How One Scientist Writes Fiction

I am a scientist and I write fiction. (Time will show whether I publish any.) People assume, therefore, I must write science fiction. But this is not the case.

If I did write science fiction, I would probably write about an apocalyptic future in which humans have defiled the Earth so much that it loses its Gaia equilibrium and lurches from disaster to disaster. There is a long history of such literature, from the 1960s The End of the Dream by Philip Wylie to the more recent move Wall-E. Some writers, with scientific backgrounds, have science as part of the plot, especially the rise and rapid spread of new epidemics, such as the movie Contagion.

In these examples, science propels the plot or acts like a causative character. The human characters tend to be shallow and predictable in their responses to science-based catastrophes. The scientific concept is in charge.

But in my fiction, the characters and their struggles are foremost. I like to create characters whom the reader can really love (or sometimes hate) and who interact in complex ways. The characters advance the plot, and whatever does not advance the plot must be excised. In my case, I sometimes stick in didactive passages of science education, which I later remove. Does science play any role in my fiction?

Yes, of course it does. It is always in the background. In my fiction, the characters are (almost) always aware of the world in which they live and know how it works. In my fiction, a forest is not just a forest. The drier forests on the hillsides are different from the moist bottomland forests. My characters know the different kinds of trees. They know about germs, but also about the rich and fragrant microbial life of the soil. In my fiction, soil is not just dirt. My characters learn things from watching plants grow and finding fossils in rocks. In my fiction, nature is not a character but is a force: it is neither malevolent nor safe, but something entirely its own that we need to respect. I wish everybody knew enough science to understand how the world actually works; in my fiction, my characters generally do.

Shakespeare said all the world’s a stage. But a stage is dead. It has dead props that humans can move around wherever they want. But the world, scientifically understood, is not like this. It is a living planet to whose processes we must all fit our activities.

On Failing to Change the World

I have been reading The Triumph of Human Empire by Rosalind Williams. The author ties the biographies of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson around a common theme: Humanity has extended its dominion over every part of the globe, and while this may be inevitable, it results in great losses not only to wild nature but to human nature.

For example, in the writings of Jules Verne, Captain Nemo explores the vast unknown expanses of the oceans, in which he desires to leave behind the conflicts of the human race, which take place on land or on the surface of the sea; but he cannot leave behind his own conflict with the human race. He sees the oceans as the ultimate freedom, but he is not really free. And whether it is Captain Nemo revealing the secrets of the oceans, or riders in a balloon revealing what the unknown center of Africa is like, the very act of exploration brings these wild and unknown spaces into the range of human knowledge and therefore dominion. Verne wanted to explore the unknown world, but at the same time regretted the end of the frontier.

I would like to concentrate on William Morris, a writer about whom I knew literally nothing until I read Williams’ book. He was most famous as one of the leading British socialists of the late nineteenth century. He despised capitalism because it oppressed the poor workers, but also because it substituted cheapness for craftsmanship. He inherited a fortune and also ran a successful interior decorating business, for which he was criticized as being a socialist hypocrite. But he ran his business by artisinal, rather than industrial, standards; he particularly detested artificial dyes, and spent a lot of effort on improving natural dyes.

The triumph of cheapness in the economy was just part of the larger picture of ugliness that was gripping the world, in Morris’ view. He loved the Old Norse sagas, and mourned the loss of ancient heroism. He went to Iceland to see the places where the events in the sagas took place. While there, he was enraptured by the wildness of the volcanic landscape, and enchanted by the relative equality of all the people, country people without a rich class of capitalists. But he also loved sailing up the Thames from dirty London into the agrarian countryside. The countryside was ordered into woodlots and fields, and therefore conquered, but it was still filled with plants and animals. Morris despised the loss of the beauties of a farmed countryside.

