Exploring anti-scientific tropes in science fiction
It’s certainly strange that most stories in this genre with names like science fiction depict mankind’s efforts to understand and improve the natural world as the center of evil. Why is so much media portraying mankind’s natural drive to invent as the downfall of all things?
List the theoretical scientific advances the author can imagine. SF finds a way to exploit it. Heroes often learn the truth of a fictional world. It’s just that humanity was better off before it had all the cool stuff that allowed the species to survive.
A common term for those who oppose technological advances is “Ludites.” The term comes from Ned Rudd, who destroyed a knitting machine out of concern for his changing workers. The Luddites took his message to heart and rebelled against the Industrial Revolution to save their lives. The Luddites’ enemy was not technology. It was greedy business owners who brutally left human workers to machines in the pursuit of maximum profit. The story of John Henry, the steel driver who defeated a large steam engine, depicts a similar story and embodies the same frustrations.
1921 Czech play Universal Robots by Rossum Written by Karel Čapek, the story is told from the perspective of an owner who replaces his employees with humanoid machines. He elaborates that the best workers are the least needed workers. His relationships with the people who run his business are purely hostile, and every dime they make is money out of his pocket, which he happily says aloud. The play is most notable for coining the word “robot” from the Old Slavic word “robota”, meaning forced labor. When the machine rebels and rips his limb from limb, they do so, enraged at their abuse. Robots are not bad guys. Not even a steam engine. Not even a knitting machine. These stories are about man’s inhumanity against man, and machines are just tools used to perpetrate that ruthless atrocity. Unfortunately, the story has mutated over the years, often ending up with the vague simplistic “Humans are good, robots are bad.”
In the overwhelming majority of cases, robots, artificial intelligence, thinking machines, and all equivalent concepts are evil by default. They were not programmed to experience empathy or sympathy. An AI built for war almost inevitably expands its intentions until all of humanity becomes the enemy, and most of the time wins. Harlan Ellison devised perhaps the most brutal AI ever to grace the pages of his 1984 novel. i have no mouth i have to scream He spoke of “the innate dislike that all machines always harbored for the weak, soft creatures that built them.” We set our own doomsday clock to tick inexorably. Robots aren’t the only ones who paint with this brush.
How many mad scientists had a good scientist to beat them? How many evil technologies were defeated when the heroes went to the lab to invent the solution? Living at the mercy of unsympathetic forces maintains a certain nobility, so why is there an attempt to make the world more commonly seen as “pretend play”? Intellectualism leaves most clever characters portrayed as cruel, arrogant, unsympathetic, and ultimately evil in their quest for all answers. Either spiritualism or the transfer of technology. Meet the wise and spiritually enlightened Jedi who must defeat the technologically superior Empire and its army of clones and robots. Watch HG Wells’ 2002 adaptation Time MachineMorality said, “Science should only exist to preserve the memory of the past, and everything else should be destroyed. transcendencewhen a man upgrades his dying brain to a computer, he quickly turns evil, proving a group of anti-technology terrorists right.
Perhaps the most interesting counterpoint to this general trend is the overwhelmingly popular cyberpunk subgenre. The villain in every cyberpunk story is a giant technology conglomerate. Usually shown by a jerk in a skyscraper suit, usually responsible for various major advances that went wrong, and usually steeped in an uncomfortably orientalism. You don’t swing sticks and rocks to bring down the neon-lit headquarters. They weld the thermal blades and plasma cannons they find to flesh and bones. Cyberpunk and its myriad descendants are providing people with technology and launching crappy underdog science against unethical corporate science. Maybe that’s part of what makes them so powerful.
Technology can be a force for good or for evil, but it tends to be ironic so often that science fiction forgets what science means. The best sci-fi understands every aspect of the medium, and the best writers don’t just challenge us all to return to the safe past.
