The Return of Vaman - A Scientific Novel (17 page)

Good science fiction can be socially relevant, sometimes generating ideas that may be helpful to society, and it may be able to add to existing science, besides being thrilling and mind-stretching. Unfortunately, the fraction of good science fiction is small and it may be hard to spot the good ones among the vast majority of bad science fiction.

The bad variety can be of various kinds. Often, after the thin vaneer of ‘science’ is removed, what shows up is a fantasy or a horror story. Now I have no objection to horror stories
per se
: I have enjoyed reading a few like those by Bram Stoker, Conan Doyle, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. These are plain horror stories. What I object to are those that advertise themselves as science fiction and are no different from tales of horror. If one is expecting science fiction to make the lay reader science-friendly, then these horror books will not serve that purpose. Rather they will create or foster a distorted image of science in the reader’s mind.

Films like the
Star Wars
series form another class of what I call pseudo-science fiction. With a simple mental exercise one can transform them into classic “Westerns” with horses and wagons replacing weird creatures and spaceships. The long series “Star Trek” was more imaginative and closer to science, but it suffered from another problem which I will highlight next.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity has mystified a lot of people who generally only remember, let alone understand, two basic aspects of the theory. One is the maxim that you cannot travel or send information faster than light. The other is the equation
E = Mc
²
, equating mass with energy. Most science fiction stories in the bad category simply ignore the light speed limit. They have spaceships travelling across our Milky Way in times of the order of a few years when light itself would take 100,000 years! I feel very uncomfortable when such liberties are taken in the course of a science fiction story. Break this rule and then you do not worry if the spaceship
Enterprise
travels great distances in the Galaxy within relatively short time spans. But I wish the author would describe how his heros (or villains!) managed to break Einstein’s law.

As I mentioned earlier, Jules Verne’s novel
Round the world in eighty days
reveals a scientific truth only at the end, thus making the climax particularly effective. This is an example of
good
science fiction. By contrast, bad science fiction would either have nothing scientific to offer or, if it does offer some maxim, it will turn out to be wrong!

Finally, bad science fiction often ignores any limits of time and space, tolerating ranges where causality fails…and even situations where effects precede causes. While scientists discover more and more about genetics and cloning, poor science fiction seems to go on applying its own biological laws. Of course, as I stated earlier, a science fiction story may involve new laws of science, but it should manifestly avoid conflict with well tested science that has already been established.

I give two examples of the logical restrictions I have had to face while writing. In the story
A Cosmic Explosion
, I wished to demonstrate the harm a supernova could cause. Of course, the most spectacular supernova explosion is associated with the Crab Nebula, which was observed on Earth on July 4, 1054 AD. We know the date because of the records kept by the Chinese and Japanese astronomers of the time. That supernova lies more than 6000 light years away. That is, what we see there today happened more than 6000 years ago. Any harmful ingredient from that explosion, like cosmic rays, would take more than 6000 years to travel to us. Cosmic rays may suffer some resistance in travel because of magnetic fields or matter they encounter en route, so they are not expected to travel as fast as light. Assuming that cosmic ray particles travel at an average of two thirds of the speed of light, they would arrive take, say, 9000 years to arrive here. That is, they would reach here three thousand years after the Chinese saw it and hence two thousand years from today. This has to be borne in mind when we investigate whether the Crab explosion will be harmful to us. For the distance is so large that it is too early to expect the debris from that event to arrive in the near future, or indeed to expect its effect to be large.

Keeping these caveats in mind while drawing up the plot for my story, I decided to divide the time span into three periods and made the supernova explosion considerably closer than the Crab event. So it was in Period I that I had the explosion observed in around the seventh century, at a time when India was enjoying a relatively prosperous spell. That of course meant that the explosion was actually much earlier. A Buddhist monk of considerable knowledge and wisdom arranged to have records of the event kept underground, safe for posterity. Keeping track of time in this way, it was in Period II, in 1996, when the records of the observation were dug out and read by archaeologists. These showed the way towards further investigations. It quickly became clear that cosmic ray showers would arrive sooner rather than later, and that their effect might be fatal. Finally, Period III concerned the year 2710 when the Earth was slowly recovering from that catastrophe.

