...AND THE HORSE IT RODE IN ON :

The Inadequacy of Science Fiction (Hank Parnell, 5/05/02, The Texas Mercury)

To a Christian, a life without sin grants the believer a moral superiority; to a humanist, a life devoted to rooting out the causes of human misfortune and suffering grants the same. Neither remedies the ills of human life, since that remains as beyond the scope of human action to us as it did the ancients; nor is there any indication that this will change in that "kingdom of heaven" of the scientific humanists, "the future." Life, as the ancients knew, is inherently tragic, for we all must suffer and inevitably die. Yet death in science fiction is invariably a sort of martyrdom, when it is not cheated outright: an ersatz immortality. Science fiction is preoccupied with things that "are not and work not" in the human, not technical sense; and as mainstream literature itself grows increasingly preoccupied with such fantasies, it begins to impinge upon and overlap the domain of science fiction.

This, then, is the first and greatest inadequacy of science fiction: its inherent falsity, its dogmatic refusal to face the inescapable facts of human existence-something in which, not surprisingly, most science fiction writers and readers take an arrogant pride. This is not to damn SF writers, since most, if not all, human endeavors, however "noble," are ultimately self-serving. Rather, it merely points out the self-serving nature of their most cherished beliefs and assumptions, and in doing so illustrates how just challenging these beliefs and assumptions, as I have done here, will elicit the most hysterical of emotional reactions from the SF cultists, offering further proof of my argument's inherent validity.

The second greatest inadequacy of science fiction is the limitations of human imagination and knowledge; and to state that human imagination and knowledge have no limits, as most SF writers/readers will at this point, is to reference my first objection to science fiction. In truth, we don't know what alien beings, if there are such, would really be like, no more than we can know what our own world will be like 10 years from now, to say nothing of a hundred. Clever and logical as many SF aliens are, they are no more real than dragons and unicorns; just as entertaining and thought-provoking as the world of Heinlein's "future history" is, it is no more real than Tolkien's Middle Earth or Plato's Atlantis. Barry Malzberg (in Engines of the Night, largely an execrable book, but highly instructive as to the workings of the SF mentality) is right when he says there can be no "true" science fiction. There has to be some reference or connection with the present, but the flux of human culture and technological innovation is such that the world of tomorrow would bear little resemblance to the world of today. Just when the proponents of classical mechanics were congratulating themselves on having "explained" all the physical processes of existence, along came relativity and quantum theory, wholly unforeseen and unpredicted by Newtonian physics (and, indeed, quite irrational by its standards), to blow them out of the water.

A related inadequacy is science fiction's reliance on gimmicks. A traditional SF story is a gimmick story. Roads that roll, humans that change sex from male to female and back, robots with "positronic brains"-the heart of the story is the exploitation of a gimmick. Science fiction is a literature of gimmickry. And this is why the science in science fiction stories, and hence the stories themselves, are outdated, often within a matter of weeks or months, as an hypothesis or theory upon which a particular story is based is disproved or discounted. Pick any issue of Analog from the 60s and try to find a story whose science holds up 30 years later. It is a Sisyphean labor whose only reward is to conclude that without gimmicks, there would be no science fiction.

Third, and finally, science fiction is now little more than a platform for ideological agendas that are half-baked, to be charitable. Leftist scholars such as Bruce Franklin, and later David Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer and John Huntington, have long berated Heinlein and the Campbellian school as being "right-wing reactionaries"; but one need only read Gregory Benford's essay "Reactionary Utopias" to understand how the writings of such left-wing icons as Ursula Le Guin are full of their own brand of intolerance, bigotry, and a desperate avoidance of reality. Science fiction by women seems especially pathetic in this respect; I confess that I have read little of it, being absolutely appalled by what I have read. Anne McCafferty's Dinosaur Planet so seethed with wanton intolerance, mindless bigotry, a pathological denial of reality and, above all, the absolutely sloppy science (the paleontology, a subject I know quite well, was so inaccurate that I howled in derision with nearly every page as McCafferty made technical errors that a six-year-old dinosaur buff wouldn't have committed). On top of that, the story itself was simply negligible; the mindless hatred of people from heavy-gravity planets, the swaggering self-righteous intolerance not only of people but even animals who eat meat, and the suffocatingly smug sense of "moral" superiority that so pervaded the novel effectively precluded me from actually enjoying the story for its own sake.

If this is what being a political liberal is about, then I am glad to remain a "right-wing reactionary" who believes that some people are better than others (elitism), that all people should be left free of coercion by others to make their own choices about how they should live their lives (libertarianism), and that some people are by nature going to succeed where others fail in this life (Social Darwinism)-the three evils of Campbellian SF as enumerated by the shopworn theories of Hartwell, Cramer and Huntington, all of whom stole from Franklin.

This whole essay is great, but I'd like to pick up on just a couple of points. First, I think Mr. Parnell overestimates the optimism of Christianity. I'm unaware of any mainstream theologians who believe that Man is perfectible or that any man is capable of leading a "life without sin". It is the essence of the Judeo-Christian worldview that Man is Fallen and sinful by his very nature. On the other hand, I suppose he's right that religious belief, however irrational on its face, ultimately attempts to reduce the universe to rationality, by positing a God who's in control of it all.

Second though, I think he underestimates the impact of secular humanism's blind optimism by restricting himself to a discussion of just science fiction rather than science generally. It seems like his criticisms of sci fi could equally well be leveled against all of science, which likewise believes that it can eventually reveal all of life's mysteries, solve all problems, and heal all our ills. As I understand it, evolutionary psychology for example holds that every single human thought and behavior, no matter how irrational, must ultimately be a product of natural forces--it denies free will completely in favor of an iron determinism.

Finally, for all the criticism that precedes it, Mr. Parnell's statement of his own beliefs does not seem to conflict with classic Christianity in any major way. For an appropriately dark and conservative view of Christian beliefs, I'd once again point readers to Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (2001) (Robert P. Kraynak 1949-). I suspect Mr. Parnell would recognize a kindred soul even if he might not partake of the faith.

UPDATE :

Ed Driscoll adds some thoughts on Sci Fi, specifically Star Trek.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2002 1:13 PM