Astronomy , Science Fiction and Popular Culture : 1277 to 2001 ( And beyond )

stories, myths and tales can make ideas a part of popular culture. rea at religious figures have taught with parables; we use fables and fairy tales to teach our children about life; and it has been argued that even the ancient Greek myths might have been deliberate devices for organizing and transmitting information about the natural world to non-scientifically oriented people [I]. Once an idea gets turned into a story, people pay attention long enough to listen. They feel comfortable evaluating the idea by comparing the story against their own lives. And they remember it. One remembers images from Dante more than one remembers the arguments of Aquinas. With this in mind, we should not be surprised to find a strong interaction between science-fiction stories, the science behind those stories and the popular culture from which those stories spring. In particular, this paper will concentrate on stories involving concepts from astronomy, focusing on three questions: 1. How have advances in astronomy shaped science fiction? 2. How has popular culture influenced science fiction? 3. How does science fiction color the way popular culture views asaonomy? MEDIEVAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE When Arabic learning (in which classical Greek writings lost to the West had been preserved) was introduced in Europe in the thirteenth century, tensions arose between some Aristotelian ideas-such as that of a universe of immutable laws without beginning or end-and Christian teachings proclaiming the existence of an omnipotent creator God. In 1277 in response to certain philosophers at the University of Paris, the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, listed 219 philosophical propositions that were not to be taught in his diocese. Among them was the assertion that "God could not have made other worlds." God is omnipotent, the Bishop reasoned, and so one must admit the possibility of "alternate universes." Pierre Duhem saw this event as the birth of modern science [2]; though most historians today would consider that claim to be an exaggeration, David Lindberg has recently noted, "the articles that stressed God's unlimited creative power gave license to all manner of speculations about possible worlds and imaginary states of affairs that it was evidently within God's power to create. This led to an avalanche of speculative O 1996 ISAST Historically, developments in astronomy and changes in social environments have inspired new styles of science fiction. In return, popular culture has gained or hypothetical natural from Science fiction an underphy in the fourteenth century, in standing Of astronomy and Of humankind's place in the universe. the course of which various prinHowever, approaches to plot and ciples of Aristotelian natural phicharacter in science-fiction stolosophv were clarified, criticized, 1 ries color the presentation of as. , or rejected" [3]. tronomical d~scover~es, alterlng the way that popular culture views this did science fict~on's message about not include a rise in stories or fables based on such philosophical speculations. In contrast to today's abundance of science-fiction books, there was rather little philosophy fiction ("phi-fin?) written in the fourteenth century; as a result, those speculations never extended into popular culture. The closest approximation to a popularization of philosophical speculation-from the period might be Dante's Divine Comedy (ca. 1330), but even there Dante was poetically describing a vision of what he believed to be essentially true, not a speculation based on an extrapolation of a hypothesis of a philosophical possibility. By the time of Galileo, the work of John Buriden (ca. 1350) and that of Nicholas Oresme (ca. 1360) on the possibility that the Earth could be moving and spinning was nearly 300 years old. Even Copernicus's work was nearly 100 years old by then. But the general populace hardly knew about these ideas [4], and when Galileo resurrected them and brought them to the attention of the non-astronomical community, many learned people unfamiliar with astronomy were astonished and outraged. Their reaction fed the Enlightenment (and modern) misconception that the medieval era preceding Galileo must have been a period of religious fundamentalism that resulted in some sort-of dark age. PARALLELS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE FICTION AND ASTRONOMY There were a few ancient stories of space travel. In Scipio's Dream, Cicero tells of a dream in which Scipio passes from Earth to heaven through a series of concentric celestial spheres. This voyage is a literary device for looking back and commenting on Earthly events; but these concentric spheres GuyJ. Consolmagno (astronomer),Specola Vaticana, Vatican City State, and Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, U.S.A. E-mail: . Originally presented at the conference "The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena," Villa Mondo Migliore Rocca di Papa, Italy, 27 fune-2 Tuly 1994. LEONARDO, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 127-132,1996 127 @tz?