Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Mark Brake
Language: English
Pages: 250
ISBN: B005Q8B9SI
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Johannes Kepler's Somnium to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method. Science fiction's field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Brake and Hook's Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.
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to ‘enlarge the bounds of human empire to make all things possible’39. This will to power, however, violently crushed alternatives. The expropriating British Empire expanded. Native colonial peoples were dispossessed, shot, poisoned and diseased. All this was made more possible by the ideology of Bacon. The New Philosophy claimed to divide the Universe into two parts: one physical, and one moral. The primary physical truths were open to science. The moral domain lay in the realm of revelation40.
inevitable extinction. The Traveller’s headlong fall into the future begins at home. The entire voyage through the evolved worlds of man shows little spatial shift. The terror of each age unravels in the vicinity of the Traveller’s laboratory. ‘It is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should interest us’, Wells had written in his essay, The Man of the Year Million54. In The Time Machine we have Wells’ answer – a vision calculated to ‘run counter to the placid assumption... that
life, which pays tribute to the inspiring cosmic voyages87 of Kepler, Godwin, Cyrano and Swift, and their speculations on the habitability of planets and stars88. 64 DIFFERENT ENGINES Figure 2.5 The enigmatic ‘Flammarion Woodcut’ originates with Flammarion’s 1888 L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire. Like Wells, Flammarion was passionate about communicating science to ordinary people. It was only a matter of time before he used science fiction to further the cause. His 1872 Recits de
tranquil halls of privilege, beyond England history was unravelling. Russia stood at the brink of Bolshevik revolution. Henry Ford, meanwhile, cranked up American capitalist production to turn out a million cars a year. The work of Orwell and Huxley would strive to mirror the fears and ideologies of this changing and contrasting world. Huxley feared that what we love would ruin us; Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. It was a discourse they would continue until their deaths17. Orwell
flutters in the breeze to a soundtrack of Waltzing Matilda. It reads, ‘There is still time... brother’55. Alas, it seems the Australian legend that the film’s female star, Ava Gardner, while shooting, glared around and said of Melbourne, ‘What a great place to make a movie about the end of the world’ is untrue56. On the Beach had a massive impact. The New York Times affirmed that, ‘The great merit of this film... is the fact that it carries a passionate conviction that man is worth saving after
