Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (56 page)

Before evening the wayfarers had reached the Mediterranean. On their road they failed to discern a vestige of the little town of Montenotte; like Tenes (of which not so much as a ruined cottage was visible on the horizon), it seemed to be annihilated.

On the following day, the 6th of January, the two men made a forced march along the coast of the Mediterranean, which they found in some degree less altered than the captain had at first supposed; but four villages, Callaat-Chimah, Agniss, Marabout, and Pointe-Basse, had entirely disappeared, and the headlands, unable to resist the shock of the convulsion, had been detached from the mainland.

The circuit of the island had been now completed, and the explorers, after a period of sixty hours, found themselves once more beside the ruins of their gourbi. Five days, or what, according to the established order of things, would have been two days and a half, had been occupied in tracing the boundaries of their new domain; and although not the only living occupants, inasmuch as herds of cattle had been seen, they had ascertained beyond a doubt that they were the sole human inhabitants left upon the island.

“Well, sir, here you are, Governor-General of Algeria!” exclaimed Ben Zoof, as they reached the gourbi.

“With not a soul to govern,” gloomily rejoined the captain.

“How so? Do you not reckon me?”

“Pshaw! Ben Zoof, what are you?”

“What am I? Why, I am the population.”

The captain deigned no reply, but, muttering some expressions of regret for the fruitless trouble he had taken about his rondo, betook himself to rest.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the search for scientific knowledge increasingly was seen as belonging to a select group of people: those with the professional credentials that came with advanced graduate training, full membership in elite disciplinary societies, access to sophisticated laboratories, and the ability to publish research articles that featured technical language and mathematical analysis that was difficult for outsiders to understand. The conventional wisdom said that science was progressing so far, so fast, and under conditions that were so specialized that it was no longer possible for laypeople to grasp the nature of modern scientific thought. After all, hadn’t it been reported that only twelve wise men could comprehend Einstein’s general relativity theory?

If the inward explorations of scientific thought were seen as increasingly remote and inaccessible to ordinary people, it was nonetheless true that they were expected to meet the new demands that came with living in an age of science. As human capabilities expanded in ways that shattered previous boundaries—with near-instantaneous telegraphic messages speeding across the air and under the oceans and earthly beings flying through the atmosphere in machines of their own devising—the very nature of space and time underwent change from one generation to the next. The reorganization of social life in an era of complex interconnected systems brought with it the ability to mesh man and machine in assembly lines that resulted in a complete automobile every three minutes, a determination to sort human potential by standardized testing, and the creation of media transmissions that allowed hundreds of millions of individuals to experience the same event simultaneously. The future belonged to those who wielded the tools of science, blazing a path for the rest of us to follow. As the entrance to the Hall of Science at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago declared: “Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms.”

As important as these trends were, contemporaries pointed to one that was still more powerful in scope: “the disenchantment of the world.” Where religion, myth, and sacred wonders had once infused the world with meaning, these frameworks were seen as having been replaced by a demystified worldview based on rationality, skepticism, and objectivity. In the twentieth century, otherworldly sensibilities would necessarily give way before the cold equations of an impersonal Nature known through dissection, quantification, mechanization, and experimentation. Although the disenchantments wrought by science might not be accepted immediately by all, those who lagged behind in accommodating themselves to the new cultural coordinates would find it difficult to navigate the ever-changing landscape of modernity.

At least, these are the explanations that made sense when looking out at the general public from within the confines of professional science. What did the public have to say for themselves? For answers to this question, historians of science have had to shift their focus away from their long-standing preference for studying the official worlds of elite science, and instead explore science in the vernacular, as it emerged from within the sphere of popular culture. Indeed, it appears that within the unauthorized spaces of popular culture, an “intellectual commons” emerged in which vibrant and creative forms of scientific commentary, critique, and speculation circulated—a picture at odds with generalizations about members of the public as disengaged, disenfranchised, and disenchanted. And of the variety of science-inflected popular forms that came to exist within the vernacular sphere, science fiction may be the most significant of all in contributing to the creation and re-creation of cultural understandings across the twentieth century’s age of science.

Far from being intimidated bystanders, the creators and audiences for science fiction could more aptly be seen as active participants in scientific culture (a range of participants that runs the gamut from children to professional scientists themselves, crossing numerous categories). Nor would it make sense to think of science fiction primarily as a literature that confirmed and conformed to the status quo, given its orientation to the future, its quest to explore a plenitude of “what ifs?,” and its world-building ethic. Similarly, the triumph of a disenchanted worldview sits uneasily with the inner workings of science fiction stories, given the warrant they possess for evoking a sense of wonder even as they draw from a scientific foundation (whether strictly conceived in the manner of hard SF, or more flexibly otherwise). As communities of inquiry that call into question the nature of current realities, the world of science fiction represents an experimental space in which ideas about “science” itself can be entertained, offering up the possibility of using science fiction to reveal hidden histories of science in the vernacular.

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 values. 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?