&&M; % ";%-Jd BY-*%* + 8*.%""" vi $ <*Tl ;;c;* ,*< $. ?$;_ f" *-a -:? are clearly based on the crystallinesphere cosmology of the fourth-cen~uT~-B .c . Greek philosopher Eudoxus. True Hzstory, by Lucian of Samostat, who wrote in 165 A.D. (coincidentally, only 14 years after Ptolemy's last recorded observations of the planets), describes a voyage of Greek warriors to the Moon, where they fight against the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun and colonize Jupiter. Note that Jupiter, the Moon and the Sun were all thought of as planet-sized places that could be colonized. But, by and large, such stories were rare in classical times [5]. After the birth of the astronomical telescope (1610), this began to change. Galileo engaged in the mass-marketing of astronomy; he wrote science books in Italian, not Latin, and spent much of his time discussing his work and theories at fashionable salons in Rome. He embraced the role of popularizer and could be considered the Carl Sagan of his day. The dialogue format of his later books (four friends discussing new ideas over a period of several days) is, in fact, a fictional style bearing a certain similarity to modern science-fiction novels, such as Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama [6], that are long on exposition and short on plot. Kepler's Somnium (written in 1615 but not published until 1634) presented the new astronomy in a narrative form. It depicted a dream voyage to the Moon, incorporating accurate astronomy: the Moon is described as having mountains and a day that is 14 Earth days long, for example. Likewise, in 1638, Bishop John Wilkins produced A Discourse Concerning a New World, also predicting what one would really see on a trip to the Moon. And the famous adventure by Cyrano de Bergerac, Voyages to the Moon and Sun, was published in 1657. However, as James Gunn [7] points out, all these are tales of wonder or far-traveling, satires or utopias; they convey no conviction that what was being written could really happen. Clearly, they were influenced as much by the post-Columbian world of exploration as they were by advances in astronomy. In fact, real space-travel fiction begins only in 1863, when Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon, followed by its sequel, Around the Moon, in 1872 [8]. The first book is basically an adventure story; the second, a travelogue. Verne quotes extensively-especially in the second book-from DerMond, a book by W. Beer and J.H. von Madler published in 1837 [9].Der Mond presented the first trigonometrically accurate study of lunar features, including the positions and heights of over 1,000 mountains [ lo] . For the first time, the Moon had been mapped as accurately as any piece of the Earth's geography had. No longer merely a heavenly body, the Moon had become a place. Clearly, this depiction was an inspiration for Verne's work. Verne was the first writer to attack the problem of space travel in a realistic way and suggest that it might actually be possible. His propulsion method, a large cannon, had obvious problems, but the book recognized them and did attempt to deal with them. He also introduced the idea of using rockets in space. In addition, these books discussed the possibility that creatures could be living on the Moon. One of the heroes in Around the Moon claims to see evidence of their ruined cities; the others do not, and they argue about whether such aliens could exist and might ever have visited Earth. But the implications of alien life for humanity and its place in the universe are not really explored. Indeed, the attitude seems to be rather matter-of-fact: as if it were not surprising that people would exist elsewhere. Linear markings on Mars had been observed since the late 1700s and in 1869 Angel Secchi, a Jesuit astronomer at the University of Rome, first referred to these channels using thc Italian word ranalz. In the 1870s Schiaparelli publicized these observations in Italian, inspiring other astronomers to make further observations of Mars. One such astronomer was Percival Lowell, an American. In 1895 he published Mars [ l l ] , in which he argued that these features were indeed canals in the English sense, produced by a dying race of intelligent beings. Three years later (1898), H.G. Wells came out with The War of the Worlds. His race of Martians fleeing a dying planet was clearly inspired by Lowell's suggestion. The first years of the twentieth century saw other pulp-fictional works pick u p on this theme, most notably the Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of which was published in 1912 [12]. In these books, John Carter is a Civil War veteran who "thinks" himself to Mars and has a series of adventures involving glorious battles and beautiful women; again, the