Jack Haven

"The Relevance of Science Fiction"

A sandstorm assaulted the tarps that covered the excavation site in the middle of an immense plateau. For years, the Geons had pecked tirelessly through ash and rock to reach what appeared to be a large hall, with ornate columns surrounding a circular design. In the center of the circle, there stood a small, solitary mushroom with a stem of glass and a mirror cap.

The Geons, having finally broken into the domed hall, cooed excitedly amongst themselves. Three of them threw climbing equipment over the grayish blue fluff covering their pale, bumpy skin and began their descent. They landed in the middle of the circle and explored the hall. Their light projectors revealed a mural that extended along the wall all around them. There were images of primates gazing in awe at a black monolith, humans happily eating a substance labeled "Soylent Green," a giant octopus embracing a submarine, and a square-shaped tin-man shooting a laser from his Cyclopean forehead. Two of the Geons, who had become entranced by the mural, startled each other when their feathery backs accidentally touched.

The third Geon connected a cable from a metallic panel in the wall to a small grey square in his wingtip. The square illumed with a green pulse, and the Geon set it down gently above the panel frame.

Behind him, in the center of the hall, a human female materialized. "Searching last request before abrupt deactivation," she said in a melodic voice and flickered.

The third Geon cooed to the others to attract their attention.

"Search complete. File 346B7793NPSF: 'The Relevance of Science Fiction in the Postmodern Age.'" The female shimmered away and her image was replaced by another.

A glistening white airplane with a round black nose and wide wings crouches along the back of a silver whale. The whale, a Boeing 747 Shuttle Aircraft Carrier, has a blue, red, and white stripe painted along its side. The carrier glides toward the surface of the troposphere, its rostrum aiming at the dark blue expanse above. The giant turns down its nose. A series of heavy clicks release the clamps attaching bird to whale, and the Boeing slides back down. The white airplane is left on its own; its flight is bumpy at first, as this is only the second time the clumsy bird has ever sailed the air on its own. The Space Shuttle Enterprise jerks up, and its passengers gasp, squeezing the seats of their chairs anxiously. Then, its wings relax, and its flight smoothes. The first test flight of the Enterprise took place on August 12, 1977, a success that would revolutionize space travel for years to come.

The Enterprise was originally slated to be called the Constitution. It obtained its new name when hordes of letters convinced NASA to rename the shuttle. On the day of the dedication, the cast of the celebrated science fiction series Star Trek was present, along with the series creator, Gene Roddenberry. The show's theme song became the centerpiece of the occasion.

Star Trek was one of the first television programs that brought science fiction to a mass audience. It aired in 1966, when the world was still very much embroiled in the Cold War between the United States and Russia. The Vietnam War was in full force, and President Lyndon Johnson had, by August 1966, committed 429,000 more troops to the offensive against the Communist Party of Vietnam, founded by Hi Chi Minh and supported by the newly Communist China. Star Trek saw the hatred of the time and attempted to counter these deep divisions with an illustration of the universality of humanity. It's crew was made up of a black officer, an Asian officer, an alien officer, even a Russian officer, all treating each other as we should. The show also approached controversial themes during its duration: among these, the first interracial kiss on American television. Star Trek showed a generation of Americans that humans were truly created equal, making its flagship, the Enterprise, an excellent role model for the universality of all humanity and a perfect namesake for the new space shuttle.

The relevance of science fiction lies in the fact that it situates itself within its own cultural milieu and attempts, through the form of fantasy, to comment upon those issues that affect the human existence of the time. This can occur because science fiction is a genre that asks the question, "What if?" What if we could all work together in order to explore the vast reaches of unknown space? What if things were not as they are now; would we make the same mistakes? Most simplistically, science fiction attempts to show, through imagery and prose, the impact of science or technology on societies and individuals. While the societies that may form the foundation for a science fiction story may be fictional, one can identify with the individuals who form a part of these societies and the connection helps one to see one's own society more clearly.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a bleak political dystopia. A man named Winston Smith, who has grown up in the ruins of post-World War II London and has been raised by the Ingsoc political movement, lives in a colorless, one-room apartment. His diet is restricted to hard bread, artificial food, and "Victory Gin." He is a languid man who trudges up the stairs to his cell in agony. His miserable life is watched over by a figure called Big Brother; he turns his back to the imposing screen through which the thought police keep track of citizens and begins to write on a small diary he bought in the prole district, where the people are so poor and uneducated that the government does not consider them a threat to its power.

