SOURCE: Sawyer, Andy. “Narrativium and Lies-to-Children: ‘Palatable Instruction’ in The Science of Discworld.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13, no. 1 (2002): 62-81.

[In the following essay, Sawyer explores the collaboration of science writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart with Pratchett in The Science of Discworld, arguing that the fields of science and science fiction only serve to strengthen one another.]

Hugo Gernsback made no bones about claiming science fiction as instructive. His propagandizing editorials form the backbone of Gary Westfahl's defense of Gernsbackian science fiction in The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (1998). “If every man, woman, boy or girl,” says Gernsback, “could be induced to read science fiction right along, there would certainly be a great resulting benefit to the community, in that the educational standards of its people would be raised tremendously” (Science Wonder Stories 1, 1061; qtd. in Westfahl Mechanics 54). Could it be that the “idea of science fiction” exists as a way of telling science rather than as a literary response to it? If this is so, we need to consider the science-writing too is a necessary part of the enterprise.

I want to discuss not so much the science in science fiction as aspects of the science fiction in science: a fusion brought together with interesting effect in The Science of Discworld by Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart. This collaboration of science and fiction writers, if not unique, is remarkably rare in both popular science and science fiction writing. Pratchett is perhaps the foremost living fantasy writer, a humorist whose targets are often the pretensions of academics or scientists but who values knowledge, understanding, and story. Cohen and Stewart are scientists, science writers, science fiction fans, and science fiction writers, who bring to their own work a series of narrative stances formed by all these roles. In doing so, they bring into question previous uses of science fiction to “explain” or “justify” or even “encourage the study of” science itself. In this collaboration of fantasy writer and satirist with scientist and science popularizers, we see the wizards of the Discworld, which operates by Magic,¹ create a world not unlike our own, which operates according to our more prosaic laws of Science. The wizards are confused and amazed at the incongruity and illogicality of a world which does not operate according to the (to them) obvious and natural rules. The result is some highly enjoyable mental slapstick as some of the more parodiable aspects of Big Science are lampooned. But as the “Roundworld” cosmos evolves before the puzzled gaze of the Discworld wizards, we are also given a commentary on events by Cohen and Stewart which sheds light on why this scenario has interesting things to tell us about science. Unlike most other examples of what (to use the phrase which so often occurs in the titles of such books), I will call the “Science of …” trend of science writing, the threads of the “fiction” and “science” aspects of the work are there to illuminate and interrogate each other rather than merely to be “entertaining” or “instructive.” To examine this, before turning to Discworld itself, I would like to examine other examples of imaginative “retellings” of science: different (if we can hold on to the concept) “science fictions.”

FICTIONS OF SCIENCE

There is a kind of “storybook science”—usually but not always directed at children, which teaches science through the medium of an avuncular narrator explaining the wonders of the universe. Often (it was a favorite device of Victorian examples of the genre) it actually is the kindly uncle explaining to wide-eyed nephew and niece how the natural world operated. Narrators ask “Have you ever wondered why … ?” and proceed to explain in a way which makes it quite clear that this is a different way of passing on knowledge than classroom-based education. Sometimes, the child or child-substitute enters into a fantasy world which represents the knowledge to be imparted. In the 1940s the physicist George Gamow popularized quantum physics by playing upon its “unlikely” aspects and turning it into fiction. Mr Tomkins in Wonderland (1940) and sequels such as Mr Tomkins Explores the Atom (1944) showed the eponymous “little bank clerk” within fictions which act out the lectures on the post-Einstein theories of cosmology he attends. Mr Tomkins, who as a youth read science fiction adventures (Wonderland 1), dreams scenarios inspired by the physics he learns: worlds in which the speed of light is so slow that relativistic distortions of time and space can be discerned, adventures in which quantum tigers have to be shot by a veritable barrage of bullets because it is impossible to discern accurately the position of both bullet and tiger. A more modern version—but harking back to earlier examples—of this story is Russell Stannard's The Time and Space of Uncle Albert (1989), the first in a popular series of children's books explaining physics and cosmology for young readers. Here we have literalizations of Einstein's thought-experiments as “Uncle Albert” and his niece Gedanken (“thoughts”) puzzle out together the effects of light-speed on time and space. This is not actually science fiction, although it is quite obviously fiction about science. One suspects that if the term “science fiction” had not already been established it would be the appropriate term.

Science-writing, then, is made up out of physics and what Terry Pratchett, in Witches Abroad (1991), calls “narrative causality” (8) or Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart throughout The Science of Discworld call “narrativium.” It is formed by the need for explanations which the reader will both understand and be grasped by: simplification and storytelling. Take an account of a popular-science favorite: the “Big Bang.” For cosmologists, this is a set of mathematical relationships working themselves out over time. But for readers of John Gribbin's In Search of the Big Bang (1987), this is also a story of the attainment of knowledge: what was once theorized about the formation of the universe, and what now is, and where some of the implications of modern theory might lead. It unfolds from Greek and Persian philosopher/mages staring into the night sky to the remarkable mind of Stephen Hawking. It is a narrative full of images with their own surreal beauty. A statement such as “The omega minus, for example, can be thought of as made up of three strange quarks, each with the same spin, but one ‘red,’ one ‘blue,’ and one ‘green’ […]” (314) is not meaningful in terms of language. Gribbin immediately tells us that the “colors” are mere mnemonics, ways of distinguishing between different phenomena. But even though we know that in this case “red” is not the color we see when we look at a tomato, and these sub-atomic particles do not actually “spin,” we are trapped by the language Gribbin uses into envisaging them as tiny multicolored spheres. And does Gribbin really mean “strange”, or is he talking about the quality of “strangeness” which, like “charm,” is another attribute of these particles? Particle physics and other problems of modern cosmology are summaries which Gribbin is at pains to tell us are not “the truth.” Much of his book is devoted precisely to telling us why we should not envisage red quarks as tiny revolving tomatoes, and explaining with remarkable clarity what the cosmologists and particle physicists actually think is happening. Those of us who are non-scientists may see far more narrativium than physics, and those of us who try to understand the physics see almost pure narrativium, but that is entirely another story.

