Science Fiction

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SCIENCE FICTION

From its beginnings as a literary genre science fiction has displayed ambivalence toward the ethical implications of scientific discovery and technological development. As a form of literature devoted in large part to evoking the potential futures and possible worlds engendered by mechanical innovation, science fiction (SF) has emerged over the last century as the preeminent site within Euro-American popular culture where the social consequences of modern technology may be explored creatively and interrogated critically.

As Brooks Landon has argued, SF "considers the impact of science and technology on humanity" by constructing "zones of possibility" where that impact can be represented and narratively extrapolated (Landon 1997, pp. 31, 17). Landon's understanding of the genre builds on James Gunn's definition of SF as the "literature of change," a mode of writing that investigates the outcome of technological progress at a level "greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger" (Gunn 1979, p. 1). This broad focus on the promises and perils of techno-scientific transformation requires a degree of concern, however implicit, for its moral repercussions, and the best SF has not shrunk from ethical engagement.

From Frankenstein to Brave New World

If, as several critics have argued, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1816) was the first true SF novel, the genre's founding text provides a paradigm of moral ambivalence toward the processes and products of scientific inquiry. Driven by an urge to unlock the secrets of nature, Victor Frankenstein is at once the genre's first heroic visionary and its first mad scientist. Indeed, these roles are inseparable: Frankenstein's bold commitment to unfettered experimentation makes him capable of both wondrous accomplishment—the creation of an artificial person endowed with superhuman strength and intelligence—and blinkered amorality. Unable to contain or control his creation, whose prodigious powers have been turned toward destructive ends, Frankenstein comes to fear that he has unleashed "a race of devils ... upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror" (Shelley 1982, p. 163). Frankenstein, through its many cinematic incarnations, has bequeathed to contemporary popular culture an enduring myth of science as an epochal threat for humanity and a source of moral corruption.

Throughout the nineteenth century the maturing genre continued to manifest that dualistic response: on the one hand limning a world transformed by the relentless advance of modern science and industry and on the other hand depicting the corrosive effects of that transformation on traditional values and forms of life. Jules Verne's popular series of "Extraordinary Voyages," with their celebration of the wonders of technology, represented the former trend, whereas H.G. Wells's darker and more skeptical series of scientific romances, beginning with The Time Machine (1895), epitomized the latter response. Although Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) contains a kind of mad scientist, Captain Nemo, he is more a misunderstood genius than a figure of Frankensteinian evil, and his futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, is more a marvel of invention than a lurking monster. That powerful machine may inspire fear, but this is the result of ignorance rather than intrinsic threat. By contrast, the eponymous character in Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is a power-mad fanatic whose creations, a horde of human-animal hybrids, clearly descend from Frankenstein's fiendish invention. Twisted parodies of natural forms, they point up the moral limitations of experimental science: Moreau's brilliance can mold a beast into a human semblance, but it cannot endow the result with virtue or a functioning conscience.

Emblematic though he may be of the ethical predicament of modern science, Dr. Moreau, like Victor Frankenstein, is just one man, and an isolated one, exiled on his island. In the twentieth century SF began to explore the possibility that individual overreaching might be generalized, wedding scientific novelty with industrial mass production to generate in the ironic title of Aldous Huxley's novel, a Brave New World (1932). Huxley's satirical vision of a future in which babies are grown in vats and emotions are managed technocratically by drugs and the mass media offers a wide-ranging indictment of a regimented society from which morality has been purged in favor of a coldly instrumental scientism. A triumph of scientific and social engineering, filled with technological marvels, that false utopia is ethically atrophied and spiritually void. Huxley's depiction of the dystopian implications of techno-scientific development in the capitalist west were echoed in Yvgeny Zamiatin's We (1924), which projected a future socialist Russia dominated by a grim totalitarianism. Though capable of tremendous feats of industrial engineering, this regime dehumanized its citizens, ruthlessly suppressing their artistic impulses, their sexual drives, and their moral aspirations.

