Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Those who are considered great writers don’t usually dedicate part of their efforts to science fiction. This genre has traditionally been considered second-rate, despite the fact that some prestigious authors have occasionally engaged on it. In this context, the most cited work is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932), a book I have talked about in previous posts in this blog.

But there has been a recent foray into this genre, by no less than a Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Kazuo Ishiguro, who writes in English and received the award in 2017, is well known for works such as The Remains of the Day, or An Artist of the Floating World, plus his science-fiction novel, Never Let Me Go, a dystopia along the same lines as Corinna Turner's I am Margaret, which I mentioned in my post on dystopias in this blog. Now, in 2021, he has published a science fiction novel that touches on the theme of strong artificial intelligence.

Utopias and Dystopias

Utopias, the descriptions of fictitious perfect societies, owe their name to Thomas More's Utopia (1516), a title of Greek origin that literally means nowhere. Before and after More's work there have been many other utopias, each one to the liking of its author, for the question of the perfect society gives a lot of play to the imagination. Examples include Plato's Republic, Tomasso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888, see this post), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), or Aldous Huxley's Island (1962).

Literature and Science: Huxley and Heisenberg

Aldous Huxley

In 1963, the year of his death, Aldous Huxley published an essay titled Literature and Science. In it, he raises the existence of two different specialized languages, literary and scientific, different from the vulgar language, each of which is directed towards a specific objective:

• The purpose of literature is to describe, in the best possible way, man's most private experiences, especially those that deal with our feelings. To do this, it creates a specific language, where the ambiguity of words is the fundamental element giving strength. For Huxley, the term literature can be applied to all possible forms of the art of writing: poetry, drama, novel and essay, whose relationship with science he analyzes successively.
• Science, on the contrary, seeks to univocally describe the public (or less private) experiences of man, those that have to do with objective reality. To do this, the scientific language must be as far as possible free of ambiguity. Each term must have a univocal and unambiguous meaning. In the best case (as in physics) scientific language can be reduced to mathematical formulas.

About the social order

In a comment to the Spanish version of a previous article in this blog, JI Gs wrote this:

All societies have an explicit social order, whether they are fundamentally believers or not in the immaterial; even animal societies, let alone insects, have a strict social order and the immaterial has no need to act to generate it or to maintain it.

I have two considerations to make:

Solitary bee (Megachile) and social bee (Apis)

• Comparing human societies with insect societies is a false step. The human social order is based on a set of moral rules that has remained fairly constant over time, except in relation to sexual morality (see the appendix to The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis). The social order of insects is programmed in their genes and their nervous system. While in the human species it is possible, even frequent, that one or more members of society rebel against one or more rules, or even attempt to overthrow the entire social order, the members of insect societies cannot rebel. In other words, man is conscious and free, insects are not. Any comparison between them is out of place, because they are based on totally different structures.

Mass manipulation

Aldous Huxley

Albert Speer, minister for armaments in Adolph Hitler’s government, said these words when he publicly apologized during the Nuremberg trial:

Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all predecessors in history: it was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship that made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought.

Since the days of Hitler, the technological tools that a dictator can use to manipulate the masses have come a long way. In addition to radio and loud-speakers, cinema and the press, available to Hitler, we now have television, sound and image recording, mobile phones that provide countless information, computers capable of processing it, and social networks, which are becoming one of the most powerful instruments of social manipulation in existence.

As I said in another post on this blog, these tools are neither good nor bad: what is good or bad is their use. All can be used well, and all can be misused. Do we have controls to prevent their being misused? Or do we know that they are actually being misused?

Toward Brave New World

Cover of Brave New World's 1st edition

Just as a utopia is a literary work that describes a perfect society, from the point of view of its author, a dystopia is the description of a society where certain characteristics of the world in which the author lives, which he considers unacceptable, are exaggerated and carried to the extreme, with a satirical or denouncing intent.

The two world wars caused a feeling of disillusionment in the West that gave rise to the two most famous dystopias of recent history: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (written in 1931, published in 1932) and Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell (written in 1948, published in 1949). These two works are original in another sense: while other earlier dystopias (such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon, 1872) were located in remote places, such as the Antipodes, the two modern dystopias take place in the future.

The feeling of oppression that seizes the reader of these two novels is almost unbearable. In both cases, the very few nonconformists in society are excluded: in the first, they are banished to an island; in the second, the exclusion is only temporary: the rebel is submitted to brainwashing so as to destroy his spirit and turn him into a mental waste, raw material on which the social planner can act, remodel and educate until he is recovered and adapted to society. The two dystopias are horrible, but they have a very great power of conviction and verisimilitude.

Predicting social future: political correctness

2001, A Space Odyssey

As I discussed in a previous post, scientists are often wrong when they predict the future of science. Science fiction writers make mistakes too, especially when they are trying to predict technical advances. Consider the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, which got wrong almost all the developments proposed for that year. Fourteen years after the date in the title, we still don’t have a base on the moon, manned spaceships to Jupiter, artificial intelligence, or humans in hibernation.

We should remember Asimov’s third law of futurics, which states that predicting the social consequences of future scientific progress is more important than accurately predicting that progress. A SF story predicting cars, but not the parking problem, would not have been a good SF story.

In 1941, before Asimov formulated this law, Robert Heinlein correctly applied it in his short story Solution Unsatisfactory, which predicted the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, its use to end World War II and the subsequent nuclear stalemate between the great powers. Not bad, as an example of what you can do in a well-built science fiction story.