On 05/07/16, 5:47 PM, "silklist on behalf of rajeev chakravarthi" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:
> SF has an important role to contribute here, as it has done in the past. Much > of the writing that I have come across has taken an alarmist slant to > genetics, raising concerns on unchecked experimentation. True, yet the > converse also holds - nothing ventured, nothing gained. I'm quite sure that > these alarms would have been sounded during research on nuclear physics in > the first half of the 20th century. Yet that didn't stop people from taking > risks (though one can argue that the basis for taking such risks had its > roots in military applications). My point is - why not bring out something > that accentuates the beneficial side of what can happen? There have been shall we say – and this is surely an overbroad generalization – two distinct sorts of schools in any sort of futuristic writing. One that is dystopian, talks about technology going way out of control, destroying the world and/or creating a race of supervillains, and another race of underclass that is perpetually kept under subjugation for slavery, food, whatever and from which a plucky hero emerges. An age old trope that goes right back to Sir Walter Scott writing about brave highland clansmen fighting against better armed and trained redcoats. And the other side sees the positive in science and posits, for example, a noble race of superbeings working for the earth’s welfare in deep space colonies, or a noble lost race that dies away but fortuitously leaves behind enough advanced technology for a future less sophisticated hero(es) to use. A sort of age of Aquarius, characterized by advances in technology and in humanism – Frank Herbert’s Dune is an example. Bene Gesserit eugenics + other creationism influencing all of Dune, including primitive Fremen who somehow gain access to advanced survival technology such as the stillsuit. I won’t say one school is wrong over the other. Science has its pitfalls as well as its (possibly utopian) successes, nobody can deny that. Possibly the single largest obligation any novelist dabbling in these topics has is to actually understand what he or she is writing about. No deus ex machina miracles that are explained away as highly advanced science – notwithstanding Clarke’s third law about advanced science being indistinguishable from magic. And absolutely no fake science, no essential oils touted as miracle cures, no upending the laws of physics inconsistently. OK, it is perfectly possible that an alternate universe has a different set of physics to our earth – but that alternate physics must remain consistent. Essentially – the novelist must not give people an aversion to science – there is already enough anti intellectualism sweeping the world today, and more than enough myths propagated by the ignorant. Some under the garb of “science studies” – which Sokal excoricates, but does have the potential to become a serious discipline IF people sufficiently aware of both ‘universes’ build bridges. Science deconstructed by the ignorant simply leads to more Sokal hoaxes. I could go on. And on. But this is something that is best discussed over many beers rather than on email. And this thread is a lovely reminder of just how silk used to be back in the late 90s. --srs
