Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  Alan E. Nourse, M.D.

  Alan E. Nourse was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1928, and spent his childhood in Iowa, New York, and New Jersey. After graduating from high school, he started his pre-medical studies at Rutgers in 1945, but these were interrupted by two years in the Navy's hospital corps. In 1948, he returned to Rutgers, where he received his B.S. in 1951, and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. After getting his M.D. in 1955, he interned in Seattle, and then devoted two years to freelance writing before entering general practice at North Bend, Washington, in 1958. In 1963, he returned to full-time writing.

  His first national publication was a short story, "High Threshold," published in Astounding in 1951, and this was followed by some sixty sf stories and novelettes which appeared in virtually all the magazines of the time. In addition, he published a short novel, A Man Obsessed (Ace Books, 1954) and wrote The Invaders Are Coming (also for Ace) in collaboration. His writing, at the time, helped to pay for his medical education, and of course still reflects a strong medical orientation.

  Nourse has published fiction and nonfiction in a great many magazines: Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, Argosy, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, Boy's Life, and so forth. At present, his work in progress includes (in addition to fiction) two medical guides: The Ladies' Home Journal Family Medical Guide and The Outdoorsman's Medical Guide (both for Harper & Row) and The Backyard Astronomer (for Franklin Watts).

  He lives in North Bend with his wife and four children, and also maintains a writing retreat in eastern Washington, where much of his work is done. His hobbies include reading, fishing, hunting, and backpack hiking in the mountains.

  NONFICTION

  Nine Planets: Astronomy for the Space Age, 1960 and 1970 (Harper & Row) and 1962 (Pyramid Books)

  The Management of a Medical Practice, 1962 (Lippincott); with Geoffrey Marks So You Want To Be a Doctor, 1964 (Harper & Row); one of a series all for the same publisher, including So You Want To Be a Lawyer; a Scientist; a Nurse; an Engineer; a Physicist; a Chemist; a Surgeon; an Architect, several of which were collaborations, (various dates) Universe, Earth and Atom: The Story of Physics, 1969 (Harper & Row) Venus and Mercury: A First Book, 1972 (Franklin Watts)

  SCIENCE FICTION AND JUVENILE FICTION

  Trouble on Titan, 1954 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), 1964 (Lancer Books)

  A Man Obsessed, 1954 (Ace Books)

  Junior Intern, 1955 (Harper & Row)

  Rocket to Limbo, 1958 (Ace Books) and 1957 (McKay)

  Scavengers in Space, 1958 (McKay) and 1960 (Ace)

  The Invaders Are Coming, 1959 (Ace) with J. A. Meyer Star Surgeon, 1960 (McKay)

  Raiders From the Rings, 1963 (McKay)

  The Universe Between, 1965 (McKay)

  PSI High and Others, 1967 (McKay)

  The Mercy Men, 1968 (McKay)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Tiger by the Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories: 1960 (McKay)

  The Counterfeit Man: More Science Fiction Stories: 1965 (McKay)

  Rx for Tomorrow: Tales of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Medicine; 1971 (McKay)

  Thomas N. Scortia

  Science Fiction as the Imaginary Experiment

  “The thing I like most about science fiction," a physicist friend of mine once remarked, "is that all of the experiments work." His rather plaintive remark was prompted by the frustrations of a lifetime of experimental science. It was generated by the anguish of seeing a year's work disappear in pages of meaningless measurements while the elusive quantity he was studying vanished in the complexity and noise level of his instruments. Such frustration was further compounded by those too frequent instances in which someone in Paris would report an observation, using a new technique, and he and his colleagues would labor for months in vain in an attempt to duplicate the observation.

  The whole basis for experimental science, of course, is the unquestioned faith that the experiment that works in Paris will work in New York or San Francisco. It is not uncommon, however, that the data gathered in San Francisco is not quite the data gathered in Rome. Indeed, it seems sometimes as if the laws of physical science aren't quite the same in San Francisco and in Rome. This is a problem rather pointedly ignored in technological science fiction. The purely human factor is ignored blithely except in those instances where the author is postulating some psi influence on the experiment. In most stories the experiments, even when they don't work as planned, always yield the same data at any spot in the universe.

  Behind all of this concern for the repeatable experiment are two tacit assumptions, almost articles of faith: that the number of factors influencing an experiment are finite and predictable, and that the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe. If this were not so, there would be little point in developing an experimental science. Why bother to codify laws of nature that vary, depending on the location of the experiment or the nature of the experimenter? Yet, there always remains the nagging suspicion that some quality of the experimenter may influence the nature of the data derived from the experiment. If this were so, a natural consequence of this phenomenon would be the realization that the laws of the universe are not truly ordered and subject to rational interpretation. This is the ultimate blasphemy in the hierarchy of faith we call modern experimental science.

