"What if...?"

In my opinion, one of the most interesting points in SF – here I mean hard SF and not Fantasy – is its capacity to ask questions about our universe and try to reply through reasonable and somewhat logical, if not possible, answers. Numerous SF authors build their stories by answering the question “What if…?”

Of course, all sorts of literature can ask good questions and answer them; but it seems to me that SF authors have special avenues of freedom to do so, for several reasons.

The first reason is that in a conventional novel, you are severely limited by natural boundaries: the story takes place in such country at such an epoch. The plot is set in a place and time which will influence the behavior of the characters if there is to be some consistency in the story. Even when place and time are not explicitly defined, the reader is generally able to infer them. On the other hand, if the action takes place not only far away on earth, but somewhere else in the universe, and in a distant past or future, those boundaries are not so strict.

You might retort that the legends and fairy tales or the fantasy novels have a lot of freedom, and probably more than SF novels. True, but the questions they ask and the answers given are not driven by logic. To take an example, in the One Thousand and One Nights stories, people use flying carpets. In Dan Simmons’ Hyperion SF novels, flying carpets are also used, on a world called Maui-Covenant; but they are called hawking mats and we understand that they use some antigravity principle through flight threads embedded in the carpet fabric, which can be charged with a battery. And that little explanation makes all the difference between the legend where the flying carper is just magic, and the SF story where the author suggests there is some technology based upon physical principles.

To go further, it is interesting to note that someone like the internationally acclaimed physicist Dr Michio Kaku studied the physical possibility of such feats as using time machines, travelling faster than light, becoming invisible and other “impossible” actions described in SF stories. He ended his study by dividing the “impossible” into three categories. In the class I impossibilities, he grouped technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics; thus they might be possible within the next centuries. They include teleportation, antimatter engines, some forms of telepathy, psychokinesis and invisibility. In the class II, he includes technologies that sit “at the very edge of our understanding”: they would be possible in a matter of thousands of years and include such things as time machines, hyperspace travel or use of wormholes. In the class III he groups the technologies that violate the known laws of physics. Do you believe it? He found there are very few such impossibilities in that class.

Coming back to our matter, we thus are able to affirm that the majority of the impossible technologies described in our SF stories could be realized by science some future day.

The second reason – and to me it is a very exciting one – is that it is easier to criticize or simply evaluate a given state of affairs from a distance rather than from the heart of it. You can experiment it when you are in the heat of an exchange with, say, your step mother: you may have difficulties to completely understand her point of view. Throughout history, a fair number of satirists have used circuitous means to criticize their society or environment without suffering the leaders’ wrath and censure. Even in our more tolerant societies we are bent by non-written laws to keep more or less politically correct statements. But in SF, by setting his plot on a faraway world in an unimaginable future, the writer increases dramatically his possibilities to question all kinds of human behaviors and societies without being too worried. Thus, viewed from remote, through the eyes of aliens or machines, he or she can more easily question not only matters such as political systems or social behaviors, but details we are not even conscious of in the course of our day-to-day habits, details that weave our very ways of life. In this sense, SF may approach the philosopher's questioning way, and for me this is highly interesting. Of course that kind of strategy has been used for centuries, for instance in Gulliver'sTravels, which could be viewed as some pre-SF novel. 

Third – and that is rather specific to the SF field – the writer is free to study the dynamics of the situation as it unrolls during any length of time: in SF, periods spread upon many thousands or millions or even billions of years are not uncommon. In our society, where the vast majority of the problems we deal with are only considered in the short term – decades at most – SF can offer speculation about the very long term and ask ultimate questions such as: why we humans are there? Where did we come from? What will become of the human species and its environment in a thousand years? In a million years? What will become of our universe? Is this universe the only one in existence? And so on…

But – and that is a huge difference between (hard) SF and legendary stories – there is always to be some consistency in the unrolling of the situation and its consequences. 

Bibliography

Michio KAKU: Physics of the Impossible - A scientific exploration of the world of phasers, force fields, teleportation and time travel.Penguin Books, 2008 - London (329 pages)

Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group - New York