Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

An examination of science fiction narratives and the light they shed on human life, the unknowable future, and the vagaries of unforeseeable change.

With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological life: about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation. 

Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.

Release date: August 3, 2021

Publisher: Goldsmiths Press

Print pages: 192

Sample

Chapter 1

The New Reality

Charles L. Harness’ 1950 short story “The New Reality” (Harness 1950) is about a scientific experiment that threatens to “destroy the Einsteinian universe.” Adam Prentiss Rogers, the story’s protagonist, is an “ontologist” working for the International Bureau of the Censor. His mission is to “keep reality as is,” by suppressing any scientific research that might “alter the shape of that reality.” But such research is actually being conducted by the story’s antagonist, Professor Luce. He has invented “a practical device – an actual machine – for the wholesale alteration of incoming sensoria,” the raw material of subjective experience. Once he runs this device, human beings will be bombarded with “novel sensoria” that “can’t be conformed to our present apperception mass.” That is to say, our minds will be traumatically overwhelmed by sensations that we are unable to process.

What can this mean? Kant famously warns us that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Luce’s experiment threatens (and intends) to “blind” us, by producing “intuitions” (Kant’s word for sensations) to which our usual concepts cannot be applied. Reality will no longer fit into the shapes that we impose upon it, and through which we are able to parse it. Faced with such disruption, experience as we know it will fall apart. “Instead of a [space-time] continuum, our ‘reality’ would become a disconnected melange of three-dimensional objects. Time, if it existed, wouldn’t bear any relation to spatial things.” The vast majority of humankind will not be able to navigate such a new reality. The only people able to “get through,” to grasp the altered state of the world and function within it, will be “the two or three who understood advanced ontology”: Prentiss, Luce, and perhaps Prentiss’ boss and love interest, the woman known only as E. In a classic display of scientific hubris, familiar from so many science fiction stories, Luce promises that the two or three of them “will be gods,” finally able “to know all things” as they truly are.

One obvious way to take “The New Reality” is as an allegory of relentless scientific and technological progress. As George Zebrowski puts it, in his general introduction to Harness’ work, the story “takes its strength from the dynamic fact of human scientific development, by which the growth of our knowledge is linked to new ideas and imaginings.” For the last several centuries, new technologies have traumatically overwhelmed us, leaving us numb and alienated – a theme treated by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan. More specifically, “The New Reality” anticipates what later came to be called future shock: as in the 1970 book of that title by Alvin Toffler, and John Brunner’s 1975 science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider. It is not for nothing that, in his day job, Harness was a patent lawyer; he was well positioned to see how the rapid pace of technological innovation might surpass our ability to adjust to it.

But “The New Reality” also warns us that the violent change it envisions is not just a matter of “something like the application of the quantum theory and relativity to the production of atomic energy, which of course has changed the shape of civilization.” The disruption goes much further than this. Beyond the pragmatic “application” of scientific theories, we must consider the basic ontology of the scientific process itself. The story anticipates, by more than a decade, Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts in the history of science (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). In the course of what Kuhn calls scientific revolutions, new models of reality are introduced. These new models do not just reflect the accumulation of additional empirical data; they are often flatly incompatible with the prevailing previous ones. The Einsteinian universe is quite different from the Newtonian universe that it replaced. As Zebrowski notes, people have historically found it difficult to accept and adapt to such changes in our world picture as “the dethroning of the Earth as the center of the universe” (Copernicus) and the theory of “evolution by natural selection” (Darwin).

“The New Reality” radicalizes the drama of scientific paradigm change by the simple expedient of taking it naively – which is to say, literally. The story’s basic premise is that our consensus reality is itself merely a historical construct. The physical universe has actually changed over the course of time, in tandem with the development of science. For instance, the story tells us that the world really was flat when people thought it was flat, prior to 500 BC; now it is actually round because our theories tell us that it must be. The “Late Greeks” inferred the spherical shape of the Earth from their observation “that [the] mast of [an] approaching ship appeared first, then [the] prow.” But if “earlier seafaring peoples” like the Minoans never made this observation, it is because there was no such phenomenon for them to observe. We should not think that they failed to notice because “they worked with childish premises and infantile instruments.” Rather, the Minoans were sophisticated in their own way; it is just that the curvature of the Earth didn’t exist yet. In 1000 BC, the mast of a distant ship did not appear any earlier than the prow. Five hundred years later, the Late Greeks observed this phenomenon because their metaphysics required evidence of roundness, which the Minoans’ earlier metaphysics had not.

Or, to give another example, today it is an established truth that the rocks making up the Earth’s crust are millions or billions of years old. But the story suggests that this was not the case in the seventeenth century, when everyone just knew that the Earth itself was only six thousand years old. At that time, the best scientists “studied chalk, gravel, marble, and even coal, without finding anything inconsistent with results to be expected from the Noachian Flood.” It was only during the course of the nineteenth century that these rocks retrospectively became much older. It’s a bit like the retcon (retroactive continuity) process sometimes found in comics, ...