Bridges to science fiction / PDF
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Page ii is a new series under the general editorship of Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander which has been established to serve the growing critical audience of science fiction, fantastic fiction, and speculative fiction. Page iii Bridges to Science Fiction Edited by George E. Slusser George R. Guffey and Mark Rose Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville Feffer & Simons, Inc. London and Amsterdam Page iv Copyright © 1980 by Southern Illinois University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Designed by Gary Gore Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1st, University of California, Riverside, 1979. Bridges to science fiction. (Alternatives) Essays prepared for the First Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, held Feb. 24–25, 1979, at the University of California, Riverside. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Science fiction—Congresses. I. Slusser, George Edgar. II. Guffey, George Robert. III. Rose, Mark. IV. Title. PN3448.S45E2 1979 809´.3876 8016622 ISBN 0809309610 Page v Contents Preface vii Science and Fiction 3 Harry Levin Incorporating Divinity: Platonic Science Fiction in the Middle Ages 22 Kent T. Kraft Dialogues Concerning Human Understanding: Empirical Views of God from 41 Locke to Lem Stephen W. Potts Aliens and Knowability: A Scientist's Perspective 53 Gregory Benford Visionary States and the Search for Transcendence in Science Fiction 64 Robert Hunt Fairy Tales and Science Fiction 78 Eric S. Rabkin Page vi Science Fiction as Truncated Epic 91 Patrick Parrinder Science Fiction and the Gothic 107 Thomas H. Keeling Philip Dick's Man in the High Castle and the Nature of ScienceFictional 120 Worlds Carl D. Malmgren The Past of Science Fiction 131 Thomas A. Hanzo Notes 147 Biographical Notes 159 Index 160 Page vii Preface Critical discussion of science fiction has become fairly sophisticated in the past decade or so; nevertheless, even today, there is some tendency on the part of critics and teachers as well as readers to discuss science fiction as if it were a wholly independent phenomenon unconnected with the mainstream of our cultural inheritance. One purpose of the present volume is to suggest connections between science fiction and other aspects of Western Culture. Ranging in interest from the specifically philosophical to the specifically literary, the essays deal with science fiction in relation to such topics as medieval cosmological discourse, classical empirical philosophy, contemporary philosophy of science, fairy tale, epic, and gothic fiction. A second purpose of the volume is to make a coherent statement about science fiction as a literary form, and the essays are arranged to emphasize the overall logic that emerges from the development of the individual discussions. The volume begins with Harry Levin's "Science and Fiction," which explores the long history of literary response to science and places science fiction in a wide historical perspective. Whereas "Science and Fiction" deals with the whole field of Western literary culture and thus provides a general background for the other essays, Kent T. Kraft's "Incorporating Divinity: Platonic Science Fiction in the Middle Ages" suggests the connection between science fiction and a single early philosophical school. The next two essays continue the concern with philosophy, but move into more modern and perhaps more familiar areas: Stephen W. Potts suggests how Stanislaw Lem can be understood as dealing with the epistemological issues raised by Locke, Hume, and Kierkegaard; Gregory Benford further develops the epistemological question of the knowability of the truly alien and considers this subject in the light of contemporary philosophy of science. Kraft, Potts, and Benford have been con Page viii cerned with ways in which science fiction is involved in areas that overlap the traditional concerns of religion. Robert Hunt focuses on this region of overlapping concern in his discussion of the portrayal of religious revelation in science fiction. With Eric S. Rabkin's "Fairy Tales and Science Fiction," the volume moves from the consideration of specifically literary matters. Patrick Parrinder considers science fiction in relation to epic, and Thomas H. Keeling reexamines the proposition that science fiction developed from the gothic novel of the late eighteenth century. Next, Carl D. Malmgren studies the way in which sciencefictional worlds distinguish themselves from other narrative worlds. Finally, in a theoretical statement about the genre as a whole, Thomas A. Hanzo suggests a point of view from which many of the questions implicit in the earlier essays can be answered, a point of view from which further discussion of science fiction might begin. Nine of the authors in this volume are literary scholars; one is a physicist and science fiction writer. Some are well known; some are appearing here for the first time in print. Some have previously written a great deal on science fiction; some are presenting their initial statements about the genre. From this diversity, however, we believe that there emerges both a coherent view of science fiction as an important literary form and a sense of its complex relation to our cultural heritage. The essays in this volume are all original and were all written specifically for the first Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature held