The sociology of science fiction -

The sociology of science fiction

22/12/2024

Culture • Literature

By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*

Science fiction is the literary genre that perhaps most makes us think about solutions to possibly insoluble problems.

Introduction

Science fiction is not the literary genre most celebrated by critics, which explains why only one of its great names has been honored with the Nobel Prize to date.[I] On the other hand, there is no literature that makes us think more about solutions to possibly unsolvable problems, and often builds an imaginary fantasy, whether optimistic or pessimistic, for the future, past and present of humanity.

To a large extent, classic science fiction works are characteristically optimistic about the fate of humanity, but several also fall into the dystopian realm. It should be said that the relationship with the conditions of social coexistence and even the maintenance of human ethics are important elements in the perception of fiction writers, and not only the treatment of technological evolution.

Our interest will be in establishing a certain sociological and economic problematization based on a script of fictional works, with four assumptions constituting the most interesting seasoning for interaction with them: (i) fictional reading becomes more interesting the more challenges are posed to our imagination; it would not be fiction if it were obvious; (ii) the best fiction combines temporal rupture, sociological change and spatial reconfiguration; (iii) interaction with the facts of non-fictional reality, establishing a semiotic identity with history; (iv) production of new civilizational identities and differentiated technological arrangements. We consider that these four factors constitute the core of a sociology of science fiction and we will address each of the aspects in accordance with the treatment of the works that we will briefly present.

Temporal ruptures occur both in movements of abrupt historical changes or in subtle temporal leaps. These movements are often more radical ruptures and can occur in short periods of time, as if “days were worth years and years were worth centuries,” as Vladimir Lenin predicted. The logic of temporal ruptures has always haunted humanity, whether by Aristotelian and religious thinkers, or by materialists, Epicureans, and atheists.

In science fiction, the human condition is expressed in the continuous modification of the space-time relationship, in such a way that different times and spaces overlap and integrate. The ruptures can be merely spatial, such as linear travel in the ever-expanding universe, or temporal-spatial when multiple dimensions are integrated.

Sociological changes are also part of the way different authors see things, with a considerable portion of science fiction modeling historical time according to a sociology that is not very dynamic, which is curious since the biggest changes in history are in social patterns, even though this has changed considerably in more recent authors such as Cixim Liu and Charles Melville. Added to this is the lack of emphasis on the treatment of economic configurations.

The social and economic arrangements of a considerable portion of science fiction are established in a kind of continuous time of capitalism, except for the possibility of dystopian forms, whose definition would be of established chaotic barbarity. As already mentioned, some of the most recent authors have sought to build a broader dialogue with social changes, economic and environmental crises, but the classics of this literature are not very keen on dealing with economic and social conditions and ruptures. Finally, spatial reconfiguration, something that the authors deal with, to a large extent, in the form of clashes between civilizations with similar technological levels and with integrated spatial formations.

The saga of the 20th century

Our brief excursion begins with two Victorian authors, figures who, having passed through the height of the intoxicating 19th century, emerged in the 20th century still quite uncertain about the possibilities of humanity and its science, largely positivists, but restless. I believe that Jules Verne (French) and H.G. Wells (English) are largely exemplary of the production of a Science Fiction that explores the above factors that guide us, especially spatial and temporal transitions or ruptures.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) is the typical example of a Parisian petite bourgeois of the mid-1851th century. In the spring of 1868, we find Jules Verne in cafés occupied by Bonapartist troops, but in the company of figures such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. In the head of that man, maps and fantastic journeys. Thus, one afternoon in XNUMX, Verne had the magnificent idea of supposing that man would go to the moon. This indictment of space travel, entitled From Earth to Moon, becomes, perhaps, the initial work of understanding the future geopolitical role of the USA, not to mention Marx's impossible pen and his journalistic correspondence with the New york tribune, which already established what would become in the 20th century, what is now the Empire in agony imposed by the Asian winds and by the environmental and sanitary metamorphosis that saturates the air in every part of the planet.

