Inventing the Enemy: Essays

Science Fiction

Modern science fiction, from Verne to the twenty-first century, opens up another chapter of imaginary astronomies, in which theories of astronomy and scientific cosmology are taken to the extreme. My old pupil Renato Giovannoli has written a fascinating book on science in science fiction,² in which he examines not only all the (often highly convincing) pseudoscientific theories developed in stories about the future, but also shows how science in science fiction consists of a fairly uniform body of ideas and topoi that return from narrator to narrator, with subsequent improvements and developments. These include Verne’s cannons loaded with nitroglycerin and Wells’s antigravitational rooms; time travel and the various techniques for space navigation; traveling while in a state of hibernation; the spaceship as a small, ecologically self-sufficient world, with hydroponic gardening systems; and the infinite variations on the Langevin paradox, whereby the astronaut returns from a voyage in space at the speed of light, only to find himself ten years younger than his twin brother. Robert A. Heinlein, for example, in Time for the Stars, wrote a story involving twins who communicate telepathically during the journey, but Tullio Regge, in his Cronache dell’universo, noted that if telepathic messages arrive instantly, the answer from the brother in space ought to arrive before the question.

Another recurring theme is that of hyperspace, which Heinlein, in Starman Jones, describes using a scarf as a model: “Here’s Mars . . . Here’s Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here . . . But suppose I fold [the scarf] so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What’s to prevent us just stepping across?” So science fiction has been off in search of abnormal parts of the universe where space can fold back on itself. It has also used scientific hypotheses, such as Einstein-Rosen bridges, black holes, and space-time wormholes. Kurt Vonnegut, in The Sirens of Titan, theorized about “chrono-synclastic infundibula,” tunnels in hyperspace, while others have invented tachyons, particles that move faster than light.³

All the problems of time travel have been discussed—with and without the time traveler meeting his own double (including the famous grandfather paradox, whereby if we go back in time and kill our grandfather before he gets married, perhaps we would disappear at that moment)—using also the concepts developed by scientists, such as Hans Reichenbach in The Direction of Time, in relation to closed causal chains whereby, at least in the subatomic world, A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. Philip K. Dick, in Counter-Clock World, theorized about entropic inversion. The first part of Fredric Brown’s short story “The End” makes the supposition that time is a field and that the character Professor Jones has found a machine that reverses it. Jones presses the button, and the second part consists of the same words as the first, but in reverse order.

And finally, using the ancient theory of the infinity of worlds, writers have imagined parallel universes, so that Fredric Brown, in his novel What Mad Universe, reminds us that an infinite number of universes can exist at the same time: “There is, for example, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated, except that you—or the equivalent of you—are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones . . . There are an infinite number of permutations on that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger, and one in which you have purple horns . . .” But on the logic of possible worlds, philosophers such as D. K. Lewis, in Counterfactuals (1973), has also stated, “I emphatically do not identify possible worlds in any way with respectable linguistic entities; I take them to be respectable entities in their own right. When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally . . . Our actual world is only one world among others . . . You believe in our actual world already. I ask you to believe in more things of that kind.”

How much separates science fiction from the science that preceded it or will come after it? Given that science fiction writers certainly read the work of scientists, how many scientists have nourished their imaginations reading science fiction? How many imaginary astronomies of science fiction are, or will remain, imaginary?

I have found a text by Thomas Aquinas (In primum sententiarum, distinction 8, article 1.2) in which he distinguishes two types of morphological relationship between cause and effect: cause can resemble effect, as a person resembles his portrait, or cause can be different from effect, as happens with fire that causes smoke; and in this second category of causes Aquinas includes the sun, which produces heat but is itself cold. We may laugh, since he reached this model from his theory of celestial spheres, but if one day cold fusion is taken seriously, might we have to reconsider this idea of Aquinas with more respect?