The Science of Science Fiction

The Influence of Film and Fiction on the Science and Culture of Our Times

Mark Brake

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781510739369
• eBook ISBN: 9781510739376
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Biological Sciences

Let Mark Brake open your eyes to how science fiction helped us dream of things to come and building the future we inhabit—from Star Trek to The Martian, from Back to the Future to Guardians of the Galaxy from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Avengers. Media headlines declare this the age of automation. The TV talks about the coming revolution of the robot, tweets tell tales of jets that will ferry travelers to the edge of space, and social media reports that the first human to live for a thousand years has already been born. The science we do, the movies we watch, and the culture we consume is the stuff of fiction that became fact, the future imagined in our past—the future we now inhabit. The Science of Science Fiction is the story of how science fiction shaped our world. No longer a subculture, science fiction has moved into the mainstream with the advent of the information age it helped realize. Explore how science fiction has driven science, with topics that include:

• Guardians of the Galaxy: Is Space Full of Extraterrestrials?
• Jacking In: Will the Future Be Like Ready Player One?
• Mad Max: Is Society Running down into Chaos?
• The Internet: Will Humans Tire of Mere Reality?
• Blade Runner 2049: When Will We Engineer Human Lookalikes?
• And many more!

"This book is the story of how science fiction shaped our world. No longer a subculture, science fiction has moved into the mainstream with the advent of the information age it helped realize. Explore how science fiction has driven science. This book will open your eyes to the way science fiction helped us dream of things to come, forced us to uncover the nature and limits of our own reality, and helped us build the science-fiction-driven world we live in today."

PART I

SPACE

It’s where “no one can hear you scream” in Ridley Scott’s Alien. It’s the “final frontier” in Star Trek. It’s the realm of Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar, along with a billion other habitable worlds of the imagination. The science fiction of space focuses on some facet of the natural world. Very often, the space theme is about that outward human urge to conquer and master the vast interstellar depths of the cosmos, in the classic manner of Captain Kirk and the legions of fleet and nimble ships of Star Wars and other space operas. In other tales, space is the vast, cold, and unsympathetic theater featured in Alien, or the immense void in Interstellar, a cosmos we may never come to terms with. The sheer indifference of space, such as featured in The Martian, reminds us that life may be frail and precious, but also tenacious, and that the universe is largely inhuman and deserted.

That Shakespeare of science fiction, H. G. Wells, really started something with The War of the Worlds back at the end of the nineteenth century. Wells’s Martians were an early warning of what was to come. They were the first agents of the void, the first menace from space. The Martians were Wells’s timely reminder that we may not be at the top of the universe’s evolutionary ladder.

The alien is one of science fiction’s greatest inventions. The alien is featured here in the space theme rather than monster theme for two reasons. For one, science fiction very often portrays the alien, such as the Na’vi in Avatar or the heptapods in Arrival as animated versions of nature. Second, the monster theme in science fiction focuses on the human condition, and, as we shall see, it’s about the monster within us, not without.

A lot of science-fiction stories about space can be understood as a longing to escape our sense of being merely human. Earth is our prison. That’s why we get tales in which the wonders and potential terrors of the universe are explored through the marvels of space travel, bringing tales of contact with extraterrestrial beings. Indeed, space stories have often been extrapolations of travelers’ tales to lost or forgotten lands on Earth.

The space theme shows us that there are great similarities between science fiction and science, and that science fiction has been a huge influence on modern science and culture. Science fiction is an imaginative device for a kind of theoretical science: the exploration of imagined worlds. Scientists build models of hypothetical worlds and then test their theories. Albert Einstein was famous for this. His Gedankenexperiment or thought experiments led to his theory of special relativity, for example. The science-fiction writer also explores hypothetical worlds but with more scope. Scientists are meant to stay within bounded laws. Science fiction has no such boundaries. However, we can see that a spirit of “what if” is common to both science and science fiction.

There are many examples where science fiction has proposed theories far too speculative for the science of the day, but that have later proved to be prophetic. The theme of space contains some great examples—space travel, exoplanets, men on the moon, to name just a few. However, it’s important to remember that the correctness of the science is not as important as its poetry or the sense of wonder and adventure experienced in pursuit of the science itself.

