IGMS Issue 15 (31 page)

When it's done more seriously (as in companies such as GBN) it can be part of an overall planning strategy: You come up with a scenario and then work backwards from that, thinking, "If that's really how things turned out, what would be the symptoms that we would see as we fall into that scenario?" Do that reasoning with a number of contrasting scenarios. Then you have these families of symptoms for different sorts of outcomes. To me, this is a far more effective way of dealing with uncertainty than simple forecasts. As time goes on, you can watch for symptoms on your various lists. You can say, well, if such-and-such happens, that makes it more likely that we are in Scenario A or Scenario C, in which case it would be good to spend some money on such-and-such. Of course, this also feeds back into further scenario generation.

SCHWEITZER
: Does this then give the science fiction writer a certain responsibility to be realistic?

VINGE
: I think that a story should be true to itself, but that's a much broader requirement than what most people mean by "realism."

SCHWEITZER
: You're talking about science fiction as a kind of dreaming. A lot of science fiction makes no attempt to be realistic. Think of van Vogt's
The World of Null-A
. It was supposed to be a big revelation, but there is nothing realistic in it at all.

VINGE
: I haven't read
The World of Null-A
in a long time, so I shouldn't try to comment on it specifically. I have noticed that there are so many different categories of quality that a story can be an abject failure in some ways and still be a treasure for what it does in others.

SCHWEITZER
: Aren't we describing only a specific type of science fiction, if the subject of realism comes up?

VINGE
: The dreaming metaphor probably covers most types of science fiction (and the superset of sf, fantasy). It's not reasonable to have a preset definition of serious science fiction. And taking science fiction writers as a whole, there is no reason why they have to take themselves seriously. Now, the people who read their stories get various different things out of them. I read some people's stories for reasons that may be fairly serious, but for many, the more crazy the better, if the author can handle it cleverly and/or with emotional impact.

Now it's true that the kind of sf writer who is invited to planning meetings is normally of the more realistic variety. But their value may be as loose cannons, crazy enough to mix things upwithout turning the boat over. And even the non-sf scenario-based planners can be affected by oddball stories. An emotionally evocative story can put your head in a different place, and suddenly facts have new connections.

SCHWEITZER
: I am thinking of the Balonium Factor. Balonium is that substance or field effect which suspends the laws of the universe as needed for the plot. Doesn't any given science fiction contain something which is probably impossible? If Wells had known how to build a time machine, he wouldn't have written a story about it. He would have done so, and collected his Nobel Prize. What he was actually doing was
pretending
that someone had discovered a new scientific principle which made this possible. So, in a science fiction story, how much extrapolative realism is required, and how much balonium is desirable.

VINGE
: [Laughs] There are different grades of balonium. At one extreme, there are stories describing inventions that may well be patentable. At the other extreme, there is fantasy relabeled. I think that it's unwise to say, "beyond this point, the balonium is pure." Sometimes you read something that seems like pure balonium, but if you look at the story in the right way, you say, "Oh, geez, this situation could be caused by X," where X has nothing to do with the balonium. The area of computers may be the most fertile source of such surprises, because there are many crazy and magical things you can do if you have a proper distributed system setup. For science fiction, it's good that we don't have any predefined proper balance between realism and balonium, that that remains a matter of taste and saleability.

SCHWEITZER
: The idea that what you can imagine might actually become possible must have itself only been possible when people became aware that the past was different from the present.

VINGE
: Yes! This and your point about Wells's time machine could be part of a framework describing much of human progress. Certainly, if we really knew how to make some bit of future super-science, we'd do it now and it wouldn't be future super-science anymore. In fact, even if we don't know the details, just knowing that something desirable is possible is enough to prod some humans into the invention. And then there is the most extreme case, namely just imagining that something is desirable being enough to get the invention.

In the millennia of pre-history, I imagine that the idea of human progress was a rare notion -- and that was an important reason why change was so slow! The acceleration of progress through the Renaissance was partly due to "compound interest" growth of knowledge, but also to the notion that progress was possible. One might argue that part of the acceleration during the Industrial Revolution was due to smart people consciously focusing on the importance of invention.

Somewhere I read that in the late 1940s, Soviet nuclear espionage did not get detailed engineering data that made a big difference. The most important thing the spies delivered were statements such as, "Yes, this approach works. You can do it this way." That by itself was enough to point their physicists to success. Now in the first part of the twenty-first century, humanity is toying with the more dubious extremes of this progression, wondering where is the balance between the wish and the fact.

SCHWEITZER
: But, for example, Lucian of Samosata could imagine going to the Moon. He made a joke out of it. He wrote something like a Douglas Adams story. But for thousands of years thereafter there was
no
feeling that merely because you could imagine going to the Moon that one day it would be possible. Maybe somewhere around the 18th century did this begin to change. People had imagined flying for a very long time, but only about then did more than a very few people realize that they actually could. There was Leonardo back around 1500, but he was way ahead of his time and pretty much alone.

VINGE
: Yes, the wish and the fact can be very far apart -- or near enough to be extremely frustrating. I believe Benjamin Franklin once speculated that within two hundred years or so, we would have prolongevity. Too bad for Ben. Maybe too bad for you and me.