On Tue, 29 Apr 1997 11:29:32 -0700 L. Timmel Duchamp wrote:
> From: L. Timmel Duchamp <ltimmel@HALCYON.COM>
> Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 11:29:32 -0700
> Subject: science & science fiction
> To: FEMINISTSF@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
>
> 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
A very good summary of the situation. It is *always* a mistake to
think of any aspect of behaviour as intrinsic. Thanks Timmi.
farah
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