Science Fiction and the Two Cultures

In 1959, the noted English scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave a famous lecture titled “The Two Cultures” about the breakdown of communication between the sciences and humanities, later published in book form as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Snow wrote then that the

intellectual life of…western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups…[with] literary intellectuals at one pole, scientists at the other, with [in between] a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes hostility and dislike.

As Snow noted, such a relationship is not a healthy one, either for intellectual life or society generally, and I suppose I have long liked to think of science fiction as a meeting point for the “two cultures” C.P. Snow famously discussed.

After all, science fiction is by definition a fiction informed by, borrowing from, and explicitly concerning the possibilities of science. Additionally, just as science fiction writers draw inspiration from the sciences, so do scientists often draw inspiration from science fiction, which frequently anticipates their researches. Werner Von Braun was influenced by Jules Verne, Leo Szilard by H.G. Wells, Freeman Dyson by Olaf Stapledon. (Indeed, Dyson wrote the foreword to a recent edition of Stapledon’s most important work, Patrick McCarthy’s annotated 2004 edition of Star Maker.) At the same time, many successful science fiction writers have done a great deal to popularize the sciences (as Wells, Asimov, and Clarke certainly did), while perhaps also bringing popular science readers to fiction. Nonetheless, as the recent furor over The Fix’s review of the October, 2007 Analog also made clear to me, science fiction also mirrors that split between the two cultures.

Revisiting The Two Cultures
It may, admittedly, seem odd that I have elected to discuss Snow’s idea at all. His “two cultures” argument has been taken to task by figures ranging from the novelist Thomas Pynchon to the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould over the years. Indeed, Snow himself backed off from it, reassessing his argument in a second piece just four years later.

There is no question that Snow painted his picture with very broad strokes, and some of his predictions have since proved to be far off the mark. His depictions of scientists and literary intellectuals, it must be admitted, read like caricatures. In all fairness, however, he acknowledged even the first time around that he was looking at the extreme ends of the spectrum, the “hardest” and “softest” branches of knowledge, and that this was very much a British perspective, less applicable to intellectual life in other countries. And that he was excessive in his claims does not necessarily mean there was never any truth to them—far from it.

There is such a split in intellectual life. It is not the only one, and it may not even be the most important of them. There are many splits cutting across (as well as within) science and art, many gradations between the poles, and many exceptions to the rules (literary critics well-acquainted with complexity theory, astrophysicists conversant in philosophy). However, a big gap between science generally and arts/humanities generally does exist. (If you doubt it, just take a look at this recent Space Review article about “The humanities and space history.”) And Snow’s famous analysis offers some worthwhile insights into the matter.

Money Talks
Not the least of these is the economics of the two cultures gap. Joseph Conrad summarized the issue about as well as anyone in his novel The Secret Agent through the diplomat Mr. Vladimir:

Any imbecile that has got an income believes in [science]. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow. It is the sacrosanct fetish …[and an attack against] it will alarm [his] every selfishness [because]…they believe that in some mysterious way science is at the source of their material prosperity.

It may be argued that today’s public is less credulous than the one Mr. Vladimir spoke about, and it is certainly the case that their support for science is not quite so knee-jerk, if ever it was. Government, business, and the general public are quite happy to disregard scientific findings they do not like, as the current controversies over Creationism and global warming demonstrate. And they can be quite tightfisted when it comes to Big Science, particularly the astronomical kind at the center of Conrad’s story. (In constant dollars, NASA today is funded at half its 1966 level, and many think this is still far too much—the grain of truth in Dan Brown’s ridiculous thriller Deception Point.) In fact, politicians who want to present themselves as populists know they can score some cheap points by attacking scientific research programs as pork barrel spending, whether or not they really are such. And while the “Frankenstein” scenario has been with us for centuries, today the fear of the untoward consequences of scientific research may be greater than ever, amid fears of gray goo scenarios and clones run amok.

