Reading and writing have long been recognized as interconnected activ-ities, especially in the genesis and development of literary genres. With sci-ence fiction, however, this activity has always seemed strange, as it violated the academic rift between the sciences and humanities that persisted through-out the twentieth century. The growing professionalization of scientific dis-ciplines and the elitist pretensions of some English departments made bridging the gap between them seemingly impossible. C. P. Snow, in his famous essay “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” decried the split between these “two cultures” that seemed to preclude any reading of science and fiction on equal terms. As Gary Westfahl and George Slusser’s 2009 anthology Science Fiction and the Two Cultures shows, science fiction has always been engaged with bridging the gap between the sciences and the humanities. Perhaps this is one reason why SF as a genre has struggled to gain a foothold as legitimate literature in many English departments.
In the first issue of Amazing Stories in April 1926, Hugo Gernsback famously described the “scientifiction” story as “a charming romance inter-mingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (3). For Gernsback, com-bining the knowledge and methods of science and literature was at the heart of the genre. As a self-reflexive historian of the nascent genre he was pro-moting, Gernsback saw the potential and value for such border crossing. Sev-eral recent theories of genre — in fields such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, rhetoric, cultural studies, and film and television studies — have demonstrated that genres arise to solve recurring communicative or
repre-sentational issues faced by members of a community (Bazerman, “Social Forms”; Luckmann 228). As a genre develops, certain formal elements are repeated and become codified because of their familiarity and success in han-dling communicative or representational issues. One such issue identified by Gernsback (and his SF predecessors) was the perceived gap between litera-ture and the sciences. Authors as diverse as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells brought together the traditions of literature and the dis-courses of the sciences in their particular attempts to join these two cultures.
The texts they produced, which we now label as SF, were hybrid creations that proved immensely successful with their reading audiences: clearly, these early SF authors had solved some sort of modern representational issue in a way that appealed to large numbers of people over many generations.
Recent theories of genre have also emphasized understanding genre as a system, a complex set of discursive frames that writers and readers have at their disposal when producing and interpreting texts. During the act of writ-ing, authors draw on what M. M. Bakhtin calls both “primary” and “sec-ondary” genres. Primary genres are simple and unmediated, whereas secondary genres are complex and generally constitute more formal discur-sive patterns such as novels, lab reports, and political speeches. During their development, secondary genres generally ingest or include primary genres (Bakhtin 60–63). For example, Judith Merril’s classic 1948 SF short story
“That Only a Mother” includes such primary genres as internal speech, baby talk, and domestic dialogue and such secondary genres as epistolary writ-ing, telegram messages, and the future-war story. With the presence of so many genres within any given text, it then becomes necessary to talk about a text in terms of its complex of genres, which draws from the numerous dis-cursive forms available in a culture (Todorov 10). Within a given culture, the available discursive forms constitute a system of genres that serves as a resource for authors to tap into when writing a text, and that readers rely on when reading a text. Early SF authors drew from the existing field of gen-res that circulated in their cultugen-res in order to addgen-ress their peculiar set of representational issues.
Genres, of course, are not limited to literature. As Charles Bazerman shows in Shaping Written Knowledge, Isaac Newton’s publication on optics in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society had a major impact on the development of the scientific laboratory report. The generic formula Newton hit on was characterized by “a discovery narrative” that presented him as “stumbling across a natural fact” and then investigating it “in a
sys-tematic way” (90). This scientific discovery narrative became central not only to the lab report genre, but also to early SF. In countless gadget sto-ries, such as John W. Campbell’s 1938 story “Frictional Losses,” the plot revolves around a scientist working in a lab and stumbling across a new fact.
In Campbell’s story, a second wave of alien invasion is about to finish off humanity. However, a heroic scientist develops a gadget to exploit his new discovery in time to save humanity. The story emphasizes the accidental nature of the discovery and the subsequent systematic investigation of the scientist. In both the nonfiction scientific report and the SF gadget story, a similar complex of genres is at play.