Orwell uses imagery and prose to create a dismal world where most of the citizens live in squalor and utter poverty. This is a world that could have come to be at the time when he was writing. In 1948, just after World War II, the government of the United Kingdom was still rationing its resources among the people, restricting how much each person could consume. Orwell was working overseas for the BBC, which at the time was still under the control of the Ministry of Information (a government institution that became the inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four's Ministry of Truth). The British Empire was falling apart, yet the newspapers were reporting victory for the Commonwealth. London was in ruins, having suffered through years of bombing raids from the Luftwaffe. The Cold War had only recently begun.

The world, it seemed, would not tire of subjugation and war. Orwell novel showed us what was possible: what we should prevent. He was a visionary. Although his world did not come to pass, he foresaw the consequences of a stalemate war between two powers who, on occasion, came into conflict via their satellites. The industrial age had never seen a drawn out war like this, and neither had Orwell, but we all would see it. We would live through just over 50 years of the Cold War, a struggle that came dangerously close to the nuclear war he had imagined. Orwell also envisioned the rise of Eastasia as a competing power to Oceania (the United States) and Eurasia (the Soviet Union). It would be a year after Nineteen Eighty-Four's publication that the Kuomintang, under Mao Zedong, would take over China and turn it from a peasant country into a power that would eventually rival the United States.

The same day the Enterprise flew for the first time, 24 years before, the ground shook in Kazakhstan. A Yggdrasil of black smoke rose five miles into the heavens, which had been soaked in blood. The Soviets had begun testing of the Layer Cake, a 400-kiloton bomb that rivaled the American hydrogen bomb, which had been tested less than one year before that. The disastrous power of the nuclear weapon was predicted by one of the preeminent science fiction writers of the 19th-century, Herbert George Wells. Wells wrote the novel The World Set Free, which deals with the effect of technological progress on human civilization. In his book, a man named Holsten is able to discover how to tap into the internal energy of atoms to fashion a weapon of such wanton destructive power. He adds a comment on the ease with which we now have the ability to hurt one another: "...a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city" (Wells).

Wells was interested in the way in which scientific progress would affect human civilization. One of his favorite themes was Darwinism; he saw every species as engaged in a perpetual battle for survival. When he wrote The War of the Worlds, Europe was awash with pride in its own technological superiority over the other races of the world. Therefore, Europeans saw themselves as more qualified to lead the colonized regions of the planet than their native populations. In his novel, Martians arrive in southeast England and wage a violent war to take over the planet. They unleash their Tripods, three-legged metal creatures with saucer-shaped heads that could travel twice as fast as a cheetah. The Tripods fired beams of concentrated heat that would turn water to steam, melt metal, and incinerate flesh. Their black smoke would kill any human being on contact. Their technological supremacy notwithstanding, Orwell defends, the Martians' cruel machinery of death by reminding the reader of the atrocities that humans have brought upon one another, especially those the British imperialists have brought upon the peoples they had ruthlessly colonized.

Prophecy is not a pseudoscience. It arises from a careful observation of one's contemporary world and from a cogent analysis of a culture's hopes and fears. Some science fiction writers, such as Orwell, see into the future and warn us about what is possible and, we hope, preventable. Other writers see into the future and tell us what is most likely, warning us, instead, to be wary of how we use our new technological capability. This seems to be Wells's message in both The World Set Free and The War of the Worlds. In the latter case, although there were some people who had come recently to believe that there was, intelligent life on Mars (scientists had recently discovered straight lines along the red planet's surface that resembled canals), it is most likely that Wells did not consider it possible for Martians to attempt an invasion of Earth. But the Europeans had been abusing their power, using their technological superiority to overthrow the rightful rule of native peoples over their own territories. Wells used the image of Martians enslaving the planet to bring this message across.

Jules Verne was not any more optimistic than Wells, but his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, urged him to be more so; his works would sell better if they had happy endings. Verne used imagery to warn humanity about the dangers of scientific progress, much as Wells did. His many novels made him a pioneer within the science fiction genre. While most of his works make him out to be a technophile, his later works show his somewhat darker side. Inone, a lord becomes infatuated with an opera singer only to discover that she is nothing more than a hologram and a recording. Paris in the 20th Century, a novel which had been rejected by Hetzel, was not published until it was rediscovered by his great-grandson in 1989. The story revolved around a young man named Michel Dufrenoy. Durrenoy lives in a very wealthy and successful future version of Paris. There are buildings made of glass that touch the sky, automobiles powered by gas whisking along busy streets, electrical lights and music, a system of underground high-speed trains, a worldwide communications network, and even electronic calculators. But this is a world in which engineering and banking are the major industries, and there is no place left in society for the artist. Dufrenoy is unable to find happiness in a cold, commercial world, and he suffers a tragic end.