Nonetheless, most people still sense that connection between the “nerd-magic” of the hard sciences and the wealth they enjoy or wish for, and that feeling influences their attitude toward science. Even when they have almost no knowledge of what science actually is, they speak piously of the need for improved science education. (It helps that this is a cheap way to avoid talking about serious economic reform, as the debates in Edwardian Britain demonstrate, and the Thomas Friedmans of the world today remind us.) Religious fundamentalists may detest a scientific worldview, but have absolutely no problem with advertising the fact on websites that would be inconceivable without the quantum physics that suggests that if there is a God, he does indeed play dice with the universe.

By contrast, Vladimir notes in Conrad’s novel, “Artists—art critics and such like—[are] people of no account,” which is precisely why he has his agent provocateur target the Greenwich Observatory rather than the National Gallery. The unvarnished truth is that unlike the wielders of mighty nerd-magics, unquestionably useful people, they have a very hard time pointing to a contribution to society’s “material prosperity.” (A perfect example of the limpness of most such attempts is economist Richard Florida’s writing on behalf of a broad “creative class.”) The world might not be able to get by without its engineers, but “art critics and such like” might never be missed.

The rewards of their careers reflect that. As Snow himself put it:

to be brutal…young scientists know that…their contemporaries and counterparts in English or History will be lucky to earn 60 percent as much. No young scientist of any talent would feel that he isn’t wanted or that his work is ridiculous, as did the hero of Lucky Jim.

Science is not so lucrative a path as finance (as so many economists have lamented over the years), and the hard fact of the matter is that the New Economy still leaves an awful lot of computer programmers stacking shelves at Wal-Mart. Only an infinitesimal minority ever enter that clichéd nerd’s Valhalla of software company ownership, where they are compensated for the humiliations of high school by the chance to gloat over the sight of the jocks that picked on them washing their Ferraris, and the attentions of girls even better-looking than the ones who earlier blew them off.

Nonetheless, it is generally regarded as a more profitable ticket than that English degree. This is not only the case in a private sector which has little use for English majors, but even in the university itself, from the graduate teaching assistantship onwards—with the difference actually sharpening in recent years. Unless the English degree is a stop on the path to a law career, there will be no Valhalla for these nerds to even dream of. Instead, they will probably go down quick into nerd hell, teaching bored and unwilling students for a pittance, the humiliations of high school for them unending, often literally.

The difference in their economic fortunes has a moral weight as well as a material one, given the economic Calvinism that simplemindedly equates wealth with virtue and the lack of it with moral failure. And adding still more insult to injury, any area of study where achievement is difficult to quantify is regarded as suspect, the arts major commonly viewed not only as a person of poor economic prospects, but as intellectually second-rate. We tend to think that those who work with words are not quite as clever as those who work with numbers. We compare an intellectual challenge to rocket science, not metaphysics. A genius is an Einstein, not a Kant or a Tolstoy. (If anything, the poor training of American students in math probably sharpens that feeling by making the subject seem all the more intimidating to the non-specialist.)

Of Problem-Posers and Problem-Solvers
These economic differences are what give weight to our stereotypes about the sensibilities of the two cultures, another point about which Snow had much to say. Scientists are traditionally characterized as optimistic, and for Snow, the grain of truth in this for him is their tendency “to be impatient to see if something can be done: and inclined to think that it can be done, until it’s proved otherwise.” Arthur C. Clarke aptly summarized this sensibility in the first of his “three laws of prediction”:

When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

In short, scientists tend to be at their best, and truest to their vocation, when they act as problem-solvers.

Moreover, while research scientists may in Snow’s assessment be collectively more liberal than any other profession, engineers—and it is these who tend to attract the admiration of Americans (is any American theoretical scientist as celebrated as Thomas Edison?)—are, in Snow’s words, “conservative, to a man.” They are “absorbed in making things, and the present social order is good enough for them.” That combination of conservatism and optimism, that image of the practical problem-solver who gets things done (however simplistic, inaccurate or outdated) fits in quite easily with American values, whatever the ambivalence about science itself.