February 24– 25, 1979, at the University of California, Riverside. The Eaton Conference, centered in the University Library's Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, one of the finest in the world, is an annual gathering of international scholars and writers devoted to discussion of problems concerning these literatures and, on a broader plane, science and fantasy in modern art and culture in general. The editors would like to thank Eleanor Montague, University Librarian, University of California, Riverside, and JeanPierre Barricelli, Chairman of the Department of Literatures and Languages, University of California, Riverside, for their untiring interest in science fiction and the Eaton Conference. Without their support neither the conference nor the essays presented here would have come to be. GEORGE E. SLUSSER GEORGE R. GUFFEY MARK ROSE RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA MARCH, 1980 Page 3 Science and Fiction Harry Levin Since my threeword title echoes those two nouns which denote the subject of this symposium, it should be selfevident that my own keyword is the conjunction between them. Not that I would wish to put asunder what has clearly been compounded with so much imagination, industry, and ingenuity. The copula is merely my confession that I have little right to expatiate on the compound. Though I have had frequent opportunity to read and write and talk about various forms of fiction, my encounters with the genre that we have been invited to discuss—enjoyable and instructive as they may have been—have been somewhat casual and slight. As for science, I can only confide that in my case the ordinary layman's interest has been enhanced, if not solidified, by a number of happy associations with professional scientists through academies, common rooms, and personal circumstances. Yet I realize, as I begin to fill in the pages that follow, that I am adopting the simpleminded tactic of the journalist in Pickwick Papers. Having been assigned an article on Chinese Metaphysics, it will be remembered, he looked up both China and Metaphysics in the encyclopedia and thereupon combined the information. As a bugeyed alien among a galaxy of experts, I feel something of the thrill that must alert the interplanetary voyager. Since the rhythms of my thought are conventionally measured by academic semesters rather than lightyears, we may have some degree of mental synchronization to work out among us. Such considerations do not make the adventure less exciting for me; but, not wanting to travel under false colors, it should be clear from the very outset that I view myself as rather a tourist or passenger than a pilot or guide. Page 4 Perhaps we may take our chronological bearings by noticing that we now stand within five years of 1984. Reading the newspapers, we may even wish to congratulate ourselves on having come so near to fulfilling George Orwell's projections for intercommunication and cognition: Newspeak and Doublethink. Orwell made his prognostication in 1949, thereby allowing us another lustrum for its fulfillment. One decade afterward, just exactly twenty years ago, C. P. Snow delivered his reverberating pronouncement on The Two Cultures. This, as the problematic formulation of an important issue, has weathered better than F. R. Leavis's virulent counterattack. There has meanwhile been some tendency, I suspect, for scientific and literary sensibilities to come closer together. What could be a better witness to that than sciencefiction? Can there be a scholarteacher or writercritic here who could not respond correctly to Snow's elementary shibboleth for scientific literacy: the Second Law of Thermodynamics? On the other hand, there must be some who put forth, or lend credence to, fictive postulates that have still to be acknowledged by Snow or Carnot or the canons of physics itself. One of my colleagues who was awarded a Nobel Prize in that field, and who reads extensively beyond it, has testified that Snow's early novel The Search is the only book that conveys what it feels like to be a practicing scientist today. Other scientists have written fiction, Kepler in elaborately phantasmagorical form. Still others, even closer to the Cavendish Laboratory than Lord Snow, have written autobiographical accounts of what has been going on there. But, though James Watson's Double Helix chronicles the discovery of DNA, his underlying themes are human competition and vanity. Literature, taken in its broadest sense, has acted as an agent for the dissemination of science. Some of the most technical treatises, in the early days, were couched in poetic modes. The Greeks and Romans read Aratus and Lucretius for information about meteors and atoms. Indeed the evocation of Epicurus, at the beginning of De Rerum Naturae, "proceeding far beyond the flaming walls of the firmament," is a more eloquent tribute than any Nobel Prize winner has ever been paid. Dante, in transit through the celestial regions, listens to a lecture from Beatrice on gravity. Chaucer is transported to his House of Fame by an eagle who discourses upon the principles of acoustics. Scientific popularizers, like Fontenelle and Algarotti, wrote as if they were novelists addressing themselves to feminine readers. The scientist himself, when cast as a literary character, has played an equivocal role: a subspecies of the archetypal trickster, a man of many inventions like the elusive Odysseus, a fabulous ar
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