This is the best part of it all

“It’s interesting that science fiction emerges right at the time when science and literature are diverging”

Yes. Certainly. This is an interesting observation. But aside from an interesting throw-away kind of comment that one might insert into some kind of literary cocktail party chatter, what are the implications of this observation?

And more importantly, WHY did science fiction emerge right at the time when science and literature diverged? I hadn’t really thought about the why of this question till tonight, when I had a couple of 18th century specialists point out that literature and science was certainly alive and well in the 18th century, long before the end of the 19th when science fiction is supposed to have emerged.

Now it’s true that Frankenstein and The Last Man might be legitimately called science fiction, but it strikes me that there is a difference between those novels and the ones of say H.G. Wells and his followers. I’ll try to describe some of those differences in what follows.

I don’t want to get into a discussion of genre, but I did spend much of the bus ride back to the hotel after this question came up over pizza pondering why science fiction did emerge right about when science was trying to distinguish itself from literature. (I think it’s safe to propose that it was science that did the leaving in this relationship, even if both agreed that it was time for it to go.) In the late nineteenth century, science certainly was trying to distinguish itself from literature, mostly because it saw the activities of literature as being too close to its own 18th century roots, where scientific arguments were often based on metaphysical arguments. In the 19th century, there’s a return, or a real embracing, of Baconian principles of empiricism and proof as the bedrock of scientific advancement. (I’ll leave aside Popper’s complication of empiricism and hypothesis for now since I don’t want to tangle with the philosophers and he comes along later anyway…)

So one of the things that scientists in the 19th century are trying to do is to distance themselves from metaphysics and philosophy and create disciplines that can stand rigorous experimentation. (Not that many of the nineteenth century scientists were rigorous – just look at scientific race theory of the period!) But that doesn’t seem to me to offer an explanation of why science fiction arises during this period.

One possibility that occurs to me is that science fiction was a kind of apologia for science, a way of explaining it to the layman, now that it was becoming a specialized set of disciplines that no longer catered to the everyday person in plain language. The generation of jargon, and emergence of specialized scientific societies that spent more time conducting internal meetings than publishing their results for a lay audience tended to give science the appearance of secrecy. Some 19th century scientists like Sir Francis Galton even encouraged such secrecy and imagined scientists as a superior category of social being, almost priest-like in their power to explain the world.

I suppose science fiction is in some way an apologia for science, but so often in the science you find in say Wells, there’s less cheerleading and more cautionary tale, with narrators who stand outside the scientific establishment trying to understand it. I’m particularly thinking of the Island of Dr. Moreau here, but even something like The Time Machine or some of his short stories like The Star might even be appropriate texts for this purpose.

In the case of these kinds of texts, the engagement with science presents the reader with a set of consequences if a particular scientific discovery or trend is followed through to one conclusion, and it leaves the reader to decide whether or not this would be a good thing to happen in the future or not. There’s lots of science fiction that does this, particularly in the subgenres of dystopia/utopias – think 1984 or even Brave New World for particularly potent examples.

But even so, why is the science still a big part of these texts? In The Time Machine for example, the whole difference between Eloi and Morlocks is a comment on a growing division between leisure and working classes. But then why is there so much more to the text? Why the descriptions of the other trips? Why the fairly involved description of the far future in which the sun is dying? If the text is supposed to just be a criticism of contemporary (19th century) social dynamics, why the rest of the physics? I think part of the answer lies in a similar text – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – and how it visualizes the same situation of workers below and leisure class above.

But I’m still left asking the question, why now? Why does science fiction emerge just as science and fiction begin to diverge as categories?

It may just be that I’m partial to “technology” as an answer because my work is so involved with technology, but I’ve gotta wonder if it’s more than just science that’s at work in the emergence of science fiction. Perhaps it should be called “techno-fiction” or something like that, since it strikes me that there’s a different set of technologies at work in 18th century science than there is in 19th century science, and perhaps it’s the technology that’s at the heart of the difference between literature and science in the 18th and 19th centuries. After all, when Lang imagines this divide between working and leisure classes, he does it specifically through the context of machinery and a robot.

