On Chronicle of the Stellar Bridges
To define science fiction with any rigour, we need a conception not only of science but also of technology — because what these stories most often present is a display of fabulous devices whose theoretical foundations are left implicit. Here we will draw on the following text by Gustavo Bueno (1924–2016), a Spanish philosopher — ¿Qué es la ciencia? (1995) What Is Science? — and in particular:
(3) The third meaning of science, whose denotation corresponds to the so-called “positive sciences” or science in the strict sense, belongs to the “state of the World” characteristic of modern European civilisation, the era of the early industrial revolution (…). It is here that science appears in its modern sense, the one we shall consider the strong or strict sense (…); science, in this new strong meaning, comes to the foreground during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the twentieth century it will be recognised as a fundamental content of our world, in the form of “big science” (…) it is universal and assumes the role of the “dispersed skeleton” of the World that corresponds to our industrial civilisation.
This theory has the merit, as can be seen from its reference to industrial civilisation, of granting fundamental importance to technology. For Bueno, techniques are the origin of the sciences, which are not mere isolated speculations but have a constructive and operational character. We may then conceive of technology as that same technique filtered and refined by modern science — moving, for instance, from a traditional medicine founded on superstition and trial-and-error, to a scientific medicine that draws its power from the various sciences that nourish it.
According to these principles, what does science fiction consist of? Imagination feeds on what is known. It is inconceivable, for example, that in antiquity anyone should have imagined teleportation in its quantum sense — but stories were told about bilocation (the nun María de Jesús de Ágreda was said to be in two places at once, without need of any apparatus). Pre-modern wonders took their mould not from technology, but from magic, miracle, spirits, gods, or other supernatural forces. In his True History, Lucian of Samosata describes a voyage to the moon, reached aboard a ship of the kind familiar to him, carried there by a prodigious waterspout. The marvels that follow carry the typical hallmarks of ancient mythologies, which were perfectly capable of inventing monsters and extraordinary beings. The same creative ease belongs to medieval travellers, who gathered in remote lands stories from places yet more remote. Some of these stories might perhaps be considered proto-science fiction, though it would be more accurate to speak of a broad genre of fantastic narrative within which science fiction stands as the peculiar contribution of our own era.
What we are arguing here is that for science fiction properly speaking to exist — for scientific speculation to be possible — science must already be established in the third sense cited above. It is this known science that inspires authors to imagine wonders which, though impossible or not yet real, remain coherent with it. Only in a derivative sense can we speak of science fiction according to the other meanings, and always by reference to the strong model of the third. The psychohistory of Hari Seldon, Asimov’s character, might be considered in this light as a science-technology fiction in the fourth sense — the one that extends the concept to the “human sciences” — though what Seldon properly does is mathematics and probability. A science fiction in the first sense, as a know-how, would simply be magic, like the extraordinary know-how of the cobbler of the seven-league boots, and would fall within the more broadly defined fantastic genre. This is not to say that a clear boundary can be drawn between what is and what is not science fiction. The debate will always remain open as to whether a given conceit has a scientific flavour or is a fantasy of another kind — because the ancient sources, such as magic and religion, do not simply vanish from the new narrative; they frequently appear mixed with it, and revitalised.
On the importance of technology, there is one crucial aspect that tends not to receive sufficient attention: its social, economic, and political dimension. Technologies and the sciences that enable them are the fruit of the enormous labour of human groups in constant competition; they are not free gifts that one simply happens upon, but costly, valuable things that justify wars and all manner of ventures. Suppose someone were to invent a technology capable of jumping from one solar system to another. If one wished to present such a thing coherently in a work of fiction, one could not offer it as something trivial. One can, of course, displace the conflict elsewhere and leave the technology in the background, using it as a backdrop with which to explain the impossible, and then play freely with romance, adventure, or whatever one chooses. Setting that aside, the technology itself is powerful enough to sustain an entire plot built around it. That is what the novel Chronicle of the Stellar Bridges does. If the great conflicts establish the frame of the story, the characters’ struggle consists in exploring the limits of their freedom — in alignment with or in opposition to that frame. It is the old dialectic between the two great poles of modernity: an absolute that reduces the subject to insignificance on one side, and the often fatalistic individualism of an extreme existentialism on the other. In the winding paths between the two lies reality. The world of the Chronicle does not aspire to be magical, though it sometimes plays at those margins — it is content with the startling novelty of its invented technologies, and it is for this reason a work of science fiction in the fullest sense, which is no small thing.