Via Bill Benzon at The Valve, the philosopher of biology John Wilkins remembers the science fiction he no longer admires as much as he used to as being mostly mad-scientist novels:
Frankenstein is the model of the SF scientist, meddling where he (usually a he - SF was very masculine for a long time) had no right to meddle. . . . [M]ost SF showed science in a very apocalyptic and dangerous aspect, as befitted the post A-bomb era.
I'm with those of the commenters who think Wilkins has been reading different SF than we have. I've wondered whether this is to some extent a difference between American and British science fiction (for example, compare "literary" novelists in both countries who have written "science fiction" novels). I don't remember a lot of mad scientists in the science fiction I used to read. True, again unlike Wilkins, I don't remember a lot of sex in the books either, in the SF I found in the middle school library or was given by my uncle (in fact I stopped reading SF around age 13, when I started looking elsewhere and found more male sex fantasies than I had much interest in).
I remember plenty of medievalism, and a good dose of metaphysics, but where could Wilson be finding mysticism (especially mysticism of a kind that might lead a reader to religion!)? And why doesn't he realize that social criticism is an integral part of the genre?
Sure, you could force lots of classic SF into Wilson's schema, if it suited you to do that. So Asimov's story "Buy Jupiter" would be a condemnation of scientists for being liable to invent neon advertisements that can be installed on large gaseous planets to be seen by space tourists flying past. And Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles would be a condemnation of scientists for always destroying indigenous cultures. And Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven would be a condemnation of scientists for having values that logically lead to legislating universal compulsory ingestion of pills. And some story I read in Omni twenty-five years ago would be a condemnation of scientists for allowing young teenagers to become sexually active, thwarting an old man who finds his pre-teen lover has an equally young rival for her affections. But something would be missing.
Could this be explained by a split between the kind of science fiction popular in the UK (and maybe also Australia, about which I don't know a lot), and what is considered science fiction in the United States? You do see a difference in the literary novels that are called SF. In North America, we have The Handmaid's Tale and Galatea 2.0, which think seriously through current trends in science or social change, and deeply imagine a whole world or a new technology. In England, there are The Children of Men and The Cleft. I have looked and looked in The Children of Men and can find nothing at all about science; nothing that explains what caused the social or biological changes that form the basis of the plot; and little (except for that one superficial plot gimmick) that distinguishes the society of the novel from the England of today. The novel is a dystopian fantasy, but this single fact doesn't make it science fiction. That James and the reviewers thought it was would seem to mean they define "science fiction" somehow differently.
(Yes, Atwood is Canadian, but she is writing about the United States.)
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