Taking Notes: 'Preface' in The History of Science Fiction (2006) by Adam Roberts

儘管我給本書的評價不怎麼樣，但是 Roberts 在〈序文〉（'Preface'）和首章〈定義〉（'Definition'）裡，對科幻定義的再剖析，並以此探索科幻起源的部分堪稱全書的靈魂。其論點頗有可觀之處。無怪乎本書可列名於 2006 年 BSFA Award Non-fiction 的推薦清單。這裡先記下〈序文〉中的重點：

閱讀出處：

Adam Roberts, 'Preface', in The History of Science Fiction (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), pp. vii-xvii

首先看看 Roberts 所認定的科幻起源，是從古希臘的幻想旅行作品開始：

p. vii

I argue that the roots of what we now call science fiction are found in the fantastic voyages of the Ancient Greek novel; and I use the Vernean phrase voyages exrtaordinaires, which I found to be the most supple and useful descriptor for these sorts of texts. Narratives of travel and adventure, often with fantastic (which is to say, impossible or fantastical) interludes, were among the most popular modes of ancient culture: …… I argue that among these many accounts of lengthy and entertaining sea voyages, or treks by land, is a category of voyages extraordinaires of a different sort: voyages into the sky, and especially voyages to other planets. ……

In other words, I am arguing that the ur-form of the SF text is 'a story about interplanetary travel'. It still seems to me that stories of journeying through space form the core of the genre, although many critics would disagree. Travels 'upwards' through space, or sometimes 'downwards' into hollow-earth marvels (distinguished from more conventional 'ordinary' travels over the surface of the globe), are the trunk, as it were, from which the various other modes of SF branch off. Speaking

p. viii

broadly, these other branches are twofold. First, there are 'travels through time' as a corollary of 'travels through space'. It is not, I think, coincidental that this sub-genre comes into being and rapidly becomes vigorous in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth – which is to say, at the tie that 'science' was establishing the intimate interrelations between these quantities of 'time' and 'space'. A second branch, a major bough in fact (to continue the metaphor), is 'stories about technology'. Because long-distance travel already involves a range of complex technologies – ……– it is again not surprising that 'tales of technology' begin as embedded elements in extraordinary voyages. ……

這裡他明確指出有三種故事是科幻的濫觴：

1) 空間旅行（甚或太空旅行）

2) 時間旅行

3) 科技故事

後兩種均衍生自第一種。

These three forms, broadly conceived, delineate my rough sense of what SF 'is': stories of travel through space (to other worlds, planets, stars), stories of travel through time (into the past or into the future) and stories of imaginary technologies (machinery, robots, computers, cyborgs and cyber-culture). There is a fourth form, utopian fiction, which is often discussed by critics of science fiction as belonging to any reasonable definition of the form. My assumption in this study is that utopian fiction is indeed science fiction, although it takes as its starting point philosophy and social theory. We might say that the 'novum' (or new thing), the nub of Darko Suvin's definition of SF, in Utopia is 'a new social organisation', and for many critics this is enough to make the book science-fictional. I argue in this study that utopian fiction must be discussed as a parallel development to SF, including as it often does voyages to distant lands or into different times, and facilitated with different technologies. But it is easy to see why some critics wish to exclude utopias from a discussion of SF: because utopian writing is fundamentally a satiric mode of literature; that takes its force from the implied contrast between the 'ideal' society being described and the imperfect world in which the author and his/her readers actually live.

When it comes to SF I cling, perhaps naively, to the belief that the worlds encountered in the genre's best texts are more than simply modified forms of this world – which is to say that SF embodies a genuine and radical Will to Otherness, a fascination with the outer reaches of imaginative possibility. Not all utopias partake of this alterity, but utopias must be discussed nevertheless. For one thing, many practitioners of SF have regarded utopian fiction as part of their practice and have themselves written utopias. For another, as SF developed it became more and more concerned with the intricacies of 'world-building', in which writers construe alternative but self-consistent societies. World-building has now become one of

p. ix

the most prized things that SF provides its readers, and much of the grammar of such constructions derives from utopian fiction. So, although developing independently of the genre, utopian writing becomes a sort of para-SF, entwining itself round the genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

這邊則論述科幻故事的第四個起源──烏托邦小說。儘管其生成自外於科幻類型，但也屬於科幻的「旁支」，進而衍生出現今科幻中常見的「世界建構」（world-building）觀念。

在提出上述說法之後，不可避免地要解決歷史上的現實問題：自希臘羅馬之後，空間旅行的代表作品要等到文藝復興以後的十七世紀才又再度出現。中間怎麼會有這麼長的斷層？Roberts 將之歸因於「宗教改革」：

…… I argue that the re-emergence of science fiction is correlative to the Protestant Reformation. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the balance of scientific enquiry shifted to Protestant countries, where the sort of speculation that could be perceived as contrary to biblical revelation could be undertaken with more (although not total) freedom. ……

