Skip to main content

Science Fiction - Sherryl Vint **

Many science fiction fans enjoy also reading books about science fiction (me included), so this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series is of interest - particularly as Sherryl Vint tells us that she isn't taking the usual route of a history or describing key works, but rather focussing on what 'science fiction can do, how it has been described by a variety of constituencies in distinct ways for multiple ends.' 

Vint does recognise that science fiction is many things to many people - but rather than embrace this diversity, she seems determined to force it into a particular image (that you are only likely to appreciate if you can cope with somebody using ‘imaginary’ as a noun rather than an adjective). We are told SF is about change - but I'm not convinced that's accurate. It is about storytelling (which is hardly mentioned here) that asks 'What if?' - so it's not so much about change as things being different. The obsession with change produces an overemphasis on dystopias or reflecting particular groups’ challenges where these often make dull or worthy fiction. Vint just doesn't seem to get the point the reason many of us read SF is not to deeply consider important concepts - it's for enjoyment. To have fun. There's very little fun in this book.

This comes through, for example, in the description of the science journal Nature's decision to have a short SF story in each issue. Vint comments 'Acknowledging that imaginative speculations have their place in scientific histories and in discussions regarding policy making, the preeminent science journal Nature began to publish short original works of SF in 1999, initially as a project to reflect the turn of the millennium, but adopted as a regular feature, Nature’s “Futures” beginning in 2005...' I've contributed several stories to this series: when I asked someone at Nature about the reasoning, they found Vint's justification very amusing, saying that it was done because they could, and they wanted to have some fun.

Leaving aside the strange take on the nature of SF, there were one or two smaller issues. History of science (as opposed to science fiction) is clearly a problem, as we read about 'the widespread cultural interest provoked by Galileo's invention of the telescope.' We're also told that Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics 'have become a starting point for conversations about robotic design and the ethics of a world in which we increasingly interact with them.' Yet almost every book I've read about robot and AI ethics, if it mentions the three laws at all, it does so to quickly point out they are meaningless in practice and to move on.

It doesn't help that we sometimes get a heavy dose of indigestible academic English. So, for example, we read this remarkable single sentence: 'Design choices are the real-world equivalent of what the sf community call worldbuilding, that is, the coproduction of the social and its technology from existing cultural assumptions that create a set of constraints that shape future possibilities: how work and family structures intersect, what kinds of people are considered valuable and why, what is made easy and what is difficult to achieve and the like.'

In the end, this feels like a vegan telling you what a hamburger tastes like, based primarily on what a bunch of other people who don't eat hamburgers have guessed its chemical constituents to be. It's a curious, but ultimately unfulfilling experience. 

Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more