Tea at Trianon: Stranger Than Sci-Fi: How Science Nudges Fiction Into New Frontiers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 4, 2022

Stranger Than Sci-Fi: How Science Nudges Fiction Into New Frontiers

From TOR.com:

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The good folks at Tor.com love SF writers (well … duh) but they also understand that it is our job to not exactly tell the truth. As I am a distinctly unreliable narrator, I have been sternly warned that if I am claiming to write facts for you lot, I had better have the citations to back them up. Ugh. I write science fiction for a reason.
Well, fine then. That quote is from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5. Hamlet wasn’t wrong. There are things out there far stranger than we can possibly imagine. Like what, you might ask. To which my answer is this: I have no freakin’ clue because I can’t possibly imagine it.
Which is where science—“philosophy” in Shakespeare’s day—comes in. Science is always discovering new things, things that no one had thought of before. Sometimes they turn out not to be true, but they invariably have science fiction writers, with our limited human imaginations, scrambling to catch up. From the early days of SF, writers of science fiction have relied on finders of science fact to launch our stories into entirely new directions. You could do this exercise for pretty much any branch of science, but let’s stick with my own personal favorite, outer space.
Back in 1877, the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, using telescopes that were the best available at the time, observed what, to him, looked like dense, linear formations on the planet Mars that he identified as “canali,” or “channels.” “Canali” however got mistranslated as “canals” and, in 1895, Percival Lowell, the influential American astronomer, published a book arguing that there were canals on Mars and that a struggling Martian civilization was using them to move water from the poles to the rest of that desert world. Science fiction followed Lowell’s lead. In 1898, H.G. Wells produced War of the Worlds, in which envious, highly advanced Martians launch an invasion of Earth from their dying planet. Similar themes can be found in Edgar Rice Burrough’s 1912 pulp classic, A Princess of Mars, which was also the basis for the (in my view) deeply under-appreciated 2012 movie, John Carter. Despite scientists’ protestations to the contrary, SF stories about Martian civilization weren’t fully laid to rest until the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars in 1965.
War of the Worlds was exceedingly vague, of course, about how the Martians reached Earth. In the novel, human telescopes detect huge explosions on the Martian surface and then, several months later, the Martians arrive. The implication at the time was that they must have been launched from incredibly large guns á la Jules Verne’s 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. But the problem with shooting living things into space using a gun is that, if you do the math, the acceleration required would turn everyone into strawberry jam. Rockets, first suggested by the Russian genius, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in 1903, are a better way to go.
Despite the objections of the New York Times, opining in 1920 that rockets couldn’t work in space because there would be no air to push against (I can’t even), SF eventually picked up the baton. In the 1933 novel When Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, humans escape from a doomed planet Earth using “atomic rockets.” By the time we get to Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 rockets are pretty much ubiquitous in science fiction and remain so to this day (the propulsion used in my own novel, Braking Day, is also some kind of super-powerful rocket, although I haven’t the faintest idea how it works. Matter-anti-matter? Space pixies?).
Rockets in the real world(s) have also been ubiquitous in the exploration of our solar system. In the 1970s they hurled Voyagers One and Two into their grand tour of the outer planets, including Jupiter and its moons. Not long thereafter, having examined the photographs, scientists started suggesting that Jupiter’s moon, Europa, might harbor a vast underground ocean, something no one in SF had previously imagined. (Read more.)