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THE ROLE OF SCIENCE FICTION
Ben Bova
The year 1972 was marked by publication of a controversial book, The Limits to Growth, This study of the world‘s future, done by a team of MIT scientists with the aid of computer "models" of the future of our society, forecast a planet wide disaster unless humankind sharply limits its population growth and consumption of natural resources.
Most people were caught by surprise when the book came out. Many refused to believe that disaster is possible, probable, inevitableif we don‘t change our mode of running Spaceship Earth. But science fiction people were neither surprised nor outraged. The study was really old news to them. They‘d been making their own "models" of tomorrow and testing them all them all their lives.
For what the scientists attempted with their computer model is very much like the thing that science fiction writers and readers have been doing for decades. Instead of using a computer to "model" a future world society, science fiction writers have used their human imaginations. This gives the writers some enormous advantages.
One of the advantages is flexibility.
Science fiction writers are not in the business of predicting the future. They do something much more important. They try to show the many possible future that lie open to us.
For there is not simply a future, a time to come that‘s inevitable. Our future is built, bit by bit, minute by minute, by the actions of human beings. One vital role of science fiction is to show what kinds of future might result from certain kinds of human actions.
To communicate the ideas, the fears and hopes, the shape and feel of all the infinite possible futures, science fiction writers lean heavily on another of their advantages: the art of fiction.
For while a scientist‘s job has largely ended when he‘s reduced his data to tabular or graph from, the work of a science fiction writer is just beginning. His task is to convey the human story: the scientific basis for the possible future of his story is merely the background. Perhaps "merely" is too limiting a word. Much of science fiction consists of precious little except the background, the basic idea, the gimmick. But the best of science fiction, the stories that make a lasting impact on generations of readers, are stories about people. The people may be nonhuman. They may be robots or other types of machines. But they will be people, in the sense that human readers can feel for them, share their joys and sorrows, their dangers and their ultimate successes.
The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful characteror perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist‘s own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it‘s Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world‘s knowledge and powerthe stories that stand out in the minds of the reader are those whose characters are unforgettable.