  Yet, modern physics is aware that there is a quality in nature called randomness, that on an atomic level mechanistic determinism doesn't quite seem to work. The laws of nature that we formulate on the macro-level are in the final analysis statistical laws. The assumption that mathematics may be used to describe the interaction of moieties in the real universe ignores the fact that mathematical formulations of natural laws are, at most, what mathematicians call "curve fitting." A simple formulation such as the Universal Gas Law, for instance, is an approximation that becomes less and less exact as the molecules of the gas become more compacted to the point where their separation is of the same order as the real dimensions of the molecule.

  Such a problem rarely arises in science fiction. Here the laws are all idealized and the experiment, when it works, follows rather precise mathematical definitions. Such fictional experiments are always unambiguous, even when they yield results that the scientist-hero did not expect. Implicit in such stories is the humanistic assumption that the laws of nature are amenable to the interpretation of human logic and, more than this, amenable to logical extrapolation. It is this tacit assumption that nature will yield her secrets by the application of logic and extrapolation that underlies all of science fiction, even that science fiction which at first glance appears to be anything but hard-core technological fiction.

  There is a tradition in modern physics known as the "gedankenexperiment," a term coined by Heisenberg. The term means literally "thought experiment" and describes a mental experiment in which the physicist imagines a precise set of experimental conditions or sets up a well-defined series of assumptions and tries to infer logically the results of the experiment. That such an exercise in logic has become important to modern physics is understandable when one considers that modern physicists concern themselves with the very stuff of space, time, and energy on such minute or on such grand scales that meaningful experimentation is often beyond the capabilities of mere human experimenters.

  The science fiction writer is in the truest sense a professional fabricator of gedankenexperimenten, whether he is exploring the narrow consequences of a new scientific or technological development or whether he is considering the broader consequences of a social trend. If he has done his groundwork well in setting up the story, he has presented the reader with the necessary premises on which the story is based. He conscientiously avoids the deus ex machina in the same way that the mystery writer avoids introducing the murderer in the last five pages of the whodunit.

  The rules of the game are as simple as that. The writer may assume that time travel works in such-and-such a fashion or that antigravity with certain c
haracteristics has been invented or that a given social trend will continue. Once he has established those constraints, he must honorably be bound by the state of human knowledge as it now exists. There are, of course, rare writers who can throw such rules aside and still produce a viable and exciting story. Probably the most notable exception to the rule is A. E. van Vogt, who not uncommonly will suddenly introduce "a little known [and fictitious] physical law" that conveniently allows him to rescue his hero from an untenable situation. (He does this in The World of A by postulating a Law of Three-point Similarity so that his hero may simply disappear from the spot where he is about to be killed and reappear in another less perilous place.)

  Most writers are reluctant to pull such rabbits out of the hat, however. While a technical deus ex machina may be used to solve a plot problem, the reader is either prepared for the appearance of the device by an early plant in the story or the writer takes great pains in developing a sophistic structure that seems technically to justify the device. In my own Artery of Fire (Doubleday, 1972), a so-called "black-field effect" is postulated to rid a plasmoid stream, traveling a quarter of the speed of light, of an inconvenient amount of kinetic energy so that the metallic U-235 of the plasmoids may be plated out on the moon.

  Such a justification is not always considered necessary when the device has become through frequent use a convention of the genre. Thus, few writers feel it necessary to explain the workings of a time machine as did H. G. Wells in his pioneering novel The Time Machine, nor does a writer feel compelled to explain what he means by a "space warp." It suffices that the story may not move without the assumption that faster-than-light travel is possible, and the convention "space warp" solves the problem without slowing the story for a long-winded explanation.

  The conventions of science fiction, however, often violate fundamental logic. Time-paradox stories are a case in point. The ultimate exercises in such paradoxes are Robert Heinlein's story "All You Zombies," in which the hero is his own father and mother, and David Gerrold's Random House novel, The Man Who Folded Himself. In this latter tour de force the hero repeatedly travels through time, altering the future and establishing alternate time lines, in the process having a love affair with his female counterpart and participating in a beach-side homosexual orgy with himself.

  However, even in the use of conventions the writer will often wish to define more precisely the conditions of his device, especially when his basic story line proceeds from some peculiar restriction which he places upon himself. As an example, the recent search for the tachyon, a hypothetical faster-than-light particle not excluded by relativistic theories, has resulted in a spate of faster-than-light drives based on this particle as a reaction mass. It has served as a special explanation of time travel. Other writers have faced the contradictions inherent in the postulation of a space warp and have restricted their ships to less-than-light speeds while relying on the relativistic time-dilation effect to allow their astronauts to survive voyages of centuries.

  Many of the conventions of science fiction betray basic errors of science. While one may argue that the assumptions in such conventions as faster-than-light travel and time travel are in an area not clearly explored by modern science, other science fiction conventions are clearly violations of known physical laws. Such a violation is found in the often used convention of giant ants or other living creatures expanded beyond their usual size. Here the writer encounters the problems of the square-cube law. Doubling the linear dimensions of the beast will quadruple the cross-sectional area of legs and the absorptive area of lungs and gut while multiplying the mass of the creature by eight times. It becomes obvious that after several such expansions, the beast's legs will not support it while the lungs will not be able to absorb enough oxygen or the gut enough food to sustain the mass of the creature. (This relationship can be illustrated by comparing the simple lungs and digestive tracts of insects with the complex branching lungs and convoluted alimentary canals of humans.)

