Unfiltered Smoke

an essay by Matthew Payne

I’ve always been in love with science. I read science magazines when I was a kid and I am always thrilled by new discoveries or new technologies. But I only started reading science-fiction a couple years ago, because most popular science fiction has very little to do with real science or scientific ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek and Star Wars, but there’s very little in the way of real science there. I love them because they’re good stories with compelling characters, not because the science is stimulating. So they didn’t compel me to seek out more “science fiction.”

When I finally did start reading science fiction, I saw that the best stuff was not made of what we understand the genre to be. We tend to think of science-fiction as a story set in the future, but real sci-fi fans know better. I want to do something now to clarify the differences and maybe open up some new ground for curious book-lovers. I want to show you the mind-bending glories of a plot based on a scientific idea; the curiosity and paranoia of speculative fiction which can bring current issues and age-old questions into the light of a different context; and also the dizzying aesthetic panoramas of a regular good story set in the future. But mostly, I want to show curious readers that there is so much more to science fiction than just spaceships and lasers.

So I will try to show some examples from some sub-genres of sci-fi. These aren’t my categories: they already exist, and I’ve heard different ideas about what constitutes each pseudo-sub-genre. I’ll describe them as I see them, with examples that will often amount to a miniature book-review. There are spoilers in here, and I might ruin some good books for you, so be careful.

I’ll start with my favorite, and the most rare style of sci-fi: the plot based on a scientific idea. This is the playground where most hard science-fiction plays. It can be a simple enough idea, like in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park where they clone dinosaurs and the dinosaurs eat people. We’re all familiar enough with the movie, which did a good job at portraying the book (probably because Crichton wrote the screenplay). The plot is based on the idea that genes (DNA) naturally create life, and thus we can manipulate them into creating life. Scientists in the story found old dinosaur genes and created a favorable environment for them to grow living dinosaurs. The action of the story involved people trying to avoid getting eaten by the giant monsters, but without the science aspect there would have been no dinosaurs and no action. Jurassic Park has a plot based on a scientific idea, and for me that means that it is just as sci-fi as Star Trek.

But Jurassic Park is not what I’d call “hard” science fiction, because the science-part pretty much ends once the dinosaurs are alive. All you need to do is accept that cloning might be possible in this fictional world, and proceed to be afraid of dinosaurs. I admit that the book is much closer to being hard science-fiction than the movie, with occasional discussions about ideas and deeper descriptions about the mecahnics of genetic science, but when I compare it to the work of Greg Egan, I can’t justify calling Jurassic Park “hard sci-fi.”

Greg Egan is the man who showed me the brightest possibilities in true science-fiction. He is one of my favorite writers, and I’m always shocked (genuinely shocked) by the new places his sci-fi can take me. I’ve only read three of his books, but they are three of my favourite books. The basic plots of his books are based on complex scientific ideas, the action itself is a constant interplay of theoretical physics and software-fiction, and his characters themselves are often based on scientific ideas. It all seems very abstract when I describe it like that, but the characters are very compelling and the conflicts, while strange, dig right into your heart. The evocative stories carry on at a fast pace, the biggest page-turners I have ever read. He is a master storyteller.

To summarize the plot of his 2003 novel, Schild’s Ladder, in one sentence, I could say that “a new type of physics is eating up the universe, expanding at half the speed of light, and futuristic scientists are trying to find out how the human race can survive it.”

The novel is set twenty-thousand years in the future, when science has discovered much more about physics. According to the science of Egan’s fictional world, the vacuum of space and the particles within it are just one type of possible vacuum that can exist in the so-called “universe.” But one scientist has created an experimental new kind of physics, a new kind of vacuum, which is stronger than the current one which gave rise to stars, planets, and life. This new vacuum, called the “novo-vacuum” starts expanding as a huge ball, moving at half the speed of light, eating everything in its way (including space itself).

That’s a pretty cool plot by itself, but Egan adds crazier elements to the story. People are no longer flesh-humans, nor are they part-robot or anything like that. They can choose to take flesh-forms, they can choose to inhabit robots, they can live as independent software floating around with no computer (“incorporeals”), and they can transmit themselves across the galaxy at the speed of light. This creates interesting conflicts between characters, and a new context for the strange new-physics problem facing all the “people” of the galaxy. A lot of the conflict is based around characters arguing whether to try to stop the new physics, or try to study it and adapt to it. Egan gets philosophical about this point. It might seem silly to get philosophical about a problem that’s probably impossible, but it is also a metaphor about being brave and pursuing new things.

