In using science fiction as our guide to our scientific culture’s past realities, what is it that we stand to learn? In truth, historians of science and popular culture are just beginning to treat science fiction with a careful eye and an open mind: there are entire galaxies we have yet to locate, and where to begin at times seems overwhelming. The important point is to get started, for if history of science is to be more than just the history of scientists—that is, if we are to create inclusive histories of what being members of a scientific culture means to all of us—then we need to learn what science fiction has to teach us.
Beyond Frankenstein
Where science fiction has mattered most in articulating histories of modern science is in teaching history of science. This is true despite the fact that most scholars are familiar with historical moments in which ideas move back and forth between the spheres of science and science fiction, as with visions of space travel. Instances such as these are seen as contingent moments, however, not as reliable dynamics that elucidate either matters of routine science or matters of scientific genius. But works of science fiction are often called on to illustrate key social or ethical issues that arise in relation to the timeline of “big ideas” (like Darwinian evolution) and “revolutionary events” (like the development of nuclear weapons) that we teach in class.
When science fiction does enter the classroom it almost always earns its invitation by displaying signifiers of merit. The most-often assigned text is likely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which comes pre-certified due to the longevity of its influence, and because it so often wins out as the answer to the question: “What was the first science fiction work?” Novels by H. G. Wells are favorites, too, since they are vivid and compact, and are legitimated by his status as one of the “fathers/founders” of modern science fiction. It also matters that Wells’s work comes with an impeccable scientific pedigree for someone not a scientist himself: as every professor who assigns Wells notes, he studied in college under zoologist T.H. Huxley, who, as “Darwin’s bulldog,” is one of history of science’s great men.1
To view the history of science through the lens of science fiction would certainly allow for any work in the science fiction universe to be fair game, but in reality, the mini-canon of celebrity texts is highly selective. It’s rare for even the well-credentialed works to be assigned in comparison to each other (that would be to devote too much time to science fiction), much less for more obscure works to make an appearance. But a lack of fluency outside of the “teaching canon” makes for an impoverished understanding of the diversity of voices being registered within science fiction over time, and what they were saying and how and why and to whom.
To take just the example of the question of life and its transformations as science and science fiction began flourishing in the nineteenth century, Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) by Wells are just the beginning of the realm of the possible texts to consider. Science fiction works categorized as belonging to “other” scientific areas prove to be relevant, as with Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884), which by tradition is held to belong to the category of science fiction as mathematics/physics, given its depiction of a two-dimensional universe inhabited by geometric figures. And yet the story’s logic depends on strong evolutionary themes, relating to Flatlander “physiology” and “genetics.” But the work of a housewife from Ohio counts as well, with her depiction in Mizora of a female-only scientific utopia made possible through parthenogenesis, first published anonymously in serialized form in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper in 1880–1881, and then in 1889 as a book under her name of Mary E. Bradley Lane. Mizora, in turn, is but one of a myriad of hollow earth tales from the period, pointing to another set of contemporary works that play with questions of biological malleability and environment. Nor is this all. As historian of science Paul Fayter sketched out in 1997, a veritable “evolutionist science fiction underground world” existed in these latter decades, whether focusing on animal/human linkages with such stories as Simiocracy: A Fragment from Future History (1884) by Arthur Montagu Brookfield—in which orangutans gain equal rights with Homo sapiens—or appropriating the planet Mars for alien evolutionary speculation, as in Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space (1890)—which portrays a superannuated race in decay—or the satire and utopianism in Alice Jones and Ella Marchant’s Unveiling a Parallel, which wreaks havoc with gender norms (1893).2
As it turns out, the emergent conversations about modern science through science fiction that set the tone for the century ahead were more animated, noisy, elaborate, provocative, and numerous than has generally been acknowledged when looking at the history of science—and missing out on these conversations has made it more difficult to pick up the threads in later decades. Relying on a short list of the most familiar addresses when taking a science fiction tour is unlikely to provide visitors with a chance to take in the activity at the central market, let alone get wind of where the underground congregates. We need to be as open today to contemplating a report from the future in the pages of the Cincinnati Commercial as were past generations.
Science as if Storytelling Mattered
If there’s a good case to be made for expanding the universe of science fiction stories that we use to shed light on the history of science, it is an effort that still runs up against the issue of science fiction’s status as genre fiction: that is, stories that are categorized as formulaic, convention-laden, and escapist. That science fiction might be used as an analytical tool to capture sentiments about scientific ideas at play during a particular era might well be possible, but in the end wouldn’t its genre characteristics limit the insight it could provide? This certainly seems to have been a factor for why so little research on science fiction exists within the history of science.
And yet, historians of science, as well as others, do turn again and again to science fiction in the classroom to play the role of social/ethical issues tutor. A key reason for this move is that the norms of science make it difficult, out-of-the-ordinary, or unprofitable for scientists themselves to routinely engage in extrapolation about possible scenarios involving the social and ethical effects of their work—to focus on the unknowns and a range of possible consequences in light of these unknowns—and to discuss them with a wide array of participants. The norms of science fiction, on the other hand, are the exact reverse of this situation, allowing for the consideration of these and other subjective matters, precisely to stimulate conversations—indeed, to add new threads to already ongoing conversations due to the legacies bequeathed by spirited cohorts of creators and audiences reaching back to the late nineteenth century.