“Explaining” science is not talking to the ignorant or naive but more frequently a matter of translating what cannot be directly translated: of finding analogies in the experiences of the readers. In Big Bang Gribbon writes as follows:

[f]rom now on I shall be describing the standard model of the Universe, the current “best buy” among cosmologies, as if it were a description of the real Universe. This is necessary license; it would break up the flow of the story too much to keep putting in cautions about how this is the best description of the Universe that we have but that new developments may supersede it.

(195-96, italics added)

Gribbin does not follow the model of the writers already mentioned since he is writing for an adult audience who do not, it seems, need the sugar-coated pill of fictionalization. Nevertheless, he is establishing a model which is not solely the transfer of facts but the telling of a “story.” This story, the mega-text of science, moreover, has interesting relationships to the development of science fiction as a more specifically “literary” response to science and technology.

The relationship of science to science fiction has been summed up by Brian Aldiss' quip in the introduction to his 1973 Billion Year Spree (but not in the heavily revised Trillion Year Spree, published 13 years later) that “Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts” (1). While there are scientists who loathe science fiction, science fiction writers who confess themselves illiterate in the hard sciences, and science fiction magazines which do not feature popular-science columns, sf as it has developed in the twentieth century has manifested itself in a number of stances towards the combination which is a fusion of those parts “science” and “fiction.” These stances are not defined by the presence or accuracy of science in the fiction, but rather by a more complex relationship between science and story. This is how science, usually “speculative” science, is used to create a kind of fantastic verisimilitude (for example, to create a realistic picture of another world), how science fiction becomes a kind of “touchstone” for science narratives, or how the storytelling element becomes the raison d'être of the whole narrative.

Hugo Gernsback, often dubbed the “Father of Science Fiction,” developed the first stance. A propagandist for the new literary form “scientifiction,” he was at pains to stress its didactic qualities. “Prophetic fiction today—cold fact tomorrow,” reads the masthead to one of his magazines. In the first issue of Amazing, he told his readers: “Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge that we might not always obtain—and they supply it in a very palatable form” (“New Sort” 3). Gernsbackian science fiction, says Westfahl (summarizing Gernsback's claims), is a kind of writing “which is both fiction and nonfiction and thus superior to ordinary fiction” (Mechanics 43). Stephen Hawking's foreword to Lawrence M. Kraus's The Physics of Star Trek parallels the words on Amazing's masthead: “today's science fiction is often tomorrow's science fact” (xiii).² Science fiction is often defended because it teaches: a point made throughout Karen Sands and Marietta Frank's Back in the Spaceship Again: Juvenile Science Fiction Series since 1945 (1999). Early science fiction for children, with its young inventors like Tom Swift and Frank Reade, Jr. had its didactic purposes. Sands and Frank cite Robert A. Heinlein, whose books for young people in the 1940s and 1950s such as Space Cadet (originally published 1948) are among the best of the field. We might also consider, on the British side of the Atlantic, Patrick Moore, well-known today as an astronomer and entertainer and, perhaps, now less well-known for his novels involving a young teenager on a Martian colony. The unreality of having a semi-educated 16 year old chosen, in the 1955 novel Mission to Mars, to become part of a space expedition is made up for by his plot role: such a character—a sympathetic and well-drawn stand-in for the reader, but hardly a realistic figure—needs fed to him the kind of basic astronomy and physics which Moore is trying to get across to his young audience. In the context of Moore's (for the times) well-imagined scenario and concern for accurate science, this works relatively well. Other juvenile science fiction (with which it is probably necessary to class film and television science fiction of the Star Trek/Star Wars variety) is almost embarrassingly confused in matters of fact. Science here, is at best “technobabble”: not the carefully-constructed plausibility of the “Great Game” of hard science fiction³ but the stringing together of enough hocus-pocus words to paper over some gaping plot holes or to re-create in science fiction terms what in another genre might be “[a]nd then I waved my magic wand and we were in another country.”