By contrast, the humanities tend to be “problem-posing” rather than problem-solving, for they grapple with the unsettled, ambiguous insides of human beings instead of a readily dissected and manipulated external world. (Indeed, it has been noted that scientists, thinking less about the social order and more about what machines can do, tend to overestimate the prospects of change in the future; literary intellectuals, to underestimate it because of their focus on the psychological and social factors that tend to impede change.)

The turn that high culture took in the twentieth century emphasizes this with its stress on character, psychology, and introspection, on irony and uncertainty, on themes like alienation, anomie, angst, and many other dreaded words brought to you by the letter “a.” Those who delve deeply into it are probably more likely than the average to identify with such attitudes and ideas. (And the economic realities of life after college are likely to sharpen such feelings. As Snow noted, “some of the disgruntlement of [Kingsley] Amis and his associates is the disgruntlement of the underemployed arts graduate.”)

The mainstream, however, has little time or patience for such things. Instead, it sees alienation as a fashionable pose for kids who wear black, don’t talk to anyone, and hate everything, which we complacently take to mean that “it’s them and not us,” and that we should take every pain to stamp out that difference. (Before Janet Jackson’s nipple, there was Marilyn Manson to frighten easily frightened parents.) Introspection is morbid, suspect, even—though we rarely put it so bluntly in our superficially ultra-p.c. times—effete. The social critic is readily dismissed as a whiner, and “whining” is an unpardonable sin. The advent of post-structuralism, “queer” theory, critical theory and their assorted cousins and fellow travelers, and the campus culture wars into which they have fed (as well as the rightward shift of American politics in recent decades) has only exacerbated the attitude of the general public.

The Two Revolutions: Golden Age and New Wave (And Cyberpunk)
These images of an economically useful, socially “safe,” problem-solving culture of hard science, and an “impractical,” “subversive,” problem-posing culture of the arts, certainly have their counterparts in the main currents in the history of science fiction, with the Golden Age mirroring the former, the New Wave the latter. As Isaac Asimov wrote in his foreword to the seminal New Wave anthology, Dangerous Visions:

When [John] Campbell started his revolution, the new writers who came into the field carried with them the aura of the university, of science and engineering, of slide rule and test tube. Now the new authors who enter the field bear the mark of the poet and the artist, and somehow carry with them the aura of Greenwich Village and the Left Bank.

The three most important writers of the Golden Age—Robert Heinlein (engineer), Isaac Asimov (professor of biochemistry), and Arthur C. Clarke (a math and physics degree-holder who proposed the communications satellite in a scientific paper)—were indeed from that world of slide rules and test tubes. And such were comparatively rare in the New Wave (which for our purposes should include precursors like Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, and Philip K. Dick).

Moreover, the fiction they wrote really did reflect those origins and differences of outlook. Golden Age science fiction is a fiction of doers rather than brooders, engineers and space captains, optimistic problem-solvers, not least of all because they are tackling primarily technical challenges (the speculative element usually being rooted in the hard, physical sciences).

Such optimism is, as Snow noted, conducive to a conservative outlook (if there’s a problem, don’t worry about social change, just get better toys), and Golden Age science fiction is generally remembered as having been conservative in that way. Of course, it included left-wing Futurians like Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, but you can read a great deal of Asimov, at least, and not have much sense of his politics—something that cannot be said of Robert Heinlein’s fiction, which frequently epitomizes the above-mentioned stereotypes about the engineer’s outlook.

New Wave science fiction, however, is reputed for being more pessimistic, more prone to dissent than accept the “present social order as good enough.” It also tended to make use of the experimental techniques that twentieth century writers and critics often deemed to be better-suited to capturing the actuality of our lives than older, “realist” approaches. New Wave writers value ideas just as much as their predecessors, but as Michael Moorcock put it in the introduction to his anthology The Best SF Stories From New Worlds:

by “idea” we do not mean merely a technical gimmick of some kind, but the presence in the writer’s work of a serious intention, a wish to say something about the human condition.

