Science and Fiction

Let me begin with an image: imagine a tortoise crossed with a hippopotamus—some lumbering creature designed for a heavy-gravity world. Or consider those stories about canals on Mars, complete with ancient civilizations tending their irrigation systems. This is bad science fiction: superficially plausible, but biologically absurd.

Good science fiction requires carefully fitting creatures to their environments, thinking through the consequences of novel conditions. But I should acknowledge at the outset that this is not everyone's cup of tea. Some people simply are not interested in such speculations. Others dismiss it all as base materialism—a mere playing with gadgets and rockets while ignoring the soul.

What is the aim of fiction in general? To construct imaginary situations that are true "in spirit"—not literally true, but illuminating some aspect of reality. Fiction should interest, delight, and stimulate. It should epitomize aspects of life, condensing vast experiences into memorable forms.

At its best, fiction creates symbols that quicken the mind and feelings, generating new awareness. It opens windows onto possibilities we had not previously considered. The question is whether science fiction can achieve this—whether it can be genuinely significant, or whether it must remain mere entertainment.

The straight novel accepts the current scientific background as given and puts personal relations in focus. It is "about" people. The author's imagination plays upon human character and events, illuminating the complexities of individual lives within society.

The historical novel combines history with fiction to make a past period live. Here imagination plays upon a vanished human society, bringing it into vivid presence for the modern reader.

The propaganda novel uses fiction to put across ideas—social, religious, or political. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is the great example. But to succeed as genuine art, propaganda must be subordinated to the demands of the story; otherwise we have a tract dressed up as fiction. Here imagination plays upon the idea itself, giving it concrete embodiment.

Any fiction, to be art, must fuse its materials into a whole. It must attain unity of form and harmony of emotion. The various elements—character, setting, event, idea—must cohere into something greater than their sum.

But beware the tyranny of convention! Novel critics often demand "pucker" novels—as strict in form as sonnets. They impose the standards of one kind of fiction upon all others. Yet there is surely place for other kinds of fiction: epics, romances, philosophical tales, fantastic voyages. Science fiction may require different criteria than the domestic novel.

Any fiction must either assume current science as background—as Galsworthy does—or deliberately violate it for a purpose. David Garnett's Lady into Fox asks us to accept an impossible transformation for the sake of what it reveals about love and wildness. Orwell's Animal Farm uses talking animals to expose political tyranny. These violations work because they serve a clear artistic purpose.

Consider science in earlier fiction. Dante's Divine Comedy accepts the science of its time—Ptolemaic cosmology, medieval physics—and consciously uses it for religious purposes. The architecture of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise follows the best contemporary understanding.

Fairy stories accept science but add magic—which we might call a science beyond science, operating by its own consistent rules. Milton in Paradise Lost awkwardly straddles old and new science, uncertain which cosmology to adopt.

And consider angels: entirely plausible to the medieval mind, but impossible to us. We immediately notice the problem of center of gravity—where would an angel's weight be distributed with those enormous wings?

The scientific background available to fiction keeps changing. We have moved from Newtonian physics to Relativity, opening new possibilities—perhaps travel by entering the timeless and returning at a different point. The focus has shifted from physics to biology, and now perhaps to the paranormal: telepathy, precognition, phenomena that science has not yet explained or explained away.

Compare Haldane's "Possible Worlds," with its speculations about linked species presents and circular lives—time flowing differently for different forms of being. Or Priestley's Berkeley Square, drawing on Ouspensky's ideas about time as a dimension one might move through consciously.

Each new scientific paradigm opens new territory for the imagination.

As science becomes more precise, fiction must keep pace. Swift's Lilliputians did not violate the science of his day, but they certainly violate ours—we know now that a six-inch human could not function; the physics of scaling would defeat him. We forgive Swift by adopting his conventions, just as we may break our own conventions for a purpose.

But in general: the truer fiction is to current science, the more plausible and powerful it becomes.

This brings us to science fiction proper, where scientific ideas are placed in the focus. We must distinguish two types. First, imaginative doodling—escapism, the stuff of the science fiction magazines. Sheer marvels, often scientifically poor and humanly atrocious. Giant spiders, robots run amok, beautiful princesses on Venus—the modern equivalents of old fairy stories. I confess I love them.

Second, serious science fiction—exemplified by Wells's early stories: The Star, The War of the Worlds, Star Begotten, The Time Machine. The aim here is mind-stretching: to give concrete life to abstract possibilities, to make the reader feel what it would be like if certain ideas were true.

What are the rules of the game for serious science fiction?

First, conform to current scientific ideas—be plausible. Do not violate known physics or biology without good reason.

Second, imaginatively explore further possibilities. Science fiction must create within its framework, not merely illustrate established facts. It projects beyond the known into the possible.

Third, be humanly plausible and significant. The story must be a symbol relevant to current humanity—not mere spectacle but meaning. At its best, science fiction creates myths for a scientific age: narratives that speak to our deepest concerns while respecting what we know about the universe.

Note that serious prophecy is not the aim. We are not trying to predict the future but to illuminate the present by imagining possibilities.

Wells is the undisputed master—The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Star. He understood both the science and the human implications.

Jules Verne gave us the Voyage to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea—engineering romances, less philosophically ambitious but wonderfully imagined.

J.B.S. Haldane wrote charming stories for children in "Mr Leakey," and more seriously explored ideas like the abolition of pain—and its reinstatement when we realize pain serves a purpose.

Karel Čapek's War with the Newts is a brilliant anti-capitalist symbol: intelligent salamanders exploited by humanity until they rise up. His Insect Play likewise uses non-human creatures to satirize human folly.

The French writer Régis Messac gave us La Cité des Asphyxiés and Quinzinzinzili. M.P. Shiel's Purple Cloud imagines the last man alive wandering a dead world.

