Science and Fiction

Science and Fiction Editorial Board Mark Alpert Philip Ball Gregory Benford Michael Brotherton Victor Callaghan Amnon H Eden Nick Kanas Geoffrey Landis Rudi Rucker Dirk Schulze-Makuch Rüdiger Vaas Ulrich Walter Stephen Webb Science and Fiction – A Springer Series This collection of entertaining and thought-provoking books will appeal equally to science buffs, scientists and science-fiction fans. It was born out of the recognition that scientific discovery and the creation of plausible fictional scenarios are often two sides of the same coin. Each relies on an understanding of the way the world works, coupled with the imaginative ability to invent new or alternative explanations—and even other worlds. Authored by practicing scientists as well as writers of hard science fiction, these books explore and exploit the borderlands between accepted science and its fictional counterpart. Uncovering mutual influences, promoting fruitful interaction, narrating and analyzing fictional scenarios, together they serve as a reaction vessel for inspired new ideas in science, technology, and beyond. Whether fiction, fact, or forever undecidable: the Springer Series “Science and Fiction” intends to go where no one has gone before! Its largely non-technical books take several different approaches. Journey with their authors as they • Indulge in science speculation—describing intriguing, plausible yet unproven ideas; • Exploit science fiction for educational purposes and as a means of promoting critical thinking; • Explore the interplay of science and science fiction—throughout the history of the genre and looking ahead; • Delve into related topics including, but not limited to: science as a creative process, the limits of science, interplay of literature and knowledge; • Tell fictional short stories built around well-defined scientific ideas, with a supplement summarizing the science underlying the plot. Readers can look forward to a broad range of topics, as intriguing as they are important. Here just a few by way of illustration: • Time travel, superluminal travel, wormholes, teleportation • Extraterrestrial intelligence and alien civilizations • Artificial intelligence, planetary brains, the universe as a computer, simulated worlds • Non-anthropocentric viewpoints • Synthetic biology, genetic engineering, developing nanotechnologies • Eco/infrastructure/meteorite-impact disaster scenarios • Future scenarios, transhumanism, posthumanism, intelligence explosion • Virtual worlds, cyberspace dramas • Consciousness and mind manipulation More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11657 Damien Broderick Consciousness and Science Fiction Damien Broderick San Antonio, TX USA ISSN 2197-1188 ISSN 2197-1196 (electronic) Science and Fiction ISBN 978-3-030-00598-6 ISBN 978-3-030-00599-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00599-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958318 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Gregory Benford Russell Blackford and Gary Livick with thanks And in memory of David G. Hartwell who got my first novel into print a shockingly long time ago Introduction Until recently, few critics and theorists of science fiction (sf) have examined closely a topic long considered suspect by science itself, especially in the doleful behaviorist years that ended only in the early 1960s or even later. That maligned topic was the nature and structure of the mind, its design and variations, and its products in the making of our selves: thinking, emotion, consciousness itself. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure and in later decades a brain researcher, cited a cautionary quote from philosopher John Searle: “As recently as a few years ago, if one raised the subject of consciousness in cognitive science discussions, it was generally regarded as a form of bad taste, and graduate students, who are always attuned to the social mores of their discipline, would roll their eyes at the ceiling and assume expressions of mild disgust.” For several decades now, sophisticated emphasis on cognition and consciousness has clambered back toward prominence, but in forms that are still mutually at war. It is the nature of consciousness that this book investigates, although from an unusual angle: how this contested domain of scientific endeavor affected the literary form known as science fiction, and perhaps to some small extent how it was in turn influenced by sf’s speculations. *** In the years before most of us were born, science fiction tended to be derided as “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” Buck is now pretty much forgotten, but in the late 1920s and for some decades beyond, he was a meme crossed with an icon, representing the wonders of a space-faring tomorrow. In 1928, a novella by vii viii Introduction Philip Francis Nowlan in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories featured Anthony Rogers, a former WWI soldier who is preserved by radioactive dust nearly half a millennium into the future. Amazing Stories was the first outlet dedicated to what was then coming to be understood as an entirely new form of popular fiction, first clunkily dubbed “scientifiction” by Amazing’s founding publisher Hugo Gernsback and then shaved back to the now familiar “science fiction,” sometimes with a hyphen, and abbreviated as “SF” or “sf.”1 By the end of 1928, Nowlan had adapted his tale into a comic strip, changing Anthony’s name to the more swaggering “Buck.” There had been plenty of examples of this new genre in print for decades—famously, the slightly futuristic tales of Jules Verne and the brilliantly imaginative stories and novels of H.G. Wells—but Buck caught the wind of a postwar technological surge. Drawn crudely by Dick Calkins, it deployed spacecraft of some inge- nuity, a leap of faith well past propellers and jets into a future still not yet here, with home-made rocketships and interplanetary war. Artist and illustrator Steven Stiles has commented on the impact of Buck’s ludicrous, rather adolescent adventures in branding sf of any kind as a sort of children’s playground of the mind. “For far too many years we suffering science fiction aficionados were confronted with the descriptive and dismissive phrase, ‘Oh, that crazy Buck Rogers stuff!’ When applied to the works of, say, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, or Philip K. Dick, it could be pretty galling. Now the phrase is ‘Oh, like Mr. Spock!,’ which is, of course,” he added sardonically, “a vast improvement.”2 Star Trek did indeed drive a simplified form of futurist sf into the minds and hearts and even mini-skirted couture of many TV and eventually movie viewers, from 1966 to the twenty-first century. It spawned an endless sausage factory of paperbacks set in variants of the Trek universe—some of this share- cropping surprisingly well written and deftly handled, but all of it crippled by the need to stick pretty much within what had gone before. The same triumph of old ideas handsomely decorated with special effects and scenes drawn from sf magazine covers of the 1940s and 1950s infused the Star Wars franchise from 1977 to this day. Science fiction proper, by contrast, while now often retreated into safe clichéd ruts, has the capacity to generate novelty, not just comic-book inven- tions like Buck’s war cry “Roaring rockets!” and his girlfriend Wilma’s flying belt. Sf is able to ask genuinely startling questions and then to pose even more 1 The term “sci fi” arrived several decades later, a neologism coined in parallel to the then-sexy new “hi-fi” recording medium, hated by the writers of the new medium, but eventually adopted anyway by the public. 2 http://stevestiles.com/buckrog.htm Introduction ix startling answers to them. It did so in the mode of empirical and theoretical science rather than, say, fantasy or chrome-plated history reruns. There is a term for this process familiar to philosophers and physicists, perhaps coined by Einstein who was a master of the form: gedankenexperiments, or conceptual trials undertaken purely in imagination—mental modeling of situations and outcomes that have never yet happened but can cast a searching light on problems and phenomena that science has not yet resolved. So the “expert dreamers,” as sf writer and editor Frederik Pohl called them, catch the scent of new notions and project possible outcomes that might change the world we know or at least challenge our certainties. Could humans voyage to the Moon, or deep beneath the ocean? For centuries these were enthralling speculations enjoyed by the curious, but by the nineteenth century Verne and others witnessed all around them the innovations of the Industrial Revolution. On this basis they built imaginative fiction (often quite wrong in detail, like Verne’s gun-fired lunar ship that would have crushed its crew) embodying this sense of an unleashed future.

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