Aspects of Science Fiction

Last update: 14 Apr 2026 11:54
First version:

Attention conservation notice: Some thoughts about different levels at which "science fiction" can work, provoked by an exchange of texts with my brother, actually written out late at night after one too many beers.

The genre we call "science fiction" can work on (at least) four different levels. I proceed in order of increasing estrangement, not from the everyday, but from the sort of fantasy which is as ancient and universal as any sort of human literature.

Every culture has stories of adventure, which take place in what the tribe regards as a realm of wonder and peril. (It is a fact about human psychology that we link wonder and peril; this seems more peculiar the longer I dwell on it, and I am not sure that an intelligent ant [say] would do likewise.) Such realms must be well-enough-known that the audience gets what can be expected, yet vague and unknown enough to give the story-teller latitude, and allow for suspense. Thus Europeans (once) used Egypt or Baghdad, while the 1001 Nights did the same to "China", the farther reaches of the Indian Ocean, or the Far West. A technological, historically-conscious society, more especially a society undergoing constant technological change, has new, and newly-compelling, realms of wonder and peril: outer space, sure, but also the future. (The future is available to us, imaginatively, in a way it was not available to pre-industrial High Cultures, to "Agraria".) With such realms available to the imagination, they will be filled with stories. It is thus not surprising that a lot of science fiction is tales of heroism, revenge, romance, and so on, through the rest of the catalog of topics and tropes that have fascinated humanity since time immemorial. If someone wants to call this "fantasy that has been to community college", well, fine. (To be very clear, I consume this stuff in vast quantities, but there is also a reason I call it "mind candy".)
To explain the second level, I will invoke a famous footnote in the Feynman lectures, which reads, in part, "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" We are not just a technological but a scientific society, where science reveals (or so we think) a universe very different from that imagined by any previous culture. It is an artistic challenge to craft stories which accept, or even dramatize, this universe. This is, I think, what "hard science fiction" is attempting, at least at its best: to frame stories in which Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of ammonia and methane, in which Jupiter is still awesome and the story is still humanly compelling. If someone wants to call this "fantasy which has taken physics 101 at community college, and so thinks it can explain the universe" --- well, we can debate (bemoan) how often (rarely) the sub-genre achieves this aim, but the aim itself is not one that would have occurred to previous ages, and I will go ahead and say it's noble one.
The third level is to contemplate the facts of technological and social change, and to ask what we might, and what we should, make of ourselves. This "vertigo when contemplating the future of mankind" repays artistic exploration, rather than dogmatism. (I have said more on this before.) This is not the same as making prescriptions or predictions.
The fourth, and for tonight at least final level, of science fiction is to contemplate minds very different from our own. This is, again, only something which is possible in a very scientifically advanced society; if you buy another of my at-least-half-crank notions, there are also good social reasons why this would now seem like a compelling artistic challenge. It is intrinsically hard to attempt to depict something which thinks in a genuinely alien way, but still thinks.
(The imaginative worlds of Agraria were of course full of supposedly non-human intelligences, but not really. If you read the philosophers and theologians of Agraria, when they try theorizing God, gods, angels, etc., it swiftly becomes clear that the minds they are describing are "human, all-too-human". [Spinoza is, arguably at least, a different story.] The Book of Job is actually far superior to, say, Aquinas in this respect.)