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, since what these stories most often present is a display of fabulous devices whose theoretical foundations are left implicit. Here we shall draw on the following text by the Spanish philosopher Gustavo Bueno (1924—2016) — ¿Qué es la ciencia? (1995) What Is Science? — and in particular:
(3) The third meaning of science, the one 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 (…). Here science appears in its modern sense, the one we shall consider strong or strict (…); science, in this new strong meaning, comes to the foreground during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the twentieth it is 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 corresponding to our industrial civilisation.
This theory has the merit, as its reference to industrial civilisation makes plain, of granting fundamental importance to technology. For Bueno, techniques are the origin of the sciences, which are not isolated speculations but have a constructive and operational character. Technology, then, is to be understood as that same technique filtered and refined by modern science — as when one moves, for instance, from a traditional medicine founded on trial and error and superstition to a scientific medicine that draws its power from the various sciences feeding into it.
Given these principles, what does science fiction consist of? Imagination feeds on the known. It is unthinkable, for example, that anyone in antiquity could have imagined teleportation in its quantum sense — but stories were told of bilocation (the nun María de Jesús de Ágreda was said to be in two places at once, with no 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 recounts 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 bear the typical hallmarks of ancient mythologies, which had no difficulty in inventing monsters and extraordinary beings. The same readiness to invent belongs to medieval travellers, who would gather in distant lands stories from places more distant still. Some of these tales 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 our own era’s peculiar contribution.
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 prompts 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 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 of the first sense, that of know-how, would simply be magic — like the extraordinary know-how of the cobbler of the seven-league boots — and would belong to 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 order, because the ancient sources, such as magic and religion, do not simply vanish from the new narrative; they often appear mingled with it, and revitalised.
On the importance of technology, there is one crucial aspect that tends to receive too little attention: its social, economic, and political dimension. Technologies and the sciences that make them possible are the fruit of the enormous labour of human groups in constant competition; they are not free gifts one simply happens upon, but costly, valuable things that justify wars and all manner of undertakings. Suppose someone were to invent a technology capable of leaping from one solar system to another. 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 carry a whole plot 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 against 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. The truth lies in the winding paths between them. The world of the Chronicle does not set out to be magical, though at times it plays at those margins; it makes do with the startling novelty of its invented technologies, and is for that reason a work of science fiction in the fullest sense, which is no small thing.