There has been some discussion of late of the role science fiction might play in inspiring science – see Damien G Walter’s piece here, Cheryl Morgan’s here, and Mark Charan Newton’s here. The argument being that, allegedly, innovators read science fiction, or many scientists chose their careers because of science fiction, and so the genre is assumed to have a very real influence on the future of science, technology and engineering.

I don’t buy it.

For one thing, most present-day science fiction has very little real science in it. Space opera, arguably the most visible form of sf, has almost none at all. It’s little more than space adventure stories. Which is not to say, of course, that space opera in any way epitomises the genre. However, what it does do is associate outrageous, non-realistic ideas in science or technology with science fiction. So when someone comes up with such an idea, it’s immediately labelled “science fiction”. Sf is not a tool for innovation, it is a licence to imagine, a legitimisation of blue-sky thinking. It suggests the unrealistic is feasible and/or desirable, it makes it palatable.

Take the example of a crewed base on the Moon. It has been the dream of NASA and space enthusiasts since the 1950s, if not earlier. Had the Apollo programme continued as originally planned, it might even had happened. Now it’s back on the space exploration agenda – or rather, it’s back in the public arena of space exploration. But there have been remarkably few science fiction novels published in the past fifteen years about such an endeavour. Sf novels set on a colonised Moon, yes; but about colonising the Moon? No.

Before Apollo, there were a number of sf novels published about the landing on the Moon – e.g., Jeff Sutton’s First On The Moon, Charles Eric Maine’s High Vacuum, or Hank Searle’s The Pilgrim Project. But even then they comprised only a small fraction of the genre’s output, and they were as much inspired by actual real studies on – and real work towards – Moon landings as they were by pure genre speculation. The truly speculative lunar landing novels had been written decades earlier; whereas the actual science of space exploration fed back into the sf of the 1950s – not that it was depicted especially accurately, it must be admitted.

Science fiction reflects the ambitions of its time. Some of it may speculate about the concerns of its time. Some of those concerns may be scientific, but if science fiction has one true role it is as a licence to free the imagination. It is a label that can be applied to ideas in the real world which are not really scientific, though they may involve science or technology. This, however, can swing both ways – both putting down innovation, as well as encouraging it.

It’s not science fiction which inspires innovation, it’s imagination. And that’s not something science fiction has a monopoly on.

Earlier this week, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and US publisher Tor/Forge issued a press release announcing they would work together to develop and publish “NASA-inspired works of fiction”. Or, as the release put it, they would work together on “a series of science based, commercial fiction books … around concepts pertinent to the current and future work of NASA”.

I should be excited about this. I like reading science fiction, I like reading about space exploration. But which is best? There’s only one way to find out…

But, seriously, any sf author worth his or her salt writing on such a topic will do the necessary research anyway. Perhaps they won’t have access to an actual NASA scientist, but they could probably find much of what they need to know on the Internet. And, if not, there’s always that old information-access tech known as “books”.

Of course, this assumes that the Goddard Space Flight Center is merely offering itself as a research resource to Tor/Forge authors, which may not be the case. It could be the reverse: authors acting as ghostwriters for NASA scientists. Or perhaps it’ll be a creative partnership between the two (or however many are involved in the book). The emphasis on “current and future work of NASA” does suggest this is as much a PR exercise for the agency as it is a desire to develop a series of novels which are intended to boost interest in careers in engineering and the sciences.

And yet… Look at science fiction now and its most visible face is that of the escapist space opera. There’s not a lot of science in it, and not much that might cause a reader to think of NASA and its works. While many scientists (and one prominent economist) have pointed to sf as the inspiration for their career choices, and a number of sf writers have been, and are, working scientists… I have to wonder how strong the link between the two is. After all, does historical fiction inspire people to become historians?

So what’s the likely effect of putting the science back in science fiction? It depends, of course, on the books the partnership produces. I suspect that, given the need to produce commercial fiction, we may get something closer to a techno-thriller set on the ISS than Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital, or Mars, trilogies. I certainly hope not. I would dearly love to read authentic near-future high-concept science fiction which, as Wikipedia describes Goddard Space Flight Center’s role, is concerned with “increasing knowledge of the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe via observations from space” and the “scientific investigation, development and operation of space systems, and development of related technologies”.

I recently read Heaven’s Shadow, a 2011 blockbuster sf novel by movie screenwriter David S Goyer (so, of course, the film rights have already been sold for a humungous sum) and television screenwriter (and genre mid-lister) Michael Cassutt. The novel boasts that it accurately describes a near-future space mission to a comet visiting the Solar System. While there are definitely no pointy rockets of yore, or magical anti-gravity spaceships, in the book, and it makes a better attempt at depicting state-of-the-art spacecraft than sf as a genre usually does… Heaven’s Shadow does initially read more like a techno-thriller set in space than an actual science fiction novel.

