Optimism and Darkness in Science Fiction

In mid-February, I attended Boskone, a science fiction convention in Boston. I was on the “Optimism vs. Darkness in SF” panel, together with John Joseph Adams, Jennifer Pelland, Phoebe Wray, and the moderator Peter Brett. After the panel, Justine Graykin, who was in the audience, came to me and said thank you for a brief speech I gave at the beginning of the panel, saying that this was worth attending it. This was perhaps the most memorable moment at Boskone for me. Although my time was sharply limited after the convention, I always meant to go back to this subject and post a version of what I said at the panel. The time is now.

By one of its many definitions, science fiction examines the impact of technology and progress on the human psyche and human society. So it is not surprising that we find the themes of optimism and darkness so sharply stated in SF, for they inhere in the phenomenon of progress itself. Anything growing displays this pattern: the potential for things to go wrong grows, yet the potential for the good grows as well.

When your son or daughter is born, the first concerns are medical—and though sometimes serious, in most cases they are light and manageable easily. As the child grows, though, as she learns to walk, there comes a chance of her getting lost. As she learns to bike, there comes a possibility for her to get seriously hurt. As she learns to drive, the danger goes higher still. She goes out in the world, leaves home, finds people to love… Every step of the way, the potential for things to go wrong grows. And although often we may feel we’d rather have her stop, we don’t. Because we feel that the potential for the good is greater.

Is it always, though?

What we see here is a battle of two major tendencies that fight it out everywhere in the universe. One is exemplified by the second law of thermodynamics: in any closed system, entropy statistically grows. The maximum state of entropy is that of death, because everything is uniform, with no differences: the same temperature, the same density, nothing differentiated. When he discovered this law, Ludwig Boltzmann grappled with the “heat death” scenario—what would occur when the entire universe ran down to such state.

Interestingly, Boltzmann arrived at such a pessimistic outlook while trying to do to physics what Charles Darwin had done to biology: to introduce the evolutionary principle into the picture. Unfortunately, the first pioneers in science often have to start with simple things, covering the basic, easily isolated scenarios. And so it was Boltzmann’s fate to study systems close to equilibrium. However, when several decades later Ilya Prigogine turned to studying systems far from equilibrium (and yes, there is a rigorous mathematical definition of what that means), he did successfully what Boltzmann had once failed to do.

Prigogine discovered (and received a Nobel Prize for that) that in open systems far from equilibrium, entropy statistically goes down through a variety of processes (depending on the system) that are all varieties of spontaneous self-organization. Since any closed system still obeys the second law of thermodynamics, this can only be possible if the open system exchanges entropy with its environment, giving more entropy out than it receives from the outside, increasing its internal order and complexity at the expense of its environment. This may appear to be coincidental in each case, but in fact the law is universal and it’s only its relatively late appearance that prevented it from being called the fourth law of thermodynamics.

This generalized evolutionary principle is the source of all structure in the universe: from formation and evolution of galaxies (with huge near-empty voids between them), to birth of stars, to planets and their geologic processes, to the appearance and growing complexity of life, to birth of consciousness (see also Neural Darwinism), to our society with its complex social structure, to the increasing growth of technology… The spiral of progress never ends but rises to the ever greater levels of complexity. Who knows what the next stage may be, for surely it will never end?

Yet in order to rise in order, to lower the entropy, complex adaptive systems must keep increasing their rate of energy flow with their environment, which also necessitates an increase in the number of energy pathways and their complexity. And in order to persist within their environment, they must become progressively smaller relative to the environment. Indeed, although galaxies and stars are huge, containing enormous energy; but the relative rate of flow of energy and entropy in them is way smaller than in our brains and in computer chips.

And here we come back to the potential for the good and the potential or the bad, the promise and the disillusionment, the optimism and the darkness. Close to the top of the observed spiral of progress, at the level of human societies, we have already faced them both. The higher the complexity, the greater both become. But does it mean that we must stop? No way. The message of the unnumbered “fourth law of thermodynamics”—the generalized evolutionary principle—is that, although things can certainly go wrong, the likelihood of them going well is greater, after all. This principle is universal. And even though any given child can die in infancy, more will survive. And even we may drive ourselves extinct, it is more likely that we won’t; even if we do, perhaps other intelligent species (if they exist—in fact, they must exist, although progressively more rare than life, planets, stars, and galaxies), they will survive. To stop, however, is to die for sure. Stopping the progress ultimately brings “heat death” (in all the many ways that one can die).

The potential for the good is greater. But being the creatures of survival that we are, we tend to focus on what could go wrong. Thus, much of our literature reflects less optimism than darkness. Science fiction is the child of the very latest loop of the evolutionary spiral (the technological progress). Even within SF, we see the focus shifting over time from physics to biology to sociology—like in a developing fetus going through the philogeny in its ontogeny, through the earlier evolutionary stages, in her mother’s womb, so does the literature of science fiction, in its own way.

This makes SF even more susceptible to darkness. But, paradoxically, this is for the best. After all, our very tendency to focus on the things that can go wrong is what makes the likelihood of our survival higher. The dystopias we write are warnings and perhaps one of the very mechanisms that actually raises the potential for the good. In this, perhaps, we see the evolutionary principle in action. So, when reading yet another dark thing, do remember that the good will ultimately triumph. Seek those rays of light in darkness. Smile.