In Defense of Science-Fiction

The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial.

No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott's masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott's film is, the seventh and "final" cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It's visually enhanced and, says Scott, "tweaked". It looks, and is, superb.) The further oddity is that fantasy - Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman - is not embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it's downright respectable. Perhaps this is because these are seen as children's books that grown-ups can read, whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.

"In a fantasy story," Aldiss says, "there's a big evil abroad, but, in the end, everything goes back to normal and everybody goes home to drink ale in the shires. In a science-fiction story, there may be a terrible evil abroad, and it may get sorted out, but the world is f***ed up for ever. This is realism. It's certainly not beach reading, unless you can find a really nasty, shingly beach."

The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it's just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges's Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World or Wells's War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time - both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.

For this is where it excels. It is the most vivid and direct chronicler of our anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called "the mysterious fears of our nature". It was Shelley's Frankenstein that was, Aldiss argues in his superb history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, the first true SF novel. Her big idea - and it is the big idea that haunts all SF - was that our imperious ingenuity would backfire horribly. Frankenstein's monster runs amok, the Skynet computer in the Terminator films decides to destroy humanity, Philip K Dick's robots think they are human, and his humans fear they might be robots. And when the scientists in Fredric Brown's one-page story Answer ask their new super-computer if there is a god, it replies, "Yes, NOWthere is..."

This is why the genre is called "science" fiction. It deals with the effects of scientific insight and technological application. A new book, Different Engines by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook, makes this clear by showing how closely SF follows scientific developments. The Copernican revolution that displaced the earth from the centre of the universe produced 17th-century space fantasies by Kepler, Godwin and Bergerac. Darwin, by showing how life might evolve anywhere, generated a wave of alien-encounter literature that still submerges us. The weird physics of Einstein and Planck made fictional interstellar travel - such as the "warp drive" in Star Trek - seem possible. And the rise of the computer-inspired "cyberpunk" SF, most famously in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the novel that preinvented the internet in, of course, 1984.

But Brake and Hook go further. They suggest this is a two-way street: SF also influences science. Brake points out to me that it was Wells who invented the atom bomb in The World Set Free, in 1914, in spite of the fact that two of the leading nuclear physicists of the day, Rutherford and Soddy, had said it was impossible. Leo Szilard read Wells's book in 1932. A year later, Szilard discovered the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for the traffic lights to change on Southampton Row, in Bloomsbury. "Wells's fictional bomb led straight to Hiroshima," write Brake and Hook. I would add that Astounding magazine led to the cold war. Werner von Braun had the magazine smuggled in while working on rockets for the Nazis. His V-2 - a pointy cigar with fins - was plainly inspired by an Astounding cover.

This is not so surprising. SF writers are free to speculate in a way that scientists aren't, and this can suggest the path ahead. Perhaps the best example of this process is the way the idea of the alien has moved from fiction to reality. The Nasa historian Steven Dick has pointed out that the billions spent by the agency on investigating the possibility or likelihood of alien life is a direct result of the invention of the extraterrestrial in fiction. Furthermore, there is now an entire scientific discipline - astro- or exobiology - that exists to study a so far entirely fictional entity, life beyond the earth. In effect, science has accepted a terrifying, uniquely SF insight that has been with us ever since the fantasies of Kepler and Godwin: simply, that we are nothing special, and that the universe is unimaginably large. There must be aliens out there, said the SF writers, and the scientists now, on the whole, agree.

The point is that SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science. How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom, rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead? Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever. Unfortunately, as Aldiss and Brake agree, this does not seem to be a great time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF. The classical age - of Wells, Lem and Dick - seems to be behind us, and the emerging genre of New Weird, led by Britain's China Mi�ville, shades too much into fantasy and horror to be strictly classified as SF, a genre that must remain true to a certain level of logic and realism. But one can try Greg Bear, a practitioner of old-fashioned "hard" SF, the kind that, like the work of Michael Crichton, sticks most closely to real current science. Bear's celebrated Blood Music is a brilliantly horrible vision of genetics gone wrong. Or there's another Brit, Stephen Baxter, who writes hard SF strongly influenced by HG Wells; or Iain M Banks (Iain Banks's SF guise), who has written a series of novels about the Culture, an alien civilisation existing in parallel to the human. Banks's emphasis is more philosophical than strictly scientific, and seems to descend from the supreme practitioner of philosophical SF, Olaf Stapledon, a man incapable of writing about anything less than everything.

Aldiss is the great champion of logical SF - with good reason. He worked on the film script of his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long with Stanley Kubrick for 10 years, much of the time simply trying to persuade the director not to bring in a Pinocchio theme of a robot boy seeking love from the Blue Angel. "But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a chair as persuade Stanley of anything. I should have known better." Kubrick died without making the film. Steven Spielberg took over the project and made AI, a film that toppled over into whimsy and fantasy. "It's crap," Aldiss says. "Science fiction has to be logical, and it's full of lapses in logic."

But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there's a lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it's badly written, which most of it is. So is most "literary" fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There's a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary. So, watch Blade Runner for the seventh time, or curl up with Aldiss's Omnibus. And remember, it's all happening now.

Hear! Hear!

By their natures, Science Fiction and Fantasy challenge the order of the world we presently inhabit--and the archtypal Establishments needs the current world order to survive.