Nevertheless, science fiction is full of scientists—Gregory Benford, Robert L. Forward, Stephen Baxter, and so forth, many of whom, such as Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, have written best-selling science popularizations as well as closely-reasoned and plausible “hard” science fiction. The “sense of wonder” created by science fiction is close to that of science. In describing the visionary in the language of the mundane, Clarke, for instance, follows the lead of the natural scientist to whom the universe is both strange and beautiful and an environment of which we are firmly part. In examining these writers, furthermore, we can discern the truth behind science fiction's didactic impulses. Gernsback's “palatable instruction” is still at work. We can even, if we are careful, learn things about cosmology from writers like Benford and Forward, who are physics professors, and about space travel from Clarke, who has been one of the leading popularizers of the concept since joining the British Interplanetary Society as a young man in the 1930s. What we learn from novels such as Benford's Cosm (1980) or Forward's Dragon's Egg (1999), however, is not that “the universe is constructed so” but that there are certain speculative suggestions put forward that might be clues about the construction of the universe. And, there are stories which might be told about or with them. Even at its most naively didactic, Gernsbackian science fiction takes us into a thought-realm which suggests that science is interesting for much the same reason that a thrilling adventure story is interesting and new dimensions can be added to fiction by incorporating not just the metaphysical questions of “why are we here”—the questions of personal and social identity which post-Romantic fiction has posed—but by asking that question in its most obvious and simplified form. What does make up the universe and our place in it? Part of the answer lies in the basic laws of physics, which can be examined and interrogated in fiction just as the avuncular narrators of “storybook science” narratives suggest that the dry facts of optics or mechanics can be enlivened by translation into story.

Many science writers, such as John Gribbin, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart, have written science fiction. Many more have read it, and a second, more complex, stance towards science fiction becomes apparent: science fiction becomes part of the more general story of science; a shared communication between writer and reader through which examples of more general speculation or extrapolation can be extracted. Science writers are illustrating science from science fiction. Ian Stewart, for example, in Nature's Numbers (1988) illuminates a discussion about a predictable, deterministic universe by summarizing the scenes in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) in which the master-computer “Deep Thought” calculates the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything—and in doing so reveals that while the answer may be precise (“42”) and even, for all we know, true, it makes no sense without an equally clear question. Paul Davies cites Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957) in Other Worlds (147-48) as an example of science fiction's speculation of alien life.⁴ Both writers are demonstrating a knowledge of science fiction's use of science: the novel written by the astronomer and the TV series where science is sacrificed to narrative imperative or plot device. Davies, in The Matter Myth (1992), writes a personal account of his difficulties as a student in coming to terms with relativity theory:

In the end, my taste for science fiction helped me over these difficulties. By reading fiction you get used to picturing yourself in the place of the characters, seeing an unfamiliar world through their eyes, sharing their experiences […] After all, I had no trouble putting myself, mentally, in the place of H. G. Wells's time traveler, even though I knew the story made no sense from the point of view of physics.

(98)

This stance becomes an approach which takes science fiction as touchstone rather than convenient example, to examine more closely the scientific ideas in science fiction. Hence the series of popular science books which talk about The Physics of Star Trek, The Biology of Star Trek, and so forth. Often, such books are entertaining since occasionally they do discuss the relationship between the fiction and the science they exploit. Although Krauss' Physics of Star Trek (1996), for example, is aimed at the Trekker rather than the science student, he points out the ludicrously wrong in Trek and carefully extrapolates from concepts like the warp drive and the matter transporter to the laws of physics such devices might work within, explaining also why, in some cases they might be impossible. Dubceck, Moshier, and Boss's Fantastic Voyages: Learning Science through Science Fiction Films (1994), a less successful reversal of this technique, might be seen as a thorough-going expansion of the science-writer's use of “example.” In form, a straightforward textbook (with tables and diagrams), it covers a wide range of fields—from mechanics, electricity and magnetism, relativity and time, to cell biology and the differences between plants and animals. The section dealing with the latter, for instance, considers the difference between the structure and function of plant and animal cells and then summarizes the 1964 film of John Wyndham's 1951 The Day of the Triffids to compare movement and nutrition in plants and animals, ending with a number of tasks for the student (“Is it plausible that seawater would kill triffids? Try to formulate an explanation for the lethal effects of the seawater on triffids”). While the book would undoubtedly suggest some stimulating classroom discussion (most of the exercises are considerably better thought-out than the example I have quoted), its concentration on film—to the exclusion of the hundreds of possible examples from novel and short-story—is severely limiting, and its textbook style makes it an ideas manual for the teacher rather than a compelling narrative for the student, let alone the fan. The Biology of Star Trek (1998) is somewhere between the two. The “Science in …” enterprise holds the danger of becoming less an exploration of the scientific principles behind science fiction and more a pseudo-scholarly engagement in reconciling discrepancies. This can, of course, be enormous fun, but the book is part of the fannish subculture rather than of the world of scientific discourse. TV aliens, according to this approach, are largely humanoid, because, for instance, of convergent evolution or because most intelligent species in the galaxy are descended from an ur-species whose DNA had been extensively seeded. These are not bad explanations in themselves, but ones which overlook the challenge of the “real” alien: how evolution might have taken altogether other paths leading to what appears to be the fundamentally unknowable. As Gregory Benford puts it in the afterword to his short story “In Alien Flesh,” “rendering the alien is the Holy Grail of science fiction, because if your attempt can be accurately summarized, you know you've failed” (32). Robert and Susan Jenkins tackle their task with enthusiasm and perception (the first chapter, for example, is an interesting dissertation on the role of faces) but of course the question of “the alien” in Star Trek does all come down to the fact that it is easier to get an actor to play a variation on the standard humanoid than, say, any of the insectoid, elephantoid, caterpillaroid or icthyoid aliens in James White's “Sector General” series—which may explain why this imaginative and ethically inventive story-cycle remains untelevized.