John Gloag deserves special mention for his variety of approaches. Tomorrow's Yesterday has imaginative power but biological flaws—his intelligent cats, for instance, would never have evolved that way.

Manna imagines a substance that makes people lazy—what happens when effort becomes unnecessary? The New Pleasure explores addiction and sensation. Pendulum deals with post-death experiments—communication with the dead through scientific means. And 99% plays with inherited memories—racial memory made accessible.

Each book takes a single speculative idea and works through its consequences.

We should distinguish science fiction from fantasies that are not primarily scientific but use fantastic elements for other purposes.

David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus has poor science—yellow water and impossible biology—but tremendous aesthetic and spiritual power. It uses science fiction machinery to explore mystical questions.

C.S. Lewis in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra is essentially anti-science, using space travel to deliver Christian apologetics. His Screwtape Letters shows good psychology and wit, though I find the fundamental assumptions false.

Morland Bishop's The Star Called Wormwood uses apocalyptic imagery for religious purposes. Anatole France gave us L'Ile des Pingouins—a satirical history of France disguised as penguin chronicle—and the magnificent Révolte des Anges, where Satan declines to overthrow God lest he become tyrannical in turn.

Balzac's Peau de Chagrin uses a magical premise for psychological exploration. J.C. Powys's Morwyn is frankly magical, hostile to science.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon remains a masterpiece of satirical fantasy—a land where illness is punished and crime is treated medically.

Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin) wrote the remarkable Swastika Night, imagining a Nazi victory centuries hence, and Proud Man, viewing humanity from an evolved perspective.

T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone is anti-modern but plays wonderfully with time—Merlyn living backward, collecting cigarette cards from our future in his medieval present. There's a marvelous incident with a hat, and the interplay between boy Arthur and the ancient King Arthur yet to come. White understands that fantasy can illuminate by looking backward as well as forward.

Rebecca West said of Star Maker that it was as if Milton had given Paradise Lost to the author of Bradshaw's railway timetable to rewrite. A fair criticism, perhaps. My prose is not Milton's. L.H. Myers was kinder about Last and First Men.

My aim has been to write modern myths—narratives that will seem crude to future generations but that attempt something important now. These myths should be scientifically plausible, working out possibilities and possible futures, juggling with time. They should create symbols of man-in-the-cosmos.

Above all, they should relate science to religion, exploring the potentialities of humanity as a vessel of spirit. The science is true in principle, if not in detail; the spirit is what matters.

Last and First Men began with a vision on Anglesey—like stout Cortés gazing at the Pacific, but looking into time instead of space. I imagined successive human species across two billion years: the superman, various extravagances of evolution—the Great Brains, the Flying Men, the Martian invasion, the colonization of Venus.

The time scale is deliberately vast: two thousand million years. Within that vastness, I tried to show the transcendence of time itself, and the persistence of spirit through all transformations.

I missed Hitler—the book was written before his rise—but I anticipated atomic power. The vicissitudes of humanity in that book mirror, in extended form, the vicissitudes we actually face.

Star Maker works on a larger, more philosophical canvas. Here I imagined many types of beings—plant men, "Other Man" (humanity evolved differently), symbiotic races, composite intelligences. The focus expanded from Earth to societies of worlds, galactic civilizations, the whole cosmos.

The book traces cosmical progress and ultimate cosmical death—the heat death of the universe, the extinction of all mind. And at the center, the fiction of the Maker: God as artist, creating cosmos after cosmos in pursuit of beauty and meaning, indifferent to the suffering of the creatures within.

The theme of spirit and "the other"—the encounter with absolute otherness—runs through Star Maker and also through my philosophical work Death into Life.

Odd John attempts a plausible superman by two means: first, extrapolation of existing human powers—greater intelligence, longer life, enhanced perception; second, hints at qualitatively new powers that we cannot fully imagine, only gesture toward.

Sirius began with a vision triggered by Waddington's story of experiments on rats—enhancing animal intelligence through surgery and breeding. The problem I set myself: what happens when a non-human mammal achieves human-level intelligence?

I had to work out the consequences carefully: the choice of beast (why a dog rather than, say, an ape?), the environment (rural Wales), and above all the conflict of natures. Sirius has a human mind in a dog's body—he loves and hates as a dog, thinks and questions as a human. The tragedy is built into his being.

A World of Flames—or simply Flames—represents my wildest biology: beings of fire, intelligence in plasma, life forms utterly unlike terrestrial carbon chemistry. Yet even here, the theme of spirit recurs. Perhaps this is my best science fiction? The idea is so far from normal experience that it requires a leap of imagination from the reader.

Throughout my work, certain special examples recur: the use of atomic power (anticipated before Hiroshima); the Great Brains, immobile intelligences served by lesser beings; the Flying Men, humanity redesigned for the air; the Martians of Last and First Men, clouds of sub-microscopic units; the Vegetable World of Star Maker; and the long-legged race that follows the sun around their tidally-locked planet, forever walking to stay in twilight.

Beyond the cosmic themes, science fiction allows psychological exploration—the effects of person on person under novel conditions. How do humans behave when freed from Earth's constraints? When facing alien intelligence? When their own nature has been transformed?

To create genuinely novel beings, we had to invent environments. Normal environments lead to normal creatures—as the head needs its louse, adapted precisely to that ecological niche. Strange beings require strange conditions.

Consider the possibilities: environments with no gravity, where beings might be vast gossamer structures; environments with great gravity, producing compact, powerful forms; environments of fire, where life might exist in plasma states. Each imagined environment generates its own biology, its own psychology, its own philosophy.

This is the ultimate aim of science fiction: to expand our conception of what life and mind might be, and thereby to understand our own lives and minds more deeply.