Mars described is clearly based on Lowell's vision of a dry, dying planet. The years following World War I saw advances in airplanes, automobiles and, especially, radio, which fed an increasingly popular enthusiasm for personal technology. In 1926 Hugo Gernsback, a publisher of magazines for radio hobbyists, began the modern style of sciencefiction story by establishing a pulp-fiction magazine called Amazing Stones. Most of the stories published in the first couple of years of this magazine were tales of future engineering marvels. But the Anlazing Stories issue of August 1928 had two important new kinds of stories. The first was a story by Philip Francis Nolan called "Armageddon 2419." In it, a World War I soldier, Anthony Rogers, is trapped in a cave filled with strange gases and emerges, unharmed, 500 years later. In 1929, Tony Rogers's adventures in the twenty-fifth century were made into a comic strip (and later, a movie serial), changing the protagonist's name from Tony to "Buck." But, besides the first Buck Rogers tale, there was another story in this issue worth noting. It never did get made into a movie and is not nearly as famous. But every serious science-fiction reader has probably heard of E.E. "Doc" Smith. August 1928 marks the date of the first installment of his first novel, written 10 years earlier but unpublished until the pulp magazines came along. It was called The Skylark of'Space [13]. Let there be no mistake. This book is dreadful. (I t has been suggested by some that my assessment of Skylark is a bit harsh. However, judging the original serial published in the magazine and not the extensively rewritten version that came out in paperback in 1947, I stand by my assessment!) It has every stereotype of bad 1920s pulp fiction: the handsome young inventor; the millionaire's beautiful daughter, whose sole function is to be kidnapped by the evil villain; a chirpy best friend; endless chases; stolen formulas; secret ingredients and a climactic scene in which good triumphs over evil in a fistfight. It is also the first popular book to present heroes who travel, not to the planets of our solar system, but to planets around other stars. A later set of books by Doc Smith, the Lensman series (the first was serialized in 1938), is even more grandiose. It posits Earth and Earth people as pawns in a grand interstellar battle between two warring alien races, one good, one evil. Aliens are given character and personality, although it is a hero from Earth, Kimball Kennison, who eventually saves the day. The Lens is a symbol worn by 128 Consohagno, Astronomy, Science Fiction and Popular Culture the good guys of all alien strains; it signifies their common citizenship in a community that encompasses the entire lens-shaped Milky Way Galaxy. (The 1920s and 1930s, of course, were the time of the great debates by Shapley, Hubble, Eddington and others on the size, shape and nature of our Galaxy.) Why is this important? Why does Doc Smith matter? His books are crude space operas. They read like popcorn; you could finish them all in a week. (I did.) But they are important precisely because they are classic space opera. They invented the genre. As a result of Doc Smith's books, notjust planets but stars became places where people had adventures. One early imitator of Doc Smith was John Campbell. In the late 1930s he became the editor of a rival of Amazing Stories called Astounding Stories and fundamentally changed the style of science fiction. As an editor, he made the crucial decision that travelogues or panoramas of technological marvels were not good enough. His magazine had to have real, plotted stories of human protagonists who develop, interact with the marvels, solve problems and change as a result. Under his guidance, such writers as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were nurtured and developed into popular science-fiction novelists. After World War 11, the view of alien races in science fiction had long progressed past the evil-invaders-from-Mars stereotype. For one thing, that was old hat; doing it again made for boring stories. Instead, it was realized that aliens might just be misunderstood, as they were in the film The Day The Earth Stood Still [14]. Heinlein's book Double Star [15] and Cordwainer Smith's haunting series of Underpeople stories [16]-which were based on the style and themes of ancient Chinese folk tales-both dealt with the struggle of nonhuman races for equal status in a universe dominated by human beings. Note the obvious connection with the nascent Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s there was a wave of "new wave" stories; they were about grand ideas or attempted experimental narrative styles. But, unlike the stories fostered by Campbell, they were not about people and, ultimately, they were never very popular except among an intellectual elite. By contrast, television shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "Outer Limits" offered