The language of Science Fiction - An Essay

I remember Bob Heinlein talking about a writer who served up the same basic plots over and over, sometimes 'filing off the serial numbers' of a story he liked changing the lines a bit and then he 'owned it'. I have always shied away from this method of writing, even when people writing about writing have stated that there are only a limited number of basic types of plot, and almost all stories will fit to these basic types. I figure there are going to be no more Heinlein stories, since the guy is deceased. How about filing off the serial numbers and changing the lines a bit on some of his stories? The fact of the matter is that you can't copyright Ideas, only the form in which they are expressed. This of course smacks of plagiarism but consider for a minute what would happen if plagiarism was in fact a criminal offence. If plagiarism extended copyright to the extent of protecting ideas then any idea in science fiction, once used (and published!) would no longer be available to any other writer to use as his or her work and separate works which were published that did use the same or similar ideas could face years of legal wrangling to determine to whom the idea belongs. If one work used the concept of 'gravity plating' for example, then no other work except by the same author(s) could use that or a substantially similar concept. This is verging on the ridiculous! The non-legal definition of plagiarism is not clear and it is this concept of protecting ideas which makes it unclear, so we must beware of taking large chunks of another person’s work and claiming them as our own, or indeed whole works and simply changing a few proper names and so on. But, using an idea which is already present in the language of science fiction is not a crime, so long as the actual use of the idea is in your own words and your own story.

It is Heinlein's ideas that make his stories so interesting, in many cases the plots themselves are somewhat weak, but the ideas presented make the story worth reading. Clearly much of the technology he describes is defunct. Stories written in the 1940's and 50's no longer stand up technically in the 21st century. For example, in one story he describes an atomic powered 'space ship' which is basically an orbital lifting vehicle powered by steam, super-heated by a fission pile. The ship is cobbled together by a bunch of teenagers and an 'old space hand'. We now know this would never have worked due to the weight of the shielding that would have been required to prevent the occupants being irradiated. In another story a ship of a much larger scale is described, also using the same basic principle but of sufficient size to carry the necessary shielding for the passengers to at least survive in the short term. The danger of radioactive contamination is such that such a ship would never be permitted, unless either these dangers are solved, or nobody gives a shit about the danger. Another classic Heinlein story involves a 'tunnel in the sky' which is basically a Stargate concept not dissimilar to the movie of that name.

Once of the main problems which has been holding me back in my writing of science fiction is the feeling that it is necessary to always come up with something, some concept that is completely new, never been done before, and such ideas are few and far between. By the 21st century, most if not all possible ideas have been explored, often in several ways and differing approaches. Science Fiction has become more mainstream, that is to say that the story has become more significant than the ideas which are explored. Which in my view makes it possible incorporate old ideas in the form of the genre, with good plot and characters. In much the same way a writer may approach writing a detective story, or a western, the ideas and concepts of these genres are basically dictated by what has gone before and it is only the implementation that differs from example to example.

So how would we go about 'ripping off' Heinlein, without being plagiarist, and which stories or ideas are the most suitable to be 'updated'?

Let's look at 'Tunnel in the Sky' in more detail. The ideas behind this is the basic precursor to the Stargate concept; a planar region of space-time is by means of some sort of machinery, connected directly to a similar planar region of space-time, usually light-years removed. This story actually pre-dated several academic papers derived from Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, where some solutions to his equations implied that a traversable stable wormhole could be created, given sufficient energy and a source of negative mass. Subsequently a whole new field of physics has been developed to theoretically describe the physics of wormholes. I have mentioned the Stargate movie previously, more recently we have the concept of 'Runcible Gates' described by the author Neal Asher, and probably other variations on the theme by numerous other writers. This is to say that the 'Stargate' concept has become part of the language of science fiction and indeed also the language of theoretical physics. Asher's Runcible gates are more or less identical in effect to those gates found in Heinlein's story. So basically there is no problem using this idea, since it has become part of the language of science and fiction.

So what about the plot of the story?

The basic plot is that a group of high school students are taking a frontier survival class taught by a veteran. Their final exam involves being dropped by means of a star gate onto another planet with only what they can carry and expected to survive for 10 days or two weeks. The survivors are picked up by means of another gate set several kilometres away from the initial drop. Only this time it goes wrong, the recovery gate does not open, due to 'solar interference', and the group is marooned for months. The lead character becomes 'mayor' of the primitive village that they establish. There are various trials and tribulations when the kids assume rescue is not coming, and with negligible resources they do in fact survive after a fashion. The premise is that even a bunch of teenagers can whip an alien environment and survive with only minimal losses given the basic appropriate training and moral turpitude.

