Science Vs. The Fiction

ETHICS, SCIENCE, AND SCIENCE FICTION

By Nancy Kress

A very interesting and intriguing report Nancy Kress gives us on the role of Science Fiction(SF), in mending our realities. She very lucidly pulls out examples of different SF works, and elucidates in simple language, the impact of the writers on predicting the plausibilities of our future.

She begins by defining SF as a “near-future story or novel” that takes a serious note of what is to be done with today’s available technological and scientific advancements. From movies like Star Wars and Star Trek, to works of magic realism by Borges and Garcia Marquez, Science Fiction is a very big galaxy, dealing with stories of space adventure, scientific puzzle, engineering speculation, and social extrapolation, with media tie-ins, explains Kress.

Science Fiction raises many ethical questions on prevailing conditions of technology on how it is used, applied, and the outcomes of its role in the society. These ethical dilemmas have been closely examined and enquired by SF writers from Mary Shelley and H.G.Wells, till the writers of this day. And Kress presses on a manner in which these writers elegantly approach these dilemmas. She categorises the approach in four important ways, personalization, negativity, timing, and distortion.

PERSONALIZATION: Kress relates to us, on how SF writers are different from ethicists, theologians, or scientists, whose arguments are either logical or abstract. SF writers on the other hand focus on the consequences and moral implications by embedding them in a story. So, the appeal is directly to the readers’ emotions. The events of the story, caused by scientific intrusion, are affecting people whom readers come to care about, she explains. And hence the result, which becomes very personal. So, this becomes the power of any fiction.

She gives the example of Neville Shute’s “On the Beach” which never told the readers, but made them feel, what nuclear war was. The SF writer modifies the very attitude of the reader towards what Science could do to them. They start having opinions about the particular mode of Science/technology that the author or the filmmaker talks about to them.

NEGATIVITY: This aspect of SF, lies in the very ‘nature of fiction’, observes Kress. She says, “Nobody wants to read a story in which a group of people make a scientific discovery or technological breakthrough, implement it without opposition, and reap only positive results.” The readers need a masala of conflicts, drama, problems and disaster. Ultimately, the question that revolves every SF writer’s mind is “Who will this hurt?” That’s the person he/she writes about. It makes a better story.

A myriad of famous examples she poses to explain the concept. The difficulties faced by Mary Shelley’s scientist Dr. Frankenstein; The Eloi and the Morlocks of H.G.Wells’ genetic experiments not ending in a happy society; and William Gibson’s adventures in the cyberspace, do not always do the right thing she declares. The mistakes made, the situations exploited, and the people that are harmed are the tools that make a better story, affirms Kress.

TIMING: The SF writers seem to absorb the consequences, which may blow up as realities in the future, way before time. The Science Fiction works serve as an early warning system of the incoming dilemmas, says Kress.

Arthur C.Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” and Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” are works which do not visualize the future, but a future which leads to one of the many possible destinations where the adversity of Science and Technology may lead us to.

When Larry Niven for example, told in his stories about “Organ Transplant” and “Illegal Organ Trading” more than fifty years ago, no one was listening except the SF readers. But today, we can witness real such cases where people are hunted for organ trade. Kress magnifies the idea of how fictional ethical discussion varies from real-world ethical discussions through such instances. She brings out extraordinary outbreaks of SF visions, such as “Frankenfoods” and “Crop mutations”. She rightly points out that, SF was there when journals, bioethics departments, commissions, or advisory panels were clueless of such destructive issues. So, it is evident that readers might assimilate such ethical concepts decades before anyone might even dream of it, even though it is nurtured through personal, emotional, and often negative biased medium of Science Fiction.

Kress produces a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in which the protagonist addresses a group of SF writers: 
“You‘re all I read anymore. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage… You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”

From the book,

SCI-FI IN THE MIND’S EYE, by Margret Grebowicz

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

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