Science fiction: the literature of intriguing juxtapositions
by Rob - May 26th, 2020.Filed under: Academics, Tube Alloys.
![[Einstein's 70th birthday]](https://sfwriter.com/rogue's-gallery.jpg)
There’s just one week left until The Oppenheimer Alternative comes out, so here’s our penultimate real-life chapter-head epigraph from the novel:
“The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.”Certainly, this is true of the science in The Oppenheimer Alternative. Oppenheimer started out as a chemist, his own pre-war work was in astrophysics, and only after the Manhattan Project became public was he famed as an atomic physicist.–J. Robert Oppenheimer
And my novel brings together disparate thinkers indeed, including the physicists who built the bomb and rocketeer Wernher von Braun.
But, more than that, I think Oppie’s quote is particularly applicable to the field I’ve devoted my life to: science fiction. Indeed, when asked to define science fiction, I sometimes call it “the literature of intriguing juxtapositions.”
Where else would one find, for instance, quantum physics and paleoanthropology cheek-by-jowl except in a novel such as my Hominids? Or life-prolongation technology and SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, as in my Rollback? Or experimental psychology and (again) quantum physics as in Quantum Night?
At most universities, professors in such disparate departments probably don’t even know each other (unless they have to serve together on some cross-faculty committee).
When McMaster University decided to hold a three-day academic conference in honor of the donation of my papers to their archives, they took my suggestion and called it “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” and we had papers presented by academics in such diverse fields as theology, theater, literature, philosophy, astronomy, and gender studies.
I initially set out to be a paleontologist — but you can’t just be a paleontologist; you have to drill down the tree of subspecialties until you end up being a paleontologist (level 1), a vertebrate paleontologist (level 2), a dinosaurian vertebrate paleontologist (level 3), a dinosaurian vertebrate paleontologist who specializes in theropods (level 4).
But I am interested in ALL THE THINGS, and being a science-fiction writer was one of only two possible career choices that would let me hop freely from scientific discipline to discipline (the other is science journalist).
And so, The Oppenheimer Alternative: a novel that combines political history, military history, the history of atomic and nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum physics, rocketry, and Martian observational astronomy, along with — in the character studies — psychology into a single whole, which, to paraphrase Oppie, brings multiple sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with each other.
The novel comes out one week from today, on June 2, 2020, in print, ebook, and audiobook worldwide.
Pictured, left to right, at Einstein’s 70th birthday party at the Institute for Advanced Study (where much of my book takes place):Eugene Wigner, Hermann Weyl, Kurt Gödel, I.I. Rabi, Albert Einstein, Rudlof Ladenburg, and J. Robert Oppenheimer — all but Weyl and Ladenburg are characters in The Oppenheimer Alternative.
(Click picture for a bigger version.)
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