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Modifiable Futures: Science Fiction at the Bench Author(s): Colin Milburn Source: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 560-569 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655793 Accessed: 17-12-2016 06:43 UTC

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Modifiable Futures

Science Fiction at the Bench

By Colin Milburn*

ABSTRACT

Science fiction remains an alien dimension of the history of science. Historical and literary studies of science have become increasingly attentive to various “literary technologies” in scientific practice, the metaphorical features of scientific discourse, and the impact of popular science writing on the social development of scientific knowledge. But the function of science fiction and even literature as such in the history of scientific and technological innovation has often been obscured, misconstrued, or repudiated owing to conventional notions of authorship, influence, and the organic unity of texts. The better to address those close encounters where scientific practice makes use of speculative fiction, this essay proposes that we instead analyze such exchanges as processes of appropriation, remixing, and modification.

S CIENCE FICTION: the very concept appears as a monstrous violation of categories, animproper joining of radically different domains. Hugo Gernsback, the founding editor of Amazing Stories (the first magazine exclusively devoted to this strange literary genre), coined the term in 1929, as a more marketable successor to his earlier neologism “scientifiction.” Certainly, stories of this kind had existed long before Gernsback gave us the name. The roots of science fiction are at least as old as modern science itself, germinating in the utopian romances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with offshoots in the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century and onward, eventually flourish- ing in the scientific romances and voyages extraordinaires of the nineteenth century. But the sense of science fiction as a recognizable genre, a ready-made cultural form, is largely an invention of the last century. Indeed, science fiction is often said to be the most characteristic literary mode of late modernity, the defining genre of our age.1 Yet even as

* Department of English and Program in Science and Technology Studies, University of California, Davis, California 95616.

1 For examples see Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005); Carl Freedman, Science Fiction and Critical Theory (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press New England for Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2000); David G. Hartwell, ed., The Science Fiction Century (New York: Tor, 1997); and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2008).

Isis, 2010, 101:560 –569 ©2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0020-9903/2010/1013-0005$10.00

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it has become ever more familiar and commonplace, this mash-up of the word “science” with the word “fiction” still seems to insist on a certain internal incoherence, as if the tiny typographic space inside the label of “science fiction” were to signify a vast chasm, a void between alien worlds. And this, of course, is precisely the problem.

Among aficionados, the idea that science fiction influences science as much as science influences science fiction is now something of a cliché.2 Legendary examples of science fiction shaping the history of science have entered the communal lore of fandom: Leo Szilard theorizing nuclear chain reactions—and their social implications—after reading H. G. Wells’s depiction of atomic bombs in The World Set Free (1914); Wernher von Braun pursuing a career in rocketry because of his early interest in Jules Verne; Gerald Feinberg analyzing the quantum field properties of tachyons as an answer to James Blish’s faster-than-light communicator in “Bleep” (1954); and so forth. We often hear about the “predictions” of science fiction that eventually came to pass; and, to be sure, a favorite proverb of popular science reportage goes: “Yesterday it was science fiction; today it is science fact.” If this form of folk wisdom puts fiction writers in the untenable position of prophets and clairvoyants, it likewise renders the task of professional science as the fulfillment of literary dreams, diligently turning fantasies into realities. Neither seems very adequate as a springboard for historiography.

If science fiction is to be considered as pertaining to the history of science and its cultural influences—and it would seem high time that the history of science, as a discipline, fully take on the study of science fiction as one of its own specialties—we must better address how scientific actors actually navigate the abyss between what appears proper to science and what appears proper to fiction in historical context. In this regard, literary scholars and historians of science have much to offer each other. However, conventional ways of understanding the relationship of fictive texts to their authors and their audiences have frequently obscured both local and nonlocal interactions between science and science fiction (or fiction as such), insofar as they have typically involved quasi-theological notions of authorship, creativity, and intellectual property.3 Instead, I propose that we might understand scientists’ relationship to science fiction texts in terms of “fan practice”— even in cases where individual scientists or groups of scientists may not be fans at all—and in this way reorient problems of influence and intellectual property, or philosophical quandaries about “proper” relations, toward the processes of modification involved in moving between science and fiction. This would then mean understanding science fiction as among the quotidian activities of science—which is to say, science fiction at the bench.