The Science of the X-Men (2000) by Link Yaco and Karen Haber, inspired by the film, unfortunately does little more than list characters and what might cause their powers. Despite the title, this is tie-in rather than tie-up: too many loose ends are left dangling with expressions like “it [the extra mass generated when characters like the Hulk transform from spindly human to muscle-bound monster] seems to come from another dimension.” Fashionable concepts such as wormholes, superstrings, and the Human Genome project are cited but rarely discussed in detail. Unlike Fantastic Voyages, this is not a textbook.

These books, which we might call the “Science of …” books, written by people who know both science and science fiction,⁵ are, whatever their specific merits or otherwise in imparting information, interesting fusions of science and science fiction. Even as The Science of the X-Men offers summaries which in some cases are simplified to the point of vagueness, it also points out directions towards more solid information. But nearly always science fiction is there to sugar the pill of the “difficult” science, just as in some forms of science fiction the science is there to add “respectability” to the fiction.

FICTIONS IN SCIENCE

In many ways, a more creative stance is that taken by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart in The Science of Discworld, which, despite its title, I would argue, is a very different activity from the books mentioned above. These writers are, more than many, distinguished in both arms of the enterprise. Both are frequent guests at British science fiction conventions, known for their entertaining talks. Both are more than scientists who do guest spots: they are fans. Cohen designs aliens for science fiction writers such as Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, or Anne McCaffrey. As a team, they also write science fiction. In their collaborative science writing, they use science fiction as a way of interpreting science not from the “alien's eye view” of pop-science writing which assumes an alien viewpoint which rarely goes beyond “Here is a cute alien: let it explain the world for us,” but by playing directly with the speculative element of science fiction.

“In place of formal definitions,” they write, “we will offer illustrations, images, metaphors” (3-4). In other words, they are using the techniques not solely of fiction (illustration, image and metaphor are not by any means the exclusive property of fiction) but of writing which lends itself to fiction: to the process of exploring the implications or possibilities of a situation by taking it out of the “real” for a moment, re-positioning it in the land of story, and (unlike most other “fictionalizers” of science) actually examining what they are about in doing so. Presenting factual narratives by using the techniques of fiction is by no means confined to science writing. A much more “slippery” collision of realistic and fictional narrative occurs in travel writing. But one expects travelers' tales to be tall tales, and this is not quite the collision I wish to emphasize. Earlier forms of factual writing show elements we would now attribute to fiction. The Socratic dialogue, for instance, is the province of the novel and drama.⁶ We are no longer used to the commonplace rhetorical device of putting philosophical or scientific discussion in the mouths of imaginary characters. Cohen and Stewart, though, use this device in The Collapse of Chaos (1995) and Figments of Reality (1997) by allowing conversations between humans and Zarathustrians, or within the Zarathustrian gestalt, or between Augusta Ada Lovelace and “Wallace Lupert” to emphasize relevant points. Unlike Boyle, writing in the seventeenth century, for whom this conversational device is far more transparent, they stress their unreality. The conversors are not imaginary figures standing for different approaches to natural philosophy, or teacher-and-pupil, but the kind of ostrich-like aliens which could be characters in a science fiction novel. Cohen and Stewart also stress that their books are collaborative ventures, a third, constructed voice arising out of the dialogue between them with a different tone to that which they each develop in their own individual books. By adding jokes and other inclusive devices, they are able to address their readers directly. Finally, they are aware—as earlier examples of this semi-fiction could not have been, not so much that the rhetorical devices they are using lend themselves to fiction (these devices, after all, are at the heart of how Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists constructed their plays)—that there has been and is this actual fictionalization of the matter of science. They are writing against a background where fiction writers have used story to illuminate not only all the other elements of human concern, but the process of speculating upon the observable “facts” of the universe and developing hypotheses and theories to question the nature of these facts.

This re-positioning becomes the realm of the “thought experiment” where an experiment or process which is confined to the phase-space of the imagination by the limitations of the physical world is nevertheless rehearsed in a realm which differs from the world of fiction only because most of the trappings which we need in fiction (character, setting, plot) are abandoned or reduced to a minimum. One of the most famous such thought-experiments, repeated almost every time the theory of relativity is discussed, is the relationship of time to velocities approaching light-speed. Summarized, as for example, in Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield's The Arrow of Time (1991), the story concerns two identical twins, one of whom stays on Earth while the other travels to another star. When the star-faring twin returns, some years later (according to his reckoning), less time has passed according to the reckoning of his brother on Earth. The star-farer is younger than his brother (81-82). It is this kind of thought-experiment which Russell Stannard semi-fictionalizes in the “Uncle Albert” books. It is also the bones of a story which has been told numerous times in science fiction. Joe Haldeman's Forever War (1974) shows us the narrator becoming increasingly alienated each time he returns to an ever-changing Earth. James Blish's 1953 story “Common Time” explores the subjective nature of the passage of time at super-luminal speeds. The fiction writer explores the possibilities: what it would feel like for individuals with a persona to be in such a situation. The scientist thought-experimenter is not interested in the social implications of the twins' experiences, or even in who the twins are. There is no reason to name the twins: any set of twins will do, after all. Science fiction—or at least an important strand of the number of literary threads which make up the tangle of sub-genres which we call science fiction—stems from this exploration of the possible. Tom Godwin's 1954 story “The Cold Equations,” for example, published by John W. Campbell in Astounding, is a celebrated instance of a story built around a set of scientific facts. If the fuel on a spacecraft is calculated to transport a mass X and no more, then the addition of a naive young girl of mass Y will present a problem which can only be solved by the immediate subtraction of Y from the sum (X＋Y). Or so the theory goes: a number of critics have pointed out serious flaws in the scenario (see Westfahl, Cosmic Engineers 74-77 for a number of examples) while Campbell himself, in a number of letters, suggested that the real point of the story was one of ethics rather than physics. In the latter case, the story remains a thought-experiment, although perhaps one of a more complex and fruitful nature.