Echoes of filed off serial numbers and altered lines here? Perhaps those who have read 'Lord of the flies' or other similar stories will find elements of the plot recognisable, Heinlein did say in his writing that there are no new plots. But is the plot worth ripping off (again). Perhaps, perhaps not.

Given that the Stargate concept is now accepted as part of the language of science fiction, what other concepts are also now part of that language? Well certainly the 'Star trek Universe' or series of series have added a number of 'concepts' to the language of science fiction. Most notable of these would probably be the 'phaser' and 'photon torpedoes' and the 'transporter'. Star trek conveniently glosses over the problems involved in creating artificial gravity, instead of ships which require spin to provide artificial gravity using centripetal force, the deck plates of all ships in the Star trek Universe magically produce a one directional and variable gravitational field apparently by electro-mechanical means. The 'transporter' concept is an interesting one, in that it is basically predicated on matter-transportation from one place to another by means of some electro-mechanical process, something that has also been used elsewhere in science fiction. For example, the movie 'The Fly' where the inventor of a matter-transport machine gets merged with an intruding fly. Safe to say then that 'matter-transport' is now part of the language of science fiction. A variation on the theme of matter-transport has been used in several novels, in the form of a person (or animal!) being able through the power of their mind to teleport themselves and or others between locations in space-time.

Another concept that Star trek has gifted to the language of science fiction would have to be 'warp-drive' or 'warp-bubble'. The basic concept is that a warp-bubble is created around a space ship, then space-time is compressed in front of the ship and expanded behind it, thus allowing the ship to travel at a velocity faster-than-light. The actual physics of this is far from proven, unlike wormhole theories which have a basis in Einstein’s equations, warp-theory seems to be completely fantasy, however in his 1994 paper Alcubierre formally proposed this concept, in his metric the relativistic effects, such as time dilation do not apply. One aspect of these Star trek theories is in fact realistic, warp-bubbles require the use of anti-matter as a source of energy, and anti-matter has indeed been detected in real physical experiments. Unfortunately, at present it would take millions of years to collect a sufficient amount of it to be useful in this respect.

An older concept, in the same vein, is 'hyperspace', often characterised as a region or property of space-time which when entered will allow the spaceship to travel faster-than-light, there is no real world theoretical basis for the 'hyperspace' concept. However, recent developments in theoretical physics require that higher orders of dimensions in space-time must exist mathematically in order to describe quantum mechanical objects and behaviours that exist. It is not then beyond the realms of possibility that some sub-set of these higher orders of dimensions might not represent something like the 'hyperspace' concept.

Heinlein has also looked at the possibility of higher order dimensions, for example in his book 'The Number of theBeast' where he postulates that the four space-time dimensions we experience are in-fact a sub-set of six available dimensions, and if a machine could be made to switch between these available dimensions it would not only be possible to travel faster-than-light, but also to travel to 'alternate dimensions' and to travel forwards and backwards in time. The concept of 'alternate universes' has been much used in science fiction, though usually the writers spend little or no time actually explaining the conceptual theory, and just get on with the story.

The concept of time travelling is very popular in Science Fiction, so much so that most people will be familiar with 'The Grandfather Paradox', where a time traveller travels back in time and impregnates his grandmother, thus becoming his own grandfather. Many entertaining plots have been developed using loops through time or loops in time. Again the means of travelling is usually by virtue of some electro-mechanical device the theory of which is rarely explained in any detail. It is my view that 'time-travel' has been 'done to death' in the genre. However, in each case it is done by means of the hypothetical electro-mechanical machine, whereas in theory the only way to achieve time-travel currently would be by means of two 'Krasnikov Tubes' (a type of wormhole), one outgoing and one side by side returning, which when traversed in the reverse direction would give rise to time travelling in that the traveller would arrive before having left, the temporal displacement being directly proportional to the length of the tubes. There is some discussion as to whether there must be some currently unknown physical law which would act to prevent this, a sort of 'Law of Conservation of Time'.

In summary I would say that the state of science fiction today is that the language, as of that of any other genre of writing, is well established and there is no shame in using that language to tell a story, so long as that story is sufficiently entertaining that someone wants to read it. It doesn't matter whether you use the concepts behind faster-than-light travel to enable your setting to be that of a space empire in conflict with its neighbour, or you use the multi-universe or multi-dimensional concepts to enable your character to travel in time, with all the interesting philosophical paradoxes that that entails. Your readers are assumed to understand or simply to accept these concepts as part of the language of science fiction, so much so that many writers now use these concepts like buzz-words without really going into detail on the theory.