The Return of Vaman - A Scientific Novel

by Jayant V. Narlikar

  The scientists had meanwhile constructed and launched a space probe carrying gas and a nuclear explosion device which was heading for the comet. It was to be exploded in a cloud of gas close to the comet, thus giving it a small push sufficient to change its direction. If the plan succeeded, the push would be enough to ensure that the comet went close to the Earth but passed by at a safe distance.

  Dutta could not help contrasting the two attitudes: one purely superstitious and the other rational. When the mission against the comet succeeded he thought that he could now reveal the real situation and explain to his wife why the Earth had remained safe, despite the threat brought by the comet. But, alas, she argued that the trick was to be imputed to the yajna conducted on his behalf by his grandson. This was where the story ended, highlighting the contrast between the superstitious and the rational. For me, however, it was a matter of some satisfaction that I had got the scientific idea right, when at a press conference about a decade later, a NASA scientist advocated the very same method for diverting a solar system body heading for collision with the Earth.

  Collisions within the solar system are not all that common, but they have happened. In 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter and this outcome was not only well-documented, but had also been predicted to happen down to the day and date. Jupiter is somewhat exceptional in the sense that it has large enough mass to attract gravitationally an object that happens to come close enough. Thus it will increase the probability of collision. The Earth in comparison is much less massive and so less prone to such collisions. Even so it also bears the marks of such impacts in the form of craters with diameters measurable in kilometers. The Arizona Crater in the south-west of the USA is a well visited tourist attraction. A bigger and more attractive spot is Lonar in the Buldana district of the state of Maharashtra in India. It has the form of a crater lake. It was earlier mistaken for a volcanic crater, but now it is believed to have been caused by the impact of a twenty million ton stone or meteor which hit the Earth nearly 50,000 years ago. The impact is calculated to have generated an energy equivalent to nearly five hundred atomic bombs, each comparable to the one that destroyed Hiroshima. Although the energy released was not nuclear but thermal, the rise in temperature melted the stone meteor and it got mixed with underground water. This changed the mineral composition of the latter, which is why the chemical composition of Lonar Lake is considerably richer than that of a typical water reservoir in the neighbourhood. And of course the combustion started by the release of so much heat led to consumption of atmospheric oxygen, thus destroying life over a region much larger than the impact site.

  For this reason astronomers felt that there should be an archive of collisions in the solar system, including not just the “have beens” but also the “likely future impacts”. So a programme called “Operation Sky Watch” was initiated in the United States with the aim of computing the future orbits of all solar system bodies to check the when and where of future collisions. This database will be able to warn future Earthlings of any likely threats of this kind.

  This story has two morals! The main theme tells us how an international team of scientists, working under the aegis of the UN, plans and successfully completes the job of saving our present civilization from the destructive collision of a comet. However, a more worrying aspect is presented by the side-show of rituals conducted in the comet discoverer’s house to ward off any evil effects of the comet. Although the discoverer himself is rational, his family and friends are bound by superstitions. My underlying purpose in this story was to show the contrast between the two extremes that prevail in our country today.

  I will end this section with an idea cleverly used by A.A. Milne, the celebrated author of Winnie-the-Pooh, in a fairy tale. The prince was hoping to free a princess trapped in a witch’s castle. A friendly fairy gave him special shoes with the help of which he could take paces as long as six miles. Unfortunately, the witch’s castle was only three miles away. So how could he reach the princess with his fast shoes? The solution lay in drawing an isosceles triangle each of whose long sides measured 6 miles while the base was three miles. This is a simple idea involving school geometry. It shows how one can construct any length span not longer than the range of the shoes supplied by the fairy.

  Indeed, one can summarize the above discussion by highlighting this aspect of good science fiction: it displays the power of a scientific idea.

  Bad Science Fiction

  Good science fiction can be socially relevant, sometimes generating ideas that may be helpful to society, and it may be able to add to existing science, besides being thrilling and mind-stretching. Unfortunately, the fraction of good science fiction is small and it may be hard to spot the good ones among the vast majority of bad science fiction.

  The bad variety can be of various kinds. Often, after the thin vaneer of ‘science’ is removed, what shows up is a fantasy or a horror story. Now I have no objection to horror stories per se: I have enjoyed reading a few like those by Bram Stoker, Conan Doyle, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. These are plain horror stories. What I object to are those that advertise themselves as science fiction and are no different from tales of horror. If one is expecting science fiction to make the lay reader science-friendly, then these horror books will not serve that purpose. Rather they will create or foster a distorted image of science in the reader’s mind.

  Films like the Star Wars series form another class of what I call pseudo-science fiction. With a simple mental exercise one can transform them into classic “Westerns” with horses and wagons replacing weird creatures and spaceships. The long series “Star Trek” was more imaginative and closer to science, but it suffered from another problem which I will highlight next.