In other words, their science fiction is not about coping with technical challenges, but coping with the same messy human issues central to mainstream literature, the “softer” sciences of mind and soul; instead of the machine that fixes our problems, how human neurosis and stupidity get in the way and muck things up.

As one detractor of New Wave fiction put it on Analog’s board, the stories basically come back to “unyieldingly pessimistic introspection” inside some dystopia, amounting to “The world sucks. Life is pointless. Woe is me. The end.”

This is, of course, a caricature, but even a quick comparison of the writing of Heinlein and Ellison makes the point. And while many New Wave stories are formidably plotted, packed with action and rich in technical detail, the difference in sensibility would be crucial. The various incarnations of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, or Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s original Dune trilogy, bear much resemblance to traditionally heroic figures—but their stories are ultimately tragic rather than inspiring.

It should not be forgotten that there was continuity as well as rupture in the field, and that a great many members of the old guard in fact helped nurture the science fiction emerging in the 1960s. As Asimov himself tells us in that foreword, Frederik Pohl during his tenure as editor of Galaxy may have done as much as any other American editor to bring the new fiction to audiences. Dune, the novel that many credit with marking the end of one age and the beginning of another with its demonstration that science fiction could produce works as rich and complex as any other branch of literature, first appeared in the pages of Campbell’s own magazine.

Nonetheless, the clash between the two cultures ought not to be downplayed. A great many of the partisans of “science” reacted quite fiercely to this incursion by the “artists” onto their turf. The remarks in Analog’s forum these last few weeks are mild next to the venom directed against Dangerous Visions and New Worlds in their day, as Ellison and Moorcock have often recounted.

That reaction even seems to have come close to succeeding in burying the New Wave, as much of the counterculture with which it was identified has been buried, along with the greater scope it provided for the viewpoint “art” is seen to embody. There is a widespread sense that its output is passé, its moment passed. The Heinleins and Asimovs and Clarkes remain household names in a way that the Aldisses and Moorcocks are not, a consequence of which is that one would have a far easier time finding a complete set of Heinlein’s tales than Moorcock’s at their local library or bookshop. Indeed, much of Brian Aldiss’s treatment of the history of science fiction in these decades in Trillion Year Spree has been criticized (unfairly) as a sore loser’s reaction to those developments as hard SF fought back and won.

Or did it? One can certainly point to moments of synthesis. In his famous preface to the influential Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Bruce Sterling acknowledged both streams as influences on cyberpunk, the cutting edge of hard science fiction in the 1980s. Even before describing the debt to the “harder” tradition, he mentioned:

the streetwise edginess of Harlan Ellison. The visionary shimmer of Samuel Delany. The free-wheeling zaniness of Norman Spinrad and the rock esthetic of Michael Moorcock; the intellectual daring of Brian Aldiss; and, always, J.G. Ballard.

For all its attention to technical detail, the movement’s defining author, William Gibson, was an English major, and not one who was particularly tech-savvy at that. His vision of the Internet was more intuitive and metaphorical than an extrapolation from computer science, about which he was no expert. (The story goes that when he got his first computer—this after already penning the second of his Sprawl trilogy novels—he heard the whirring of his disk drive and took it to mean the machine was broken.)

It is not Asimov or Heinlein that Gibson speaks about at length in No Maps For These Territories, but Ballard and William Burroughs; Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Robert Sheckley that he cites as influences in his introduction to a new edition of his collection, Burning Chrome. “The Gernsback Continuum,” perhaps his first really important story, is an explicit rejection of the Golden Age’s vision of the future, and from there on out, the style and sensibility of the New Wave is unmistakable. Indeed, I am tempted to say that it is New Wave with a hard SF veneer.

And Beyond
Whatever it was exactly, the work of Gibson and others like him clearly appealed to engineers and poets alike—but then cyberpunk’s moment was twenty years ago. (Indeed, after I used the term in an article that recently went to press, my editor said that as a member of “the younger generation” he simply didn’t know what it meant.) While some speak of “post-cyberpunk,” the field is today a fragmented one, where no magazine or movement can claim to be the center of the science fiction universe, no one or two or three writers even make the claim to being a defining voice these last twenty years or so.

