Science (Fiction)

Even though I have Science as one of the subjects of this blog, I haven't talked about science yet and I probably won't talk about mundane science (i.e. what I do for a living) very much, if at all. I do intend to talk about more speculative aspects of science now and again. A good way to get into these topics is through science fiction, which has been an interest of mine all my life.

In my impressionable late teens I discovered William Gibson, who co-founded the subgenre of cyberpunk. The cool thing about the cyberpunk fiction of Gibson (and Bruce Sterling, among others in that genre) was that the stories generally took place in the near future and the extrapolations from current technology and settings were quite direct and believable. Even though at the beginning Gibson knew little about computers (still used typewriters well into the 80s, according to interviews) and even less about things like genetic engineering, he had a talent for "namedropping" all kinds of real and/or very believable tech into his text, which meshed well with his slangy, fast-paced, and poetic literary style.

I have a lot of things to say about Gibson's stories, but here I'll concentrate on one SF trope, the alien encounter, that I think Gibson got right and virtually all of classic SF gets wrong. From a purely scientific point of view (obviously there are other reasons to write alien stories they way they are written) if humans ever meet intelligent life from elsewhere in the galaxy/universe, there is very little chance it will be anything like us. In fact, it will be so utterly strange that it will be literally psychologically toxic to come in contact with it. William Gibson's short story Hinterlands (the link has the complete text) depicts this, as well as the desperation of the humans who are obsessed with becoming contactees and those who are psychologically crippled after being "rejected" as potential contactees. This is one of the best SF short stories I've ever read. I highly recommend the entire Burning Chrome (1986) collection, which represents the bulk of his published writing before his breakthrough novel Neuromancer came out in 1984.

Here's an exerpt from Hinterlands. The main character is ruminating on the story of the first human to make contact with the aliens:

"Hiro didn't trust me to get up on my own. Just before the Russian orderlies came in, he turned the lights on in my cubicle, by remote control, and let them strobe and stutter for a few seconds before they fell as a steady glare across the pictures of Saint Olga that Charmian had taped up on the bulkhead. Dozens of them, her face repeated in newsprint, in magazine glossy. Our Lady of the Highway.

Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, youngest woman of her rank in the Soviet space effort, was en route to Mars, solo, in a modified Alyut 6. The modifications allowed her to carry the prototype of a new airscrubber that was to be tested in the USSR's four-man Martian orbital lab. They could just as easily have handled the Alyut by remote, from Tsiolkovsky, but Olga wanted to log mission time. They made sure she kept busy, though; they stuck her with a series of routine hydrogen-band radio-flare experiments, the tail end of a lowpriority Soviet-Australian scientific exchange. Olga knew that her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer. But she was a diligent officer; she'd press the buttons at precisely the correct intervals.

With her brown hair drawn back and caught in a net, she must have looked like some idealized Pravda cameo of the Worker in Space, easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender. She checked the Alyut's chronometer again and poised her hand above the buttons that would trigger the first of her flares. Colonel Tovyevski had no way of knowing that she was nearing the point in space that would eventually be known as the Highway.

As she punched the six-button triggering sequence, the Alyut crossed those final kilometers and emitted the flare, a sustained burst of radio energy at 1420 megahertz, broadcast frequency of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to stations in the southern Urals and New South Wales. For 3.8 seconds the Alyut's radio~image was obscured by the afterimage of the flare.

When the afterimage faded from Earth's monitor screens, the Alyut was gone.

In the Urals a middle-aged Georgian technician bit through the stem of his favorite meerschaum. In New South Wales a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT".