Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 4

by Eric Flint

  Then there is the alternative: simply postulating a future cosmological viewpoint that supersedes Einsteinian relativity. Simple? Yes and no. Einstein, after all, didn't knock Newton into a cocked hat; he created a new cosmological paradigm of which Newtonian physics was a still-valid special case. That's the way sciences seem to evolve, at least at this late date. You can't simply state that in 2394 A.D. Glockenspiel showed that magic in fact worked and that in the 25th Century faster-than-light starships zip through the ether on ectoplasm. If you want a new cosmological paradigm, you must construct it along lines consistent with the way sciences evolve. The chance that 20th-Century physics will later be shown to have been a complete crock is nil. You have to try something like the notion that our four-space universe is really a bubble in five-space, or that black holes are hyperspacial tunnels between points in our own continuum, or that objective time can somehow to contracted as well as subjective—paradigms that contain Einsteinian relativity but transcend it, rather than contending that it's all pure baloney.

  Rule Four of the Rubber Sciences: when creating a new science or a new master-theory for an established science, pay attention to how sciences evolve; don't just wave your magic wand and produce magic with scientific mumbo-jumbo trappings.

  I've spent all this time on faster-than-light drives because they are surely the most pervasive example of Rubber Science in science fiction and because they most easily and clearly illustrate many of the basic rules. But FTL, most often, is an example of first-order Rubber Science: something you create for plot or setting purposes. Beyond lies a higher order of Rubber Science—scientific speculation about the nature of the universe, life, culture, and the mind of man.

  * * *

  No doubt the best example of a "science fiction science" that we have is one that strictly speaking was never a fictional science at all: Scientology. But since Scientology is the creation of L. Ron Hubbard, a full-time science fiction writer at the time he created it, since the history of the Scientology movement reads like a science fiction novel, and since Scientology so beautifully illustrates so many of the principles of Rubber Science creation, it's still worthwhile to consider it for a moment.

  Basically, Scientology is a kind of crossbreed of simple Freudian psychology with even simpler computer theory. "Traumas" become "engrams" and "neuroses" become "engram chains." Instead of "complete abreaction" as the ultimate goal, we have the "state of clear," in which all engrams have been cleared from the mind, much as old programs are cleared from a computer. Instead of a patient free-associating or relating his dreams on a couch to an "analyst," we have an "auditor" running a "clearing program" and the patient clutching the handles of an "E-meter." The E-meter, or Engram-meter (actually a simple skin galvanometer, a piece of a lie detector), supposedly tells the auditor when his question has hit an "engram." He then bores in until the E-meter shows him that the engram has been "cleared" or eliminated and continues to run his program until all such engrams are cleared.

  For the purposes of this chapter, the question of whether or not Scientology actually works in the real world is irrelevant. The point is that it would surely work beautifully in a story. It has plausibility, and it does raise some interesting speculations on the workings of the human mind.

  From whence this plausibility? For one thing, Scientology is based on two existing sciences, psychoanalysis and computer theory. The new Rubber Science is created by interfacing two existing sciences which had not been cross-disciplined before. This gives it some genuine content, which not only creates plausibility but even raises true validity as a genuine askable question.

  Isaac Asimov did much the same thing when he created "psychohistory" for his Foundation series; here the interfaced sciences were history and statistics. Various writers have done it with "psionics," most often by interfacing psychic research with brain physiology and/or bioelectronics. I myself have done it with pharmacology and various psychological sciences and produced things like "psychedelic pediatrics" and "psychedelic design." I've also (in a nonfiction piece) interfaced pharmacology, brain physiology, systems analysis, psychology, holography, and a handful of other existing disciplines and created "psychesomics," the science of the mind-matter interface itself.

  Rule Five of the Rubber Sciences: interfacing two or more existing sciences will generate a plausible (if not necessarily valid) new science.

  Another lesson in Rubber Science plausibility that can be gleaned from Scientology is the use of terminology, or, if you will, jargon. Fiction, after all, is word magic, and a well-crafted system of magic words in itself has a certain intrinsic reality, as witness law, religion, philosophy, criticism, and advertising. Too often, the coined words in science fiction stories exist in isolation, both from the actual Rubber Science material to which they refer and each other. In Scientology we can see how it should be done. Words like "engram," "clear," and "auditor" all have both specific meaning pertaining to specific elements of the pseudo-science and metaphorical overtones relating the word system to the general body of human knowledge. They can be put together or qualified in ways that extend their meanings in a reasonably self-evident manner. Once "engram" is explained, "engram-chain" has real meaning; once the state of "clear" is explained, "clearing program" becomes self-explanatory. The terminology holds together as a system, which lends plausibility to the Rubber Science as a system.