From Earth to Moon has a fantastic beginning that gives us a glimpse of how 20th century capitalism will develop: the arms industry and the production of permanent wars. The American Civil War had just ended and Jules Verne followed it, just like Karl Marx, meticulously following the advance of the arms industry, but his novelistic interest diverted him to a possibility that would be a milestone: space travel and the difficulty of building a logistics that would make this technological leap possible.

This author, who had already predicted the submarine, in the fantastic 20 thousand leagues under the sea and genetic manipulation in fabulous fiction The mysterious Island, anticipates the trip to the Moon by a hundred years (1868/1968), and is also a passionate romance between research and scientific practicality, including foreseeing the need for chemical fuel to launch a space capsule, as well as, curiously, the use of Florida (where Cape Canaveral is located) as a launching point for space vehicles: “the incandescent jet rose to a prodigious height, the flames illuminated all of Florida and, for an incalculable time, night was replaced by day in almost the entire region”.

In a leap we go to Mars and the viral presence so central today, through the pens of HG Wells (1866-1946), we have in The War of the Worlds, the best description of the geopolitical, technological and biological diversity dispute that can be given in fictional planetary terms. In this classic published in hardcover in 1898, we have the most ambitious anticipation of the colliding forces of different worlds and the fantastic presence of a redeeming virus. Yes, it is a virus that defeats the Martian occupation forces and enables the continuity and domination of humanity in the solar system.

In a single book, this novelist biologist, because Wells was a scientist and worked with the leading biologist of the late 19th century, “Darwin’s dog” and Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas Huxley, manages to give us a glimpse of the anticipation of robotic wars (see today’s drones), viral reactions and, mainly, the recomposition of power relations in a framework of dispute between very unequal forces, but with factors of unpredictability in nature that alter historical movements.

In this fantastic Worlds War, he interposes the metaphor that the capitalist logic of unbridled consumption is similar to the form of fantastic beings that are largely just “brains” and far from the natural condition of life, far from all “these organic fluctuations of moods and emotions”, as he describes it. He therefore anticipates artificial intelligence and this proximity to a dehumanized humanity, which Wells’ Martians ideally represent, but which are ultimately defeated by a primitive virus!

Wells had previously imagined the impossibility of linear time travel, something that Einstein's relativistic physics would demonstrate, and with the critique of the notion of progressive history, something that Marx had already demonstrated, in his Time Machine (1895), with human evolution leading us to a system of genetically differentiated castes, ultimately suppressing humanity.

We have entered the 20th century, our creator and destroyer of souls and roles, a century that, as Eric Hobsbawm stated, has extreme humanity and brought fiction and reality closer together than ever before in human history, with the nuclear chapter perhaps being the greatest anticipation of the end of civilization in intergalactic history.

The authors of the twentieth century (born in the twentieth century) are perhaps from other realities, perhaps from parallel universes, and who, through spatial folds or inter-universe holes, have gifted us with a formidable imagination. I will focus on seven authors who construct an impenetrable mosaic of the changing realities of that and this derivative century: Huxley; Orwell; Hesse; Dick; Bradbury; Adams and Asimov.

Aldous Huxley, Huxley's grandson who was Wells' mentor, inaugurated the dystopian fiction that has become the fictional standard of today. However, this author was of formidable grandiloquence, his logic and interactivity with complex time make him an unparalleled and perhaps unsurpassed novelist. Admirable new world It is a masterpiece, bringing together at the same time the dramatic fantasy of Shakespeare, the realism of Charles Dickens and the fierce anguish of Alan Poe.

Brave New World should be read in sighs, the author's logic mixes sociological cognition expressed in form and envisioned society: social control, integrated psychology, inequalities falsely suppressed by spatial exile. The social dispute, between the isolation of those who were subjected to atomic radiation, a type of virus as or more deadly present in our now and near future, or the forgetting of history, something that Huxley will return to in The monkey and the essence, his latest novel that considers how humanity will end before thinking of itself as a civilization, something that the various fascist and neoliberal waves establish as a standard in the current temporal fluidity.