A similar vision of simultaneous technological achievement and moral impoverishment is offered in Karel Çapek's R.U.R. (1920). That popular play coined the term robots to describe the mass-produced workers who, like Frankenstein's monster, finally rebel against their creators in an orgy of destruction. Çapek's robots, like the test-tube babies in Huxley's novel, are actually synthetic humans rather than the clanking machines their name implies. More conventional mechanical creatures figure in SF texts of the 1920s and 1930s, the most famous being the humanoid robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), a sinister automaton used to manipulate and control the masses. In all its varieties the artificial person, following in the wake of Frankenstein, continued to provide a potent icon of moral ambivalence within the genre: Physically and intellectually superior creatures that symbolize at once the titanic capacities of modern technology and the potential perfectibility of humanity, they are ultimately soulless, wholly lacking in moral will.

An American Affirmation

Not all SF produced during that period was equally pessimistic, however. In the United States a more technophilic strain developed, associated with popular pulp magazines whose titles—Amazing, Astounding, Wonder—suggest their wide-eyed enthusiasm for technological innovation. However, despite the celebratory tone of much of that material, a more cautionary note sometimes was sounded; indeed, the best pulp SF carried forward the ambivalence toward the moral implications of scientific progress that the European tradition had pioneered.

This attitude is especially visible in pulp SF depictions of artificial persons, such as Isaac Asimov's influential series of robot stories, published during the 1930s and 1940s and eventually gathered into his book I, Robot (1950). A large part of Asimov's purpose in the series is to overcome popular anxieties about mechanical beings as uncontrollable Frankenstein's monsters; to this end he develops an ethical code—"The Three Laws of Robotics"—that, hardwired into his robots' brains, ensures their virtuous behavior as protectors and servants of humanity. However, much of the narrative suspense of the stories lies in the various contraventions of the laws, with disobedient robots taking advantage of conflicts within the moral norms governing their operation. Clearly, if left to their own devices (i.e., if not programmed with ethical precepts), the robots would, as in Çapek's play, turn against humanity or at least refuse to accept their own servile status. Another pulp writer, Jack Williamson, pursued the logic of Asimov's Three Laws as moral safeguards to their reductio ad absurdam in his story "With Folded Hands" (1947), in which robots take their charge of protecting human beings from harm so seriously that they prohibit all risk taking, mandating comfort and safety through a regime of moralistic totalitarianism.

Still, within American pulp SF these moments of doubt about the ethical consequences of technological advancement were far outweighed by a resolutely affirmative vision of the overall role of science in reordering human life. John W. Campbell, Jr., who became the editor of Astounding in 1937 and presided over what has come to be known as SF's Golden Age in the subsequent decade, was famous for championing scientific literacy within the genre and embracing technocratic solutions to social problems. In the pages of Astounding and other SF pulps scientists and engineers emerged as an intellectual elite; as John Huntington has argued, a "myth of genius" (1989, p. 44) predominates, with readers encouraged to identify with superior, powerful technocrats whose expertise and pragmatic skill presumably transcend ethical doubts and hesitations. The writers most closely associated with this upbeat vision were Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp, all of whom were trained scientists.

In Heinlein's collection The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950) an entrepreneurial genius single-handedly pioneers space travel as a commercial venture, bypassing government control. The ethical-political complications surrounding this move into space are neatly evaded by associating moral questioning with bureaucratic inertia, a collective stagnation the confident capitalist transcends through bold individual action. De Camp's classic alternative-history novel Lest Darkness Fall (1941) contains a similar portrait of intrepid genius as a technologically adept time traveler from the twentieth century visits ancient Rome, deploying his expert knowledge to forestall the Dark Ages.

Such sweeping visions of techno-scientific accomplishment seemingly untroubled by ethical qualms were characteristic of much Golden Age SF, although, as Asimov's robot stories showed, a lurking anxiety about the potential perils of technological breakthrough could not be dispelled entirely.

