Fiction About Science

Science fiction could mean fiction about science, i.e., about the work of scientists and about scientific processes. How much would we have to know about science in order to understand such a kind of fiction? Would the author be able to explain scientific issues clearly enough for the benefit of readers who were not scientifically educated and would he also be able to hold their attention throughout a narrative specifically about scientific questions and their resolutions? Scientifically uninformed readers tend to skip past the scientific rationales in works of sf but suppose the content of such rationales was present not only in a few introductory passages but also throughout a novel or short story, forming the main content of its narrative? James Blish put a lot of scientific background into They Shall Have Stars about the development both of antigravity and of antiagathics. I mention this because, among Poul Anderson's short stories, "Catalysis," which we have just read, and "Snowball," which we might be about to read, seem to fit into this proposed category of "science fiction." I could quote some dialogue from either story to illustrate this point. However, I would have little or no understanding of what I was quoting.