Sci-Fi and Fantasy

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

You and I live in a fairy Story.  Or perhaps I should say a world created from fairy stories.  We gaze into magic mirrors which enable us to see and talk to people who are in countries far away. We have Strange thinking machines, and we’re just about to face the final cataclysm of the world in flames and smoke. Mobile phones, genetic engineering, space flight, global warming, artificial intelligence were all once the mad imaginings of crazy people sitting round the fire and starting stories that begin “What if…”  prefiguring  a form of story telling deriving from fairy stories – science fiction. The two are really indistinguishable from each other.  They both can be lumped together as Speculative Fiction.  Speculative Fiction always begins by asking the question “What If…?” And then goes on to create a world in which the rules of nature or physics are slightly altered for the story-teller’s own ends and the delight of the listener.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke

one person’s “What if…?”  becomes some engineer’s “Let’s see if we can…”.  Arthur C. Clark, the doyen of British sci-fi writers is credited with having come up with the idea which inspired satellite communications in one of his early works.  Occasionally this sort of backward forming from fantasy does actually influence real life.  It is said that the inventors of the modern cell phone actually based the design on the Star Trek communicator and devices currently being made for non-invasive medical diagnosis are inevitably called “tricorders” after the Star Trek device with that function.

The fact is, that fantasy drives the reality of the modern world.  Ideas are thrown up and occasionally settle in some particularly fertile imagination where they grow. And become manifest as a thing.  Or an understanding of a process.  Albert Einstein (him again) is famous for deriving much of his work from what he called “Thought Experiments” and once we are out of school (where thinking is specifically banned) you might be enjoined to “Think the Unthinkable”. Of course, the danger is that you may be so immersed in What If that it becomes some sort of reality (See previous Phase 10 about how truth and lies become interchangeable)

But this is not the primary outcome of speculative fiction.  It is rather how it shines a spotlight on us as human beings and how we are in this world we know and love,  Or are fearful of.  By placing us, with all our human failings and foibles and capabilities in an alien landscape, our true natures are thrown into sudden and dramatic relief.  We can, as it were, see the wood for the trees when the trees are suddenly of a different colour.

It is not the morphology of the many tentacled purple creature from the planet Skaaarg that interests us so much as our human reaction to these aliens.  In the same way, it is not really the trolls who live under the bridge or the witch who lives in the forest as much as how we might use our human ingenuity to overcome our underlying fears in such a situation.  Sara Maitland does a thorough job in explaining that almost all fairy stories allow for one arbitrary magical occurrence per fairy story.  Indeed, her insight into the Hansel Gretel story is that, apart from having a house made of ginger bread, there is no magic employed in the story either by the Witch or by the children.  The enactment and resolution of this tale relies entirely on the human resource and wit of the protagonists.

There is an imperative in fairy stories and science fiction which enables their seeds to flourish.  It is the generally held view that, in order to understand the consequences of “What if… there should only be one variation at a time from the physical laws of the universe as we know them. (citation needed)

This is not an entirely arbitrary rule still less a law, but it is the device which enables me the story teller to cosy up to you the listener.  “We are together in this alien landscape, stick with me and I will get you home safely.” At the same time, I believe we must start from a place that is familiar to both of us. Hence the necessity for including the minimum alterations to the laws of nature as you and I understand them. I am like the hunter, explaining the chasing down of the wildebeest by starting here at the camp fire and then bidding you follow into stranger, less familiar thickets. I may feel free to invent cataclysms but only one at a time.  It is essential to keep some contact with human reality as we know it.  Much of the power of “War of the Worlds” comes from its beginning in the suburban Woking and the outskirts of London.  (Incidentally, it is said the H.G. Wells derived his own malicious pleasure from destroying Woking as he had come to loathe it himself)

The not so obvious point is that all story-telling is about magic.  Whether you call it sci-fi, fantasy or gritty reality every story-teller aims to be a magician and create something that was not there before.  Whether it is a soap opera stream of unlikely, unrelated events or a worming mental stream of consciousness, it is all magicked up out of the creator’s mind. The skill of the story teller is in keeping the surprises coming. You have ownership of the narrative and you may use patterns to guess which twist or turn is coming next but I must endeavour to keep ahead of you.  Concealing my true intent until I produce the four aces one after another.

Above all, it is fun indulging in What Iffery. Exploring the fringes of possibilities that stream from the reality we experience every day.  We are safe here while all the time the Conditional flares and flickers around us.