How Scientific Are Science Fiction Authors?

An unscientific inquiry

From A Trip to the Moon (1902). The state of scientific knowledge has improved since then

I like a lot of science fiction, even though it takes up a comparatively small portion of my reading diet nowadays. One thing that has slightly nagged me about the genre is the question of how much science one needs to know to write a good SF story. If you’re a writer who wants to work in the genre, do you need a scientific background (which nowadays means an academic degree at the very least) to do it properly?

I decided to tackle the question in an unscientific manner, by looking at the educational backgrounds of some SF writers I have read. This list is arranged in rough ascending order of the educational attainments of the authors:

• Ray Bradbury: didn’t go to college

• Philip K. Dick: dropped out of UC Berkeley after one semester

• Frank Herbert: attended college but didn’t graduate; apparently he only wanted to study things that interested him, and therefore he didn’t complete some required courses

• J.G. Ballard: dropped out of two universities (Cambridge, London) without getting a degree in anything, though he did study medicine for a while

• Ursula K. LeGuin: degree in Romance languages; dropped out of her doctoral studies

• Stanisław Lem: studied medicine at university level, but didn’t take his final exams and never became a doctor (he couldn’t stand the sight of blood!)

• Karel Čapek: studied philosophy at several European universities; wound up with a Ph.D. in the subject

• H.G. Wells: bachelor’s degree in zoology, but being an omnivorous intellect, spent a lot of time studying other subjects while he was getting it

• Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: a humanistic/scientific duo, with Arkady the linguist and translator (Japanese, English) and Boris the professional astronomer

• Gene Wolfe: degree in engineering; invented the mechanism that gives Pringles potato chips their distinctive shape

• Arthur C. Clarke: degree in mathematics and physics, King’s College London

In short, what we have here is a mixed bag of scientists, non-scientists, and some authors who are hard to classify. One pattern is worth noting: a lot of SF authors did not follow a smooth, predictable educational path. Consider the double dropout Ballard; the queasy medical student Lem; Wells with his wide-ranging social and political interests; Dick who didn’t last more than one semester. This suggests that a lot of SF writers are uncomfortable or ambivalent about formal education, which may lead them to prefer the free exploration of ideas in their own mind to learning difficult stuff in a classroom.

If you know nothing else, you might conclude that the writers with the more formal and complete scientific educations would stick to so-called “hard” science fiction, but the facts don’t really support this. Wolfe and Bradbury both wrote a lot of stories that can be more correctly classified as fantasy than SF, although one writer was scientifically educated and the other wasn’t. Wells wrote an early version of hard SF, but also a number of social-realist novels, and some of his best-known stories are pure fantasy (“The Door in the Wall,” “The Man Who Could Work Miracles”). Clarke and Dick both wrote plenty of hard SF, but it’s fair to conclude that Clarke knew hard science a lot better than Dick did.

To complicate the matter, in addition to recognized SF writers, there are also those litfic writers who have written SF on occasion (examples: Anthony Burgess, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro). The conclusion I reach from such cases is that the success or failure of their work is mostly a function of their storytelling ability rather than their knowledge or ignorance of science.

In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess doesn’t explain the chemical basis of the “Ludovico method,” just as Stevenson doesn’t explain exactly how the potion that turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde works. This doesn’t mean that the storytelling is somehow deficient. You take it on trust, because we do live in a world where chemicals can alter our personalities. In the state of tension that stretches between this could happen and this couldn’t happen, you incline to accept the former.

Ishiguro is a writer I admire, and Never Let Me Go is a very highly-rated book by almost everyone it seems, but I wasn’t able to take it very seriously. This was because of two factors, only one of which was Ishiguro’s deployment of scientific knowledge. The main factor was his narrative strategy: the big reveal comes early on, but the characters’ reactions to it struck me as totally unconvincing. The secondary factor was indeed scientific: (minor spoiler alert) I couldn’t believe that human bodies could be subjected repeatedly to the process he describes and last very long.

I think that fundamentally, if you’ve invested in the rigors of a scientific education, you’re going to spend your life doing actual science. From my list above, only Boris Strugatsky was a full-time scientist, and he was a co-author rather than a single author; one wonders if he’d have been able to write any SF without his brother’s involvement. Literary people, on the other hand, seem to be attracted to the personal, the exploratory, and the aesthetic, which makes them less suited to the strictures of real science.

That’s my tentative conclusion, based on a small sample. I may be wrong. But I do think it’s clear that you don’t need to have a degree in science to write good science fiction.¹

1. There’s a problem of terminology here, because the term “science fiction” is often used to cover genres that are not scientific at all, ranging from alternative or dystopian history to pure fantasy. These genres should be classified under the heading “speculative fiction,” but – perhaps because it’d easier to say, or because the term arose first – most people seem to prefer to shove all of them under the general rubric of “science fiction.”