By keeping to these time constraints, it becomes clear to the reader that, while a terrestrial explosion is a short term phenomenon, a cosmic one could be an event lasting two millennia!

My second example is drawn from the novel
A Message from Aristarchus.
It centres round radio messages sent to a likely civilization. While such messages travel with the speed of light, the receiving location cannot be too far away. For example, if it were even just 100 light years away, it would take at least 250 years and probably more for a message to be received by the aliens and for them to actually arrive on Earth. Thus a novel requiring human-alien interaction with the present level of technology will have to have aliens not more than 10–20 light years away. This and the earlier example both alert the author of a science fiction to be aware of these space-time restrictions.

How have the film and TV media received science fiction? In the early 1960s the BBC aired a television serial called
A for Andromeda
, with a scheduled length of 13 episodes. The principal author was Fred Hoyle, while John Eliot co-authored the script. The serial was well received, so much so that it was followed by a sequel comprising another 13 episodes with the title
Andromeda Breakthrough.
The role of the heroine in the first serial was played by Julie Christie, a more or less ‘raw’ recruit from her film and TV course. This role very successfully projected her as an excellent actor. Ironically, this success raised her ‘level’ in professional circles so much that, when she was approached to play the same role in the sequel, the BBC discovered that she had been ‘priced out’ of their budget! So another girl had to play that role.

The success of these serials raised the fraction of science fiction programmes on TV. A very long running programme was
Dr Who,
which was shown on the BBC in the early evening. With interruptions, the series has so far had 812 episodes up until November 2014, and may probably claim some kind of world record. The earlier version of this serial had 25-minute episodes each connected to the next, while the later (revived) version had 45-minute programmes, each more or less standing on its own. The Guinness Book of World Records mentions another serial entitled
Smallville
, with a run of 218 episodes broadcast
without interruption
. It could still be argued that, compared to the never-ending soap operas on TV, these science fiction series provide an intellectually superior viewing diet.

However, if one wants to see the maximum influence of special effects, one should look for full scale movies on the big screen rather than short episodes on small screens. Films like
Star Wars
and its sequels show how special effects can dominate a film and its science fiction plot. A good combination of science fiction and special effects is found in movies like
2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are mystical overtones in the original Arthur C. Clark novel. At the beginning, in his caveman guise, man gradually picks up inspiration and hauls himself up the ladder of ‘progress’. The mystical part is in the form of a huge monolith with sides in the ratio 1
³
: 2
³
:3
³
. It emits a haunting tune which has an impact on the human brain. This tune, by the way, was borrowed by the BBC as the signature tune for its televised broadcasts of the Apollo 11 expedition to the Moon.

By comparison the movie
Zardoz
contains more fantasy, its main emphasis being on immortality. Set in the year 2293, it describes a small but elite group of people who have achieved near immortality, living in an isolated ‘vortex’ away from the rest of the population, who are referred to as ‘brutals’. The elite have almost secured immortality, because the key to their death has been hidden in a tabernacle with safeguards preventing access. The brutals live under the heel of the god Zardoz, at whose bidding the ‘chosen few’ can exterminate the rest. In a sense Zardoz is like the
Wizard of Oz
, who was a humbug with no special powers. He is in fact a member of the elite group of the vortex. One of the brutals, Zed, has indeed found this out. He kills the god and comes to the vortex, where he discovers the secret of death in the tabernacle and releases the elite colony from the pains of immortality. At the end of the film, one is inclined to ponder whether we will ever find ourselves in such an elite state in some distant future, when science has somehow eliminated all the trials and tribulations of life.

