Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes
From the mid-1920s, when Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” several fallacies became associated with the increasingly vigorous commercial genre and never entirely went away. The first was the “Taught Me Science Fallacy,” which goes something like this: Isaac Asimov writes about science and particle physics, so if I read the Foundation trilogy, I might learn what a neutrino is. (Kingsley Amis argued in his influential New Maps of Hell in 1960 that, at the very least, the “aim” of sci-fi was to do “justice to the laws of nature.”) But while it is theoretically possible for someone to learn science from a science fiction novel, it would probably be foolish to read the entire Foundation trilogy—concerning a secret tribe of “psycho-historians” who design millions of years of future history before it happens—to learn something. In fact, if you read the Foundation trilogy and put it down thinking, “Ah, a neutrino!” then you very likely missed the point of that ridiculous and absorbing set of novels.
Second, and more annoying, is the “Predictive Fallacy.” This suggests that science fiction might accurately describe what the world will be like 100 years after we’re dead. This argument usually runs along the line of: “Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and guess what? A few years later we went to the moon!” Or it cites the various occasions when some story described television sets, microwaves, escalators, and two-way video phone calls and then, voilà, they happened. But of course, sci-fi novels—both good and bad—are littered with gadgets that happened and didn’t happen; what they never foresaw was how (and usually how poorly) those inventions would be implemented. Show me one novel that predicted something like Fox and Friends, or The View. You can’t do it. (Oh, well, maybe C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons.” But let’s move on.)