Cohen and Stewart's trilogy The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and The Science of Discworld is a thought-experiment in itself, constantly moving in and out of areas rarely touched by even the most populist of popular-science writers.⁷Collapse of Chaos has chapter-heading jokes and aliens: the Zarathustrians, who allow the confusions and misunderstandings of “First Contact” fiction to illuminate the provisional nature of human mindsets, also allow self-reference to science fiction: the spaceship Thighbone is a direct link to the transformation scene in 2001 in which the hominid Moon-Watcher discovers, or is led to discover, the potential of tool-using. As his newly-invented weapon is hurled into the air with the passion of victory, it segues into its logical development: the spaceship dancing beyond the atmosphere. “Captain Arthur” is an echo of Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (51-54, passim) as is “Watcher-of-Moons (Fragments) to the afore-mentioned hominid. 2001 and Hitchhiker's are almost as obvious as references to Star Trek, but Cohen and Stewart are better-versed in their science fiction than most. They also refer, for instance, to such items as Tom Easton's “gengineer” stories (289), which, it is probably fair to say, would be unfamiliar to most of their readership. A discussion of the “arrow of time” leads naturally (251) to references to science fiction works dealing with the concept (Martin Amis's Time's Arrow [1991], Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World [1967], and the authors' own thought-experimental reverse-time “story” [261-62]). Speculation about evolutionary possibilities explores what might have happened if flight had first been developed not with the wing but by the use of tiny sacs filled with hydrogen gas (analogous to the air bladder of fish). The “balloonist” scenario resembles the light-hearted rationale for dragons in Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons [1998] as well as Stewart and Cohen's gas-giant ecology in “Code of the Skydiver.” It is returned to in SD (199-200). They borrow the classification of simplex, complex, and multiplex from Samuel R. Delany's Empire Star (1966) (FOR: 289-90; SD: 292). Chapter 42 of SD refers, in the context of the need for humanity to ensure long-term stability and survival by traveling off-planet, to Bishop John Wilkins, Jules Verne, Armageddon, Star Wars, Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Sheffield, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Robert L. Forward. In a further exploration of Moon-Watcher's hurling a thighbone into the air, the chapter, “Ook: A Space Odyssey” shows us the Librarian giving a tribe of apes the knowledge of tools (or, more accurately, weapons), paralleling the role of the monolith in Kubrick and Clarke's 2001 (280-84).

Aside from the jokes, there are also more serious references to “exploring worlds of If”—the speculative technological alternatives of science fiction writers like Hal Clement, or Larry Niven (Figments 120). The most telling parallel to science fiction, though, is where Collapse also introduces the reader to the concept of phase-space (200-12): “Phase space contains not just what happens but what might happen under different circumstances. It's the space of the possible” (200). It is precisely this space where science fiction interrogates reality and explores possibilities: not because they are true, not even because they might be true, but because, given initial conditions, they are possible. In science fiction, we are able to tell stories which a) might happen (Kim Stanley Robinson's “Mars” [1992-96] trilogy offers, in simplified form because the author is also telling a number of other stories than this one, a picture of how Mars might be “won”); b) might have happened (Kipling's “With the Night Mail” looked remarkably plausible in 1905 and its distorted reflection of communications technology, politics, and everyday life in the 21^st century still has the capacity to jar); and c) could actually never happen but illustrate by satiric exaggeration. James Morrow's City of Truth (1990) examines a world in which lying is surgically prevented. Truth is a good thing, but much of our discourse, from family life to the nature of scientific discourse, is not-quite-truth.

“If aliens were to arrive on earth they might be very surprised, if they were not aware of the importance of context, to find that we already have words for them, that we have already rehearsed the unknown future, and that the tools to deal with it are already present in the language” (Cohen and Stewart 357-58). Science fiction also explores the phase-space of the possible: a phrase which looks alarmingly respectable. But we might also like to consider that “[m]ost of the stories we teach our children are myths, Just So Stories, oversimplifications. They are teaching stories, not truths” (351). In The Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality, we come across the concept of “lies-to-children”—the necessarily simplified stories we tell children and students as a foundation for understanding so that eventually “now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true” (Discworld 39). The “lies-to-children” we tell ourselves about science are a different form of science fiction: one, perhaps where “fiction” qualifies the word “science.” They are “fictions about science” rather than “scientific fictions.”

Cohen and Stewart's “lies-to-children” technique culminates in The Science of Discworld in which story and exposition are parallel. The Science of Discworld is two narratives, both fiction and nonfiction but in almost the opposite way to Gernsbackian science fiction. It is in part a conventional Discworld story by Terry Pratchett in which Ponder Stibbons leads a team of research wizards into developing a pocket-universe which operates by the laws of science, not magic. The Pratchett narrative, though, is much more than an illustrative example inserted to add color and humor to Cohen and Stewart's writing.⁸ While it is certainly true that the story of the Roundworld project brings out the points Cohen and Stewart wish to make more comprehensively and colorfully than their own “Zarathustrian” inserts in their previous books, one of the reasons it does so is because the Discworld scenario will be familiar to their readers. We read the “Roundworld” narrative knowing the characters and how they react. Ponder Stibbons and the High Energy Magic unit have appeared in a number of other Discworld stories. Part of the appeal of the Discworld series lies in Pratchett's concern with the shaping power of story and the ways in which metaphor, in the Discworld, becomes reality.