One of the best examples of the symbiosis of science and science fiction to be found anywhere is the question of life in space, or astrobiology. Through most of its history, science fiction has held a positive view of the possibility of alien life. Much of hard science fiction is made up mostly of two main sciences, physics and biology. Historically, physics came a lot earlier. Nicholas Copernicus shifted the center of the universe from the Earth to the Sun way back in 1543. Just over a century later, Isaac Newton produced a “system of the world,” one of the first attempts to produce a theory of everything. As a result, early fictional accounts of alien life, from Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634) to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), were based mostly on the physics in question. Simply put, the argument was based on the idea that since there are billions of stars in the universe, there must be millions, if not billions of planets. Plenty of places for ET to live. This line of reasoning is much like the principle of plenitude: everything that can happen will happen, and in a universe fit for life, many planets will bear bug-eyed monsters. For a long time, the mere physics of the matter has been fiction’s main concern. Biology didn’t come into it. The fact of the sheer number of stars and orbiting planets was enough to suggest that life on other Earths lay waiting in the vastness of deep space. The influence was fed back into science so that by the twentieth century, an entire generation of scientists was cast under the same spell, and huge investments were made in serious searches for alien life.

Meanwhile, a unified theory of biology didn’t see the light of day until the second half of the twentieth century. It brought a modern synthesis of aspects of biology and was accepted by the great majority of working biologists. This evolutionary synthesis provided a new perspective on the question of ET. Biologists are far more skeptical about the possibility of complex alien life, let alone intelligence. We may, they concluded, be alone in the Universe after all, so let’s venture into the space theme of science fiction to meet lost worlds and quantum universes, other Earths and the human future in the cosmos.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY:

IS SPACE FULL OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS?

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many—perhaps most—of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven—or hell. How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars. Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become a reality. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: ‘Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?’ Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

—Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

[Yondu is floating in the air, hanging on his arrow]

PETER QUILL: You look like Mary Poppins.

YONDU: Is he cool?

PETER QUILL: Hell yeah, he’s cool.

YONDU: I’m Mary Poppins, y’all!

—James Gunn, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 screenplay (2017)

The idea of a universe full of extraterrestrial life has produced many of the best movie taglines: “In space, no one can hear you scream,” “we are not alone,” “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” “the truth is out there,” and, of course, “you only get one chance to save the galaxy twice.” Science-fiction writers and directors have thought long and hard about the portrayal of creatures from other worlds. The predatory and possessive mother in Ridley Scott’s Alien, the swirling and sentient sea in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, and the wise, benevolent sage with curious sentence construction in George Lucas’s Star Wars series have three very contrasting extraterrestrial types: alien as highly evolved killer, alien as ocean-planet, and alien as guiding mentor, perhaps only lacking a little gravitas due to being a puppet.

There are huge numbers of extraterrestrial races in the Marvel Comics Universe. So much so that the Guardians of the Galaxy, a band of former intergalactic outlaws, have teamed up to protect the Galaxy from planetary threats. The Galactic Council is an assembly of leaders of different alien empires from across that Universe with major races such as the Kree and the Skrulls presiding over scores of secondary alien races, mostly humanoid, but occasionally weird, such as the A’askvarii, a green-skinned race with octopus traits, three-toed taloned feet, three tentacles sprouting from each shoulder rather than arms, and closely spaced needle-like teeth, which would make a mess of an intergalactic burger. But, just in case you thought this was all new, take a look at how long aliens have dwelled in the human imagination.

Science fiction, driven by the discoveries of science, has been conjuring up extraterrestrials for many a moon. In fact, for much longer than you’d first imagine. Take the relationship between Italian astronomer Galileo and German math genius Johannes Kepler, for example. Moved by Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope, Kepler was one of the first writers to imagine alien life. (And this is in the first few years of the 1600s!) Kepler made sure that the extraterrestrials stalking the characters in his protoscience fictional book, Somnium, published in 1634, were not humans. Instead, they are serpent-like creatures that are fit to survive their lunar, but quite alien, haunt. So, more than two centuries before Darwin, Johannes Kepler had been the first to grasp the bond between life forms and habitat, science and science fiction. But, generally speaking, before science fiction really rocketed into the creative imagination in the late nineteenth century, extraterrestrials were not normally portrayed as genuine alien beings. They were merely seen as humans and animals living on other worlds.

Charles Darwin changed all that, for Darwin essentially invented the alien.