Science fiction, then, in its engagement with the social and ethical ramifications of scientific research due to its more liberal environment for reflection and speculation, can be seen as an adjunct to a scientific enterprise that has been too busy in its work practices (conducting experiments, applying for grants, administering research groups and scientific departments) and too remote from the everyday world to communicate with those without specialized knowledge. But a deeper reading of history suggests that science fiction’s entanglement with the larger questions of life in an age of science is a significant development in the history of science in an even stronger sense: demonstrating why storytelling matters.
Through storytelling, science fiction animates abstract ideas by providing context, meaning, and resonances to issues at stake for individuals and societies, engaging its audiences on an emotional level by inviting the reader to become a partner in a process of discovery, and facilitating, in turn, responses from readers or viewers that result in their own insights. Its inner workings owe a debt to the logical and technical referents of modern science, and, as fiction, to the humanistic traditions of interpretation and cultural expression. In this, science fiction can be seen as a hybrid form, bringing together two realms that often seem at odds with each other in terms of methods, goals, and valu
es. Rather than a manufactured hybridity, however, I would suggest a slightly different historical reading: that in its hybridity science fiction demonstrates the substantive reality that science is a humanistic enterprise as well as a technical one, even as training in science has downplayed that prospect over the last century and on into the present. That is, science is about more than what the results of the next experiment indicate about what the next experiment after that should be, and how these experiments speak to other experiments. The provisional questions and tentative answers embedded within scientific modes of thought and practice are directly related to the search for understanding that marks humanistic disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy: What is a human being? What relationships make society possible? What are our responsibilities to each other? What are our responsibilities to the non-human world? What do we owe to the past, and to the future? How is truth defined? How should we expect nature to behave? How are the technological and the natural related? What is our place in the universe?
When the members of the most prestigious scientific disciplines made the choice to focus inward on the work at hand—on the technical aspects of the search for natural knowledge—and to leave wider-angle discussions of the human dimensions of that search to others whenever possible, they exercised an option that resulted in diminished contact with the vernacular, where humanistic concerns persist. Science fiction became one of the most highly visible conduits of humanistically construed science, but it was not the only one. Using the characteristics of science fiction as a template, it is possible to recognize other communities based in science that engage in speculative narratives that are more open-ended than they are closed, that generate a sense of wonder, and where readers are vicarious participants in a process of discovery. Good candidates would be the fields of paleontology, human origins, and archaeology. Each of these scientific subjects relies on measurement and data and advanced methods, and yet because of the timescales involved and the necessity to work with evidence that is often singular and fragmentary, informed speculation and narrative treatments are required in communicating its findings to wider publics.
As with science fiction explorations, intellectual decipherments of when nightfall came to the Cretaceous, or of the existence of “human hobbits” in a distant era in the Indonesian archipelago, or of what was being recorded when Babylonians worked their reeds on moist tablets of clay, draw on the power of storytelling to open up an intellectual commons where even the laity can become imaginative participants in thinking through the possibilities. The poet Muriel Rukeyeser once wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”3 In placing the taken-for-granted up for review to anyone willing to take part, the worlds of science fiction that have given voice to what are more than mere stories deserve a fuller accounting within the history of science than they have yet received. And if we read carefully, hidden histories of science may appear between the lines.
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Endnotes
1. The works of Jules Verne—often paired with Wells as a “father/founder” of science fiction—have been less popular as assigned texts, due to the toll taken on their reputation by the dreary and often misguided French-to-English translations/abridgments that were his fate for so long.
2. Paul Fayter, “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction,” in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 262.
3. This is from the poem “The Speed of Darkness” from the book, The Speed of Darkness (1968).
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Katherine Pandora is an associate professor in the History of Science Department at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches and researches on topics related to science and popular culture, including science fiction. Some of her teaching is online at scipop.net and she blogs at http://scipop.typepad.com/petri_dish/. She is currently working on a book entitled Science in the American Vernacular.
H. G. WELLS
(1866–1946)
Although he rose from the son of a shopkeeper father and servant mother to become a widely read author and a key voice in popularizing both science fiction (which he called scientifiction) and popular history, Wells would end his life disillusioned that his writing didn’t lead to massive social changes (as brilliantly fictionalized in John Kessel’s “Buffalo,” on p. 780).
A childhood broken leg which left Wells temporarily bedridden also left him with a love of literature, and he was able to win a scholarship to a school in London and eventually take up teaching. Within a few years he was writing full-time. He married his cousin in 1891, left her three years later for one of his students, and followed with a string of mistresses and strong-selling books. The “scientific romances” he wrote early in his career are the novels he is best remembered for now: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and others which are still widely read—but were mostly read as adventure novels rather than social commentary.
Wells gradually wrote less science fiction and more “serious” literature, political tracts, and popular nonfiction (the best-known of which was his three volume Outline of History). A Fabian socialist before feuding with the Fabian society, Wells used his fame as a writer to try to bridge the growing divide between East and West after the Russian Revolution. Neither side took him very seriously (although at least one of his mistresses was a Soviet spy).
Wells refused to leave his home in London during the Blitz in World War II. He died the year after the war.
THE TIME MACHINE, by H. G. Wells
First published in New Review, January–May 1895
I
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought roams gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”
“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”
“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.”
“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—”
“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”
“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”
Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction a
long the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”
“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; “that…very clear indeed.”
“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,” continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?”
“I have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?”
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 47