordinary review. The title, too, is Dr. Mullen’s choice. Therefore my remarks are addressed to the readers of Science-Fiction Studies, and they were written in German because my English is insufficient for the task.
1. Cosmology Now was written by several British scientists for the BBC in 1973. The American edition, the one on hand, appeared in 1976. A reviewer both well versed in the subject and malicious could claim with some justification that the book would be better called Cosmology Yesterday. If the cosmos is the most durable of things, this durability doesn’t extend to the science that deals with its exploration. Even the best cosmological reference works written some seven or eight years ago are today totally out of date. The three life-years that Cosmology Now has now had have seen much change in cosmology. Since I don’t have to write a “regular review,” I will list only the most important innovations. The age of the cosmos is today estimated to be some twenty billion years. The experiments of Weber, who claimed to have registered gravitational waves, have been discarded, since his apparatus was of insufficient sensitivity. The health of the “steady state” theory, which denies the evolution of the universe from a zero point, has deteriorated noticeably. Scientists are inclined to award the palms of victory to the theor
y of the Big Bang. Moreover, many of the things described in Cosmology Now have lost their former, beautiful simplicity. For instance, there is now a whole “family” of black holes. In addition to the ones postulated originally, which were supposed to be the final stage of a collapsing neutron star, there have been new ones — for instance, partially reversible black holes. These may not be assumed to be “gravity graves,” invisible for all eternity. And there are, especially, the black micro-holes. As the new theory of Stephen Hawking, of Cambridge, will have it, these are objects with the diameter of a proton and mass of a mountain range. Quite a lot of them are said to have been created at the time of the Big Bang. I mention the theory of Hawking, first, because it introduces the method of quantum mechanics into the field of the general theory of relativity, and, second, because it implies consequences that cannot be overlooked and may change our whole outlook. Although there are so far no irrefutable (empirical) proofs for the existence of any black holes, we cannot imagine any possible technological utilization of the big black holes, whereas one may consider the micro-holes as energy sources that can surpass the annihilation of matter by several million times, the so far energetically most potent reaction. Such a micro-hole is supposed to contain the energy of several million hydrogen bombs. Sapienti sat. There are other important discoveries, but I cannot enlarge this short aside into a “regular book review.” Therefore — finis.
In our times, scientific works grow old very fast. The Internal Constitution of the Stars by A. Eddington enthralled me when I read it forty years ago, and it is still a magnificent book, but it must be read now as (genuine!) science fiction, because nothing in it corresponds any more with our present knowledge. In my opinion the same may happen with Cosmology Now: please take this remark as an hommage. This volume will remain readable, indeed exciting, but very little of its aesthetically appealing, lucid simplicity in its development of the model of the universe will survive the changes to come. I say this as a dilettante and a heretic who knows more about the history of science than about cosmology. The first conquerors of new knowledge always find it easier to proclaim that “God may be subtle, but He is not malicious” because the biggest hurdles are discovered by the next generation of scientists. But it seems to me that one of the main theses of Cosmology Now will remain valid: that the universe is a continued explosion extended over a time of twenty billion years that appears as a majestic solidification only to the eyes of a transient being like man. The question whether we are living in a rhythmically pulsating universe or in a cosmos that will finally dissolve into vacuum still remains to be answered. The pendulum of mutually exclusive opinions goes on swinging.
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