Story, writes Pratchett in Witches Abroad “takes a shape” (8). It coils around the universe, imposing patterns on history and shaping events. What operates our universe is cause and effect (although, as Cohen and Stewart stress, often we cannot trace the path between the two). What operates Discworld is narrative and personification. Like the color of quarks, Discworld is a fictional creation.⁹ In Discworld, story is pure narrative. Coincidence, pattern, million-to-one chances that succeed take place because they have to. In our world, the story of science is of truth being slowly revealed by deduction from obvious facts. In Discworld—although Cohen and Stewart do not explore this—the medieval doctrine of correspondences holds sway, forcing plot and character in the story to adhere within specific boundaries. If, for instance, stone circles such as Stonehenge were some form of calendar-fixing computing device (the point being, of course, not that they were but simply that this is a popular explanation easily understandable to today's culture), the Druids who operate it must talk like computer nerds (Pratchett, Light Fantastic 59-61).

While Discworld is generically fantasy (there are wizards, sword-and-sorcery heroes, witches, dragons, and even maps), its advantage to Cohen and Stewart lies in the jokes already built around science and the quest for knowledge: Terry Pratchett's early career was as a writer of science fiction rather than fantasy. We have Eric, the “demonology hacker.” The image beloved by Chaos theorists—the butterfly whose flapping wings destabilizes initial conditions enough to create vast storms—is frequently the butt of jokes (Witches 7).¹⁰ In The Last Continent (1998) the wizards of Unseen University meet the god of evolution. The inventor Leonard da Quirm is a character who appears in several novels—as do the works of his mirror-image, the unfortunate engineer B. S. (Bloody Stupid) Johnson.

PAINTING STORIES ON THE UNIVERSE

By considering Discworld, we cannot merely explain science but explore it as well. “We have always,” Cohen and Stewart say, “had a drive to paint stories on the universe” (11), so we can look at some of the other stories which might have been. We are still in the world of example. Science of Discworld often repeats examples and concepts from the previous two books,¹¹ but Cohen and Stewart are also exploring the concept of narrativium itself; the story of science: how science lends itself to a number of stories. As well as being constructed around a story which is entertaining in the same way as any other Discworld story—it parodies the scientific method in the same way as Small Gods (1992) parodies fundamentalist religion—the “parallel text” of Cohen and Stewart shows how the “story of science” is a fact constructed in our world by means of our shared cultural memes. This is not to say that, for example, the path of the earth around the sun is a “socially constructed” fact, but that we view it in different ways, smoothing out the awkward bits. We see sunrises and sunsets.¹²

The strength of The Science of Discworld—and why it is in many ways something new in science writing—derives from Pratchett's story being more than a parable constructed for the specific purpose of explaining what the scientists have to say. It is, as has been said, a commentary/parody of the scientific method, just as Guards! Guards! (1989) comments on the hard-boiled detective story, Small Gods satires both religious fundamentalism and free-thinking philosophy (with the exception, of course, that the philosophers are merely comic: the fanatical High Priest of Om is one of Pratchett's closest approaches to a villain) and Maskerade (1995) gives us everything we think we know about opera (there is a fat lady and a phantom). The pocket-universe created as a by-product of Ponder Stibbons's experiment in splitting the thaum (the fundamental unit of magic) is the opposite of Discworld. It is made up of mundane, non-magical elements (no chelonium, for making world-bearing turtles), elephantium (ditto elephants), although there may still be narrativium: after all it is still possible to construct stories. The Unseen University wizards are baffled by the way small balls of rock revolve around large balls of incandescent gas, and the odd set of rules that that implies. To investigate the phenomenon further, Rincewind (whose appearance in the Discworld saga largely consists of running away from danger) is promoted to “Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography” and sent down to observe conditions in one of these worlds in a kind of magical virtual-reality suit which allows him to survive (in the sense of experiencing all the terror of events without the physical harm) the process of volcanic eruptions, hails of meteorites, and ice ages which punctuate geological and biological evolution. He notices the appearance of life, even of intelligence, and its regular extinguishing by natural disaster just as various species reach proof of their conscious, intelligent status by, for example, introducing the concepts of war or slavery to weaker sections of their race. Eventually, a species of ape-descendants go out into the universe leaving their world to rats and computer-intelligences in a scenario reminiscent of Clifford D. Simak's City (1952). Throughout, the wizards of Unseen University are bewildered by the mixture of simplicity and complexity in this resolutely un-magical cosmos:

“Simple matter is obeying a few rather odd rules. That's probably enough to get things … spinning and exploding and so on, but there's no possibility that they could cause anything so complex as—”

“The Bursar, for example?”

“Not even the Bursar, sir.”