But I refuse to be pessimistic. Something good could come of this partnership. In fact, I’m quite looking forward to seeing what it produces.

At the back of mainstream novels, you will sometimes find a list of “sources”, i.e., the books the author used as research for the novel. This has never been common practice in science fiction, though you’ld think the genre requires so much more research than mainstream fiction. It’s not just the science, but also that the real world the readers know and understand is rarely used as a setting. So there’s a wealth of additional information the writer needs to get across. And few sf authors are working scientists, astronauts or, well, aliens.

In fact, the only astronauts to write sf set in space were Edward Gibson (Reach, 1989; In the Wrong Hands, 1992) and Buzz Aldrin (Encounter with Tiber, 1996; The Return, 2000; both with John Barnes). Scott Carpenter’s two novels (Steel Albatross, 1991; Deep Flight, 1994) are underwater techno-thrillers, and are based upon Carpenter’s post-NASA oceanographic career. Also relevant is Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, who wrote a sf novel (First Landing, 2001) about the first colony on Mars.

This doesn’t mean there are no sf authors who research, or no sf authors who list sources at the backs of their novels. However, I suspect the general aversion to info-dumping in sf also extends to authors demonstrating – or proving – that they have performed any research. Perhaps they consider the presence of its “fruits” in the story evidence enough – certainly, there’s a level of authority and realism evident in prose that contains proper research. Kim Stanley Robinson considers “exposition just another form of narrative” – and is one of the few sf authors to list sources, or give a bibliography, at the end of his novels. He also writes very realistic science fiction. His Mars trilogy is considered one of the best hard sf series of all time, and notable for its realistic depiction of the initial colonisation of Mars. In his words,

And in science fiction, you need some science sometimes; and science is expository; and so science fiction without exposition is like science fiction without science, and we have a lot of that, but it’s not good. So the word “infodump” is like a red flag to me, it’s a Thought Police command saying “Dumb it down, quit talking about the world, people don’t have attention spans, blah blah blah.” No. I say, go read Moby Dick, Dostoevsky Garcia Marquez, Jameson, Bakhtin, Joyce, Sterne — learn a little bit about what fiction can do and come back to me when you’re done. (From Outspoken Authors: The Lucky Strike)

While it’s true that some subgenres of sf demand more research than others that doesn’t mean some get a free pass. Space opera is a very unrealistic form of science fiction. It could be argued it doesn’t need to be, but I disagree. The Milky Way is not the Wild West, and any story which treats it as such is doing itself, and its readers, a disservice. Having said that, space opera is a very popular subgenre and, to many non-fans, it is emblematic of all science fiction. As a result, they see sf as an unrealistic mode of fiction, one which fails to address realistic concerns.

I sometimes wonder if sf’s frequent lack of realism is a result of writers during the early decades of the genre failing to recognise – or deliberately rejecting – their own amateurism. They would dream up neat ideas, and write stories about them, without actually bothering to build anything like a realistic or plausible world in which to explore their idea. The central conceit was all; it was the only thing which needed to be phrased plausibly. The writers may have been experts in the real world – or as much as any of us are experts  – but the setting of their story was invented so that knowledge was of little use.

Of course, it’s also true that on those days sf writers could blithely make something up and the chances of them being called on it were remote. Perhaps there might be an irate letter in the magazine a month or two later. These days, any reader can look something up online, and make their opinion known on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc. There’s no excuse for getting it wrong now – those tools are just as available to the writer as they are the reader (though you would hope the writer would go the extra mile).

Looking at much sf written today, it seems to me it is turning more fantastical. No effort is made to explain the ideas used in a story, no effort is made to make them appear feasible or plausible. Why then are they sf and not fantasy? They may be stories written in a science fiction mode, but they are entirely unrealistic. That may be one way to offset criticism. If everything in a story is entirely made-up – in the purest sense of the term – then readers can’t object to any inaccuracy. But is that tactic necessarily a good thing?

To me, sf is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary settings. Yet the genre has featured a lot of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary settings. You can understand why the latter would appeal to adolescents – they all want to be special snowflake heroes and succeed in changing the world. (High fantasy is also full of protagonists such as these.) But the real world, and most invented worlds, are populated chiefly by ordinary people. Not by super-brainy scientists or manly bullet-chewing marines or super-competent alpha males. Ordinary people, of all genders, races, cultures, religions, sexual identities, etc, etc. When you have the whole universe to play with, why limit diversity? It makes no sense.

But then, sf has never been an observational genre, and has never really known how to meld the quotidian with the fantastic. The opposite, in fact: it deliberately eschews the quotidian, it revels in the fantastic. It lacks realism. I can understand the desire to exclude realism in some subgenres, I can even see how many readers would prefer non-realistic – escapist, immersive – stories. But I don’t think that’s the only way to do it, and I suspect it does little good to the genre’s reputation to produce only those.