  The closely reasoned technological story has come to be known as a "hard-core science fiction story." Robert Heinlein and Dr. Isaac Asimov have long been the leading adepts of this difficult subspecies. More recently, Larry Niven in Ringworld and Frank Herbert in Dragon in the Sea and the monumental Dune have shown themselves masters of the difficult art of constructing a story line that adheres to an internally consistent technical or social structure. Hal Clement too has been particularly facile in building completely consistent technical structures in such novels as Mission of Gravity.

  Because the fabrication of such stories is so demanding, it is not surprising that hard-core science fiction is relatively rare. Few of the newer writers have been rigorously schooled in the sciences, and a great many of them rely on the large body of science fiction conventions for the underpinning of their stories. The writer, however, who fails to account for a basic physical law or who commits a gross error of logic in his scientific extrapolation may still expect cries of outrage in book reviews and in the readers' pages of the magazines.

  Technical slips in logic and extrapolation do appear in the best of the hard-core science fiction stories. A surprising example of such a technical faux pas, considering the background of the author, is The Curve of the Snowflake by W. Grey Walter,[2] the British physiologist. In this rather peculiar novel the author has postulated a weightless vehicle constructed like a three-dimensional version of the snowflake curve. The snowflake curve series is a progression of closed figures with an increasing number of projections. The first in the series is an equilateral triangle whose sides are trisected and a new equilateral triangle constructed in the middle third. This process may continue indefinitely, yield more and more complex figures with subtriangles increasing without limit. Grey's argument for the weightlessness of his vehicle is that it rests on an infinite number of points and, since each of the infinitely small points bears an infinitesimal portion of the weight, the total weight born by the points is itself infinitesimal. Anyone familiar with theory of limits or with the calculus will spot this error immediately since the progression of a function by a summation of infinitesimal increments to a finite limit is the whole basis of the calculus.

  Some years ago physicist Dr. Sidney A. Coleman, in a talk before the Northwestern University Science Fiction Society, pointed out an amusing contradiction in the famous Grey Lensman series by Dr. E. E. Smith. The faster-than-light spaceships of the Lensman series are powered by an "inertialess drive," a device that cancels the inertia of a mass and allows instant acceleration or deceleration. (The semantics of the discussion breaks down somewhat at this point since those two words imply the presence of inertia.) Dr. Coleman pointed out that a truly inertialess starship would be at the mercy of every collision with even a hydrogen molecule, forever bounding from gaseous molecule to gaseous molecule. However, he had a ready solution for navigation, reasoning that the starship captain might reach his destination by applying well-known statistical calculations to predict the mean free path of the starship.

  As might be expected science fiction has often shown a remarkable ability to foresee technological developments in its gedankenexperimenten even though it has been somewhat less successful in anticipating social and political changes. Science fiction's function as a framework for the imaginary experiment has surprisingly been formalized in such government-supported "think tanks" as the Institute for Defense Analysis and Dr. Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute. This latter institute has for years been engaged in writing scenarios projecting a series of alternate futures, depending on possible developments in the social and political forces now at work. This, of course, is the purist exercise in the science fiction gedankenexperimenten.

  In the area of space travel, science fiction writers wrote knowledgeably years before about rocket ships and staging principles, space satellites, atomic power, and a host of other present realities.

  Arthur Clarke predicted the usefulness of communication satellites long before they were a reality. A classic examp
le of technological prediction is Cleve Cartmill's famous story "Deadline" in the March 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Cartmill's description of a fusing technique for a fission bomb which was then under consideration by the Manhattan Project (but later discarded) was based on data from the open literature but nevertheless brought a quick visit by Intelligence to the offices of editor John W. Campbell. (Campbell finally convinced his visitor that there had been no leak and persuaded him to allow publication of other stories on atomic energy by the argument that their sudden disappearance from his pages, where such stories had appeared regularly, might be even more compromising.)

  Frank Herbert in Dragon in the Sea described a limp plastic balloon that functions as an undersea crude oil barge to be towed by a submarine, raiding foreign offshore oil deposits. Soon after the appearance of the novel, such a device was perfected and patented in England. Herbert also described a "vampire gauge" that gave instantaneous readings of blood carbon dioxide content. Such a device now exists.

  H. G. Wells's 1908 novel The War in the Air describes a frighteningly realistic air raid on Manhattan; the villains of the piece are the Germans and the Japanese. (The Japanese pilots fly heavier-than-aircraft in full uniform with samurai swords at their belts.) The most striking part of the novel is Wells's conclusion that the fundamental weakness of air power in war is that, while aircraft may interdict territory to the enemy, they cannot hold ground to become the decisive force in a war. Indeed, Wells's enemy forces retire to strongholds from which they make periodic sorties against the surrounding countryside without effectively curtailing the social vigor of their antagonists. This is a remarkable insight for one writing in 1908, an insight that has not yet been granted to our leading military minds in the Department of Defense.