2 For examples see Robert W. Bly, The Science in Science Fiction: Eighty-three SF Predictions That Became Scientific Reality (Dallas: BenBella, 2005); Mark L. Brake and Neil Hook, Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (London: Macmillan, 2008); Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); and William Shatner and Chip Walter, I’m Working on That: A Trek from Science Fiction to Science Fact (New York: Pocket, 2002).

3 On the historical construction of authorship in science and literature see Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison, eds., Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1994).

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ALIEN PROBES

Writers of science fiction have often seen their genre as intrinsically contributing to the efforts of science. In the nineteenth century, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells presumed that their adventurous stories would promote awareness of scientific knowledge and techno- logical advancement. Hugo Gernsback, as well, understood science fiction as “a means of educating the public to the meaning of science, as well as providing the most delightful and stimulating entertainment” (here following a long tradition, going back through Horace’s Art of Poetry and Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, in which literature’s worldly purpose is to teach and delight). Obviously, science fiction does not always work this way (even in the Gernsback era, heuristic goals were expressed more in theory than in practice). Nevertheless, the genre has been generally understood to adhere to the worldview of modern science, in attitude and vision if not in actual details of consensus knowledge. Darko Suvin famously defined the novum at the heart of science fiction, the site of cognitive estrangement, as “postulated on and validated by the post-Cartesian and post-Baconian scientific method.” The genre is rarely concerned with falsifiable predic- tions (Ursula K. Le Guin has insisted that science fiction is never about the future; rather, it uses the future as a “metaphor . . . drawn from certain great dominants of our contem- porary life—science, all the sciences, and technology”). But it is still commonly opined that science fiction functions as a kind of scientific activity, a thought experiment within a larger conversation about the cultural production of science and its implications. This is why the novelist and critic Gwyneth Jones has claimed that the method of science fiction is to “take some persistent fiction of contemporary human life, and turn it into science.”4

But this notion of science fiction emerging already a part of science, in a way that would make it commensurable with the work of science and open to mutual vectors of influence, has not been frequently endorsed by practicing scientists. Even among scientists who publicize a favorable view of science fiction, or perhaps even write science fiction novels in their spare time, the literary object as fiction usually remains carefully bounded off from serious research.5 As the physicist Freeman Dyson writes: “Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”6 One domain appears real, with conse- quences for the world of waking life and broader society, while the other appears fictitious, with consequences only for the dreamscape of the unconscious subject. When the sleeper wakes, science fiction is put on hiatus and the real work of science begins. So it is no surprise that the very idea of crossing such territorial boundaries often appears a scandal.

For example, in his 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”—frequently taken as a foundational moment in the history of nanotechnology—Richard Feynman discusses the possibility of engineering molecular machines. He also describes what he calls a “weird” pantographic idea for molecular manipulation. Historical and textual evidence indicates that the idea for pantographic molecular manipulation actually derived from Robert A. Heinlein’s novella “Waldo” (1942)—which itself seems to have adapted

4 Hugo Gernsback, “Science Fiction Week,” Science Wonder Stories, May 1930, 1:1061; Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 64 – 65; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: Putnam’s, 1979), p. 159; and Gwyneth Jones, Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction, and Reality (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1999), p. 114.

5 There are exceptions, of course. We should not overlook figures such as Fred Hoyle, Gregory Benford, Joan Slonczewski, Rudy Rucker, Vernor Vinge, Charles Sheffield, Arthur C. Clarke, and several others.

6 Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), p. 9.

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a similar idea from Edmond Hamilton’s earlier story “The Cosmic Pantograph” (1935).7