As a number of scholars have argued, Charles Darwin’s narratives of evolution also had a profound impact on writing in literature, history, polit-ical science, and several other areas study and expression (see Beer; Bender;
and Jones and Sharp). The attempts of some to divide the sciences and humanities into two cultures ignore the fact that both contribute to the same system of genres that circulate throughout our culture. Scientists regularly draw on SF to make the case for why their science is important and worthy of funding. Authors of SF regularly draw on scientific narratives as they develop their “charming romances.” Though the system of genres in our cul-ture has evolved over time, this interchange between science and SF has remained constant. The essays in this section explore specific texts as sites of this ongoing exchange between the interconnected subcultures of science and literature. They also address the importance of literacy — in regards to both science and literature — to the traditions of SF reading and writing.
The first essay in this section, Charles Harding’s “Reading/Writing Martians: Seeing Techn` and Poi`sis in The War of the Worlds,” focuses on the issue of scientific literacy in H. G. Wells’s landmark future-war story. As Harding points out, The War of the Worlds was a peculiar SF reimagining of the popular late nineteenth-century future-war genre. The story uses a sci-entifically literate narrator to translate the meaning of a Martian invasion in a way that emphasizes the importance of the Martian relationship to tech-nology. At the same time, Harding argues, the story shows the illiteracy of the writers (and readers) of future-war stories, whose visions of the future failed to capture the impact of technology on warfare and humanity. Wells’s Martian invasion, and the narrator’s scientific descriptions of the Martians themselves, showed the errors of anthropocentric Victorian assumptions about progress and evolution. Harding shows how Wells represents newspa-pers and organized religion as centers of backward thinking and scientific
illiteracy. Wells counters this illiteracy with the knowledge and change of perspective brought about by the Martian invasion (and his text itself ). Ulti-mately, Wells tries to educate his readers with a scientifically enlightened sense of their own nature, and to open their eyes to the possibilities for the future of humanity when technology is properly understood.
In the second essay, “The Creation of Heinlein’s ‘Solution Unsatisfac-tory,’” Edward Wysocki explores the direct exchange of ideas about atomic weaponry between science and SF. Heinlein and his editor, John W. Camp-bell Jr., kept abreast of new work in chemistry and physics in part through reading articles on the subject in the New York Times. The influence of these articles is clear from some of the technical mistakes they made that were repeated in articles written by Campbell in Astounding Science-Fiction. As Wysocki shows, however, Heinlein’s friendship with physicist Dr. Robert Cornog played an influential role in the development of Heinlein’s famous story. At the same time, Wysocki shows how the ideas of Campbell and Heinlein — about using radioactive dust as a weapon — may have influenced an important scientific report on the possible military uses of atomic fission.
In the process, Wysocki identifies an early instance of how the United States government used SF to help plan for future military conflicts. This connec-tion between science, military planning, and SF continues to the present day.
The final essay in this section, Donald M. Hassler’s “Entropy, Enter-tainment, and Creative Energy in Ben Bova,” examines the possibilities and merits of the hard SF subgenre that has fallen out of favor in recent years.
Hassler describes the comfort and familiarity of genre conventions and the pleasure of reading stories that follow a recognizable pattern. He also acknowledges the particular joys of reading powerful nonfiction accounts of warfare and serious depictions of “human nobility.” Hassler suggests that the desire to escape such serious depictions of warfare could have fueled the Golden Age of SF. The recent work of Bova also contains this desire to leave warfare and history behind, replacing it with a sense of wonder and an unproblematic exploration of the solar system. Hassler examines Bova’s sto-ries as examples of a playful renewal of older forms and tropes that are in many ways resistant to changes in the ideological landscape of SF. Such sto-ries, Hassler argues, provide readers with a sense of hope for the future.
Together, these essays present an image of SF as both consistent and evolving. Since the nineteenth century, SF has consistently taken up themes such as the meaning of new technologies and the exploration of space.
Despite the constant evolution of the genre (and the culturewide system of genres), these themes have remained a central concern of SF. These themes are deeply rooted in SF’s ongoing role as a mediator between science and literature, and the powerful hopes and fears that surround the role of sci-ence in the modern world. For SF writers and readers, scisci-ence also remains at the center of cultural imagination and inspiration. This would have seemed a contradiction to antiscience literary scholars such as F. R. Leavis (Moran 31); fortunately, SF has thrived despite its violations of academic boundaries and protocols to become one of the dominant genres of the twenty-first century.
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