  How much more solid Scientology seems than fuzzy Van Vogtian psionics or even Asimovian robotics! One can discuss it beyond the bounds of Hubbard's books and in Hubbard's own terminology. Some psychotherapists have even picked up "engram" and apply the concept to other psychological systems. Rule Six of the Rubber Sciences: systematize your terminology and relate it to the rest of human knowledge by choosing some of the words for their metaphorical resonance in the reader's mind.

  Finally, notice how Hubbard has given plausibility to a "soft" Rubber Science by inventing a piece of hardware, the E-meter, which solidifies the whole system with the new reality of a functioning apparatus. In terms of plausibility, it really doesn't matter that the E-meter is nothing but a very crude lie-detector. If Hubbard had opted for the use of real lie-detectors (technically superior in every way to the E-meter for the very purpose for which the E-meter was designed) he would have lost the credibility effect of inventing an apparatus intrinsic to his own pseudo-science. "New science" is so identified in people's minds with "inventions" that you almost can't have one without the other. Rule Seven of the Rubber Sciences: solidify your pseudo-science with believable hardware.

  * * *

  Now that we've seen how to give plausibility to an invented science, we can approach the whole question of genuine speculative scientific content. For in its highest form, the Rubber Science in science fiction can, on occasion, actually contribute to the dialectic of scientific evolution; it can come very close, sometimes, to being the real thing.

  This is one reason, I would content, why truly great science fiction transcends other great literature. Science fiction has the potential not merely to describe existing realities, not merely to imagine nonexistent realities, but actually to create realities. It can have extra-literary extensions into the real world.

  Consider science fiction, for a moment, not as a branch of literature but as a style of consciousness, a philosophy of the nature of reality, a series of camera-angles on the universe.

  Like fantasy, science fiction describes currently nonexistent realities, but unlike fantasy, it does not require the reader's suspension of disbelief, it seeks to create it. It does this by relating the invented reality to the reader's own reality logically. It seeks to create new worlds that are logical evolutionary extensions of the world the writer and reader both share. It assumes the responsibility for taking the reader from here to there.

  Often, in conscientiously written science fiction, this means that the writer works out a great many evolutionary steps that the reader never sees. For instance, my own novella, "Riding the Torch." This stor
y is set entirely in a far future in which the last remnant of humanity lives in a great fleet of interstellar ships. Each ship is built around a hydrogen ramscoop fusion torch, which not only propels it but provides it with virtually unlimited internal power and with raw material from the interstellar medium. The culture of this story has unlimited energy and unlimited raw materials, which, combined with the ability to transmute matter almost totally, gives it the power to create just about anything it wants to. Further, full-sensory computer transceivers implanted in the people's brains give them, among many other things, the power to live in any subjective reality they choose.

  "Riding the Torch" is set entirely in this future society and told entirely from the viewpoint of characters in the ship culture, but in order to give it the solidity I wanted, I found that I had to work out for myself a capsule history of how mankind got from here to there, technologically, as well as politically and socially.

  Thus I had to contemplate such things as how the earth might become uninhabitable, the development of fusion technology in deep space, matter transformation, the psychology and artistic implications of the computer-brain link, and so forth. All this just for one story—the "homework" that was done before I wrote the first word of the actual novella, material the reader never saw, took up many pages.

  Science fiction writers do this sort of thing all the time. They are psychically at home in the future. Even the term "the future" is an oversimplification of the science fiction consciousness, for (with the exception of some writers who get bogged down in setting all of their stories in the same consistent future) science fiction writers contemplate different futures every time they set out to write a new story. They are at home not merely in "the" future but in multiplex futures. They have assimilated the multiplex nature of reality, the new realities that radiate outward from the nexus of every possible space-time event. The consciousness of science fiction is a transformational consciousness; the logic of science fiction is the logic of perpetual flux.

  I would submit that there are few minds outside of science fiction who fully assimilate this type of consciousness and virtually no other intellectual community or discipline that shares it communally. Futurology, which comes closest, is a pale shadow of science fiction; indeed it is probably a new science that science fiction actually created.

  In addition, science fiction writers are the original "generalists" or "synergists." To create plausible pictures of future sciences and technologies, science fiction writers must have some familiarity with all of the physical sciences. To create pictures of imagined other planets, they must know some astrophysics, meteorology, geology, ecology, and biology. To create future or alien cultures, they must be able to think sociologically, anthropologically, and psychologically. A little perception of the cultural evolution of art and religion comes in handy too.

  Not merely must science fiction writers have some knowledge in all of these areas, what they deal with is precisely the interaction of all these factors to create a total natural, technological, and cultural environment. This is exactly the kind of thinking that "synergists" like Buckminster Fuller "specialize" in.