However, some scientists reject the evidence that Feynman internalized a concept from the domain of science fiction. As the chemist Pierre Laszlo writes: “Feynman’s fertile imagination had no need for an outside seed. This particular conjecture [about a link between Feynman and Heinlein] stands on its head Feynman’s whole argument. He proposed devices at the nanoscale as both rational and realistic, around the corner so to say. To propose instead that the technoscience, nanotechnology, belongs to the realm of science-fictional fantasy is gratuitous mythology, with a questionable purpose.” The figurative language used here, though typical for defending scientific origin stories, is also especially telling. For we see an insistence on the absolute autonomy of scientific thought. The autochthonic, self-fertilizing imagination of the great physicist is so potent that it “had no need for an outside seed,” and the insinuation that Feynman might have let some science fiction writer put his “seed” into him—that science might have been inseminated by science fiction—is construed as a “gratuitous” indignity. The insinuation appears a preposterous inversion (“stands on its head”), sordid enough to make the motivation of the accuser (in this case, yours truly) shady and “questionable.” If Laszlo seems implicitly to cast any influence from “science-fictional fantasy” as a slight on scientific masculinity—a kind of queering—in this regard it echoes the sentiments of the young Feynman himself: “I was always worried about being a sissy; I didn’t want to be too delicate. To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. . . . So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry—all those ‘fancy’ things.”8

At the same time, obviously, there are several scientists who vehemently support science fiction as a vehicle for stimulating scientific innovation. But even in these cases, descriptions of the relationship frequently tend toward a similar pathogenic vocabulary. For instance, the computer scientist Mark Pesce, perhaps best known for his invention of the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), has said: “The recent history of hard science fiction has been the deciding influence on the direction of software development. . . . To the degree they [science fiction writers] are successful in ‘infecting’ the hacker community with the beauty of their ideas, they can expect to see those ideas brought to life.”9

The language of infection or illicit insemination in these examples exposes a certain anxiety about “influence,” a sense of impropriety.10 For being “under the influence” of science fiction would suggest a loss of scientific agency to an invasion from the outside: an alien probe. Let us recall the etymological connection between “influence” and “influenza,” the sense of penetration by some extraterrestrial vital fluid, whether divine, astrological, or demonic in origin—the effluvia of some “genius” (i.e., animistic force). The vitalistic rhetoric involved in these otherwise divergent accounts of science fiction’s

7 Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Engineering and Science, 1960, 23:22–36. Regarding the origins of the pantographic idea for molecular manipulation see Colin Milburn, Nanovision: Engineering the Future (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2008); and Ed Regis, Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).

8 Pierre Laszlo, “Is There Life after Partington?” Hyle, 2004, 10:169 –178, on p. 178 n 6; and Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 81.

9 Mark Pesce, “Magic Mirror: The Novel as a Software Development Platform,” MIT Communications Forum (1999), web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/pesce.html.

10 Cf. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).

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relationship to science (“seeds” or “germs” that might impregnate/infect science and “bring to life” the dreams of science fiction) reflects an apperception of fictional texts as the organic offspring of authorial will, transmitted in toto, making the reader a mere receptacle of the author’s original conception. Given such figurations, it is little wonder that we continue to have such an imprecise understanding of how literature actually works in the laboratory.

REMIXING AUTHORSHIP

Romantic notions of the literary work as an organic unity, a self-contained product of authorial genius, continue to dominate everyday thinking about cultural texts. The noto- rious “death of the author” announced by Roland Barthes in 1968, and echoed in Michel Foucault’s account of the author as a historically bounded function of discourse, has yet to take serious hold in today’s technoculture. Moreover, increasingly stringent intellectual property codes around the world keep the author on life support (at the expense of the commons). Even in the field of literary studies, Barthes’s “Death of the Author” essay has often been taken as repeating the New Critical position on the “intentional fallacy”— namely, that the author’s intentions are not the ultimate arbitrator on all possible meanings available to a literary text. But Barthes’s argument was more expansive. For if, as Barthes suggests, the literary text is nothing but a “tissue of quotations,” not only does the author become simply a filter of discourse—a reorganizer and tinkerer, rather than the godlike originator of meaning— but the text itself ceases to be comprehensible as an organic unity. Barthes’s contention that the death of the author is also the birth of the reader means that reading does not just reproduce, but recreates and revises—all readers are now writers. Like Michel de Certeau’s later claim that “everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others,” the death of the author was an effort to do away with older models of “influence” or “cultural consumption” and instead to situate meaning and cultural production at the level of end users.11 With the author dead, texts would no longer depend on innate coherence or originality (despite whatever copyright law might say) and would better be understood as assemblages, cobbled together from many different domains of culture—and therefore intrinsically open to repurposing, remixing, reusing, and reinventing.