This formidable dystopian author will be followed by a sociological fiction writer at heart, an agent of humanity and a radical socialist: George Orwell. Eric Arthur Blair had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and in the beautiful and tragic novel by Cuban Leonardo Padura he appears as a journalist who fights for the republican cause, a fantastic and moving representation of the builder of futures as Marx thought of in the Communist Manifesto.

1984 Today, in these critical times for humanity, it is an opera about freedom and a kind of prediction about the near future. The inability to control no longer exists and “big brother” becomes the essence of life itself against the executioner that is becoming naturalized: it is full social control through social networks and neoliberal ideology. The fantasy constructed by the author, in our view, the one that most predicted the end of the human condition, establishes another difficulty: will it be possible for humanity to continue existing with the end of creativity and its complete control by machines and artificial intelligence?

Ray Bradbury adds to this anguish, an author known for Fahrenheit 451, but in The whole city sleeps We have the most painful moment in science fiction, a thing of the anguish of a capitalism constructing an increasingly empty humanity, like this: “there were a thousand people in the shop windows, rigid and silent, and three people in the street, the echoes following them like shots coming from the storefronts…”. The construction of a sociological fiction reaches its peak in this author, making it possible, for the first time, to observe the end of capitalist logic and the chaotic construction of barbarism, a dynamic that already had in Huxley the property of affirming the end of humanity. But humanity never bows to any teleological or dystopian end.

It is in this fantastic deconstruction that the wizard of psychological fantasy will impose himself. Philip Dick will live long enough to think about the deformation of the human psyche and the establishment of radical and grotesque worlds. Two fantastic works by this wizard are certainly worth reading: The android hunter e The Man in the High Castle.

What's best about both works is humanity's struggle to adjust to the overwhelming crises it creates, establishing what is the sequence of a civilization lost due to its inability to control technology, or perhaps more correctly, the complete control of capital over humanity. Dick must have met Marx in some other dimension and thus established how space-time compression disintegrates humanity. Dick's characters with such ephemeral and self-based souls click's Fictional nervous systems might tell us that we are already in this world.

After so much bad luck for humanity, it is worth reaching the optimism of the most famous and fantastic winner of the Nebula, the Nobel Prize for Science Fiction. There is no way to discredit this genius, who is so little celebrated by non-fictionists. nerds. I am referring to Isaac Asimov and his fictional contribution to the destiny of humanity. Asimov would be a kind of continuation of Verne and Wells, whether due to the futuristic optimism of humanity or the creativity of the authors, without detracting from the creative madness of the others. The extensive work of this author takes us to two fantastic productions: Foundation e The gods themselves.

the trilogy Foundation is an unparalleled work, whether for the historical adventure it offers, or for the psychological construction of the characters and the idyllic possibility of humanity. Asimov is to the 20th century what Homer was to antiquity. In these two authors, humanity overcomes itself and rebuilds itself. In the Greek classic, the “Odyssey” is established as a victory of rationality over the mythical. In Asimov Foundation reestablishes human rationality and expands beyond the mythical.

Foundation constitutes the main long-term historical work – as Braudel thought – of world science fiction. That was until the emergence of the Chinese Liu, for those who are afraid of Russians and Chinese, science fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries will be unwelcoming. Asimov establishes five human eras, we would be in the first, the rupture with the era of capitalism, which he calls “cosmic isolationism” will only occur according to the “old” with the nuclear destruction of two thirds of the planet, something that our current tragic experience with the meaning of nuclear destruction knows that what will remain will be a cosmic void.

Foundation is an epic that begins in the year “11.988 of the Galactic Era”. Asimov introduces us to a victorious humanity that has intervened in the Cosmos and now lives on countless planets. The author’s central thesis is that humanity literally came out ahead in the dispute over the Universe, a thesis that he would only develop in another very curious work: The end of eternity.

