Anyone who wants to talk about "hard science fiction" needs to
be *explicitly* clear about the following: (1) Science fiction,
including "hard science fiction," is a form of literature, not
science. It never occured to me that this was a problem until
I read an article by a college English instructor in the Spring,
1997 issue of _Extrapolation_ actually claiming that "hard sf"
is a "branch" of science: a mistake only someone who is completely
ignorant about the practice of science could make; and (2) "hard
sf" grossly misrepresents how science works and how practicing
scientists conduct research. Practicing scientists work collectively
and collaboratively. My partner of 27 years is a research mathematician
whose work has included not only the most abstract forms of differential
geometry, but many applied science projects as well (ranging from
oceanography, geology, mathematical anthropology, to his current
work constructing algorithims for a computer graphics team).
Though mathematics is the least technology-dependent science discipline,
he, like the many dozens of his colleagues I've met, almost *never*
works alone. Two or three times a year we have visitors in our
house, mathematicians who work long-distance with him, who need
intense personal contact, involving hours of talk, of drawing
pictures for one another, of trying out various possibilities,
interspersed with sessions in which each person works by him-
or herself. I washed laboratory dishes & did other lab housekeeping
tasks about 25 years ago in a genetics lab-- there the collective
process was even more evident. Many of my friends have been biologists,
who never work alone, but always in groups. & for the last year
and a half, I've been copy-editing medical research papers. The
ONLY single-author papers come from clinical physicians writing
up a case-study about an interesting clinical observation. All
the real research papers are written by multiple authors. Nothing
could be more obvious but that science is almost never practiced
individually. & yet hard sf represents scientists as individual
heroes with unique intellects. Popular representations of science--
including the way the Nobel Prizes are packaged & contextualized--
are largely responsible for this image. But the fact was, Einstein
& all those other scientists at Gottingen were not loners. It's
no accident that they chose to congregate, rather than living
off in garrets sweating out the feats of their genius alone.
Nor was it an accident that the physicists sequestered at Los
Alamos to work on developing the atom bomb. In science, synergy
is the name of the game.
In real life, the collective aspect of science practice is conducive
to feminist forms of interaction (if only the political & economic
contexts that determine funding & research priorities didn't drive
science in feminist-unfriendly ways).
In short, "hard sf" projects a narrative ideology congenial to
a certain way of looking at the world. The story it tells is
a simplistic, fake version of how science works. It leaves out
the sociology of knowledge, and the political and economic framing
that real scientists would love to
escape.
I would note, though, that real world science & hard sf are both
driven by an ethic of the "possible," viz., the desire to do &
to discover or learn what is possible, by the definition of knowledge
as the conquest of the unknown, *regardless of the consequences*.
This ethic proclaims that if something *can* be done, or known,
then it *should* be done, or discovered, simply because it hasn't
been before, & is therefore a challenge to human amour propre.
*This*, not the methods of science per se, is where feminism
confronts science as a problem. & this ethic (besides a certain
boy's club mentality) is what the self-proclaimed "real hard sf"
afficionados refuse to allow feminist depictions of science, however
accurate (& however based on the real-world science experience
of the writers), to be called "hard."
Timmi Duchamp
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