Although mainstream literary studies persists in treating texts as unities (even if rarely crediting authorial intentions), the emergence of a robust collection of fan reception studies over the past few decades, drawing on models pioneered at the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, has made tremendous progress in showing the death of the author in action. Fans of fictional works such as Star Trek and Star Wars may deeply respect the creators of the original texts and may have a nearly devotional relationship to the integrity of these texts, but they simultaneously vigorously engage in reinterpreting, transforming, expanding, and rebooting these fictions in ways that the creators (i.e., copyright holders) might never have thought possible. In the work of scholars such as

11 Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry, 2001, 27:408 – 438 (on the literary work as an organic unity); Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 142–148; Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 113–138; William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review, 1946, 54:468 – 488; and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1984), p. xii.

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Henry Jenkins, Janice Radway, Camille Bacon-Smith, and Constance Penley, fans emerge as thoughtful critics of cultural texts, participating in a massively distributed communal action of recycling, mutating, and improving the works of others.12

Among computer geeks and gamers, the practice of reworking and transforming software and hardware created by others is called “modding.” Among music fans, “sampling” and “mashing” function in a similar way. Among fans of media franchises, “fanfic” is a common form of grassroots storytelling that responds to the desires of the fans rather than the creators, whether that desire might be to incorporate an individual fan-writer into the franchise narrative (for example, “Mary Sue” fanfics) or to make manifest certain latent but unrealized potentials of the franchise narratives (for example, “slash” fiction, such as “K/S” stories where fan-writers imagine homoerotic scenarios between Kirk and Spock from the original Star Trek series). In these types of fan practices, the characters, images, metaphors, and meanings of the “original” are not lost but, rather, newly energized, opening up for transformation in productive and exciting ways. The source texts are necessary and sacred for the fans, but their authorized meanings and extant narratives are not the limit of what fans might do with them. For this reason, Jenkins (following de Certeau) has called fans “textual poachers,” for they turn fictions into usable forms of everyday life by sampling, borrowing, hijacking, and stealing from the texts they love.13

In many ways, the day-to-day activities of laboratory science resemble some of these fan practices: sampling from and building on the work of others, taking what was successful in one experiment and applying it elsewhere, proceeding through imitation, eclectic opportunism, bricolage, and so forth.14 So with such fan practices in mind, I would like to suggest that our understanding of how science fiction works at the bench would be greatly improved by seeing scientists as cultural consumers like any cultural consumers, perhaps even in some cases as science fiction fans like any science fiction fans, but having at their disposal the tools and the resources for making science fiction and other cultural materials actually usable for science—and vice versa. If indeed, as Gwyneth Jones has suggested, science fiction involves transforming cultural narratives into science, it does not therefore simply become usable or operable in the laboratory. In having been rendered in the argot of science, it may have met a minimum precondition, but it must still be further modified before it can become an active element in any experimental system, before it can become an epistemic trace capable of producing other traces.15 Some forms of modifying science fiction for usability by technoscience—in other words, some science fiction mods—would include blueprint mods, supplementary mods, and speculative mods.

12 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2006); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1984); Camille Bacon-Smith, Science-Fiction Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London/ New York: Verso, 1997).

13 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 14 See, e.g., Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd ed. (London: Verso, 1993); Bruno Latour and Steve

Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986); and Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2008). On the scientific remixing of literary texts in particular see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 2000).

15 See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 102–103.

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MODIFIABLE FUTURES

The blueprint mod appears as a direct effort to transform some discrete element of a science fiction text into technical reality, a tangible element of everyday life. Examples abound, even in the early history of modern science. If we consider Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) as experimenting with literary conceits later identified with science fiction (in other words, if we consider New Atlantis as proto–science fiction), then the early Royal Society of London itself appears as a blueprint mod, to the extent that some of its founders sought to recreate Bacon’s vision of Solomon’s House.16 In more recent times, as an effect of science fiction’s maturation and cultural dispersion over the course of the last century, blueprint mods have become ever more common. For instance, Linden Lab modeled its hugely popular virtual world Second Life after the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). Similarly, Mechanized Propulsion Systems was formed with the goal of “designing, creating, and piloting the first bipedal humanoid anime style mecha in the next 25 years. . . . We have decided to bring to life our dreams of real, working mecha, as seen in Japanese animated works.”17