The human species decided to explore space and build its future independent of time travel and defined the order of expansion in the Galaxy, establishing a differentiated culture and inhabiting planets with a certain diversity, but centered on a hegemony controlled from a central planet: “Trantor”. The Earth remained in the historical past, little known and which will be the specific object of reunion in a peculiar moment of crisis for interplanetary humanity.

The other work by the Russian author who has been eradicated in the USA, which I consider magnetic, is The Gods Themselves. The absence of humanity and the discovery of solutions to the main problems of our civilization are exposed in this fiction. The author completely strips himself of the 20th century and is in another temporal universe, anticipates the fiction of multiverses and treats sociologically, albeit in a positive way, the interaction between universes in conflict. In this work, for the first time science fiction ceases to be in the flat Universe of linear continuity, and we begin to have a multidimensional and crooked Universe, almost close to existential chaos.

When Asimov wrote his first fictional novels about the use of innovative nuclear energy, it seemed that human optimism had reached its peak, at least in that western part of capitalist humanity. Today we know that this was a childish illusion, but Asimov's creativity remains. The "limit catastrophe" will force humanity to move towards the second and third eras of its cosmic expansion. An interesting detail in Asimov's work is that time is not linear, with different realities coexisting in parallel times. The "old man" was the first to conceive of multiverses, something that 21st century physics would curiously consider, and which current fiction has made common.

It is this chaotic Asimov that establishes the tragicomic and unparalleled Douglas Adams. The incoherent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes it possible to travel through incontinuous time without leaving your place, because the Universe expands and retroacts permanently, that is, the universe pulsates. Arthur Dent's comedy and his overwhelming criticism of capitalism as a primitive human form, and of the Universe in permanent destruction make this work a reading that eases any anguish, showing that we can and will travel through the universe and reach its impossible confines, even if the last restaurant is on the "edges of the Galaxy". To travel in the Universe we cannot require mechanical or quantum technologies, the only way is the technologies of imagination and the projection of the rupture of chaotic ideas, metaphysics returning to the world of chaos.

However, we must think about how Western scientificity and rationality integrate with the imaginative game of the Eastern world, something that, as we will report, will be the core, in our reading, of 21st century science fiction. Hermann Hesse is a difficult read, but central to thinking about the future of science fiction in the West. Interestingly, this work The Glass Bead Game It is the only futuristic novel to win the Nobel Prize.

What interests us, however, is that in the fictional exercise of the continuity of humanity, three forces established by Hesse act overwhelmingly in Any Day, human intemperance and rational incoherence: (i) “the renunciation of the creation of works of art”, a total fascist subordination to the denial of what humanity itself is. Here Hesse and Huxley seem to meet; (ii) the denial of freedom and the affirmation of authoritarian universality as a historical condition and; (iii) the philosophical critique of alienation, from a perspective that only the definitive construction of the “human tree” would make it possible to break with the “egoism” that makes travel to other universes impossible.

In these three elements Hesse is closer to Epicurus and Marx than to a dystopian, even though in the end his novel takes us to the end of humanity.

Reading science fiction from the last two centuries has become a more than necessary exercise at this critical moment for humanity. Learning about the future of humanity involves conceiving of scattered futures and chaotic conditions that only science fiction can open minds and ideas to overcome the distressing present.

Cixin Liu is from the new farm Science fiction along with the excellent China Melville. The three-body problem inaugurates a new way of conceiving the human relationship with the cosmos, from here on the human relationship will not be of universal dominion and even God becomes definitively “Einsteinian”, that is, the entire weight of “universal relativity” is imposed and the “we are not alone” and “our neighborhood” existing becomes a fantastic dramatic spectacle.

Cixim Liu raises several difficult questions throughout his trilogy: (i) is humanity the result of a single biological experiment, or is it the result of other galactic experiments?; (ii) are human contacts of universal projection, that is, are we a more than magnificent species, as Asimov thought, or are we a simple cosmic condition, as Liu thinks?; (iii) how will our species evolve in the next five thousand years? And what is the best way to interact with planet Earth in the face of the possible dystopias that arise? A question that completely escapes fantasy and becomes so heavy in the present moment of this confused and lost humanity.