As you can imagine, the action of the story requires methodical descriptions of the behaviour of particles and software. This makes for reading that is simultaneously very dry and imaginative, while the concerns and welfare of the characters keep the reader extra-interested. It is very well done. I won’t tell you how it ends.

If that seems too far-out for you, then I won’t even begin to describe the multi-dimensional meanderings of the software-people in Egan’s Diaspora, or how the regular human main-character in Quarantine has to navigate through devastatingly limitless possible quantum outcomes to every situation in an attempt to save humanity from insanity.

And that brings me to Star Wars, where Jedi-magic is just as important to the plot as any kind of technology, and scientific ideas are simply absent.

I was once at a comic-book convention and I asked a comic-book vendor if he knew of any good science-fiction comics, because I’ve been looking for a good one for a while. He said, “I have lots of Star Wars comics.”

I said, “Star Wars is more fantasy than science fiction. What else do you have?”

He frowned at me, then he looked at my friend and said, “He’s lucky there’s a table between us right now.” After that he refused to talk to me.

Star Wars belongs in fantasy just as much as it belongs in sci-fi, because the Jedi knights are wizard-warriors. There is no offer of a scientific explanation for their abilities to move objects with their minds, or any of the amazing and impossible fighting moves they do. It’s magic. They are wizards. I had a friend say, “No, it’s not magic. It’s just mind-over-matter! It’s like Buddhism.” Well, I’m sorry but if there was a story about Buddhists using telekinesis, then that story would be fantasy, because telekinesis is magic, and it’s not real.

I had someone tell me that “cyber-punk” was a sub-genre of science fiction where there is lots of technology, but the stories are usually gritty and tough. Star Wars can fall into that category, because it’s a fairly gritty epic-adventure with spaceships and laser-swords.

I have certainly relented from my previous stance that Star Wars is not science-fiction, but when I think about Greg Egan or Michael Crichton, men who have their heads right inside a science text-book, I just can’t put Star Wars in the same category. Instead it is the perfect blend of sci-fi elements with fantasy, for a truly imaginative adventure story.

Keep in mind that this is merely an organizational matter, a matter of categorization. This has nothing to do with the quality of the work. I’m a big fan of the first three Star Wars movies, and I believe that the world needs more laser-sword battles. But it stimulates a different part of my mind than the stories that I consider scientifically imaginative.

Then there is Christopher Priest. I’ve read several of his books, and they are always mind-bending soul-wrenchers. Priest is great because he intentionally messes around with the reader, using the perspective of the characters to submerse you into his surreal yet very tangible worlds.

The whole plot and world of Priest’s surreal sci-fi classic, The Inverted World, are basically a philosophical statement with a scientific explanation. The characters all live in a city which is moving on tracks. They have to work together to pick up the tracks behind the city and lay them down in front of the city every day. At first, you don’t know why they’re doing this. The main character is just a kid at first, and he doesn’t understand the city, and the reader only knows what the character knows.

The city-dwellers have a name for the areas they already passed through. They call it “the past.” The area ahead of them, where they plan to lay new tracks, is called “the future.” It seems like a stupid and pointless activity at first, desperately picking up and laying down tracks, but then the main character travels into “the past” by simply walking back to where the city has already been, and he finds that all the old mountains and trees have gotten smaller and smaller. The further back he goes, the smaller the trees and mountains get, and gravity eventually threatens to pull him vertically into the infinite and flat “past.” When he travels into “the future,” walking ahead of the slowly-moving city, he finds that everything gets bigger and bigger until he can’t even step over pebbles, and gravity won’t let him walk any further forward. To make it worse, the future and the past are always moving forwards. If the city stops moving, it will shrink into “the past,” and gravity will pull it off the flat landscape and supposedly into oblivion.

Beautifully strange as it is, the city-dwellers have a scientific explanation for this gorgeous and terrifying world they live in. They say that instead of living on a finite planet in an infinite universe (like our finite Earth in our infinite universe), these people live on an infinite planet within a finite universe. They think that their planet is a rotating parabola, but only part of it is ever within the finite universe, and the city has to keep moving to stay within the universe, and to keep existing.