And amid that fragmentation, the clash between science and art, engineers and poets, continues. Commercially, it would seem that the tradition of engineer’s science fiction has won decisively, not only with respect to the standing of its chief authors vis-à-vis the New Wave, but the shape of newer creations.

Setting aside alternate history and fantasy and media tie-ins like the stream of novels based on Star Wars and Star Trek (and today, even Dune can be described as such), the most popular science fiction seems to be military science fiction of the sort produced by Baen Books—very much a fiction of plot, action, and gimmick, featuring traditional, active heroes. As the dust jackets of his books proclaim, Baen’s biggest star, David Weber, was “the science fiction phenomenon” of the ’90s. His most successful series (a New York Times bestseller), the Honor Harrington novels, is usually described as a space opera version of C.S. Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower books, and which read like Tom Clancy dressed up in updated Golden Age gear.

The magazine Analog, which is today the great bastion of traditional hard science fiction (though it routinely publishes stories from outside that mould), may not enjoy the prominence it did in Campbell’s time, but is still the highest-selling science fiction magazine in the United States.

Despite that fact, poets still write and are still read. Indeed, they are more likely to command respect outside of science fiction’s ghetto. On the college campus, Ursula K. Le Guin is queen of the field. Doris Lessing (a writer of such science fiction, as well as much else) won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

And as the argument over the October Analog demonstrates, both factions still manage to get on each other’s nerves, which is partly expressed on the part of the engineering crowd by a great deal of sneering at “the English majors,” in fiction as well as criticism. (In Richard Lovett’s recent short story in the May 2007 issue of that magazine, “Bambi Steaks,” the hapless main character’s uselessness is highlighted by his having majored in English in college.)

But get on each other’s nerves is about all they do. There is no sense today that they are fighting for hegemony. No one but the cranks is actually saying “my way or the highway.” There is an implicit understanding that the field (if only because of the fragmentation we have come to take for granted) is big enough for all, which is probably more than can be said for the clashes of the two cultures outside science fiction.

There, it seems, apart from an occasional call for greater balance like Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, or John Paul Russo’s The Future Without A Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society, science’s dominion over intellectual life is so thoroughly taken for granted that it rarely seems worth mentioning. It may not enjoy the role it should in policymaking (ultimately, money trumps intellect), but the idea that the arts should have a seat at the table is regarded as laughable, the humanities, an indulgence. The idea that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley had it, that poets shall more than presidents be America’s referees, as Whitman proclaimed, seems wishful thinking at best. We may not quite be at the point where winning a prize in verse brings dishonor to one’s family, as in Jules Verne’s recently rediscovered Paris in the Twentieth Century (my favorite of his books, and one that hints at the possibility of his career having taken a far more interesting path), but its arrival is not too hard to picture.

The post-industrial era, after all, has proven to be a letdown to date—at least, for the humanists. The likes of Daniel Bell, Herman Kahn, and Alvin Toffler told us that we would be seeing a broadening of our values, in which beyond a certain point (Kahn calculated that it was a GDP of around $25,000 per capita, a level the U.S. attained back in 1977), economic growth increasingly made room for ecology, and leisure, and culture. Instead, it was the French sociologist Alan Touraine (a Big Name abroad, almost unknown in the English-speaking world) who got it right when he said that the post-industrial era would be the most growth-driven in history. This has meant the narrowing of our values, less and less room for all those other goods.

Only time will tell if the trend of recent decades has been an aberration, but whichever the case, the marginalization of the humanities is far from a healthy thing, and will become only more unhealthy as our technology advances. Science’s achievements make it less and less a question of whether we can do something, and more a question of whether we should do something. Not knowing how to ask the second question—and that question is the province of the “second,” receding culture of the humanities—makes the first question likely to prove more trouble than it’s worth in the long run.