The Real Reason So-Called Science Fiction is Bad

I remember weeks ago finding a post on

L.E. Mullin

’s Notes about why science fiction is supposedly so bad, and just being totally offended by it at the time. Of course science fiction isn’t bad, I thought, science is great, progress is great, are you asking us to stay with the status quo, or long for some kind of romanticized past? Progress is real, though as Francis Bacon put it when he put forth his idea of progress to begin with, it depends on people’s actions, and it’s not some kind of inexorable force of history that just happens. If people get lazy, stupid, or otherwise bad, progress can certainly stop, and I tend to think that’s a lot of what’s happening now, everyone thought progress was inexorable and just happened by itself so they stopped working on making things better.

And today when I was analyzing why I don’t really read books by Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, it dawned on me: it’s not that fiction about science is bad whether it’s about progress, science gone wrong, or both, it’s that people who feel the need to tell the world that they’re writing science fiction are the problem. That’s it. As the Bible says, he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. I could go for books about science experiments and the like all day and those tend to be my favorite, but when you really look at it, very few if any of those are written by people who are like “look how sciencey and smart I am.”

This post was mostly inspired by the fact I was trying to get into Olaf Stapledon and I just couldn’t. I can take books about future superhumans telepathically projecting their minds into the past, sentient stars, and wars against Martian hiveminds perfectly seriously, and I don’t mind all the spirituality and whatever, but man, the timeframes on these are ridiculously off and all the projections about society are terrible. Like, he didn’t think humans would even leave Earth until tens of millions of years in the future and humans left Earth in the 1960s. He thinks humans will evolve into seals and bats and stuff and gain telepathy and still count as human. If you think anything that evolved from humans still counts as human then you also have to think humans are single-celled organisms because humans evolved from those too. I thought reading the original books about a bunch of psionic mutants living on an island and people having concealed identities like superheroes would be great… The execution is absolutely terrible. It seems to me more like people like John Wyndham were excoriating these for being totally off in all sorts of ways than paying homage to it. And what’s with almost all the self-described science fiction just being allegorical and ridiculous while most of the self-described fantasy seems more genuinely speculative? I mean, I’m sure that’s also just back to “he who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

After I have encountered these books, I have amended my opinion: the world needs more books about science, but the world does not need more books that are like “look how sciencey I am,” and that’s what the vast majority of self-described science fiction ends up as, even though I was thinking like “what, are you going to ban Mary Shelly, H. G. Welles, and Jules Vernes?” None of them were like “look how sciencey I am,” they were like “look at my story about a monster/outer space/the center of Earth.”

I also have to wonder how much this affects real science as well. The biggest problem used to be the replication crisis, until now it appears all research is suspect and not only replication of papers, even though it was already known the replication crisis extends to physics and the like. Maybe people should stop being like “look how sciencey I am” in actual science to and go back to just “man I really like rocks.” As Sheldon Cooper said on The Big Bang Theory, we all know geology isn’t a real science. Only the Flash is real science. He has the Speed Force, and he vibrates his molecules. Yeah. That’s how you do real science there, and be really smart, just like Bill Nye the Science Guy, the co-representative of all science along with James Randi.