  Einstein’s special theory of relativity has mystified a lot of people who generally only remember, let alone understand, two basic aspects of the theory. One is the maxim that you cannot travel or send information faster than light. The other is the equation E = Mc 2 , equating mass with energy. Most science fiction stories in the bad category simply ignore the light speed limit. They have spaceships travelling across our Milky Way in times of the order of a few years when light itself would take 100,000 years! I feel very uncomfortable when such liberties are taken in the course of a science fiction story. Break this rule and then you do not worry if the spaceship Enterprise travels great distances in the Galaxy within relatively short time spans. But I wish the author would describe how his heros (or villains!) managed to break Einstein’s law.

  As I mentioned earlier, Jules Verne’s novel Round the world in eighty days reveals a scientific truth only at the end, thus making the climax particularly effective. This is an example of good science fiction. By contrast, bad science fiction would either have nothing scientific to offer or, if it does offer some maxim, it will turn out to be wrong!

  Finally, bad science fiction often ignores any limits of time and space, tolerating ranges where causality fails…and even situations where effects precede causes. While scientists discover more and more about genetics and cloning, poor science fiction seems to go on applying its own biological laws. Of course, as I stated earlier, a science fiction story may involve new laws of science, but it should manifestly avoid conflict with well tested science that has already been established.

  Some Examples of Logical Constraints I Have Respected

  I give two examples of the logical restrictions I have had to face while writing. In the story A Cosmic Explosion, I wished to demonstrate the harm a supernova could cause. Of course, the most spectacular supernova explosion is associated with the Crab Nebula, which was observed on Earth on July 4, 1054 AD. We know the date because of the records kept by the Chinese and Japanese astronomers of the time. That supernova lies more than 6000 light years away. That is, what we see there today happened more than 6000 years ago. Any harmful ingredient from that explosion, like cosmic rays, would take more than 6000 years to travel to us. Cosmic rays may suffer some resistance in tr
avel because of magnetic fields or matter they encounter en route, so they are not expected to travel as fast as light. Assuming that cosmic ray particles travel at an average of two thirds of the speed of light, they would arrive take, say, 9000 years to arrive here. That is, they would reach here three thousand years after the Chinese saw it and hence two thousand years from today. This has to be borne in mind when we investigate whether the Crab explosion will be harmful to us. For the distance is so large that it is too early to expect the debris from that event to arrive in the near future, or indeed to expect its effect to be large.

  Keeping these caveats in mind while drawing up the plot for my story, I decided to divide the time span into three periods and made the supernova explosion considerably closer than the Crab event. So it was in Period I that I had the explosion observed in around the seventh century, at a time when India was enjoying a relatively prosperous spell. That of course meant that the explosion was actually much earlier. A Buddhist monk of considerable knowledge and wisdom arranged to have records of the event kept underground, safe for posterity. Keeping track of time in this way, it was in Period II, in 1996, when the records of the observation were dug out and read by archaeologists. These showed the way towards further investigations. It quickly became clear that cosmic ray showers would arrive sooner rather than later, and that their effect might be fatal. Finally, Period III concerned the year 2710 when the Earth was slowly recovering from that catastrophe.

  By keeping to these time constraints, it becomes clear to the reader that, while a terrestrial explosion is a short term phenomenon, a cosmic one could be an event lasting two millennia!

  My second example is drawn from the novel A Message from Aristarchus. It centres round radio messages sent to a likely civilization. While such messages travel with the speed of light, the receiving location cannot be too far away. For example, if it were even just 100 light years away, it would take at least 250 years and probably more for a message to be received by the aliens and for them to actually arrive on Earth. Thus a novel requiring human-alien interaction with the present level of technology will have to have aliens not more than 10–20 light years away. This and the earlier example both alert the author of a science fiction to be aware of these space-time restrictions.

  My Views on Some Science Fiction Films

  How have the film and TV media received science fiction? In the early 1960s the BBC aired a television serial called A for Andromeda, with a scheduled length of 13 episodes. The principal author was Fred Hoyle, while John Eliot co-authored the script. The serial was well received, so much so that it was followed by a sequel comprising another 13 episodes with the title Andromeda Breakthrough. The role of the heroine in the first serial was played by Julie Christie, a more or less ‘raw’ recruit from her film and TV course. This role very successfully projected her as an excellent actor. Ironically, this success raised her ‘level’ in professional circles so much that, when she was approached to play the same role in the sequel, the BBC discovered that she had been ‘priced out’ of their budget! So another girl had to play that role.

  The success of these serials raised the fraction of science fiction programmes on TV. A very long running programme was Dr Who, which was shown on the BBC in the early evening. With interruptions, the series has so far had 812 episodes up until November 2014, and may probably claim some kind of world record. The earlier version of this serial had 25-minute episodes each connected to the next, while the later (revived) version had 45-minute programmes, each more or less standing on its own. The Guinness Book of World Records mentions another serial entitled Smallville, with a run of 218 episodes broadcast without interruption. It could still be argued that, compared to the never-ending soap operas on TV, these science fiction series provide an intellectually superior viewing diet.

