Why are the science fiction shelves glutted with works of “fantasy” whose protagonists are shirtless bodybuilders with Thor hairstyles fighting dragons with swords?
Nor were SF’s gifts to humanity confined to the world of ideas. Space precludes a full listing here of every real-world marvel lifted straight from a work of futuristic fiction, but suffice it to say that an artificial Earth-orbiting satellite was depicted in the sci-fi short story “Brick Moon” by Edward Everett Hale in 1869. And though it would irk Jules Verne no end, there’s also the fact that Leo Szilard, the man who first theorized about a nuclear chain reaction, said he was directly inspired by the work of H. G. Wells, in whose book The World Set Free, the term “atomic bomb,” as well as the vague mechanics of same, were first published. Atomic bombs and satellites. Is there another field of literary fiction to rival science fiction’s impact on the world? Chicklit? Chicano realism? I rather think not.
All of which underscores the question of how it came to this: Why are the heirs to such a grand tradition dipping their tortilla chips into bean dip that has not even been decanted from its original plastic container into a proper bowl? A plastic container, furthermore, to whose circumference still adhere flapping shreds of cellophane safety seal, the bulk of it clearly peeled off and discarded by someone who has ceased to even give a damn? Why are they not holding their annual meetings in some sort of gilded purpose-built pyramid while humanity waits breathlessly outside to receive their inklings into our future? Less poignantly but more shockingly, why are the science fiction shelves of bookstores glutted with brightly colored works of “fantasy” whose protagonists, judging by the covers, are shirtless bodybuilders with Thor hairstyles fighting dragons with swords?
One clue, I would submit, is preserved in the fossil record that is the written work of one Michael Crichton. There might be purists who’d argue that what Crichton writes are better classified as techno-thrillers than works of science fiction, because drawing petty distinctions is what being a purist is all about. But we can surely all agree that for decades the man has been writing fiction about science, and that his visions of the dangers of as-yet-uninvented, or only-just-invented technologies have influenced the way we think more than those of any other living novelist. “Could we be looking at an Andromeda Strain scenario here?” news anchors will even today inquire of experts whenever some mysterious virus escapes from a lab. And no advance in our understanding of dinosaur genetics can be reported without an assurance, tinged with disappointment, that cloned T. rexes aren’t about to start trying to eat our children the way they did in Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park
But Jurassic Park, which came out in 1990, was pretty much it for Crichton as an effective, hard-SF prognosticator. When he returns to science fiction in 1999 with Timeline, something clearly has changed. The topic is time travel, and true to his career-long hard-SF principles, Crichton does at least sketch out for the reader how such a thing might actually be possible. Sort of. The key, he ventures, might be “quantum foam.” In the real world, quantum foam is a term used by hard-core physicists standing beside vast, cantilevered chalkboards full of squiggles to describe a theoretical state, or scale, or reality at which particles of time and space blink in and out of existence in a soup of their own mathematical justification. But in Crichton’s hands, it’s actual foam. His heroes step into their time machine, pass quickly through a metaphysical car wash of suds, and then spend the rest of the novel jousting with black-armored knights and rolling under descending portcullises. The science, in other words, is pure nonsense, and the science fiction is not so much “hard” or “soft” as what you might call, well, “bad.”
And there’s more of it in Crichton’s next book, Prey. The threat this time is from nanotechnology and the “emergent behaviors” by which large groups of tiny mindless entities shape themselves into a single purposeful, highly intelligent organism (see Riverdance). At least here the science is real; nanotechnology actually exists; geese really do fly in a V formation without discussing it beforehand. But in Crichton’s hands it’s just so much foam. His little particles coalesce into swirling, malevolent clouds, but their intelligence maxes out at roughly the IQ of a Nazi without a speaking part in a war movie, just another evil presence for his heroes to outrun and outfox.
As to the question of what happened, not just to Crichton but to all serious science fictionists, I reckon it boils down, like so many things, to a pair of factors.
For one, it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Whatever the cause—dwindling attention spans, underfunded schools, something to do with the Internet—the fact is these days that if a Top Thinker wakes up one morning aghast at man’s inhumanity to man, he’s probably going to dash off a 300-word op-ed and e-mail it to The New York Times, or better still, just stick it up on his blog, typos and all, not cancel his appointments for the next seven years so he can bang out War and Peace in a shed. If one truly has something to say, seems to be the consensus, then why not just come out and say it? If your goal is to persuade and be believed about the truth of a particular point, then what would possess you to choose to work in a genre whose very name, fiction, explicitly warns the reader not to believe a word she reads?
This trend in global epistemology would probably have made science fiction irrelevant all by itself, I reckon. But the genre has an even bigger dragon to slay with its new profusion of cheesy, dwarf-wrought superswords: the scarcity of foreseeable future.
The world is speeding up, you may have noticed, and the rate at which it’s speeding up is speeding up, and the natural human curiosity that science fiction was invented to meet is increasingly being met by reality. Why would I spend my money on a book about amazing-but-fake technology when we’re only a few weeks away from Steve Jobs unveiling a cell phone that doubles as a jetpack and a travel iron? As for the poor authors, well, who would actually lock themselves in a shed for years to try to predict the future when, in this age, you can’t even predict the present?
But the science fiction writers—not only of America, but of the world—should not beat themselves up. If, through their talent and imagination, our species has progressed to the point that it no longer requires their services, then that should be a source of pride, not shame, and the rest of us should be honoring these obsolete souls, not making fun of their beards and backpacks in snarky, supposedly humorous commentaries (you know who you are).
There is only one tribute commensurate with the debt. Let all of us, today, march into the fiction section of our bookstores, with phasers set to give-me-a-minute-I-know-what-I’m-doing, and quietly relabel the shelves to set the record straight.
Let everything but the truth be “Fantasy,” I say, and let the truth—the searing, unmanageable, discombobulating truth of the lives we have invented for ourselves in a world it took artists to imagine—be Science Fiction.
