The Science Behind Tattoos
Science fiction defies categorization as it contains a huge gathering of disparate forms of fiction including horror, futuristic, magic, fantasy and a profusion of more demonic monsters than the Middle Ages ever imagined in its preoccupation with hellfire and damnation.
Interest in the future is always partly fear-based-the unknown, the mysterious and ‘what’s-to-come’. H.G. Wells was deeply concerned with the threat/promise of technology. He struggled in his time to create a peaceful world community, profoundly disappointed at his death with humanity’s inability to transcend the limitations of its time. So of course he dreamed of time travel, the only alternative solution.
Forty years later Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) wrote scathing denunciations-dystopias-of science, technology and their dehumanizing inventions. Orwell predicted mind control by fear and intimidation, while Huxley imagined the biological engineering of uneducated, hedonistically pleasured drug-drones.
At the beginning of the cold war Ray Bradbury, a consummate romanticist, who wrote the beautiful Dandelion Wine about an idyllic summer of happiness, yet was terrified of nuclear holocaust when he envisioned Earth both destroying itself and the wise far-advanced Martians in The Martian Chronicles.
In the late 20th century Michael Crichton, worrying about medical and computer viruses writes Armageddon stories like Coma, Jurassic Park, and Andromeda Strain, but then tried to convince us there’s nothing to be afraid of about global warming in State of Fear.
By the end of the 20th century science fiction had become almost synonymous with fantasy-magical Hobbit stories. You can’t tell whether Neil Gaiman is telling a mythical magic tale, once called a children’s story, or writing a story about grown up people. He seems to be doing both in American Gods, which illustrates what’s happened to science fiction. It’s become there-are-no-limits-in-the-universe fantasy writing, turning science fiction into cartoons and comic books for grownups. I believe entirely in fantasy. That’s what fiction is.
But now science has entered the realm of fiction, for instance, by employing hypothetical models of the environment, weather, planet size, etc., inventing two fictional planets, and drawing scientific conclusions about what kind of life would evolve there.
We’re learning that model building is the core strength of science. That’s all the various forms of mathematics are, various conceptual kits from which to build models. It’s the same strategy that Sherlock Holmes uses, where all the evidence must fit within one system of sense. Though Sherlock expected that only definitive tangible evidence would verify his theory.
Meanwhile scientists have found a way to make theory synonymous with fact. They’ve become heroes in the 21st century. We adore them. In the process they’ve gotten seduced by the fame of that experience, and, to please their growing audience, are writing part science, part fiction. Only vaguely imply they’re being hypothetical, they make grand scientific assertions that have the authority of fact. They make no clear and simple disclaimers. They seem to have embraced the illusion that their models can predict reality with a high enough probability of being right, that they can assume so. Pretending to be making pure science, they’re partly making science fiction, claiming it to be reality by blurring the boundary between models and reality.
Perhaps, unconsciously, that’s why, as readers, we’ve developed such an addiction to reality. We avidly watch real families raising real children, and real offenders committing real crime. We can’t seem to get enough of real people doing real things … as if we had lost touch with reality, and need to be reassured it’s still there. In the meantime fiction has almost become synonymous with falsehood-unless it’s just cartoons.
If a writer creates fiction, like HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, as if it was actually happening, terrifying half a nation (Orson Wells radio show), what he’ll receive instead of fame is infamy. He becomes the Judas Goat. Like the poor woman who wrote a story of her life that we bestseller loved, but later found wasn’t true. In a moral flurry of indignation the publisher withdrew the book from the marketplace, and we hounded her out of publishing.
As always, time changes everything. Does that mean perhaps that everything is fiction-even facts? Eventually they’re false … replaced with new ones. Perhaps we’re having lots of trouble getting used to the fact that everything’s relative, partly true and partly fiction, and it will always be that way. And yet in the meantime, at least for now, we still have to make a decision.
Don Fenn
Science tattoo.
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