  But science fiction writers go far beyond the synergists, for they are not scientists, they are literary artists, and their proper primary concern is the human heart. When science fiction truly succeeds, all the multiple factors that go to make up a total natural, technological, and cultural environment are brought home to living, loving, suffering characters, to the territory of the soul, and we have a truly visionary exploration of man as a physical and psychic creature of the universe.

  Science fiction writers, as much as anyone, and probably more so, are engaged in visionary contemplation of man's total being in the total reality of the universe. It is therefore not always entirely vain for them to create imaginary new paradigms and dare to consider that they may eventually prove to be not only plausible but valid.

  Scientists, after all, are tied to a logical process that forces them to prove the validity of every conjecture they make, whereas science fiction writers can examine any alternative reality of which they can conceive in physical and psychic detail. We can do just about anything we please. We can be "wrong" as much as we want to and still be "right."

  So why not use this instrument to the fullest and deepest extent possible and seriously contemplate the universe within and without us? Why not carry the Rubber Sciences beyond mere verisimilitude-creating techniques? The literary methods science fiction has developed to give speculation plausibility free science fiction writers to make any conjecture they like and still maintain literary verisimilitude.

  What I'm saying, in short, is that sometimes the Rubber Sciences can turn out to be not so rubber at all in the end. Rule Eight of the Rubber Sciences: you can use the Rubber Sciences as tools for genuine intellectual exploration of the unknown.

  We have, after all, been right upon occasion, not only in mere details but also in insight.

  Decades before the best-seller Body Language, A. E. Van Vogt had created a pseudo-science which is to "body language" as nuclear physics is to chemistry. Here the concept of reading emotional states from body postures was carried to a near-telepathic conclusion. Van Vogt's adept could virtually read actual thoughts from body postures and facial expressions and structures. Science has not yet fulfilled Van Vogt's vision, but what has been accomplished was preceded by decades by his insight, and furthermore what Van Vogt described was the distilled essence of such a future science. Not merely a lucky prediction but a true visionary flash.

  It was science fiction writers who first speculated about antimatter physics. The now-existent science of "xenobiology" comes straight from science fiction (including the name of the science itself), and even most of its current theoretical speculations can be found repeated over and over again in decades of science fiction stories. And the translation of "xenology" from science fiction to reality awaits only the discovery of another sentient race upon which to practice this already-developed science.

  Sometimes our Rubber Science fantasies turn out to be valid, true, useful in the real world. So finally we should also consider how to dream truer dreams if we are to exploit the Rubber Sciences fully in the creation of literary art.

  But science fiction writers should always bear in mind that they are creating visions, not science. Science fiction writers are literary artists, not scientists. Upon occasion, scientists have proven the validity of some of these visions, or been inspired by them. That is their function, not that of the science fiction writer. Indeed, for science fiction writers to worry about the validity of their visions would be to straitjacket them needlessly.

  What science fiction writers should concentrate on in this area is the further development of their visionary consciousness. One of the keys to this is not to get too hung up on the "science" in "science fiction writer." As I've tried to show in this chapter, most of the so-called science content in science fiction is really literary techniques and scientific logic, not actual fact. What is generally considered "hard science fiction" is not so much more rigor in scientific speculation as a common and rather limiting attitude toward the material and to the visionary faculty.

  Larry Niven, Hal Clement, Murray Leinster, John W. Campbell, Jr., among others, are generally considered hard science fiction writers. In addition, certain works of writers like Poul Anderson, James Blish, Lester del Rey, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are also considered hard science fiction. What do these works of "hard science fiction" have in common?

  For one thing, there is what can only be described as the hard science fiction "feel." One has a sense of hard black vacuum and cold pinpoint stars, a universe filled with hard-edged metallic artifacts and a reality whose rules are all of a piece, fixed, seamless, and invariant. The same feel you get watching Destination Moon, most of 2001, or an Apollo launch. The same feel you get looking at a Chesley Bonestell painting. All hard science fiction stories seem somehow to take place in the same essential r
eality, no matter the differences in superficial detail, and that reality is the hard-edged, materialistic, deterministic reality of a structured and filled-in scientific Weltanschauung which admits of no fuzziness in locus, no blank spots, no indeterminacy, no multiplexity—more Newtonian than Einsteinian.

  Secondly, hard science fiction seldom if ever focuses its attention on its characters, and when it does, there is little genuine inner life portrayed. One thing hard science fiction emphatically is not is the literature of the interaction between altered external environments and altered inner psychic states. Almost without exception, the characters in hard science fiction stories have mid-20th-Century consciousness, no matter how far out their bodies are in space and time.

  All this is not necessarily to put down hard science fiction. Many fine stories have been written within these narrow parameters and have even drawn a kind of creative tension from their very narrowness. What I am pointing out is that these are narrow parameters for visionary speculation, that hard science fiction basically confines itself to a single reality and a very narrow range of consciousness in its characters.