(135)

The alternate chapters, by Cohen and Stewart, tell largely the same story of the formation of our solar system under the causal laws operating within our universe, and the development of human intelligence and consciousness—but in the language of “popular science” rather than fiction. The Wizards, they say, are right to be bewildered, because the universe is bewildering. “We have always had a drive to paint stories on to the universe” (12). We fool ourselves—or pay money to teachers, scientific researchers and popular-science writers to fool us—in thinking that we understand. In fact, the universe is operated by magic. The technology of the motor car, the chemistry of the chlorophyll reaction, how a TV set works—all these are (as far as most of us are concerned) operated by magic.¹³ To quote an S. Harris cartoon used by Jack Cohen in his lectures, somewhere in the process between the simple laws of matter and energy which underlie all physical objects and their interactions “a miracle occurs.” Cohen and Stewart, in Science of Discworld and elsewhere, describe this miracle as “black box technology” where we can see what goes in and what comes out, but the operations in between are hidden from us or as “Ant Country.” In the “Langton's Ant” program a set of simple rules concern the position of the “ant” on a grid of squares. Every time it comes to a square, the square changes color from black to white or white to black: if it lands on a white square, it turns right; but if it lands on a black square, it turns left. The result is simplicity, chaos, and emergent order. A series of simple patterns suddenly become what appears to be completely random motion before, after about 10,000 steps, a repetitive “cycle” occurs. The question Cohen and Stewart ask is how far the apparently ordered “highway” which is the result of the program determined by the rules? “Can a change in environment change the result? We don't know. So for this very simple mathematical system, with one simple rule and a very simple question, where we know the Theory of Everything … it doesn't tell us the answer” (92). The ant moves from easily understood regularity through the complexities of “Ant Country” (the area where we cannot trace the rules) to another more complex regularity which did not seem implicit in the original conditions. One of SD's epigraphs is Arthur C. Clarke's famous “Law”: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Another is the rejoinder from Gregory Benford: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced” (SD 5). What Cohen and Stewart stress is not that science is somehow “superstition” or that any explanation, however subjective, is correct. This is the trap which fundamentalists and relativists alike often fall into: science is either “reductive” (because it attempts to explain complex phenomena by simple laws) or “just a theory” (so that both evidence and the logic which supports it can be discounted by religious or political expediency.¹⁴ Cohen and Stewart are, instead, making the case that any explanation, however full, is provisional. Scientific explanation is the map, not the territory, and like all maps, is reduced in scale and filled with symbols which represent objects and their relationships in a schematic rather than naturalistic way: the way a mountain is shown on a map is not even the way a photographer or artist would show that mountain. Neither photographer nor artist make that mountain real to the senses in the same way as seeing or climbing it would. E-mc² describes the relationship, not the process. A Theory of Everything may or may not be possible, but to explain how initial conditions at the Big Bang resulted in the person processing these words through the computer, the cat observing the words being processed, and whatever may or may nor be going on in the consciousness of these entities results in a lengthy safari through Ant Country.

So whatever rules may exist in the universe are rules which, for most of us, are summaries rather than blueprints. Science and technology, says Cohen “are not advanced by people who believe, but by people who don't know but are doing their best to find out” (136-37). Our explanations are stories: “Lies-to-children” which are not actually true but which “nevertheless lead the child's mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie” (38). In the case of Ponder Stibbons, these are “Lies-to-Wizards”: “there was no point in telling your bosses everything; they were busy men, they didn't want explanations […]. What they wanted was little stories that they felt they could understand, and then they'd go away and stop worrying” (SD 16). These stories, like the solution given two chapters before the end of a mystery novel, fit the facts and may even point us in the right direction, but they are not complete. More accurately, they are “true” for a given value of “truth.” Phlogoston, as Cohen and Stewart describe it, is a perfectly sound way of explaining the phenomenon of combustion, just as epicycles is of planetary motion. The only flaw in both theories is that they do not appear to be in accord with the facts as we now know them—but neither does the Newtonian physics which replaced the earlier theories.

Given this, Cohen and Stewart could have written their narrative along the lines of “if there really was a Discworld operated by magic, how would it work?” Just as Kraus explains the magic (or “advanced technology” of Star Trek in ways we can understand) so Cohen and Stewart could have reinvented the magic of Discworld as a kind of science (as, for example, Ursula le Guin does in the Earthsea books). What they stress, however, with their commentary on the nature of science and how it arises from the events in the narrative, is that science fiction appears to be what happens when narrativium reacts with science.

Can we look at science fiction differently after reading SD? In a number of articles, George Hay, the founder of the Science Fiction Foundation, suggested that science fiction could be used as a kind of “ideas bank” for social uses, including scientific development: “Applied Science Fiction, by which I mean the use of science fiction ideas in real-life situations” (“Science, Scientism” 68). At the time of writing, the Maison d'Ailleurs museum of science fiction in Switzerland is co-ordinating for the European Space Agency a project which looks in a similar fashion at ideas of space travel generated within science fiction which might have practical applications. Many people in the science fiction community are rightly suspicious of this somewhat reductive approach to science fiction, but if the field has any importance at all beyond the telling of stories, it has to be in its speculative approach to knowledge. The suggestion that science fiction is in some way “different from” (read: “superior to”) ordinary literature is one sometimes made by fans. The post-Gernsbackian concept of this new, improved form of literature combining fiction and non-fiction¹⁵ does, however, have merit. In creating fiction infused with science, we are responding to the new vistas and narratives science is opening up. Cohen and Stewart remind us, perhaps, that science fiction has its honorable role of dramatization and speculation, but remains at its best in a more dynamic role. Reading New Scientist and coming up with an interesting technical fix for a story is one thing, but considering the part science plays in our society, in what makes us human and why, and why we continue making up these stories about our place in the universe opens up new dimensions.