  However, if one wants to see the maximum influence of special effects, one should look for full scale movies on the big screen rather than short episodes on small screens. Films like Star Wars and its sequels show how special effects can dominate a film and its science fiction plot. A good combination of science fiction and special effects is found in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are mystical overtones in the original Arthur C. Clark novel. At the beginning, in his caveman guise, man gradually picks up inspiration and hauls himself up the ladder of ‘progress’. The mystical part is in the form of a huge monolith with sides in the ratio 13: 23:33. It emits a haunting tune which has an impact on the human brain. This tune, by the way, was borrowed by the BBC as the signature tune for its televised broadcasts of the Apollo 11 expedition to the Moon.

  By comparison the movie Zardoz contains more fantasy, its main emphasis being on immortality. Set in the year 2293, it describes a small but elite group of people who have achieved near immortality, living in an isolated ‘vortex’ away from the rest of the population, who are referred to as ‘brutals’. The elite have almost secured immortality, because the key to their death has been hidden in a tabernacle with safeguards preventing access. The brutals live under the heel of the god Zardoz, at whose bidding the ‘chosen few’ can exterminate the rest. In a sense Zardoz is like the Wizard of Oz, who was a humbug with no special powers. He is in fact a member of the elite group of the vortex. One of the brutals, Zed, has indeed found this out. He kills the god and comes to the vortex, where he discovers the secret of death in the tabernacle and releases the elite colony from the pains of immortality. At the end of the film, one is inclined to ponder whether we will ever find ourselves in such an elite state in some distant future, when science has somehow eliminated all the trials and tribulations of life.

  In this connection, I should mention that I recently saw the science fiction movie Interstellar. Its theme and the technology behind its execution raised great expectations in my mind. Alas, I was to be disappointed! The science behind it is vague at its best and mystical at its worst. The use of the wormhole concept is there, but the overall role of gravity is hard to fathom. So is the environment in an alien land, depicted as not very different from where we live. Certainly the technology for special effects is intelligently used, but to what avail? What new science is being projected? To a lay viewer it may all look fantastic, but not in a science-friendly way.

  The Andromeda Strain is another type of science fiction movie that combines suspense with science, without any great emphasis on special effects. A returning space probe brings in an alien life form, hostile to Earthlings. This hostility is demonstrated when, apart from two people, it kills all 66 of the other inhabitants of a Mexican village. A number of questions need urgent answers. How was death brought about on such a large scale? And why were two of the total population of 68, an old man and a six month old baby, unaffected? Would the killer source multiply and spread? Could it be controlled?

  To find answers a crack team of super-scientists is engaged to work in an underground super-lab. Glimpses into their work and character are given, as are examples of domineering politicians. With all this super-atmosphere, it is something of an anticlimax to discover that, if the lab needs to be saved, the one person holding the key to the device capable of stopping all destruction only has to climb a few metres up a vertical ladder and find the appropriate keyhole. So, in the last analysis it is man’s ape-ancestry that comes in most helpful by enabling him to clamber so far up!

  Obviously, when a science fiction book is made into a film, there could be crucial differences of interpretation between the original author and the director and/or script writer. How they are reconciled will have a bearing on the final version of the film.

  Critics and Reviewers

  To end, I have a few reflections on the role of reviewers. In my language, Marathi, there are hardly any professional experts capable of reviewing science fiction novels and short stories. This, in spite of there being literary reviewers capable of doing this job for literature in general. The reason is that many literary experts are afraid of the technical envelope around the sciences. Starting out wi
th the premise that they will not understand the science on which the fiction rests, they are unable to write a reasonable literary criticism. Some do a very superficial job, while others may stick their necks out and write something that is manifestly wrong.

  I can cite a personal example. My story The Comet, described earlier, referred somewhere to a date, The First of October, which played a critical role in the scientific enterprise that underpinned the story. A critic writing a review of the book blandly stated that my story was plagiarized from Fred Hoyle’s novel October the First is Too Late. Except for the date being the same, the two writings actually had nothing else in common. On closer questioning, the critic confessed that he had not read either work and had simply been struck by the coincidence of dates! Another scholar who got a Ph.D. on his critical review of science fiction by Marathi authors asserted that one of my stories was a copy of Conan Doyle’s story The Case of the Opel Tiara. In fact there is no such story by Conan Doyle!

  I think a good case can be made for organizing a course on how to review science fiction stories or novels. Those who offer languages for study will stand to gain from it. In Marathi especially, where the field of science fiction is rather limited, some training on how to judge a science fiction novel would certainly help to raise the overall standard.

  Concluding Remarks

  This brings to a close my own perception of science fiction. When one looks at the Indian national scene, one finds that Bengali and Marathi are the two leading languages fostering this genre. In Bengali in particular, the famous movie director Satyajit Ray wrote good science fiction. Science fiction for cinema or TV is even less common. In the 1980s The Children’s Film Society of India produced a film version of my story The Comet. Although preliminary studies of some of my short stories were carried out by movie producers, they got bogged down by the challenges of depicting science and the employment of special effects.