Abstract
Kai Wiegandt examines how science fiction generates fascination through its treatment of time, and begins with the genre’s evocation of the sublime. Turning to the example of Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (1970), he then discusses the relationship between science fiction and futurology on the one hand and science fiction and allegory on the other. Drawing on the work of David Wittenberg and Fredric Jameson, he shows that Anderson’s use of time travel is a response not so much to Einstein’s physics but to a growing scepticism amongst science fiction writers of his era about the capabilities of science fiction itself. Tapping a previously neglected source of fascination, Anderson’s novel is exemplary in its use of time travel for an allegory of the 1960s.
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Notes
- 1.
Jameson’s example for the reassertion of the reality principle is the Strugatski brothers ’ novel Roadside Picnic, the model for Tarkovsky’s (quite different) film Stalker (see Jameson 2005: 74–76).
- 2.
Science fiction’s reliance on thought experiments has led to the most influential alternative definition of the genre —speculative fiction.
- 3.
Hard science fiction goes back to problem-solving stories that focus on plot, such as Edgar Allan Poe ’s “A Descent into a Maelstrom” (1841), in which the hero uses scientific knowledge to escape a maelstrom. Pointedly put, there is a zone of indeterminacy between today’s hard science fiction and the speculative scientific writing of, for example, research and development departments of big technology corporations.
- 4.
“There’s no human difference between a million and a billion, or ten billion, light-years. The exile is the same” (TZ 132).
- 5.
For the problem of finding visual and verbal equivalents of extremely long stretches of time, see Chap. 1.2 of this volume.
- 6.
The life sciences have played a prominent part in science fiction, as progress in them is projected to affect longevity, intelligence and the brain, evolution, genetics, sexuality and reproduction, the environment and the biosphere (Slonczewski and Levy 2003: 175). Joan Slonczewski’s Daughter of Elysium (1993) deals with some people who age, while others are engineered for near-immortality. In the last decade, speculations by scientists and inventors about the feasibility of doubled lifespans, new theories of aging as illness, and calculations of potential biological immortality of humans have surpassed the speculations of many fiction writers (see Knell and Weber 2009: 25–73; Hülswitt and Brinzanik 2010). For a discussion of science fiction’s concern with extended lifespans (with a focus on Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire), see Mangum (2002: 69–82).
- 7.
A similar analogy is invited by two better known literary and filmic narratives: Kazuo Ishiguro ’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) and Lars von Trier ’s film Melancholia (2011).
- 8.
More or less direct invocation of religious questions and use of a religious register is common in science fiction where technological achievements suggest godlike power of the human. The tone surrounding in particular the question of immortality is often eschatological (Mendelsohn 2003b: 270).
- 9.
The novel illustrates the illicit nature of drugs by featuring so-called dream boxes in which the crew can experience artificial but addictive rich sensory environments. Drugs or simulations of this sort are not a permanent solution.
- 10.
Leonora Christine’s crew is multicultural to an extreme degree, and the ship has a female First Officer, but in contrast to multiculturalism, feminism remains a fiction rather than a reality in Tau Zero. “Woman is the nigger of the world,” Yoko Ono polemicised in 1968 in an interview with the women’s magazine Nova (Lennon made a song of it, published in 1972). Her diagnosis can also be applied to the multi-ethnic space ship, wherein the First Officer Ingrid Lindgren, the highest ranking female, finds that the best she can do for the ship is to comfort and pleasure the male engineers, scientists, or constables when they feel dangerously low.
- 11.
A critical attitude towards science became common in New Wave science fiction after J.G. Ballard (Broderick 2003: 52).
- 12.
It goes without saying that also in the 1960s, most science fiction writers continued writing novels that did not exhibit such scepticism; just as most writers writing during Modernism did not write in a modernist vein. After all, the Sixties included important writers as different as Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, J.G. Ballard , and Philip K. Dick. Broderick suggests an additional source of the new scepticism when he explains that the late fifties and early sixties saw the arrival of the first generation of science fiction writers who were influenced by Modernism, which was itself characterised by epistemological scepticism (2003: 49).
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Wiegandt, K. (2017). Futurology, Allegory, Time Travel: What Makes Science Fiction Fascinating. In: Baumbach, S., Henningsen, L., Oschema, K. (eds) The Fascination with Unknown Time. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66438-5_13
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