In these cases and others like them, even though an identifiable science fiction text or group of texts may be a source of “inspiration” or “influence,” the work of technoscience here involves abstracting something like a “diagram” from the fictional narrative, extrap- olating and inventing a distinct technical dimension perhaps entirely extrinsic to the text, and disregarding any necessary integrity or organicity of the fiction (hence, even the most absurd and unrealistic of science fiction stories might be broken apart and reduced to its most useful—that is to say, its most scientifically modifiable— elements). The diagram or blueprint would comprise, of course, actual technical drawings and designs, as well as the conceptual, mathematical, and discursive apparatus to make those designs functional within a specific laboratory, institution, or corporation. In this process of abstraction and modification, the identifiable traces of science fiction may be left far behind or may instead continue to inform the language, aspirations, and local mythologies of the research space. The degree of modification, as a measure of the abstraction and transformation involved in making a given science fiction narrative into a usable blueprint, can be assessed only by integrating the methods of textual analysis with the methods of microhistory, while also abandoning the strict conceptions of originality and authorship that would prevent us from seeing the fragmentary and endlessly metamorphic tactics whereby science fiction (or fiction in general) becomes appropriable as a tool or resource for scientific innovation.

An entire cottage industry now exists to facilitate this process of extracting certain technical resources from science fiction (and often fantasy and horror fiction, as well): the subgenre of popular science writing whose formula is “The Science of [X Media Fran- chise].” For example, The Science of Anime: Mecha-Noids and AI-Super-Bots (2005), by Lois H. Gresh and Robert E. Weinberg, assesses science fiction concepts from a variety of anime series that might be viable in the “real world,” explaining what further devel-

16 See, e.g., William Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001). On the world-building projects of early modern science in relation to utopian fiction more generally see Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1996); and Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999).

17 See Colin Milburn, “Atoms and Avatars: Virtual Worlds as Massively Multiplayer Laboratories,” Sponta- neous Generations, 2008, 2:63– 89; Thomas M. Malaby, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009); and MPS Team, “About Mechanized Propulsion Systems,” Mecha- nized Propulsion Systems (2007), www.mechaps.com.

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opments would be needed to turn them into science (thus complementing those modding processes that take place, for example, in the labs of Mechanized Propulsion Systems). Written by sundry professional scientists and science popularizers, books such as Anne Simon’s The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites, and Mutants (1999), Roger Highfield’s The Science of Harry Potter (2002), and Jeanne Cavelos’s The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist’s Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books (1999) remix popular culture with elite science. While initiating the labor of blueprint mods, these books often attend to elements of science fiction that, in their native (i.e., diegetic) form, cannot be directly adapted to technical purposes. Cavelos writes that, over the course of her scientific training, “I was already fascinated by the idea of space travel, and Star Wars fueled my interest in space exploration and the possibility of alien life. As I went through college studying astrophysics, though, I was taught again and again the scientific truths that made Star Wars impossible.”18 Such elements of “impossibility,” in order to enter into the discourse and practice of professional science at all, must therefore be modified to a more extreme degree. And this type of modification we might then consider under the category of supplementary mods.

The supplementary mod appears in the laboratory as an approximation or compensa- tion, a scientifically viable alternative to some otherwise appealing, but technically impossible, science fiction conceit. A typical example of the supplementary mod can be found in the research of David R. Smith and his colleagues on transformation optics and the electromagnetic cloaking of matter at microwave frequencies—in other words, the science of “invisibility shields” and “cloaking devices.” Smith has described his research on transformation optics as a workaround method to the fictional invisibility technologies seen in Fantastic Four comic books, the Star Trek series, and even the Harry Potter books:

There is undeniably a link between science fact and the ideas that emerge in science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction authors are inspired by actual scientific and technological discoveries, but allow themselves the freedom to project the possible future course of these discoveries and their potential impact on society, perhaps remaining only weakly tethered to the facts. . . . Sci- entists, in turn, often derive inspiration from the imaginative possibilities that exist in fictional worlds, but are constrained to follow the laws of nature that apply in this world. The inventions in fictional worlds seldom transition to the real world—at least not in the way they are first imagined.19

