SF<\/a> category, which
\nis all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
\nregularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
\nour big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
\nyeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on…<\/p>\nThe short version of the answer is that there is no short version
\nof the answer. Or, rather, there isn’t a single well-defined role for
\nSF in promoting science, because both science and science fiction are
\ntoo big for the question to be well formed.<\/p>\n
It does seem like there ought to be a connection between the two,
\nthough. And there is, but it’s a complicated issue. A large number of
\nscientists and engineers are or were science fiction readers. It’s a
\nlittle hard to sort out what’s cause and what’s effect, though– are
\nthese people drawn into science because reading SF inspired a love of
\nthe subject, or are they drawn to science fiction because it provides
\nan appealing literary option for people who are into math and
\nscience?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I suspect there’s a little of both. I know a number of scientists
\nwho are fond of science fiction, but I know at least as many who have
\nno real interest in it at all. I also know a lot of fans, and even
\nsome writers of science fiction who have no technical or mathematical
\naptitude to speak of.<\/p>\n
Personally, I was interested in science before I became someone who
\nread primarily SF (as opposed to just reading whatever I got my hands
\non). The science aspect was definitely a draw, but I think the real
\nattraction was a little more mundane– science fiction books were
\nbooks in which Really Cool Things Happened– space battles and alien
\nencounters and gateways to different dimensions– as opposed to boring
\nmainstream stories about people with relationship problems and beloved
\npets who die in the last chapter. There’s a strain of fandom that
\nconstantly hypes SF as a “Literature of Ideas,” but honestly, I got
\ninto it because it was a Literature of Explosions.<\/p>\n
As I’ve gotten older, and become a professional scientist, I find
\nthat I’m less likely to read “Hard SF,” the subgenre that is most
\nconsciously about Science, and prides itself on being all rigorous and
\ntechnical. This is largely because as I’ve learned more about science,
\nI’ve become more able to spot the places where the author really
\ndoesn’t know what they’re talking about, and I frequently end up being
\nirritated by the results.<\/p>\n
This is not to say that I’ve become one of those humorless dorks
\nwho takes grim pleasure in pointing out that there’s no air in space,
\nand thus you wouldn’t be able to hear the Death Star exploding. On the
\ncontrary, I’m much more likely to read the pulpier Space Opera side of
\nthe genre, where I will happily shut off my brain and ignore all the
\nridiculously implausible things that happen, provided the plot moves
\nalong quickly and the Good Guys win in the end.<\/p>\n
But that’s getting away from the question at hand, which is about
\nthe role of SF in promoting science. I think there is a role there,
\nbut it’s not a direct link. SF’s role in promoting science has little
\nto do with concrete facts, and more to do with inspiration and
\naspiration.<\/p>\n
Science fiction, for the most part, does a really lousy job of
\nteaching<\/strong> science. I’m sure that I’ll get a couple of
\ncomments from people who learned everything there is to know about
\norbital mechanics from reading old Hal Clement stories, but the
\nscience in most science fiction tends to be pretty
\nshaky<\/a>. It’s often dated, almost always distorted, and frequently
\nwarped to serve dramatic purposes. When the science is correct, it
\nusually comes at the expense of the story– you get two-dimensional
\ncharacters holding forth at great length about scientific principles,
\nspeaking in ways that no real, live human would ever do, and stopping
\neverything dead for pages at a time.<\/p>\nThe real power of SF, it seems to me, is to show people,
\nparticularly younger kids, a world in which science really matters,
\nand Knowing Stuff is cool. The occasional disaster novel aside, the
\nheroes of most science fiction books and movies succeed because they
\nknow things, and more importantly, they remain calm and think their
\nway through the problems that get in their way. If you look at really
\ngood Young Adult novels in SF– Steven Gould’s Jumper<\/cite><\/a>,
\nsay– that’s one of the main things they do. The heroes succeed not
\nbecause of the power of their unstoppable awesomeness, but because
\nthey think things through, figure things out, and make plans. That
\nsort of systematic approach to the world is the essence of
\nscience.<\/p>\nOf course, it also doesn’t hurt to have the occasional spectacular
\nextrapolation from some current “what-if” to connect things back to
\nspecific areas of science. Plenty of young people are pushed toward
\nphysics by stories that riff off various odd quantum phenomena, or
\ntalk about black holes and curved space-time, and all that
\nastrophysical stuff. They’re a little like the students who take
\narchaeology because they really loved the Indiana Jones movies, in
\nthat they need to have some misconceptions beaten out of them (that’s
\nwhat vector calculus is for), but that inspiration is not to be
\nsneered at. If even a fraction of the students who were turned on by
\nreading SF survive to become real physicists, that’s a net gain for
\nthe profession.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a ScienceBlogger question, and this one’s right up my alley: What do you see as science fiction’s role in promoting science, if any? If you look over in the left sidebar, you’ll see a SF category, which is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read… Continue reading Ask a ScienceBlogger: Science Fiction Promotes Science?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,37,11,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ask_a_scienceblogger","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}