My first notion of scifi was of Arabian-Nights-style adventure stories translated into outer space, with "science" meaning the author was inspired by recent scientific discoveries, and the characters plausible new technology, with scientific-sounding explanations.
Now, more and more I'm seeing and enjoying speculative fiction of a very different kind, where the plot is a means rather than the end, allowing explorations of alternative modes of understanding and of being. Here there may be little or no technological paraphenalia, and the story may very well take place on Earth. Rather than starting from a specific scientific breakthrough or theory, the authors are inspired by science's realization of its own limitations, that human understanding is limited.
For example, in Door Number Three, Patrick O'Leary has created a novel that at first glance looks like standard sci-fi -- a psychiatrist falls in love with a patient who claims to be an alien, and who actually is an alien. But then it turns out that the aliens are not from outer space, but rather are descendants of humans, living on Earth in the future, and at risk of never coming into existence if human history is altered. So you start to think here's a story in the vein of Terminator or Back to the Future, with time travel and alternate universes and people bumping into themselves at different times. And, yes, plot elements of that kind appear here, but the emphasis is quite different. In fact, although the story is exciting and effective, the resolution of the story -- will the hero survive? will he and the girl finally get together? will he succeed in saving the world? -- is not the central question of the novel. The plot is not an end in and of itself. Rather the plot helps to dramatically demonstrate the implications of possible variants of the human condition and the nature of being. As explained in a conversation between the narrator and a priest in a mental hospital, the author is interested in "the Question of Suffering" -- the same question that Dostoevsky dealt with in the "Grand Inquisitor" sequence in Brothers Karamazov -- that suffering is the price of free will, that "people feel betrayed and enraged when God allows the innocent to suffer." (p. 147) People act as if "'there were two possible answers to the Question of Suffering. Two doors: Free Will... or No God. They forget the trapdoor.'
"'Trapdoor?'
"'Strange God. A God inconceivable. As bizarre to us as an octopus is to a bird... Maybe he is to reality what we are to dreams.'" (p. 148)
In a short story entitled "The Maker of Miniatures" in a soon-to-be-published collection by O'Leary entitled Other Voices, Other Doors, the central character's father is "a dabbler in physics who regarded Occam's Razor as intellectual cowardice." (p. 59) The epigraph to that story -- a quote from Dennis Howe in Real-Time Magazine -- defines the doctrine of William of Occam as "'Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary.' That is, the fewer assumptions an explanation of a phenomenon depends on, the better it is..."
In the fiction of both Patrick O'Leary and Victor Pelevin, Occam's principle is itself an unwarranted assumption.
They both build on the unsettling revelation of current science that our minds and the world of physical reality are not perfectly matched to one another -- as philosophers in previous centuries had presumed. Our ability to perceive and understand the world evolved in the concrete circumstances of Earth, at our particular scale of size. At much smaller scales, at much larger scales, and perhaps at great distances, as well, reality is simply "inconceivable. As bizarre to us as an octopus is to a bird." It may take a dozen or even two dozen "dimensions" to mathematically describe phenomena. Concepts that we take for granted, like cause-effect, time, space, even death may not apply at all. Physical "truth" becomes relative and pragmatic -- certain ways of describing phenomena make practical sense at one scale and other ways work better at another scale. There is no "universal truth." Even the concept of "paradigm shifts" is misleading, implying as it does that one description of physical reality is "better" than another and supercedes it, when in fact different descriptions work better in different circumstances. As a practical matter, it often is helpful to think that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And at times it is handy to think of electrons rotating around a nucleus, like planets around a sun. At times it works best to think of light as energy and at other times to think of it as particles. All physical models are approximations, attempts to comprehend phenomena that are beyond the limited capacity of human intelligence. Yes, it feels logical that the simplest model, involving the fewest assumptions, is "better" than more complex models. That fits the way our minds work. But that assumption has no necessary basis in the physical world.
Hence there is a whole new playing field for speculative fiction -- trying on new modes of being, imaginatively exploring outside the Occam's Razor box.
In the story "Bat Boy" (also in Other Voices, Other Doors), a boy, bitten by a bat, is transformed into a bat. One moment the bat is inside the cage, and the next it is out. The boy's father speculates, "Was it possible for reality to turn inside out? What if the intelligence imbedded in the world operated on assumptions we know nothing about? What if the world was as ineffable as god to an atheist, as hockey to a Brazilian... The spaces between the bars [of the cage] were narrow safe things. Like comfortable ideas no one cares to re-examine. Up. Down. Time. Death. The Designated Hitter Rule. How did the bat get out?" (p. 34)
Note the playfulness in the analogies. These stories work well, in part, because the author is not heavy handed; he periodically undermines his own arguments, and mocks himself, just as he mocks our ordinary assumptions about everyday reality. There's an element of masquerade in these stories -- trying on new modes of being, getting a sense of what the world would feel like if... -- like trying on new costumes or new masks, but on a cosmic scale, that creatively throws not just our own identity, but all of presumed reality into question.
Pelevin operates in a similar realm -- part humorous, part philosophically serious. And Pelevin also experiments with transformation stories. What would it feel like to become a wolf, to see and sense the world through a wolf's body and mind. "... the greatest transformation that Sasha sensed was in his own awareness of himself. This was something very difficult to express in human language, and he began barking, whining and howling to himself in the same way he used to think in words. The change in his self-awareness had affected the meaning of life, and he realized that people could talk about it, but they couldn't feel the meaning of life in the same way as they felt the wind or the cold. But now Sasha was able to feel it, he felt the meaning of life continuously and clearly as an eternal quality of the world itself, and that was the greatest charm of his present condition. No sooner did he realize this than he also realized that he was not likely ever to return to his former existence of his own free will -- life without this feeling seemed like a long, tormenting dream, dim and incomprehensible." (A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, pp. 15-16)
Pelevin's stories often have an overlay of political satire, hearkening back to the absurd tales of Gogol, Zoschenko, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, etc., who under the tsars or under the Soviets had to disguise their social criticism. But Pelevin faces no such censorship today. His satire is more a salute to the proud literary tradition of Russia, and part of the overall playfulness. While the overall theme is closer to O'Leary than Zoschenko or Zamyatin. In The Life of Insects, Pelevin introduces scenes with characters who look, think, and act like humans. Then no sooner does the reader begin to see the world of the story through the eyes of such a character than it's revealed that the character is in fact a mosquito or an ant or a dung beetle, who then turns out to have very believable and provocative views on the meaning and nature of life. And no sooner does the reader begin to accept that reality, then the character transforms -- very unscientifically -- from one kind of insect to another. Pelevin is exploring -- what could the nature and meaning of life be if it's beyond the limits of ordinary human understanding? As is the case with the best literature, Pelevin and O'Leary don't pretend to have answers, but rather ask familiar questions in new, creative, and provocative ways.
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