Interdisciplinarity in science fiction

Abstract

Referring to C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution is clichéd yet mandatory in any project that attempts to discuss interdisciplinarity and to identify affinities between, on the one hand, “science,” arguably the last metanarrative with any significant cachet in the post-postmodern condition, and, on the other hand, the humanities. It has been nearly 50 years since Snow famously lamented the lack of mutuality between the sciences and the humanities and especially the vagueness of practitioners in the latter about important and basic aspects of the former. And the situation has degenerated further in that it is perfectly obvious that we currently lack not only interdisciplinarity, but, more urgently, intradisciplinarity within either. The present is the age of the specialist and the subspecialist, a form of superspecialist, such that one can no longer even utter the words science or the humanities with innocence or precision, and it is almost certain that no field within either of the camps demonstrates complete univocity or internal coherence. Thus, for instance, and to limit ourselves for the purposes of this example to “the humanities,” philosophy remains riven by polarities between logical positivism and Continental philosophy (which themselves permit, in turn, further subdivisions); the study of literature continues to be embroiled in the struggle “against itself”; and the study of culture, not least the very definition of culture, is highly contested. Gerald Graff contends that postmodern literature and critical theory has tended to be nihilistic, refusing to define or relate to external reality, a worldview that leads to self-trivialization and loss of referentiality, weakening literature’s claim to truth. More and more, it seems that because of the vast amounts of knowledge that specialists accumulate, they tend to speak mostly among themselves, solely within the borderlines of their specificisms and hardly at all (and certainly with questionable authority, reliability, or purpose) to specialties other than their own. In his famous lecture, Snow, a wellknown British physicist and novelist, somewhat simplistically blamed the communication breakdown between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities (“scientists” and “literary intellectuals”) as the major stumbling block to solving the world’s problems. Snow saw these as two diametrically opposed worldviews separated by intense suspicion and mutual incomprehension, outlooks that virtually eliminated the possibility of harnessing solutions that a combination of the two camps might bring about. This was not an original concept, as Snow himself admitted; even in 1798, Wordsworth, in The Tables Turned, wrote that the appreciation of nature was starkly different when approached as a poetic truth as opposed to a scientific quest conducted by the “meddling intellect” which “murders to dissect.” Snow’s frequently overlooked second edition—The Two Cultures: And A Second Look (1963)—reexamined the divergence of these two camps and, indeed, the divergence of the specialities and subspecialties within each camp. Snow also wondered why this notion had raised such a storm at the time. He believed, rather naively in retrospect, that all could be solved by despecializing education in developed countries such that future scientists would have a strong grounding in the humanities, and future literary intellectuals would have a solid scientific background. Snow also thought that the material lot of poor nations could be solved simply by educating their populations. Snow’s perceptions were already somewhat dated in 1959 and have become more so with the passage of time, as even individual disciplines have become superspecialized. A particular notion that Snow attempted to introduce was the concept—or hope—of the emergence of a new third culture which would comprise individuals who could bridge the communications gap between the two camps. Bare numbers will out the truth. Even back in 1987, it was estimated that there were more than 8,530 individually definable knowledge fields, and it is obvious that these multiple specificisms may categorize knowledge almost hermetically, making it inadvertently inaccessible to researchers in related fields. More reprehensibly, the inefficiencies and tensions that the trends of centralization of academic research and super-specialization inevitably bring about may be amplified by territorial aspects of disciplinary knowledge and methods. Multitalented inventors, such as Edison, Ford, and others, have not only captured our imagination but also served as inspirations for fictional characters, including in science fiction. SF, in its typically positive and optimistic fashion, has repeatedly warned of indulgence in super-specialization and has depicted heroes who embody interdisciplinarity, seen as an ideal modus operandi whereby knowledge can somehow become greater than the sum of its parts. Such protagonists range from prolific boy inventors or adults of Edisonian forte all the way to true interdisciplinarians who have a wide range of knowledge that encompasses diverse disciplines. This paper will review sf’s depiction of some protagonists who have reified the interdisciplinary paradigm within sf and some lessons that may be learned from these narratives