Science fiction isn't just fantasy: it changes lives and can change Britain

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Science fiction isn't just fantasy: it changes lives and can change Britain
September 20, 2011
Adrian Hon
The Telegraph

Britain doesn't have enough young people becoming scientists and engineers. It's a familiar refrain heard from politicans on both sides of the aisle, not to mention eminent scientists and most recently, Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman. There's plenty of blame to go around for this apparent decline, whether it's the glittering lure of the financial sector, inadequate teaching, or our celebrity-obsessed culture.

But what is it that inspires young people to have a love of discovering how the world works, and how to make new things based on those rules? The Apollo missions were hugely influential for a whole generation of children, but what inspired the Apollo engineers in the first place?

Science fiction is one answer; Donna Shirley, former manager of Mars Exploration at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, read Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Arthur C Clarke's The Sands of Mars as a child, as well as Clarke's more serious scientific writing about space exploration. She recalled, "It was clear to me that space exploration wasn't just fantasy … I thought, 'Gosh, I could do this.'"

We're no slouches in Britain when it comes to world-class science fiction. Along with the grandmaster, Arthur C Clarke, we can count H G Wells, John Wyndham, and Aldous Huxley, not to mention more contemporary writers such as Iain M Banks, Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Charlie Stross, Richard Morgan, China Mieville, and the late Diana Wynne Jones. But compared with the past, today's children are more likely to get their inspiration from TV, film, or games than books. So how are things on that front?

Well, the UK also has the longest-running science fiction show in the world – Doctor Who – which also happens to be one of most popular British dramas ever. It's inspired more than a few budding scientists in its time, but it's quite literally an exceptional show because there aren't really any other recent SF shows that can hold a candle to it in terms of longevity or critical or popular success. In short, it needs some healthy competition.

While I enjoy watching it, there are other ways to tell a good SF story than the way they do it; and while like other shows it's done well from increased production budgets and better special effects, I'm yet to be convinced that the stories are that much better than the old classics like The Robots of Death. So it's curious that the US has taken the lead with science fiction in recent years with shows as diverse as Star Trek, The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and Fringe, while the UK has responded with short miniseries that fail to make a lasting mark.

Perhaps it's because British TV seems to work better with ideas and characters rather than epic stories; we prefer the scrappy underdog or gentleman amateur, as demonstrated by Blake's 7, Quatermass, and Ultraviolet. Such characters often meet with messy ends, and combined with our inevitably lower production and writin budgets, it's not surprising that even the best shows seem to be over in a couple of years.

A candidate for one of the best British shows in recent decades must be Star Trek: The Next Generation. Obviously I'm being facetious, but in this series you have Captain Jean-Luc Picard who, his name notwithstanding, is as British as can be (he loves Earl Grey tea and Shakespeare) and commands a crew whose idea of a good time are Holodeck re-enactments of Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, they prefer solving things through diplomacy and smarts rather than charging in all guns blazing; but if force is necessary, then well, they have the HMS Enterprise – sorry, USS Enterprise – ready and waiting.

It's unfortunate that we don't have more inspirational science fiction on in the UK right now, and I'm afraid the lion's share of the blame must go to the BBC. If there's any broadcaster has the fortune to play the long game, it's the BBC – they can take a punt on shows and allow them to develop an audience, a strategy desperately needed for concept-driven serials and one that HBO has perfected. Yet the BBC's strength, the licence fee, also makes this difficult – it's given rise to the belief that their shows must be all things to all people, which in practice means that they appeal to no-one. The constant pressure for ratings and instant results from the press doesn't help either; it makes it difficult for any broadcaster to take real risks.

Today's children and teenagers are increasingly likely to find their scientific and engineering inspiration from games such as Halo, Dead Space, Crysis 2 and Little Big Planet. The recent Deus Ex, with its impressive grasp of near-future human augmentation devices (such as prostethic limbs and organs) will be sure to get a few teenagers curious about medicine and robotics.

For my part, I practically inhaled Arthur C Clarke's novels as a teenager, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy quite literally changed my life, sending me into biology and neuroscience at university. You'll hear similar stories from countless other scientists and engineers, those who dreamed of a different world, one that – with human effort – might just be made a little bit better than the one we have now. No wonder NASA has teamed up with Tor-Forge Books to publish a series of novels that will hopefully reaise awareness in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and maths).

In his talk, Eric Schmidt criticised "a drift to the humanities" and that Britain was neglecting the sciences. What was less reported was his other remarks, that "over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together."

He's right. Amazing discoveries begin at the interface between the science and humanities. Science fiction sits right on that interface, and we neglect it at our peril.