traditional ghost stories (actually, they covered everything from horror to fantasy), bringing into the living room the chance for ordinary people to see themselves as a part of a larger universe. Note the irony. The medieval age had spirits-angels and devils-coexisting with people; but Enlightenment science had taken them away, making human beings the only inhabitants of the universe. Now fantasy and science fiction brought back the old angels and devils in a more scientifically correct guise. Indeed, the whole field of fantasy grew very rapidly in the 1960s, fueled by imitators of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings [17] (first published in the United States in 1965). By the 1970s the genre had developed its own set of rules and cliches. The general setting of a modern fantasy novel was usually a medieval world of courtly love, with knights and fair maidens, dragons and elves and trolls and dwarves, minstrels and merchants and thieves . . . the Middle Ages, as one fan put it, the way they should have been. Unlike the male-dominated roster of pulp science-fiction writers of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the fantasy writers were often women. Since they were not bound by historical accuracy, they could explore alternate social structures or retell old myths with modern sensibilities, as did Zenna Henderson, P.C. Hodgell, Katherine Kurtz, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Lynn, Patricia McKillip and Sherri Tepper, to name but a few of these writers. In many cases, such as the books of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the fair maidens were the knights. Fantasy became a way for women writers to come to grips with the still-unsettled demands of feminism and modern society. How did fantasy get associated with science fiction? To begin with, both shared the same audience; but there is a more direct connection. The revolutionary advances in physics during the twentieth century had blurred the differences between possible and impossible science or technology, at least in the popular conception: "a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," to quote Arthur C. Clarke. Furthermore, with the assumed multiplicity of habitable planets, one no longer had to look to the future for such advances. Fantasy no longer meant "an impossible world that never was" but rather a possible world that just happens to be "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far awayn-to quote the beginning of the Star Wars movies. Many fantasies explicitly stated that they were set on other planets. One of the first, E.D. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros [18], is supposedly set on Mercury. Modern writers place their planets around other stars and often have their characters make oblique references to a mythical place called "Earth." Ursula K. LeGuin's novel The Left Hand ofDarkness [19] is a story with many fantasy plot devices that explores a possible alternate social structure and is set firmly on a realistic, scientifically plausible distant planet. Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, starting with Dragonflight [20], depict a medieval society whose heroes ride telepathic dragons; but these books, by any definition, are really science fiction rather than fantasy: the people are descendents of Earth colonists, a scientific rationale is given for how and why these dragons were genetically engineered and the main plot revolves around the celestial mechanics of a neighboring rogue planet. McCaffrey's books have also been immensely popular; they were among the first science-fiction novels to break into the mainstream New York Times best-seller list, a sign that, by the 1970s, science fiction had become an established part of popular culture. "STAR TREK" VERSUS 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY-A CONTRAST IN MYTH-MAKING The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssqr was a modern example of deliberate mythmaking. The director, Stanley Kubrick, took a very timely interest in our first steps off the planet and tried to illustrate just what it would mean when we first encountered another intelligence. It was consciously intellectual. From its sound track to its visual style, it announced its serious intentions in capital letters. But consider the matter-of-fact depiction of the hero traveling to the Moon-flying Pan Am, calling long distance on a Bell telephone. The future, we were told, would be just like today. (Ironically, neither Pan Am nor the old Bell system has survived today, much less to the year 2001.) All this homeliness was intended to serve as a contrast to the mind-expanding final half-hour when the alien encounter was experienced. But the final half-hour was deliberately vague. Any attempt to depict such an encounter literally in the highly charged atmosphere of the film would have looked out of place; it would have been an attempt to depict the ineffable. What we were given, instead, was not much more than a "groo\y" 1960s light show. Consolmag7~0, Astronomy, Science Fiction and Popular Culture 129 L ~ * " + u &' $>c4?