I just attended a convention in Calgary. I listened to and participated in panels on topics as diverse as dinosaurs, communicating the process of science to the general public, Mars, and the social responsibility of novelists.
What kind of convention deals with such a wide range of fascinating topics? Only one: a science fiction convention.
“Science fiction convention” conjur up images of teenagers in Star Trek uniforms waving toy phasers, since that’s what the TV cameras focus on, but while there were plenty of costumed people at Con-Version XIV (a two-metre-tall cat and a guitar-strumming pointy-eared Romulan, for instance), they weren’t the focus of the convention. The heart of Con-Version XIV was a series of panel discussions, led by distinguished guests that included three of the top writers in the field, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson and Robert J. Sawyer, and also included a paleontologist (Dr. Philip Currie from the Royal Tyrrell Museum), a biologist, and a handful of lesser-known writers (one of whom happened to be me).
The panels fell into three categories: panels about science related to science fiction, panels about various sub-genres of science fiction, and panels about the craft of writing science fiction.
Panels about science included some that dealt with real science, and some that dealt with speculation. In the former category, there were two panels on Mars and one on dinosaurs; in the latter category, there were panels on time travel and telepathy.
I was on a couple of panels that dealt with sub-genres of science fiction, one entitled “Fantasy by Streetlight” (“Is there a place for elves in a modern multi-cultural society?”), and another, “Genre Crossing” that looked at such cross-bred fiction as vampire stories set in the Old West and science fiction mysteries.
But the most interesting panels I took part in dealt with the craft of writing science fiction. Science fiction sparked my interest in science; it almost led me to become a scientist instead of a writer. The kind of SF that has a lot of science in it is called “hard” science fiction, and it often tells stories based on the very latest discoveries of real science, exploring the ramifications of those discoveries on society and on the future of humanity. The trouble is, if the reader is to understand the story, the science must first be explained; and if that’s handled awkwardly or in a boring manner, the story will die. In the panel, “To Rivet or Not to Rive: How Much Science is Too Much?” the consensus was that a skilled writer can make any aspect of science interesting. I, of course, heartily agreed!
A related question was, “Why is there so little science in science fiction?” The everyday work of scientists is seldom portrayed realistically in science fiction, or, for that matter, in mainstream fiction. The reason, Kim Stanley Robinson pointed out, is that a typical scientist could spend years researching something so esoteric that only a handful of people understand it, going down blind alleys, starting over, drumming up funding wherever she can find it, and the end result will be a paper that, if it’s a big success, might be cited a couple of dozen times by subsequent researchers. This is not terribly dramatic, and so fiction focuses instead on atypical scientists, who make great discoveries before breakfast and have built a working prototype of a world-changing invention by supper. Writers must constantly strive to balance the necessities of an interesting story with the realities of the scientific process, and most don’t even try.
Accurately reflecting science, however, is one of the social responsibilities of the SF writer, panelists in another session concurred. However, the primary social responsibility is simply to tell a story that is true to the writers’ own beliefs, insights and understanding. Others may misunderstand and even misuse the writers’ words–just as the U.S. militia movement uses the SF novel “The Turner Diaries” as the Bible of its virulent brand of paranoia–but the best writers can do if their words are twisted to a purpose they find hateful is to speak out against it.. They must not let the fear of misuse stop them from writing what they feel to be true. It’s only through the introduction of new and often conflicting ideas that society moves forward, and introducing new ideas is what science fiction is all about.
It’s definitely not just about people with pointy ears waving toy phasers–and neither was Con-Version XIV.