Darwin’s theory of evolution gave science fiction grounds for imagining what kind of life might evolve off Earth, as well as on it. From Darwin on, the notion of life beyond our home planet was linked with the physical and mental characteristics of the true extraterrestrial, and the idea of the alien became deeply embedded in the public imagination, so it’s no surprise that the most credible extraterrestrials occur after his work. The archetypal alien, with its strange physiology and intellect, also owes much to H.G. Wells’s first major take on Darwin: Wells’s 1898 Martian invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. Wells’s Martians are agents of the void. They are the brutal natural force of evolution, and history’s first menace from space. Wells’s genocidal invaders, would-be colonists of planet Earth, were so influential that the alien as monster became something of a cliché in the twentieth century—and the idea thrills us still. The alien as monster stalks the Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s electrifying movie Alien, lies at the heart of each Dalek in Doctor Who, and briefly, to the soundtrack of ELO’s Mister Blue Sky, consumes Drax during the surreal opening title sequence of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

With advances in science, especially biology, early writers became more imaginative about alien life forms. Evolution traveled into space with the writings of French astronomer Camille Flammarion in 1872, barely a dozen years or so after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Flammarion’s three Stories of Infinity were ingenious tales of an intangible alien life-force. If natural selection was universal, there was no reason on Earth why the random process of evolution should merely produce humanoids on other planets. Distinguished British astronomer Fred Hoyle used his science to inspire his stories, but his fiction was not forced by his physics. Hoyle’s first novel, The Black Cloud (1957), is about a living cloud of interstellar matter!

Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem pushed the creative imagination about alien life even further. In his famous Solaris (written in 1961 followed by movie adaptations in 1972 and 2002), now an entire planet enclosed by an ocean, Solaris is portrayed as a single organism with a vast yet strange intelligence that humans strive to understand.

And then, of course, there’s the depiction of the extraterrestrial as wise, benevolent teacher, here to save us from ourselves. These are the kind of aliens that show up in films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), where the extraterrestrials are presented as civilized and munificent aliens of superior intelligence. In the same way, aliens such as Yoda possess an almost saintly wisdom, and Marvel’s Watchers are cast in a similar vein; one of the oldest species in the Universe, the Watchers are committed to watching and compiling knowledge on all aspects of life in the cosmos.

But, here’s the point about all of these different portrayals of extraterrestrial life: even though science has made tremendous advances in the understanding of space during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scientists still have relatively little to say about the psychology and physiology of the alien. That’s the job of science fiction, which has been conducting a kind of continuous thought experiment on the matter for centuries.

British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke knows all about this relationship. He stressed the influence of science fiction on the alien life debate when he said in 1968, “I have little doubt that the Universe is teeming with life. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is now a fully accepted department of astronomy. The fact that it is still a science without a subject should be neither surprising nor disappointing. It is only within half a human lifetime that we have possessed the technology to listen to the stars.”

Clarke was very aware of the huge inspiration that science takes from fiction. In the history of the scientific debate on alien life, there have typically been two camps: physicists and biologists. The physical scientists such as astronomers have often tended toward a deterministic view of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. They focus on the physical forces in the Universe and make arguments based on the sheer number of stars and orbiting planets, which they feel is somehow statistically sufficient to suggest that other Earths lie waiting in the vastness of deep space. Fiction, for many centuries, led from the front with this same argument. And since Copernicus came before Darwin, and physics before biology, fictional accounts of alien life have usually been placed firmly in the pro-SETI, prolife camp of the alien debate. By the twentieth century, an entire generation of future SETI-hunters was cast under the same spell, and the imaginative power of science fiction meant that a huge investment of time and money was put into the serious scientific search for extraterrestrials.

But, as the twentieth century progressed, the story changed. Some scientists thought we might, after all, be alone in the Universe. In particular, biologists began to emphasize that while physics and fiction still think along deterministic lines, evolutionists are impressed by the incredible improbability of intelligent life ever to have evolved, even on Earth. Or, to put it in the powerful words of American anthropologist Loren Eisley,

“So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark, one thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation. Later, contemplating the infinity of time, one wonders if perchance their messages came long ago, hurtling into the swamp muck of the steaming coal forests, the bright projectile clambered over by hissing reptiles, and the delicate instruments running mindlessly down with no report … in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.”

It may be tomorrow or a decade or century from now until we discover if Guardians of the Galaxy is right. The day may come when we make the most shattering discovery of all time: the discovery of a thriving extraterrestrial civilization. When our current century dawned, we’d been imagining alien life for almost two and a half millennia, but as space a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Space
• Part II: Time
• Part III: Machine
• Part IV: Monster