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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Science vs. Fantasy False Dichotomy Redux at Fantasy Magazine
May 9th, 2008
A revised version of my original post is up at sfnovelists.com today, but more interestingly over at Fantasy Magazine, to, as their “Blog for a Beer” contest.
Fantasy has a prize for best/most interesting comment with the goal of sparking lively, fun debate, so please do check it out.
Below is the revised post. Thanks go in particular to Dan Levin for reminding me about the X-Files. I think his additional insights about that show would make a competitive post over at Fantasy.
There have been a number of books, movies, and tv shows presenting apparent conflicts between the scientific world view and that of the believers in the fantastic. Characterize this dichotomy on a science vs. fantasy spectrum, if you will.
I submit that many of these stories, with a few notable exceptions, have been unfair.
Science is a methodology for developing reliable knowledge about the world, and all it depends upon is that there is an objective reality that behaves consistently. Science works in our world. We have a world of technology that demonstrates this in no uncertain terms. It should work in any consistent world, particularly worlds resembling our own. Any world with magic, assuming the magic system is consistent, should be understandable through science.
A conflict under these situations, pitting a logical scientific type against a wild-eyed believer, reason against belief, is a false conflict. Scientists are not dogmatic and their measurements, experiments, and observations can and do change their minds. Or not, in too many cases. How many times have you seen the skeptical scientist character in a story with fantastic elements mutter something like, “There must be a logical explanation,” and then go on to offer something feeble and likely stupid in face of the reality of the story? Let me illustrate this with some TV series that regularly pitted science against the fantastic. The first never really played fair, the second is currently running and there’s hope, and a final case where the appropriate character change finally did come to the skeptical scientist (thanks to smart writers and a long run).
I recall watching Northern Exposure on TV some 15 years ago, more or less. It was an interesting show about a doctor with a fellowship compelled to serve in Alaska for several years to pay off the debt. What was stupid was that he represented a scientific point of view, while the locals provided a new age, fantasy-based point of view, and he never took into account the data of his experiences there in adjusting his outlook. The show didn’t play fair. They cheated. Science takes into account information from the environment, experiments and observations, in reaching conclusions, having an objective fantastic reality. For the majority of the show, Joel just looked like an ass denying the events that occurred based on his past experience rather than the physical evidence he was presented with week after week. It wasn’t science. It was a believer’s version of science.
This is happening on Battlestar Galactica to a certain extent. Baltar is our scientist there. He’s making the rationalist argument, but he’s also being swayed. I’m okay with that, because on the show the faith-based perspective has numerous facts in support of it, with rather unambiguous visions regularly coming true on a regular basis. It isn’t really religion as we know it when the writers can make the visions and prophecies clear and true every week. We call that fantasy. I’m very sympathetic toward Baltar. He’s a smart guy, like me. He has a weakness for women, like me. He just wants to survive, like me, and probably you, too. He’s too often made to be the bad guy. I hope he’s redeemed in the end. He hasn’t been immoral as I’ve seen it. He’s been rationally human. The final verdict hasn’t quite come in yet.
Perhaps one of the best cases, in the end, of how science can tackle the fantastic occurred on the X-Files. In the beginning we had the classic and poor false dichotomy: Mulder the believer against Scully the skeptical scientist. Her job in the early seasons was to disbelieve Mulder’s wild ideas with a more “scientific” explanation, which she did dutifully even in the face of compelling evidence. Eventually, however, her character and the show grew, although it took a very long time for them to move away from the false dichotomy at the heart of the original formula. The data started leading her to agree with Mulder’s notions. The scientific evidence supported them, in the show’s reality, and science got her there.
Look. In a piece of fiction I’ll buy into the realities of that fiction. Just make them clear and honest. Too often we have idiocy. Characters like Joel Fleishmann who keep on with a modern, scientific worldview despite events that he sees and experiences, repeatedly, regularly, and can collect evidence about. Change the rules, and science will figure it out. Stories that fail in this respect represent stories that fail to properly portray science.
I’m not claiming that science is the be all and end all on all matters. Life is about much more than that. But if you want facts to cling to, rules to understand, and live in a consistent world (fantastic elements or not), stick with science.
Where science conflicts with other paradigms, the other paradigms are probably wrong. This is just based on how science works. Science doesn’t work everywhere, but where it works, pay attention. And it should work in any self-consistent fantasy, too. If it doesn’t, someone isn’t playing fair.
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May 10th, 2008 at 4:54 am
One exception comes to my mind, for example the Lord Darcy stories. There science has never developed as a paradigm because magic was the far older system and worked (communication, power, forensics and so on is all magic-based). To a degree the magic system is scientific, but its global orientation is on discovering the rules of the meta-magic world to shape the physical world, instead of discovering what makes to physical world go round.
Doesn’t mean that science wouldn’t work or might be developed in the future (time in that alternate history is 20th century), one story even hints that if history had developed in a different way, the examination of physical rules might have had the potential to shape the world as much as magic.
May 10th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Well, not so much an exception as a situation where science doesn’t work, because it’s never developed as a thought discipline.
May 31st, 2008 at 7:01 am
The dichotomy…
I’ve run into a convergence of “The dichotomy” over the last several weeks. In fact, it started a couple of years ago when I received feedback from an agent, explaining science and fantasy couldn’t mix.
This message was reinforc…