In this connection, I should mention that I recently saw the science fiction movie
Interstellar
. Its theme and the technology behind its execution raised great expectations in my mind. Alas, I was to be disappointed! The science behind it is vague at its best and mystical at its worst. The use of the wormhole concept is there, but the overall role of gravity is hard to fathom. So is the environment in an alien land, depicted as not very different from where we live. Certainly the technology for special effects is intelligently used, but to what avail? What new science is being projected? To a lay viewer it may all look fantastic, but not in a science-friendly way.

The Andromeda Strain
is another type of science fiction movie that combines suspense with science, without any great emphasis on special effects. A returning space probe brings in an alien life form, hostile to Earthlings. This hostility is demonstrated when, apart from two people, it kills all 66 of the other inhabitants of a Mexican village. A number of questions need urgent answers. How was death brought about on such a large scale? And why were two of the total population of 68, an old man and a six month old baby, unaffected? Would the killer source multiply and spread? Could it be controlled?

To find answers a crack team of super-scientists is engaged to work in an underground super-lab. Glimpses into their work and character are given, as are examples of domineering politicians. With all this super-atmosphere, it is something of an anticlimax to discover that, if the lab needs to be saved, the one person holding the key to the device capable of stopping all destruction only has to climb a few metres up a vertical ladder and find the appropriate keyhole. So, in the last analysis it is man’s ape-ancestry that comes in most helpful by enabling him to clamber so far up!

Obviously, when a science fiction book is made into a film, there could be crucial differences of interpretation between the original author and the director and/or script writer. How they are reconciled will have a bearing on the final version of the film.

To end, I have a few reflections on the role of reviewers. In my language, Marathi, there are hardly any professional experts capable of reviewing science fiction novels and short stories. This, in spite of there being literary reviewers capable of doing this job for literature in general. The reason is that many literary experts are afraid of the technical envelope around the sciences. Starting out with the premise that they will not understand the science on which the fiction rests, they are unable to write a reasonable literary criticism. Some do a very superficial job, while others may stick their necks out and write something that is manifestly wrong.

I can cite a personal example. My story
The Comet
, described earlier, referred somewhere to a date,
The First of October
, which played a critical role in the scientific enterprise that underpinned the story. A critic writing a review of the book blandly stated that my story was plagiarized from Fred Hoyle’s novel
October the First is Too Late
. Except for the date being the same, the two writings actually had nothing else in common. On closer questioning, the critic confessed that he had not read either work and had simply been struck by the coincidence of dates! Another scholar who got a Ph.D. on his critical review of science fiction by Marathi authors asserted that one of my stories was a copy of Conan Doyle’s story
The Case of the Opel Tiara.
In fact there is no such story by Conan Doyle!

I think a good case can be made for organizing a course on how to review science fiction stories or novels. Those who offer languages for study will stand to gain from it. In Marathi especially, where the field of science fiction is rather limited, some training on how to judge a science fiction novel would certainly help to raise the overall standard.

This brings to a close my own perception of science fiction. When one looks at the Indian national scene, one finds that Bengali and Marathi are the two leading languages fostering this genre. In Bengali in particular, the famous movie director Satyajit Ray wrote good science fiction. Science fiction for cinema or TV is even less common. In the 1980s The Children’s Film Society of India produced a film version of my story
The Comet.
Although preliminary studies of some of my short stories were carried out by movie producers, they got bogged down by the challenges of depicting science and the employment of special effects.

I have on various public occasions tried to get literary figures interested in writing science fiction. But to no avail! ‘Science’ continues to be a scare word, and school teaching which sets science apart from humanities is partly responsible for creating a dichotomy. This creates a false impression that is thus perpetuated, according to which those good in science will be poor at humanities and vice versa, a situation that makes it unlikely that we will ever generate the ideal science fiction writer!

Nevertheless, I continue to call upon those with literary flair to take up writing science fiction, using a friend from the sciences to advise them on scientific issues. This may be one way of attaining the goal set by Literary Society President Durgabai Bhagvat.