The idea of crisis and its possible solution moves both Asimov and Cixim Liu, in both there seems to be a “magical” condition for human difficulties to collectively make a difference. ethos different from what the authors experience in their present. The solutions to crises in the two sagas are based on different understandings of collective intervention. For Asimov, the weight of individuality and possible solutions only from a single psyche is very strong; something very different in Liu, in whom only collective and complex solutions can be reasonable in the face of the limitations that civilization imposes on him. trisolaris imposes on us.

The 21st Century – Psychohistorians, Sophons and Interplanetary Geopolitics

Foundation is a fictional landmark in many ways, with the long-term historical treatment that the author makes possible being the main feature. The novel begins with a striking sentence: “there were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy” all subordinate to a gigantic center of power located on the planet “Trantor”. This geopolitical specification is something that Asimov absolved from his historical reading of the exhaustion of the Roman Empire, transposing the movements of crisis and disintegration of that historical experience to a framework of human presence, but not of humanity, throughout the Milky Way. The debate around different or possible other humanities.

The Galactic Empire had existed for ten thousand years, consisting of a nucleus of four outer planets that would later be called the “four kingdoms”. Technological development was based on an alleged almost linear evolution of the conditions that were established on the primitive planet Earth, which was not recognized as the cradle of “humanity”.

Humanity has been built over the last hundred thousand years, a very short time considering cosmic time, and so as we enter the 21st century we are faced with a new and intriguing fate, now intergalactic and with humanity imprisoned by its lack of audacity, this brings us to the greatest fiction writer, so far, of the current century: Cixin Liu.

The Chinese author starts from two hypotheses: (i) civilizations are short, in terms of cosmological time and; (ii) there are countless. In his view, there are infinite civilizations at different scales of development and access to control of space-time variables. The logic of historical sociological development exposed by the author marks the difference in relation to Western authors of the 20th century: there is no longer a supreme humanity, but rather one among many civilizations in dispute.

Cixin Liu relates six points that are key to understanding civilizational patterns: (a) she relates history to scientific movements. Science is not neutral, it is a historical interactivity and, therefore, a relationship of societal power; (b) human relationships are fragmented both by everyday life and by the growing imagination of social networks; (c) life and thinking are diverse. Thus, we do not know how much the bushes in our homes can think, so much so that reasoning is diverse, with countless other forms of expression.

(d) The universe is dialectical, that is, the scale of universal expansion is continuous, but subject to an unpredictable and uncertain logic. Conceiving the Universe as continuously expansive and dialectical implies affirming that the cosmic revolution is permanent; (e) finally, Cixin Liu speaks to us of the necessary radical human transformation. We are in permanent change and nothing will make us interrupt the cosmic and human revolution, except death. Do we want to die? (f) what are the limits of human inventiveness? Are we close or far from these limits, or, in the author's terms, what are our sophons?

Cixin Liu's books: The three-body problem; The end of death e The dark forest, are the best we can imagine in these first decades of the 21st century, something that Asimov would admire. Science fiction remains a necessary reading.

*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UFPA. Author, among other books, of Agenda of debates and theoretical challenges: the trajectory of dependency and the limits of Brazilian peripheral capitalism and its regional constraints (Paka-Tatu).

References

Aldous Huxley. Admirable new world. Sao Paulo: Globo, 2014.

Cixin Liu. The three-body problem. New York: Routledge, 2006.

George Orwell. 1984🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000.

Herman Hesse. The glass bead game. Sao Paulo: Record, 2000.

Isaac Asimov. Foundation. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Jules Verne. Complete works. Sao Paulo: New Frontier, 2000.

Leonardo Padura. The Man Who Loved Dogs. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.

Philip Dick. The android hunter. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. Sao Paulo: Globo, 2000.