As a metaphor, he is referring to our perspective of the future looming huge above us, and our dwindling memories of our disappearing past. Also, our seemingly innate instinct to keep moving, almost desparately towards the future, terrified of what would happen if we stopped.

As science-fiction, the idea of an infinite planet moving through a finite universe is really cool and interesting. Christopher Priest is often a dark and paranoid writer, but the action is equally colorful and imaginative.

So I’ve spoiled a lot of the fun surprise of The Inverted World for anyone who might read it (and the surprise of discovery is the biggest part of the fun of reading Christopher Priest), but you can still read The Affirmation if you want to get mind-fucked, or Darkening Island if you want to get depressed and scared. They are less sci-fi, but awesome stories. Indoctrinaire is another great book by Priest, and it is probably the most surreal of all his books that I’ve read.

Actually, you are probably familiar with his work already. His book, The Prestige, was made into a movie of the same name. It had a lot of the same lineup as Dark Knight, including Christian Bale and Michael Caine in the cast, and the amazing Nolan brothers writing and directing it.

Now for Star Trek.

Star Trek beats Star Wars for sci-fi categorization because there is no magic. They at least pretend that things like replicators and transporters are genuine inventions of technology, plausible within our own regular physics. For me Star Trek in all its forms is in the same genre as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. It’s social-science-fiction, using a futuristic setting to demonstrate ideas about humanity, rather than scientific ideas.

Asimov’s Foundation stories were mainly political stories, showing the development of humanity as empires ebbed and flowed throughout the galaxy. Star Trek used an episodic style to show the noble Star Fleet officers giving help and wisdom to other life-forms. The humans in Star Trek have overcome war and financial inequality through the use of technology to make everyone comfortable and relatively safe. Some episodes have sci-fi plots, like in The Next Generation, when Star Fleet wants to dissemble the android Data. He has no actual feelings or legal rights, but the crew of The Enterprise have grown fond of him and they want to keep him, and so there is a court battle about why humans deserve rights and robots don’t. I don’t think this idea is really socially relevant yet, but it might be some day. Also, science considers humans to be merely biological robots, so the legal rights of androids is a silly question that actually sheds light onto the question of what it means to be human.

For the most part, the science of Star Trek isn’t very scientific. The aliens they meet always seem to look like humans with makeup on their faces, and the scientific understanding of natural selection seems to suggest that it’s really unlikely that there would be aliens so very similar to us. In fact, there is sometimes breeding between different species (like Worf’s half-human, half-klingon son Alexander), which must suggest that other aliens use the same kind of DNA as humans, with the same six molecules, and that they have a genome so close to our own that we can breed with them.

That being said, I love Star Trek: The Next Generation more than Star Wars or any other sci-fi, maybe even including Egan and Priest. It’s true that it’s a corny television show, but I love it because the characters are noble and curious, the episodes have a lot of (often naïve) social wisdom, and the Enterprise just seems like an awesome place to live. Of course, Captain Picard is the most noble of them all, jolly and witty in good times; deadly serious, sharp and disciplined in the tough times.

So Star Trek is a great show, but not hard science-fiction. It is a story set in the future, and the characters could just as well be on a ship exploring the ocean in the past, and not much would be lost for the viewer. The sci-fi element is mostly an aesthetic choice. Plus, it allows us to hope for this as a possible version of “the future.”

I wanted to discuss the films The Matrix, Gattaca, and especially Terminator II: Judgement Day, but I think I’ve vaguely categorized enough for now. I’ll leave them floating among the sci-fi mists.

This short multi-review does not describe the whole massive genre of science fiction; it doesn’t even come close. But I hope that I’ve expanded your image of the genre beyond the typical low-quality space-opera conception/prejudice.

As a final note, sci-fi often refers to “alternate dimensions,” and the authors treat it like moving to a different universe similar to our own but different. They mistake the idea of dimensions. We live in three-dimensional space, and the real theoretical idea is that the fourth dimension is time. Greg Egan plays with this idea in Diaspora, but you can get a really cool description of the actual (theoretical) idea on Youtube. Check out the video embedded below. It’s part one of two. The second part should be available at the end.