"SF 1965 - 1970" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 7)

NEBULA AWARD

SCIENCE FICTION, 1965-1970
POUL ANDERSON

The Science

Never mind what science fiction is. It has as many definitions as it has definers. For that matter, there's no universal agreement on the meaning of "science" and "technology." Having been asked to discuss the status of those elements in current sf, I won't stop to wrestle with the words, but will simply use them in their ordinary senses. In fact, sometimes I'll be using "science" as shorthand for "science and technology"; Newspeak like "scitech" (or "sci-fi"!) is just too ugly. It's worthwhile bearing the distinction in mind, if only because much sf has not been about science at all, but rather about technology. However, today they are so closely intertwined that my looseness of language ought not to confuse the question.

That question can be put: "Is science on its way out of sf? Is the scientific element being reduced to a few gimmicks and catchwords in a literature which is really about something else, such as depth psychology, social protest or mysticism, when it isn't mere tale telling with no intellectual content?" My assignment is not to say whether this would be good or bad. I'm supposed to find out which way the wind is blowing, if that can be done.

In this study, for the record, my principal sources have been: the Nebula Award anthologies, numbers one through six; winners and runners-up among novels on the final Nebula ballots, 1965-1970; the two volumes of Hugo winners which Isaac Asimov has edited;
the MIT index to the magazines: the brains of my wife, Karen, and our own bookshelves and memories.* In what follows, I will for your convenience identify Nebula runners-up by a single asterisk in parentheses, winners by two.

I decided that :in analytical approach offered the sole hope of getting anything like a meaningful answer to the problem. What I did was divide sf into four types with three attitudes, twelve sorts altogether, and compare how well they have been faring.

I make no extravagant claims. The method remains subjective, arbitrary and full of ambiguities. My classifications do not correspond to the real skeleton of sf; reality is always too big and various to fit into any neat scheme. I have nothing here except temporary scaffolding on which to walk around and look at the subject.

My concern is not with plot, character, philosophy. literary values though my illustrative examples will mostly be good stories -but with motifs relevant to the scientific content of sf. The names hung on the different classes are not very precise, but then, neither are the classes themselves. After these caveats, let's get started on the four species.

1. Hard science. This includes "hard technology." Stories employing it are what the public to this day tends to identify with sf as a whole. Actually, that always was a mistake.

A hard science story bases itself on real, present-day science or technology, and carries these further with a minimum of imaginary forces, materials or laws of nature. Among Jules Verne's works are classic examples of technological extrapolation, while Hal Clement's e.g., his novel Mission of Gravity and its sequel Star Light-represent perfect scientific extrapolation, where known facts of physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy go into the construction of fascinatingly strange worlds and creatures.

Of course, science includes theories, and way-out minority-opin-

(*Although they modestly asked not to be mentioned in the text, dammit, I do want to thank Lloyd Biggle, Jr., and Dean McLaughlin for vital assistance in getting certain materials.)

ion hypotheses, advanced by practicing scientists. A clearcut instance of an author's exploring at the very frontiers of knowledge, and beyond, is Larry Niven's novel Ringworld (**), an awesome vision of a vast, artificial, annular planet.

This sort of story offers a unique thrill. Those who know enough about the scientific subject can have their eyes opened to some astounding possibilities. They can also have fun playing what Clement calls The Game: trying to find errors, explicit or implicit, in the author's development.

The hard science does not have to be all or even most of what the story is about. Thus, Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days" (*) and James Gunn's "The Listeners" (*) concentrate on human problems, while Kate Wilhelm's "The Planners" (**) begins with research on the DNARNA complex in order to deal almost entirely with the interior world of her protagonist. Other hard science works of high philosophical as well as literary value include Ursula K. Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (*) and The Left Hand of Darkness (**) -firmly grounded biological speculation and Frank Herbert's Dune (**)-ecology.

Both these novels contain, in addition, a lot of anthropology. This may lead you to ask what I mean by "hard science." The linguistics in it may justify putting Samuel R. Delany's Babel 17 (**) here, but what about John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (!)? I'd say yes to it too, if only because of the sociometrics the author used in his thinking. On the other hand, 1984 doesn't belong in this category.

Now, no story will fit entirely into any of my classes. Quite often a writer makes certain assumptions which go-altogether beyond existing science, or directly contrary to it. For instance, to get his characters to one of his meticulously detailed extrasolar planets in reasonable time, Clement must suppose that man in the future will find a way to travel faster than light . . . regardless of what twentieth-century physicists think. Classification is basically dependent on where the emphasis lies: which brings us to our next

species. \
2. Imaginary science. I avoid calling this "pseudoscience" because that would look pejorative. Many fine and intellectually stimulating stories have turned on the development of an idea for whose reality we have no evidence, or which the evidence is actually against. Examples are H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps." The first set forth the notion of deliberately using the (almost certainly impossible) phenomenon of time travel, which earlier writers like Mark Twain had postulated. The second worked out, with marvelous ingenuity, several implications of such use.

The employment of chronokinesis, or whatever, does not automatically make a story type 2. Thus, I'd put L. Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur" under "hard science" because it's mainly about paleontology, the time machine being a mere device for getting people onto the scene.

On the other hand, I'd take what most people think of as the granddaddy of hard science stories, Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+, and set it very firmly right here. Aside from a vague mention of something like radar, which Hertz had already forecast, nearly the whole of its "technology" consists of words and has no relationship to real engineering-except in its spirit of technical man triumphant.

Besides time travel and faster-than-light travel, common imaginary science ideas include psionics, parallel universes, etc. I'd classify most of James Blish's work under the present heading, though of course he writes topflight hard science whenever he wants to. So does Theodore Sturgeon; but stories of his like "The Man Who Learned Loving" (*) and "Slow Sculpture" (**) assume things quite unknown to science.

To be sure, science may one day discover them, or something like them. We would be foolhardy to suppose that we, today, have any final .answers. Hence my second class differs from my first more in degree than in kind. Further specimens are Delany's The Einstein Intersection (**), Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonrider" (**) and Joanna Russ's And Chaos Died (*):

which shows how vital a part of sf imaginary science is.