Interdisciplinarity in Science Fiction
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ICFA, Orlando, Florida, March 2011 Andy Duncan & Terry Bisson Andrea Hairston & Suzy Charnas Karen Burnham, Paul Park, Cecelia Holland & Eileen Gunn Tom & Tania Dougherty The New York Review of Science Fiction ISSUE #273 May 2011 Volume 23, No. 9 ISSN #1052-9438 ESSAYS Spyros A. Vretos: Towards an Explication of the Missing Text: The Lost Greek-American Pages of Philip K. Dick: 1 Gary Westfahl: Space Stations in Fact and Fiction: 6 Michael Swanwick: Impossible Russias: 12 Victor Grech: Interdisciplinarity in Science Fiction: 14 Nader Elhefnawy: A Revolution of Falling Expectations: Wither the Singularity?: 19 REVIEWS Hello Hi There, concept and direction by Annie Dorsen, reviewed by Jen Gunnels: 1 Dancing with Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger & Surplus by Michael Swanwick, reviewed by Henry Wessells: 11 The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell, reviewed by Ernest Lilley: 16 Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik, reviewed by Greg L Johnson: 18 Modern Times 2.0 (Outspoken Authors No. 5) by Michael Moorcock, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds: 20 PLUS Plus: David Drake, mythologer (5); questioning Hartwell (11); screed (23); and an editorial (24). Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews & Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Associate Managing Editors. Staff: Ambrose, Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, Jen Gunnels, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni. Weekly Crew: Lisa Padol. Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz. Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. $4.00 per copy. Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00. Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds. PDF subscriptions and PayPal payments are available; e-mail <[email protected]> for information on both. Send all editorial inquiries and submissions to <[email protected]> and <[email protected]>. An up-to-date index of past issues in Excel format is available at <www.maroney.org/NYRSFDownload/Public/NYRSF.Index.xls>. New York Review of Science Fiction Home Page: www.nyrsf.com Copyright © 2011 Dragon Press. Victor Grech Interdisciplinarity in Science Fiction * Referring to C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures amplified by territorial aspects of disciplinary knowledge and methods and the Scientific Revolution is clichéd yet mandatory in any project (Crane and Small 197). Multitalented inventors, such as Edison, Ford, that attempts to discuss interdisciplinarity and to identify affinities and others, have not only captured our imagination but also served as between, on the one hand, “science,” arguably the last metanarrative inspirations for fictional characters, including in science fiction. with any significant cachet in the post-postmodern condition, and, SF, in its typically positive and optimistic fashion, has repeatedly on the other hand, the humanities. It has been nearly 50 years since warned of indulgence in super-specialization and has depicted heroes Snow famously lamented the lack of mutuality between the sciences who embody interdisciplinarity, seen as an ideal modus operandi and the humanities and especially the vagueness of practitioners in whereby knowledge can somehow become greater than the sum of its the latter about important and basic aspects of the former. And the parts. Such protagonists range from prolific boy inventors or adults situation has degenerated further in that it is perfectly obvious that of Edisonian forte all the way to true interdisciplinarians who have a we currently lack not only interdisciplinarity, but, more urgently, wide range of knowledge that encompasses diverse disciplines. This intradisciplinarity within either. paper will review sf’s depiction of some protagonists who have reified The present is the age of the specialist and the subspecialist, a the interdisciplinary paradigm within sf and some lessons that may be form of superspecialist, such that one can no longer even utter the learned from these narratives. words science or the humanities with innocence or precision, and it is almost certain that no field within either of the camps demonstrates Interdisciplinarians in Science Fiction complete univocity or internal coherence. Thus, for instance, and to One of the earliest fictional interdisciplinary geniuses appeared limit ourselves for the purposes of this example to “the humanities,” in Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of philosophy remains riven by polarities between logical positivism and the Year 2660. The protagonist was a truly Edisonian inventor, and Continental philosophy (which themselves permit, in turn, further this particular story predicted television, tape recording, microfilm, subdivisions); the study of literature continues to be embroiled in the solar energy, atomic weapons, fluorescent lighting, plastics, synthetic struggle “against itself”; and the study of culture, not least the very fabrics, stainless steel, hydroponics, and juke boxes. It was by way of the definition of culture, is highly contested. Gerald Graff contends that cheap pulp magazines that sf “emerged as a self-conscious genre” (per postmodern literature and critical theory has tended to be nihilistic, the Encyclopædia Britannica), despite the repeatedly recycled series refusing to define or relate to external reality, a worldview that leads and clichéd stories, such as square-jawed heroes rescuing hysterical to self-trivialization and loss of referentiality, weakening literature’s blonde damsels in distress, meretriciously attired in brass underwear claim to truth. while fleeing from bug-eyed monsters. More and more, it seems that because of the vast amounts of The Tom Swift boy-hero character has appeared in over 100 knowledge that specialists accumulate, they tend to speak mostly among novels since 1910, ghostwritten under the corporate pseudonym of themselves, solely within the borderlines of their specificisms and hardly Victor Appleton or Victor Appleton II. Swift’s fantastic, hopelessly at all (and certainly with questionable authority, reliability, or purpose) implausible, and veritably endless flood of inventions paralleled to specialties other than their own. In his famous lecture, Snow, a well- contemporary research or prefigured eventual technologies in all of known British physicist and novelist, somewhat simplistically blamed the fields of science, such as diamond synthesis, the transmission of the communication breakdown between the two cultures of the sciences pictures via telephone, the portable movie camera, electric trains, and and the humanities (“scientists” and “literary intellectuals”) as the many others (Prager 74). major stumbling block to solving the world’s problems. Snow saw these These early stories had a common allegorical thread: they as two diametrically opposed worldviews separated by intense suspicion portrayed science and technology as desirable and completely beneficial and mutual incomprehension, outlooks that virtually eliminated the to the individual, to the race, and to the planet. The inventor was possibility of harnessing solutions that a combination of the two camps glamorized and worshipped as a hero, and perhaps because of his might bring about. This was not an original concept, as Snow himself modesty and absence of hubris, tragedy did not befall the champion. admitted; even in 1798, Wordsworth, in The Tables Turned, wrote that Later sf stories have abandoned this naiveté and have focused the appreciation of nature was starkly different when approached as a on cautionary tales that deal not only with the importance of poetic truth as opposed to a scientific quest conducted by the “meddling interdisciplinarians but also with the consequences of unnecessary and intellect” which “murders to dissect.” exaggerated strictures that prevent specialists from benefiting from Snow’s frequently overlooked second edition—The Two Cultures: the splintered knowledge and techniques utilized in other disciplines, And A Second Look (1963)—reexamined the divergence of these two strictures that paradoxically may eventually prove to be necessary. camps and, indeed, the divergence of the specialities and subspecialties In addition to The Two Cultures, Snow is also known for his series within each camp. Snow also wondered why this notion had raised of eleven related novels, the Strangers and Brothers series, which follow such a storm at the time. He believed, rather naively in retrospect, a lawyer from his training to his employment in an important position, that all could be solved by despecializing education in developed while delineating changes in English life through the twentieth countries such that future scientists would have a strong grounding century. The Search (1934) contrasts a conventional scientist in the in the humanities, and future literary intellectuals would have a solid near future with a relatively new breed of almost universal synthesists scientific background. Snow also thought that the material lot of poor who relate new discoveries to the existing body of knowledge and plan nations could be solved simply by educating their populations. Snow’s the next step and direction that new research must logically undertake perceptions were already somewhat dated in 1959 and have become for the sake of maximum efficiency. more so with the passage of time, as even individual