But to get back to the distinction between the centuries, I’m not saying there’s no technology in the 18th century – of course not! Shelley’s creature couldn’t come to life without the practical apparatus that puts the science of electricity into a format that can be exploited to make people’s lives easier. (I realize this is a pretty bare bones definition of technology, but I’m more interested in technology’s proximity to techne than to machines)

Technology certainly grows during the nineteenth century, but the way that it grows isn’t particularly spectacular. I’ve read theorists who have wondered at the relative lack of scientific fervor surrounding the Crystal Palace exhibition in the middle of the century, but I think what might be missing in such an argument might be the global implications of technology development that go beyond the boundaries of the center of the British empire. At home, technology perhaps wasn’t very spectacular. But reading through a list of inventions of the nineteenth century, I’m struck by how many of them could fall into the categories of transportation and telecommunications. Both are kinds of technologies that make the world a smaller place and bring us in close proximity with people who are very different from ourselves.

Now this is nothing new for the British; they’d been running roughshod over the rest of the world for a long time already, taking over large sections of land inhabited by other peoples. But when you’ve got a far flung empire that takes months to traverse, very few ordinary individuals come in contact with that far flung world. The empire is all just very theoretical – an “out there” that has no relevance for everyday life. But with the perfection of steam locomotives or the invention of the telegraph, it becomes much easier to connect to far away places. It’s no coincidence that Around the World in 80 Days is produced at the end of the nineteenth century!

I also think it’s no coincidence that the “invasion” narrative becomes popular shortly after the emergence of science fiction as a clearly identifiable genre. Technology is able to present science through a visual representation of the object – the machine, the gadget, the marvel – while the technologies that are being produced provide more and more people with encounters with strange and unfamiliar objects, people and places. Remember, although photography has its roots at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it’s only in the final decades with Eastman’s development of film to replace the photographic plate, that the medium really takes off and becomes a practical method for recording, including travel records and its use by ethnographers and anthropologists.

So I’m thinking that science fiction emerges just when science and literature begin to diverge because the professionalization of science presents itself in part through the marvels of technology. Scientists are able to secure their position as arbiters of a new form of knowledge – distinct from literature, history, philosophy, or other disciplines they may have associated with in the past – because they were able to embody that science in technology. In the period, the technologies that were most prominent were those that helped the expanding empire attain its goals of increasing its reach. But these also brought the English into closer proximity with the non-English occupants of those colonies. So there’s a general anxiety about the shrinking of the world that these technologies are bringing into being.

We thus end up with the “science and technology” phrase that seems so prevalent. When was the last time you heard someone talk just about science after all? It seems more and more that technology – the practical application of science – is inseparable from that science. When we want to distinguish between science-technology and science that is free from practical application we call the latter “pure science” as if technology adds a taint that science needs to free itself from. But no one does talk about “science” as a stand alone term. It is either science-technology or pure science, but no longer just science.

That’s one of the reasons why I think technology is actually the thing that drives the development of science fiction in the nineteenth century. There is something about the practical application of science (embodied in technology) that ignores the softer side of it, the social implications of those developments, and it is those social applications that science fiction seems to want to engage with. Through literature, the ethical and social implications of science, and its technologies, can be communicated with the general public, presented to them to debate their relative merits and to perhaps even though such contemplations, form the future trajectory of further scientific developments. Maybe that’s why science fiction emerges just when science and literature are diverging. Because what’s going on as science diverges from literature is that it is becoming embodied in technology, and maybe this embodiment means that there’s a lost opportunity to think about science as before, in a metaphysical way. Maybe science fiction offers the opportunity to look beyond the technology that science produces to examine some of the larger problems surrounding it. Maybe it’s not the very best answer, but maybe, just maybe, it’s a start.