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Fourth Beauty Imaginary Science ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ SF’s free science. Science is sf’s pretext. Every quantum-info-nano-bio-cyberastro -psycho-xeno-socio-physical infodump pumps up the illusion that sf stories are dramatizations of scientific knowledge. But even in the hardest of hard sf, sf’s science is always figurative. It is an image of science, a poetic illusion disguising its illusionary status. The diegetic facts about the physics of onrushing asteroids or the biochemistry of consciousness may be ones that real-world scientists believe to be true. The theories that characters formulate, and the principles on which their worlds are constructed, may be ones that practicing scientists entertain. But within the frame of fiction, these are raw materials only. Many sf writers employ scientific ideas scrupulously. But there is no compulsion for them to do so. They use the language and history of technoscience to evoke the coherence and correspondence of the scientific worldview — but always with the freedom to violate, stretch, ironize, and problematize it. If actual science intends to increase human beings’ freedom by augmenting their power over matter, sf makes both freedom and power the subject of play. In technoscientific culture there are diverse notions of what constitutes science . Instead of a single monolithic, officially sanctioned prototype, people build their conceptions of science from a great variety of uses, experiences, and images. As in ancient imperial cities, where people with dramatically differing and often internally contradictory ideas of religion crossed paths regularly and exchanged views, technoscientific moderns share a technological environment, but interpret it from many different perspectives. Technology and science charge every atom of social existence. Machine mediation and technical management pervade daily habits. But other customs of thought flow through and absorb technology in their turn. Highly technologized cultures entertain varieties of scientific imagination ranging from childlike natural fantasy to the contemplation of quantum gravity, with all the streets’ uses 111 in between. In high-tech capitalism, technoscience produces words and images that sell and legitimate commodities and power, sensation and desire. In the empire of technoscience every area of concern is examined scientifically, with a technological solution as a goal. But the concerns carry ancient baggage that science does not secure. As a genre label, “science fiction” is ostentatiously oxymoronic, and in a particularly ambiguous way. What are the forces of attraction and repulsion between these opposites? Where do they get their powers? In my view, sf has always engaged scientific ideas and speculations in order to affirm the freedom of the artistic imagination from the constraints of deterministic and oppressively systematic ideas. Exaggeratedly rationalistic theories ignore sf’s fundamentally playful performance of scientific thinking. Even when it is written by professional scientists with established reputations, sf requires its science to violate scientific correctness, even plausibility. Writers take known, plausible, or just widely entertained scientific ideas and extend them speculatively into the unknown, exceeding their contexts, revealing their fantastic dimensions, and undermining obliquely their claims to universal applicability. Most sf writers, far from pushing an agenda of scrupulous respect for scientific truth, toy with it, making it a source of metaphors, rationalized by realistic representation , and embedded in quasi-mythic narrative traditions that express social concerns. Playing the Game The genre has the not wholly undeserved reputation of being a propaganda arm of technocratic ideology. Verne had an avowed pedagogical purpose in writing the Voyages Extraordinaires.1 Gernsback’s editorials argued often that “scientifiction” was to be based on rigorous adherence to known science, and that the genre would benefit humanity by instilling the virtues of scientific consciousness in its readers, a view even more aggressively advanced by Campbell . And yet Gernsback and Campbell depended on sf that was scientifically dubious to fill the pages of Amazing and Astounding.2 And for Verne, the line between scientific correctness and fantasy was not hard and fast, although it was imperative for his project that it appear to be so.3 Wells approached his fictions less soberly. In his early essays, he often entertained contradictory views on undecided questions of evolutionary development , and was equally comfortable with optimistic and pessimistic outcomes for the human species. Evolution’s experiments could be argued either way.4 In fiction, he was acutely aware that to make the fusion of scientific ideas and fiction convincing, the science would have to be the more flexible of the pair, 112 The seven beauties of science fiction [3.12.41.106] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 17:12 GMT...

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