So, what did Morris do? He spent a fair amount of time in socialist activism. But he knew that no matter how much he did, socialism would remain an elusive goal: the forces of money and power opposed it, so it didn’t matter whether socialism was better for the people or not. Instead, he spent most of his time writing poems and novels about heroic struggles in faraway or nonexistent lands. That is, he was one of the first prominent writers of fantasy. He was much revered by C. S. Lewis (Perelandra and Narnia) and J. R. R. Tolkein (Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). (Tolkein was also enraptured by the Old Norse sagas.)

This might seem like simple escape. The world is ugly and getting uglier, so we should like in our imaginations. But that is not how Morris saw it. He strongly objected to “escape” as a description of his writings. Instead, what he was doing was to create a vision of what the world could be like, how we could live, if we pursued beauty instead of ugliness. Morris could not convince very many people of socialism, but he got thousands of people to imagine a beautiful world, and many of these, in cumulative small ways, helped to partially reverse the slide toward ugliness. Morris stirred up a feeling of heroism in the minds of thousands; and, through his successor Tolkein, millions.

This is what I am devoting most of my time to, also. I do not spend very much time in political activism. Instead, my main activities are teaching and writing. This summer, my focus is on writing fiction. I have many novels that need to be refined and perfected, and a few that have not yet been written. Am I wasting my time on a dilettante activity while the masses of poor suffer violence and oppression? I hope not. I hope that my writings, about people real or imagined who pursue beauty and peace against massive opposition, will inspire thousands of other people, who will collectively do more to make the world better than I could ever do myself. My fiction is either historical (e.g. about the Cherokee leader Nancy Ward, or about the writer of Ecclesiastes, or about Heloïse and Abélard) or alternative-futures (What would happen if a new Confederacy arose in Oklahoma? What would happen if a man actually tried to quixotically live a life of altruism?) rather than fantasy like the writings of Morris, and I hope that my writings will have more impact than his did (most of which are forgotten today except by scholars).

William Morris failed to change the world. I expect to fail also. But he succeeded, and I hope to succeed, more by writing than would have been possible by a complete devotion to political action. Lots of people can participate in political action, but only I can write the books that are currently dormant on my computer drives. Now that I have finished this essay, that is what I am going to do right now.

Brain Exercises

Intelligence is not something that we have simply because evolution favored excessive brain development in our evolutionary ancestors, nor is it something fixed by our circumstances in life. I think we all realize that intelligence is something that we can deliberately cultivate, and, within certain limits, it is never too late to start. There have been many studies consistent with this view, including some that show that working mental puzzles reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease even in old people who, upon post-mortem examination, turned out to have had advanced plaque in their brains.

But what kind of mental exercises? Like many other science nerds, I sort of enjoy accumulating trivia in my brain. But more recently I have started disliking trivia. What I emphasize in my own continued learning, and encourage in my students, is a creative understanding of major concepts. For example, I do in fact continue to memorize Latin names of plants, to add to the considerable list that is already stored in my cerebral interneurons, not because they are fun trivia (how could you not like a name such as Liquidambar styraciflua?) but because each species is different and plays its own unique role in the extremely important ecosystems in which we live. Quercus stellata and Quercus alba are very different trees, even though both are often called “white oaks.” This is not trivial. Perhaps my dislike of trivia is why I find the NPR program “Ask Me Another” a bit irritating.

And perhaps this is why I enjoyed encountering an article by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano (“Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind”) some time back in the October 18, 2013 issue of Science. (Not being a psychologist, I cannot claim to have read the article, much less understood it. I just enjoyed seeing it.) Not all forms of brain exercise are equally characteristic of our uniquely human type of intelligence.

One of the unique aspects of human intelligence is Theory of Mind, which I may summarize simplistically as the ability to know what other people are thinking. This is a kind of intelligence that proved extremely important in prehistoric human evolution; people with the greatest fitness were those who could best survive and reproduce in the complex social landscape of their tribes. It is a kind of intelligence that, I suspect, robots and computers will never have (though even as I write this someone may be creating an AI program that proves me wrong), and which alien life forms, should they exist, may be unlikely to have.

