One of my gut-level instincts about why I’m so fascinated by SF is that it is uniquely interested in the intersection of/construction of a distinction between the social and natural sciences. By the social sciences I mean politics, history (broadly construed), and anthropology, among others; by the natural sciences I mean, in particular, geology, biology, and environmental science. This is absolutely a disciplinary argument and as such can be picked apart to no end; indeed, one of my next few posts is going to be working through Latour’s argument for the dissolving of the separate spheres of “politics” and “ecology” in the realm of “political ecology.” But even if this distinction is constructed and artificial, it is quite compelling and has taken on a narrative life of its own, and the SF genealogy that I want to trace is based precisely in this narrative.
Take, for instance, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is where I (strategically, as I’ll explain) often start my personal history of SF. Wells was explicit about his choice to use time travel through deep time (journeying forward beyond the lifespan of the human species as we know it) as a mode of narrativizing evolution: evolution, he explained, functioned so slowly that jumps in time were necessary to show any alarming (and thus narratively effective) change.
But we can also read his novel as an exploration of what happens when the social/political/historical becomes biological—when class (firmly within the realm of the social science) becomes inscribed in the body, when socioeconomic divisions cause speciation such that humankind splits into two distinct species. It is precisely the genre of science fiction, with its freedom to deploy disjunctive deep temporality, that makes the wall between social and natural science permeable.
This notion of permeability, of course, opens up a very interesting if well-trodden line of critique along the lines of eugenics and scientized racism. Remember that this was rife in the nineteenth century; for context, Darwin’s Descent of Man can be seen as quite progressive for its time on account of Darwin’s argument for monogenism—polygenism being the position that human races were actually different species and came from different origins. Race was generally believed to be biological at this point, rather than socially and culturally constructed, and I’d venture to say that contemporary discourse isn’t quite as far removed from the Victorian’s brand of biologized racism as we’d like to think. In other words, positing a transparent causal claim between the biological and social sciences’ explanatory modes was fairly common during the Victorian and Edwardian periods (see also: Social Darwinism). Still, science fiction seems like one of the places in which this relationship was interrogated and complicated, not just propagated. (Another is naturalism, examples of which I’ll definitely be discussing this year; stay tuned!)
A few thoughts going forward: how does collapsing the distinction between human and natural history differ when the “natural history” in question is geological/environmental rather than biological/genetic? Is there a way to rethink the social sciences’ explanatory dominance that is less politically reprehensible than biologized/essentialized racism and more nuanced than non-agential materialism?
Time Enough At Last 