So the cloaking devices employed by Romulans in Star Trek may not be directly adaptable to science, at least “not in the way they are first imagined” by the television shows (“One shouldn’t pay very much to obtain the secrets of Romulan cloaking tech- nology,” Smith cautions). But Smith’s research now becomes a scientifically acceptable supplement. Enabling the science symbolically to attach itself to the grand future imagined by the Star Trek saga and similar narratives, the supplementary modification lends itself to new blueprints for future science and future fiction: “We have now succeeded in taking the prospect of invisibility from the realm of science fiction and fantasy to reality, providing what amounts to a blueprint for a cloaking device. . . . So, while we [research-

18 Jeanne Cavelos, The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist’s Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), p. xi.

19 David R. Smith, “Blueprint for Invisibility: The Science Fact and Fiction of Invisibility” (Research Group of David R. Smith, 2006), www.ee.duke.edu/�drsmith/cloaking.html.

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ers] have been inspired by the invisibility of fictional worlds, perhaps the discoveries that might follow from transformation optics will in turn have an impact in fictional worlds—as well as in the actual world.”20

Finally, the speculative mod. This modified form of science fiction appears frequently in scientific writing as a way of discussing possible futures and extrapolations of current research. As historians and cultural theorists of science, we are becoming increasingly attentive to the powerful role that scientific speculation, technological forecasting, and promissory futures play in the development of science and to how futurological narratives and road maps function as scripts in the everyday routine of laboratory protocols.21 But we have yet fully to take on the manifold ways these practices interrelate with the predom- inant mode of speculative narration in the modern era—namely, science fiction. Its generic traces can often be discerned where scientific probabilities or expectations for the future are rendered as discourse, as a now quotidian way of speaking about the consequences of scientific or technological change: the everydayness in postindustrial societies of what Brooks Landon has called “science fiction thinking” and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., has called “science fictionality.”22 We could point to a number of famous speculative mods, such as J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924) or Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005).23 But for the sciences at large, speculative mods appear most commonly in the concluding sections of research articles or funding proposals, which often venture into social potentials, payoffs, and other visions. Particularly in cases where the future of the world is imagined to hinge on the evolution of the research (such as we have seen, historically, in the fields of spaceflight, nuclear physics, cybernetics, genomics, and nanotechnology, among others), we observe something like a close encounter of the fourth kind: abduction by an alien force.24 Or, to put it another way: the scientific inhabitation of the narrative patterns and generic tropes of science fiction . . . no longer alien.

These categories of science fiction modding are not mutually exclusive, and we could certainly continue to expand this taxonomy. By attending to such practices, literary critics and historians of science might better work together to improve our understanding of how science fiction functions within scientific space, as a repository of modifiable futures.

Science fiction does not simply drive science, any more than science simply drives science fiction. Rather, they have a relationship of ongoing and productive mutual modification. Addressing how such modifications work, understanding what is being modified and in what way, requires a real interdisciplinary engagement between the

20 Ibid. 21 See, e.g., Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke

Univ. Press, 2006); Michael Fortun, Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2008); Nik Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew Webster, eds., Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); and Harro Van Lente and Arie Rip, “The Rise of Membrane Technology: From Rhetorics to Social Reality,” Social Studies of Science, 1998, 28:221–254.

22 Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (New York/London: Routledge, 1995); and Csicsery-Ronay, Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (cit. n. 1).

23 See Mark B. Adams, “Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J. B. S. Haldane,” Journal of the History of Biology, 2000, 33:457– 491; and Roger Luckhurst, “The Two Cultures; or, The End of the World as We Know It,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2007, 32:55– 64.

24 For some examples see De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2003); John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 2000); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1999); and Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

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methods of the history of science and the methods of literary and cultural studies—what Mario Biagioli has called a “postdisciplinary liaison.”25 But it also requires that we better historicize and query notions of authorship, the organic unity of the text, and the characterization of scientific borrowings from literature as “influence” or “infection.” If we continue to speak of influences or infections, it should be in this upgraded sense of end-user modifications and intertextual negotiations. Then we might finally be able to enjoy the alien probe.

25 Mario Biagioli, “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities,” Crit. Inq., 2009, 35:816 – 833.

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