The Return to Questions

That lingering subtext rose to the surface in American SF during the 1950s as the global repercussions of the atomic bombings that ended World War II began to be perceived fully. New SF magazines such as Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction emerged as rivals to Astounding, and the stories they featured began to question, if not openly reject, Campbell's staunch commitment to the technocratic ideal. Although Astounding had published stories dealing with the coming dangers of atomic energy such as Lester Del Rey's tense novella "Nerves" (1942), which described an accident in a nuclear power plant, those tales generally had depicted enlightened engineers steadily learning to master the technology. After the horrors of Hiroshima and in the throes of a looming confrontation between rival superpowers armed with high-tech weapons, American SF began to doubt not only the moral competence of technocrats in their stewardship of the atomic age but also the very capacity of humanity to avert its self-destruction.

Still, as Paul Brians has argued, science seldom was blamed for that awful crisis: "Many science fiction writers understood that the power of the new weapon threatened civilization and perhaps human survival, but they placed the responsibility for the coming holocaust on the shoulders of politicians or military men and argued that science still provided humanity's best hope for the future" (Brians 1987, p. 29).

Nonetheless, by showing the likelihood as well as the catastrophic effects of global war, tales of nuclear holocaust strongly suggested that humans lacked the ethical resources needed to control this powerful new technology. For example, Judith Merril's novel Shadow on the Hearth (1950) focuses on the personal costs of atomic devastation for one typical American family, whose moral strength, although admirable, is insufficient in the face of a breakdown of civilized order. On a broader scale A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) by Walter M. Miller, Jr., depicts a postholocaust culture governed by a Catholic Church unable to forestall, because of to the inherent sinfulness of human nature, a cyclical repetition of nuclear disaster.

At the same time such stories were appearing popular SF films began to deal with the nuclear menace, offering a series of alarmist portraits of the imagined effects of atomic radiation that ranged from giant mutant insects (e.g., Them [1954]) to The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Even the most optimistic cinematic handling of the postwar atomic threat, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), in which an alien representative of a cosmic civilization intervenes to prevent global war, suggests that human beings, if left to their own devices, are not fit to govern their planet or themselves.

During the 1960s and 1970s that downbeat attitude, in which humanity's technological reach is seen to escape its moral grasp, gained strength as a new generation of writers began to challenge the technophilia of their pulp forebears. The technocratic legacy of Campbell was interrogated skeptically, and in some cases definitively rejected, by what came to be known as SF's New Wave, a loosely affiliated cohort of authors, many writing for the British magazine New Worlds, who began to question if not the core values of scientific inquiry the larger social processes to which they had been conjoined in the service of state and corporate power. New Wave SF arraigned technocracy from a perspective influenced by the counterculture discourses of that period, such as student activism, second-wave feminism, anticolonial struggles, and ecological causes and in the process developed a more radical ethical-political agenda—as well as a more sophisticated aesthetic approach—than the genre had featured previously. As a result the New Wave established a crucial benchmark for modern SF's engagement with the serious moral issues surrounding science and technology.

New Wave stories with feminist, ecological, or anti-war agendas were often dire in their predictions of future developments, but their critiques of technocracy were guided by implicit ethics of gender equity, natural balance, and nonviolence. Often those different agendas were wedded, as in Ursula K. Le Guin's short novel The Word for World Is Forest (1976), in which the brutal military occupation of another planet directly involves the devastation of its physical environment by hypermacho men, and Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration (1968), which explores the roots of high-tech warfare in the flaws and insecurities of masculinity. The work of Alice Sheldon, most of it published under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., also probes the nexus of gender hierarchy and militarist and ecological violence, seeming at times to endorse a despairing sociobiological vision in which male sexuality expresses itself through technologically augmented aggression.