*$*;23 $,$ g$ L$<>$!<%*\ $< -&,, "&* $ 4 As a result, though much of the audlib z*od* ;,A* ; $ ence was entertained, many more were .%,"i' ",:.$$I confused or merely bored. The message of the film was that Space is bigger than we can understand. The realistic images in the earlier scenes of the film may have inspired some young people to pursue a career in astronomy, but for many others, the hopeless sense of incomprehensibility at the end of the film left only one question: why bother trying? With only visual clues and a meager story line, we were encouraged to read into it what we wanted to see; and so all we saw was what we brought with us to the movie. Ultimately, the movie did not change us. By contrast, consider the "Star Trek" phenomenon. Every week on television (every night in the form of reruns) we saw a story of people living in the universe, having adventures on planets and around stars and actually dealing withand being affected by-the strange things the astronomers were finding out there. Like any production wedded to a rigid weekly schedule, it was littered with clichks, easy answers and shallow characterizations. But a few of the shows were pretty good; they were enough to keep us watching. And the characters were fun. They became old friends with whom one could look forward to visiting, week after week. Slowly, without noticing it, the audience absorbed little nuggets of information (or misinformation) about what astronomers had to tell us about the universe. Planets became places where people we knew had adventures. Unlike the image-laden 2001, "Star Trek" was a writer's show, firmly based in the popular culture of pulp science-fiction stories. Indeed, some of the show's best script ideas and most famous lines first appeared in a 1952 novel by Robert Heinlein, The Rolling Stones [21]. Screenplay writers such as Robert Bloch, Frederic Brown, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, Norman Spinrad and Theodore Sturgeon were, for the most part, people who had made their living for years by writing for science-fiction magazines. "Star Trek" began in September 1966 and ran until 1969, when it was finally canceled (due to low ratings!) 2 months before the first moon landing. But "Star Trek" lives on in reruns, novels, animation, feature films and three spin-off shows (to date) that have become far more popular than the original. It had, and has, a strong, devoted fan following; people watched favorite episodes over and over (which advertisers found appealing). As of June 1994, in the "Star Trek" universe there were 331 television episodes, six feature films and over 100 novels, with more of each in the works. In addition came the "fanzines"-some 5,000 fan-written, fan-produced, photocopied magazines publishing stories, novels, articles and reviews, all involving the "Star Trek" universe and characters. It has become a billion-dollar industry. (Information on "Star Trek" and its spinoffs can be found on the electronic bulletin board/digest moderated by Saul Jaffe [22].) The message of the show? Wonder, optimism, a tolerance for others. The "Prime DirectiveB-that we should not interfere with alien races developing their own culture-was an important plot device, though it was violated more often than not . . . because that made for good stories. With more than 10 million households tuned in every week, probably more people today learn more about modern astronomy from this show than from any other single source. In "Star Trek," for the first time science fiction attracted a sizeable female audience. In turn, by the 1970s a significant number of science-fiction stories were being written by women. Furthermore, during this time the proportion of women entering the fields of science and engineering also increased rapidly: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for example, the number of women in the incoming freshman classes more than doubled from 1970 to 1974. Obviously, many developments in society at that time led to this increase, however, many of these young women mentioned "Star Trek" as a factor in their career choices. Note the contrast between the messages, the audience and the effects of 2001 and "Star Trek." The film 2001 reached much of the 1960s intellectual audience who had been unfamiliar with science fiction and confirmed, in many ways, their prejudice that space was unapproachably alien. The television show "Star Trek" reached a much larger audience, lapping several generations, with a message that the universe beyond Earth was approachable, interesting and fun. Today, much of 2001S message seems as dated as its once-avant-garde special effects. "Star Trek," a much more modest television show, still thrives. In our postmodern world, where the lines between high culture and popular culture blur, the "Star Trek" vision ultimately