Or Why an Author’s Day Job Matters.

While reading the latest in my summer’s course of Gothic methodology, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (Maggie Kilgour, 1995), I found an interesting line about the life of Ann Radcliffe.  Here it is:

. . .the mystery of her own [Radcliffe's] life stimulated the public’s imagination to construct a suitable fiction around it, and it was rumoured that she had been driven mad by her own stories.  While the artist demanded a total separation of her art and life, her audience, educated by reading gothic novels, insisted that the two were the same. (113)

This tendency in readers explains something that has puzzled me for a while now:  the insistence of SF readers that SF writers have science backgrounds or enough research on the given topic to replace it.

This was not always the case.  Hugo Gernsback, in the 1920s, insisted that the stories he published were scientifically accurate, but they weren’t.  John W. Campbell insisted the science be pretty accurate and that the focus should be on a realistic portrayal of how that science affected people, but the portrayals weren’t that realistic.  Honestly, it’s not until the 60s that the kind of psychological realism Campbell was insisting on finally made it into the genre in general.  Delany’s Dhalgren takes the ruined city, a microcosm of the post-apocalypse world, and explores, in detail, what would happen to the people who remained.  Since none of the people are scientists, the reader never learns what actually caused the ruining of the city or the apparent addition of a new moon (dubbed “George” by those few who saw it in person) or the enormous, too-close sun that rises over the city one day.

But before that we got people like Asimov and Clarke, who rarely, if ever, engaged in what we could call “realism.”  But even today, when fan-standards for writing have risen (somewhat), Clarke and Asmiov remain ascendent.  B-whuh?

Kilgour’s summation of Ann Radcliffe’s public life holds the answer.  Readers want to attach the writer and the text, and one of the ways that’s done is to demand reassurance that the writer does the stuff inside the text.  It’s not only possible, but traditional, that a well-written SF story that gets some science wrong will be thrown to the wayside, while a poorly-written piece of tech-porn by a scientist who’s decided s/he can write will be accepted, if not always eagerly.  Asimov and Clarke were both (nominally) scientists.  Clarke probably had a good, lifelong claim to that, but Asimov became more of a literature critic than a scientist in later life.  And track down the “science” of the Asimov robots.  Yes, the three laws of robotics are a cool idea, but they’re not science, they’re extrapolations from ideals of just behavior.  The obelisk (from 2001 and its originating short story, “The Sentinel,”) are cool ideas of sociological change (that is, something caused humans to evolve), but there’s no science to it in the movie or the short story — maybe Clarke added it to the novels, I haven’t managed to find a copy of the first one, yet (I have the second one, mind you).  The short story reads like a ham-fisted Gernsback SF imitation of Lovecraft more than anything else.

But any literary ideas (and these are all literary ideas, keep in mind, making them different in kind from scientific ideas) advanced by a writer who is known to have a scientific background will answer the urge in the reader to identify the author and the text, thus making the ideas advanced by the scientist as scientific as the people are.  It’s effectively the fallacy of authorial intent, but hinging on the reputation of the author rather than the actions.

And keep in mind, this is not a repudiation of the desire to see the literature of science.  Delany remarked (in an interview, I think), that he never wrote anything he felt went against the contemporary views of science regarding the way the world works.  Further, he toyed with scientific ideas just as much as anyone:  Babel-17 is an exploration of linguistics (and amazing, by the way, though it succumbs a little too much to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

If we’re going to discuss the idea (rather than the story, which necessarily includes the idea, but not necessarily vice-versa), do that.  It’s basically fine.  I usually begin a recommendation of a SF or fantasy book by describing the idea.  But we don’t really have to bring the authors into it; they don’t matter to the reading of the text.

I can turn this against a writer you all know I love, too — Tolkien.  Part of the reason The Lord of the Rings is so well-loved is Tolkien’s reputation as a medievalist.  Fans who don’t pay attention to anyone else’s academic record call him “Professor Tolkien.”  They are identifying Tolkien’s professional study of medieval literature and the text they love, LotR.  Did one influence the other?  Yes.  But so did Tolkien’s status as a husband, a father, and a symbolic Christian (that is, he once told Lewis that all religions pretty much get to the same point, and the symbolism of Catholicism was particularly agreeable to him — I don’t know if that has a real term, I just made up “symbolic Christian”).  And while readings of the text pull all those sources in, the fan view of the book doesn’t.  He’s never “Christopher’s father,” is he?