Verne's work is more prophetic than most. He predicts our glass skyscrapers, subways, cars, even the Internet. In doing so, he warns us not to give up art in our savage lust for wealth. Before him, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, considered to be the author of the first piece of authentic science ticnon, was warning us to be wary of our lust: also for wealth, but less because of its danger to art. In The Modern Prometheus, Shelley depicts an ambitious scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who reads voraciously, shunning the teachings of the Enlightenment in order to pursue the medieval science of alchemy. When he leaves his home in Geneva to study at Ingolstadt in Germany, he is introduced to modern science. He combines alchemy and science and discovers a way to bring an inanimate being to life. He begins to pursue his experiment with religious fervor, collecting parts for his creature from the bodies of the dead.

The monster that awakens is a grotesque, pitiful being. Its yellow eyes look up gently at its master and the creature grins, extending an arm toward his maker like Michelangelo's Adam extended his hand to touch God's. Frankenstein is terrified by the monster and flees, whereupon the lost creature goes into the world on its own. After the miserable monster realizes that no one will love it due to its terrible appearance, it begins to avenge itself against Frankenstein, unless the scientist will make his creation a bride so that it will not be so alone. Frankenstein's experiment was a quest for ultimate power: the power to create life. His lust for power was so overwhelming that he was willing to dig through graves and desecrate the bodies of the dead in order to accomplish his goals. The equally voracious forces empowering the concept of laissez-faire capitalism were equally unperturbed by their violations of basic human dignity. Capitalists would treat workers in pernicious ways. Frankenstein's monster's rebellion against his creator, however, seemed to imply that, should this state of affairs continue, the same thing could happen in industrial societies.

The relevance of science fiction is that is situates itself outside of a cultural milieu, in the possible future, or another culture entirely, in order to observe more openly the culture contemporary with the writer. By placing itself outside, it does not have to judge anyone directly. The reader can make his or her own observations and fashion his or her own judgments. This important role played by science fiction makes it influential. We can relate to worlds other than our own because we can see ourselves in the persons of those who inhabit these alien worlds. We are a part of them because they, once all of the alien is trimmed away, are us.

This hidden relevance has been particularly important since the explosion of technological advancement in the 19th and 20th centuries. We inhabit a world that is drastically changing. Yesterday's technology is obsolete tomorrow. The technological race that was once a symptom of the Cold War has become a symptom of our new digital society. Much of the science fiction we have discussed is no longer all that fictitious: Orwell, Wells, Verne, and Shelley have all been proven right to some extent. The explosion of interest in science fiction during the Cold War era led to an explosion in its production. Science fiction left the magazines and books, which began to decline in popularity during the later part of the 20th-century, to enter television and film. Although there was a time when science fiction was not taken seriously, it has become more sophisticated over the years, and many acclaimed writers of mainstream literature have begun to experiment with science fiction themes: Doris Lessing, C. S. Lewis, and Nevil Shute among them. It is, perhaps, this overflowing interest in science fiction work over the last century that has made it possible for science fiction and fantasy titles to fill bestsellers lists up until about the 1980s, for science fiction films to be among the top grossing films of all time, and for the Enterprise to have been named after the starship of a prominent science fiction series.

Despite its newfound popularity, we must not forget the important messages that science fiction has to offer our society. So long as we consider where we are and imagine where we might be, we will create stories that remind us about the dangers of the breakneck advances in technology that we experience today, while they keep us always alighting on the possibilities that lie ahead. Science fiction may excite us about the future, but it will also warn us when we appear to be headed for disaster. As active readers and viewers, we can keep our eyes open to these important messages and save ourselves from our own thirst for progress at any cost.

"File replay complete. Thank you for visiting the New York City Library of Science Fiction." The female froze in place. Her image glimmered.

The Geon who had activated the device scanned the female with a blue pen-shaped scanner. He cooed to the others, and the others cooed back, nodding their beaks agreeably. They then proceeded to cannibalize the holographic projector for parts.

Works Consulted

Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of. New York: Free Press, 1998.

"Science Fiction." Wikipedia. 2005. 28 July 2005 .

"Space Shuttle Enterprise." Humans in Space. 1999. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. 30 July 2005 .

Wells, H. G. The World Set Free. Sandy, UT: Quiet Vision Publishing, 2000.

Wilford, John Noble. "Space Shuttle Begins a Year's Tests Today As Prelude to Possible New Era in Flight." New York Times 18 Feb. 1977: 29+