Science, then, is the story of our culture: or one of the stories generated by and forming what Cohen and Stewart call a “make a human-being kit.” “We call the brain's internal capabilities ‘intelligence.’ It is convenient to give a similar name to all of the external influences, cultural or otherwise, that affect the evolution of the brain—and with it, the mind. We shall call these influences extelligence […]” (285-86).

It is this very capacity which makes us human. We are, not because we think, but because we wonder (a word dynamic in meaning: we wonder what happens elsewhere in the universe and we are stunned with “awe and wonder” when we find out). Some examples of “extelligence” are libraries, books, and the Internet. “The Discworld concept of ‘L-space’—library space—is similar” (286). It is through L-space and, especially through the Librarian of Unseen University and the relationship of his characters to books and learning that Pratchett explores the distinctions between information, knowledge, and wisdom.

The patterns of science reflect those of the narrative stances which make up other modes of literary discourse, including but not confined to fiction. It is sometimes noted that science fiction, with its sense of wonder and implication that at the same time the universe is knowable, and detective fiction, which suggests that mysteries can be resolved, are both indebted to the scientific method. Both genres, after all, have their roots in the mid-nineteenth century, following Enlightenment rationalism. But equally, science is a quest for knowledge. Titles like The Matter Myth, or In Search of Schrödinger's Cat (1991) seem to suggest that an encompassing narrative subsumes science. It becomes story. More and more, the fundamentals of science become the preserve of the specialist, trained through arcane language to understand what we can only approximate through metaphor. The way to “become a scientist” is the academic track of textbook study, specialization, and induction into the secular priesthood by means of the Ph.D. The approved way of “understanding” science is similar. But there are other ways of eavesdropping upon the stories scientists tell each other or of trying to establish what these stories might be. Science fiction and the publishers' category of “popular science” come close. In one, fictioneers attempt to imitate science. In the other, the science-writers are channeled into the imitation of fiction. Where these stances knowingly collide, we have, perhaps, a way in which we can consider more closely the roles both science and fiction have in making us human.

Notes

1. The Discworld is a world in the shape of a disc carried through space on the back of a giant turtle. One of the questions we are implicitly invited to ask is whether, in an infinite universe, some things are merely very, very improbable. The Discworld also features a University staffed by incompetent, inadequate, or downright bloody-minded individuals with bizarre titles and a high opinion of their status. Whether this is more or less improbable than the giant turtle is a question beyond this essay.

2. Westfahl's claim that Gernsbackian sf is “real” science fiction is an argument which for the purposes of this essay I will not examine in detail.

3. Chapter 4 of Westfahl's Cosmic Engineers has an excellent survey of the idea of hard sf as a “game” played between writers and readers.

4. The same book is cited in Davies and Gribbin's The Matter Myth (292), which also makes reference to an incident in Star Trek.

5. Karen Haber, for instance, is the wife of Robert Silverberg, for many decades one of the most distinguished American science fiction writers.

6. Near the beginning of Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661) we read “It was on one of the fairest dayes of this summer that the inquisitive Eleutherius came to invite me to make a visit with him to his friend Carneades” (12), and the following discussion takes the treatise out of the “real” by presenting it as conversation and argument, imitating the development and consolidation of ideas in a manner which reads deceptively closer to fiction that was intended.

7. All three books are issued by different publishers and, although they share numerous reference points, it is unclear whether they were intended as a trilogy: Nevertheless, it is useful to consider them, if not a trilogy in conventional publishing terms, certainly as a tryptich.

8. Pratchett's “Discworld” stories are a coherently-developed sequence of (at time of writing) over 40 books including novels, plays (Stephen Briggs), maps, handbooks, calendars, and associated spin-offs including a volume of academic essays (Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, published by the Science Fiction Foundation, 2000), a series of ceramic models, and a beer.

9. We might, perhaps, speculate about how evolution could result in a fictional beast, but that takes us away from the joy of the fiction. “Dragons don't breathe fire because they've got asbestos lungs—they breathe fire because everyone knows that's what dragons do” (Cohen and Stewart 10).

10. This discussion also refers to scientists becoming interested in chaos “partly because it was a lot easier […] but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.” (Witches 7)

11. The computer program “Langton's Ant” in which a set of simple rules drives the “ant” through chaos and out the other side and the image drawn from it of “Ant country” (91): the concept of “mind” in the mantis shrimp Jack Cohen dubbed “Dougal” (288); the concept of “extelligence” and the “Make-a-Human-Being kit” (289).

12. Only a pedant would change the words of the folk song, “Stealin'” (“Put your arms around me, like a circle ‘round the sun’”) to reflect the fact that bodies orbit the sun in ellipses. And it would take an even greater degree of pedantry to point out that even the ellipse is only approximate.

13. Apart from the video recorder operated by malevolent sorcery.

14. If, for example, “the word of God” seems to contradict Darwinian evolution then Darwin, of course, must be wrong.

15. Not necessarily “new,” of course: we might look at certain forms of Elizabethan pamphleteering as well as journalistic/novelistic fusions such Defoe's 1722: A Journal of the Plague Year.

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