Science fiction matters, but not as a forecast of future events. (Where
are the flying cars? Eternal youth? Meal-in-a-pill?)
The under-rated literary category offers top-notch entertainment—and an
overlooked benefit. The success of certain sci-fi stories holds a key to your
own writing success.
Technical fiction—use that term if the rocket ships, ray guns, mages and
alternate histories distract you—measures society’s fears about
technology-wrought change. The backbone themes of sci-fi include hubris, the
mad scientist, monsters, and playing God. These have struck a chord with readers
for millennia.
Set your Way Back Machine and travel with me 3500 years in the past to
consider one of mankind’s earliest technical thrillers. You’ll recognize it
from Genesis, Chapter 1. It also pops up in ancient Sumerian’s cuneiform
inscriptions, in Sanskrit seals, in the Koran, in Aztec and other native peoples’
stories. Most likely, you know the story as the Tower of Babel.
Technical thriller? Indeed! The survivors of the Great Flood elect to build
“a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven…” This was grand a goal
for its time as H. G. Wells’s First Men
on the Moon was for his. The ancients fired “brick for stone”. That’s
your disruptive technology. Bricks replaced sun-dried mud and permitted vertical
buildings and city walls. City states replaced tribes. Heredity and political
acumen replaced wisdom and experience in the appointment of rulers. Bricks set nomadic life on the path to
obsolescence and created social upheaval.
The Tower of Babel
account still resonates because it employs one of the oldest literary devices,
metaphor, and one of the oldest themes in science fiction, playing God—hubris.
“The Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same
language. And this [building the tower] is what they began to do, and now
nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.’”
The rest is
history, or metaphor, if you prefer. Individual city-states produced individual
cultures, languages and fragmented society. Add metaphor to history, create a
mythology, and the story has legs that carry it across the centuries.
Other early sci-fi writers used these tools successfully. Icarus’sill-fated flight towards the sun or Belleraphon’s abortive flight to Mt. Olympus
are metaphors that represent hubris.
Fast-forward to modern times
and you’ll encounter the stubborn persistence of these themes. Read no further
than Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park
and you’ll find technologists playing God with DNA. Monster stories are as old
as darkness, but Crichton struck a vein when he married technology and
mythology. That, and damned good writing.
Another long-lived premise is that of the unhinged individual in control
of limitless power, the Mad Scientist. I explore this subject in my novel, Little Deadly Things, the story of an
emotionally-damaged woman whose mastery of nanotechnology makes her wealthy…and
dangerous.
I believe that the conscious use of our primal mythologies blended with
modern technology produces great stories. Call it science fiction or technical
thrillers—whichever you wish.
Literature’s answer to playing God (a term coined in the 1931 film
version of Frankenstein) is
technology in service to mankind. Think of Isaac Asimov’s beneficent robots,
harnessed by the Three Laws of Robotics. Consider the second Terminator movie,
in which a new cyborg must protect John Connor from an even more powerful and
advanced Terminator, the T-1000. Look to Marta Cruz in LittleDeadly Things, a character who melds nanotechnology with ancient
rainforest medicines for the good of an ailing world.
When writers grok the relationship between technical change and
mythology, they add to their inventory of time-tested literary devices. Imbue good writing with technical knowledge
and mythology and the results just might be a damned good thriller that stays
popular, millennium after millennium.
I’ll tell you if it works for my novel. Just look me up in a thousand years and we’ll compare notes.