Kidd and Catana preconditioned volunteers by having them do one of four different kinds of activities. The controls did not do any supplemental reading, either of books or of blogs like this one which, if I may presume, encourages readers to think about complex topics in many situations. One group read nonfiction. Another group read genre fiction. A third group read literary fiction. They then tested the ability of the volunteers to figure out what other people were thinking by giving them a quantitative test in which they predicted what a character in a reading would do next. They found that only the group that read literary fiction showed a temporary enhancement in the ability to understand others.

As a writer who keeps looking for a chance to publish fiction, I was intrigued to discover that it is possible to scientifically define the difference between literary and genre fiction. While imperfect, the distinction is rather simple: in genre fiction, you always know how the characters are going to act (good people are always good, bad people are always bad, and detectives are always hard-boiled), while in literary fiction the characters mentally wrestle with their options. In literary fiction, the characters are always trying to figure the world out, while in genre fiction the characters know exactly what to do and do it. This is, of course, a continuum; some people would consider Twilight to be genre fiction, although it does have some literary elements, in which the vampires are not consistently bad. Not all science fiction is based on attacks by evil space monsters; Star Trek was famous for breaking this mold, as was the father of science fiction, Jules Verne, whose Captain Nemo was a very complex character. Or you could say that literary fiction makes you think, while genre fiction just allows you to play with your mind.

Let me imagine that, just possibly, Kidd and Catana see themselves as missionaries of mind. They work at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which also happens to be the world focus of fiction publishing. Increasingly, literary fiction is difficult to publish. I doubt that very many literary agents or publishers will hear Kidd and Catana’s gospel of the mental healthfulness of literary fiction.

Memes Are Everywhere

At the end of 2011, I wrote about the cultural and memetic evolution of the economy. Most of you probably understood what I meant. But I would like to include here a summary of the idea of memetic evolution, which I have extracted from Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published last year.

Humans exist in a sea of memes. For example, music is memes. Somebody invents a new piece of music, and performs it. A successful set of music memes gets performed by others. Because of memetic selection, there are more copies of Dvořák’s New World Symphony on the market than anything written by Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf. The reason that most folk songs are good is that they have endured centuries of memetic selection. Memetic selection appears to have condemned the deliberately atonal academic music of the twentieth century, such as the works of Anton Webern and Witold Lutosławski, to long-term obscurity. (You’ve never heard of them? That is my point.)

To a certain extent, memetic evolution is arbitrary. But memes, like genes, must correspond to underlying reality. In the case of music, harmonic consonance creates more of a feeling of peace and enjoyment than harmonic dissonance. Consonance results when the vibrations of different notes match one another’s overtone series. Humans desire more than just peace and enjoyment from their music, however, and a certain amount of dissonance is necessary to create a flow of musical events; resolution of a dissonance is part of the story of a piece of music. You cannot change the physical basis of consonance and dissonance any more than you can change the law of gravity. Rhythm is also based on the natural world and may be even more primal than harmony. The powerful drum beats of Japanese taiko and Lakota wacipi music bring back fetal memories of your mother’s heartbeat.

Computer programs are memes. Computer programmers commonly use evolutionary algorithms that consciously imitate natural selection. The program begins with a simple set of instructions, then generates slight variations, tries them out, then retains the ones that work the best. The weasel program is a simple example of an evolutionary algorithm. The computer iterates this process over and over, producing complex results that were designed not by the programmer but by memetic evolution within the computer. Old movies with battle scenes required (and boasted of) “a cast of thousands,” but modern movies often have such large-scale scenes generated by computer programs that use evolutionary algorithms.

Literature is memes. The marketplace is an arena of memetic evolution, as people choose some products over others. Science is memes, as scientists try out hypotheses, retaining and propagating the ones that successfully explain the natural world. Everywhere you look, there are memes, memes, and more memes, all of them evolving.

Check out the new YouTube video available soon on my YouTube Channel (StanEvolve). The video may not be available right away. Also remember to submit any comments, especially about topics you would like to discuss for this blog.

For more information about Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, which has now been published in Chinese as well as English, see my website.