The New Wave's ethical idealism thus often was tempered by pessimism, a grim assessment of the dystopian futures portended by out-of-control technology. A key New Wave theme involved the extrapolation of contemporary urban problems to hypertrophied extremes as humans find themselves immured in vast concrete prisons of their own making. Novels such as David R. Bunch's Moderan (1971) and Robert Silverberg's The World Inside (1971) present such grim portraits of claustrophobic environments that they verge on the Gothic: In these texts the universal triumph of technology predicted and celebrated in Golden Age SF has culminated in a brutal cityscape where beleaguered, stunted spirits struggle to preserve the tattered shreds of conscience and dignity. In the work of the British author J. G. Ballard the modern city emerges as a psychic disaster area. His controversial 1973 novel Crash, for example, depicts a denatured humanity bleakly coupling with machines, with the enveloping landscape of metal and concrete having unleashed a perverse eroticism that seeks fulfillment in violent auto wrecks. SF films of that period, such as THX 1138 (1971), contained similarly harsh indictments of regimented megalopolises that have co-opted or paralyzed ethical judgment.

The Future of Humankind

Long-standing anxieties regarding high technology were amplified during that period by the new science of cybernetics, which claimed that no meaningful distinctions could be drawn between humans and complex machines. The emergence of so-called artificial intelligence posed a challenge to humanity's presumed supremacy, and SF took up that challenge largely by emphasizing the moral superiority of human beings over their intellectually advanced creations. Ernst Jünger's The Glass Bees (1957), for example, derives its satirical power from a pointed contrast between the eponymous robots, who dutifully pursue their assigned tasks, and the skeptical narrator, whose ethical questioning suggests a cognitive and spiritual autonomy denied to mere machines, however skillful or complex.

The work of the British author Arthur C. Clarke, such as his story "The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953), had long engaged the possibility that humanity might have spawned its betters in the form of powerful information machines. In 1969 Clarke collaborated with the director Stanley Kubrick to produce the popular film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a sentient computer, the HAL 9000, displays at once its cognitive power and its ethical limitations, conspiring to take over an interplanetary mission, only to be foiled by human pluck and ingenuity. 2001 established a cinematic trend in which the super-computer emerged as an instrument driven by an urge to domination, as in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

If computers threatened to supplant human mental functions, sophisticated new forms of artificial persons seemed poised to replace humanity entirely. Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) deals with this imminent danger as its policeman protagonist hunts down a group of renegade androids, synthetic duplicates that are indistinguishable on the surface from normal people. However, there is a crucial difference, and it is essentially an ethical one: Androids are incapable of genuine empathy for others. The moral quandary in the novel is that humans are seldom empathetic; moreover, the protagonist's job requires that he be efficient and ruthless—"something merciless that carried a printed list and a gun, that moved machine-like through the flat, bureaucratic job of killing" (Dick 1996, p. 158)—making him as coldly unfeeling as the androids he seeks to slay. Thus, even when a bright moral line seems to distinguish humans from machines, a technocratically regimented social system serves to obscure if not efface it.

Androids was filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner (1982), a film that effectively captures the novel's morally ambiguous tone while pointing forward to subsequent "cyberpunk" treatments. The movie's bleak urban milieu, populated by cynical humans and idealistic machines, offers essentially the same fraught moral landscape that would be featured in novels such as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), in which artificial intelligences and other cybernetic entities seem more deeply invested with values such as freedom and autonomy than do the human characters.

Cyberpunk fictions of the 1980s and 1990s by Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others brought to a potent climax the trend toward ethical ambivalence that has marked SF's engagement with new technologies. Extrapolating the social futures portended by the proliferation of computers and their spin-off appliances, cyberpunk displays a humanity so morally compromised by high-tech interfaces—including powerful "wetware," machinic implants that radically alter the body and mind—that the capacity for ethical judgment has perhaps been lost. Yet even amid this spiritual collapse cyberpunk's antiheroes manage to salvage scraps of the decaying moral order, as occurs when the protagonist of Neuromancer refuses the quasisatanic lure of cybernetic immortality, affirming the finitude of the mortal self as an enduring ethical center, preserved somehow against the sweetest blandishments and the sternest threats of technology.

For nearly 200 years science fiction has provided windows onto futures transformed by modern science and technology. In that process it has shown both the resiliency and the limitations of ethical consciousness in confronting these potentially overwhelming changes.

ROB LATHAM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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