A little-known but none the less key development in the history of the genre, I would argue, occurred in 1600 when Giordano Bruno the Nolan was burned at the stake by the Catholic Inquisition in Rome. Bruno's crime had been to argue that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds – an example of speculative rather than empirical science, and accordingly science-fictional. ……

The problem, identified and discussed brilliantly (though eccentrically) by William Empson in his posthumously published Essays on Renaissance Literature (1993), can be put in these terms: if there are many worlds, with many populations of beings living on them, then this tends to deny the uniqueness of the crucifixion

p. x

and so devalue Christianity itself, perhaps terminally. …… Under the logic of the Ptolemaic system the solar system is a sort of extension of the Earth, inhabited by human souls or angels created directly by God, and the stars are a fixed sphere, making an immense, decorative backdrop. In this cosmos a single Christ can redeem everything. But if the cosmos is infinite, this belief becomes difficult to sustain.

這又和托勒密與哥白尼的宇宙觀扯上關係。

The revolutionary point of the Copernican cosmos is wholly to reconfigure the focus away from Earth and mankind. Either Christ died only once and God has ignored the rest of this vast creation, or he died in every possible world. ……

This may seem like an obscure point of theological quibbling, but I suggest that it marks a crucial point of cleavage in the development (or redevelopment) of western science fiction. To an orthodox Catholic imagination a plurality of inhabited worlds becomes an intolerable supposition; other stars and planets become a theological rather than a material reality, as they were to Dante – a sort of spiritual window-dressing to God's essentially human-sized creation. But to a Protestant imagination (or to a sceptical humanist Catholic imagination, such as Descartes' or Voltaire's) the cosmos expands before the probing inquiries of empirical science through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the imaginative-speculative exploration of that universe expands with it. This is the science fiction imagination, and it becomes increasingly a function of western Protestant culture. From this SF develops as an imaginatively expansive and (crucially) materialist mode of literature, as opposed to the magical-fantastic, fundamentally religious mode that comes to be known as fantasy.

This, in turn, connects with another form of definition often applied to the mode: science fiction, in contemporary publishing and bookselling practice, is distinguished from 'Fantasy', the latter involving tales of fantastic or non-realist form in which the mechanism for the fantasy is magic rather than technology. ……

至此，Roberts 推導出科幻與奇幻的區別：

天主教（舊教）：religious mode of literature → 奇幻

　　　　新教　：materialist mode of literature → 科幻

他並以 J. R. R. Tolkien 的 The Lord of the Rings 為例來佐證。

p. xi

…… 'Catholic' imaginations countenance magic and produce traditional romance, magical-Gothic, horror, Tolkienian fantasy and Marquezian magic realism. Protestant imaginations increasingly replace the instrumental function of magic with technological devices, and produce science fiction. This present history depends, then, on a historicised definition of SF as that form of fantastic romance in which magic has been replaced by the materialist discourses of science.

為了避免人家拿一些以天主教為主題的科幻作品來踢館，Roberts 在此將他的理論以更精確的語言來表示，並提出他對 'Catholic' SF 的看法：

p. xi

…… my thesis is that science fiction is determined precisely by the dialectic between 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' (or, if one prefers less sectarian terms, between

p. xii

'deism' and 'magical pantheism') that emerges out of the seventeenth century. SF texts mediate these cultural determinants with different emphases, some more strictly materialist, some more mystical or magical. Many of the most celebrated works of what is sometimes called 'Catholic' SF are deeply embedded in this sacramental, 'magical' vision – it is this, I would argue, rather than a fascination with theological questions as such, that distinguishes 'Catholic' SF.

針對 'Catholic' SF，Roberts 又舉了 Walter M. Miller 的 A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)、Gene Wolfe 的 New Sun 與 Long Sun 系列來作說明。

下面這一段再度強調全書的基本立論：

p. xiii

The narrative of this Critical History, in other words, sees a nascent form of SF in Ancient Greece that disappears, or becomes suppressed, with the rise to cultural dominance of the Catholic Church and which re-emerges when the new cosmology of the sixteenth century inflects the theology of Protestant thinkers in the seventeenth. The death of Bruno in 1600 is a short-hand for this crux; and the doctrine of the plurality of worlds that engages seventeenth-century thinkers informs almost all the newer interplanetary texts that SF from this period involves.

他特別提及十七、十八世紀「科幻」作品中的外星生命總會牽連到神學方面的意涵。這種現象一直到現在還不斷被重新檢視。當代科幻中對於神學與宇宙觀的討論與挑戰，Roberts 提出三個範例：

C. S. Lewis 的 Out of the Silent Planet (1938) 與續集：Christ is unique to Earth because only Earth has fallen into the clutches of the Devil.

James Blish 的 A Case of Conscience (1958)：Under the logic of the former [Catholic perspective], the novel is an interesting exploration of a theological conundrum; under the logic of the latter [non-Catholic perspective], a heartbreaking story of human arrogance and short-sightedness, with the blameless Lithians terrible victims. (p. xiv)

Dan Simmons 的 Hyperion Cantos：That there is a mystical principle of compassion behind the events of the cosmos, in conflict with a ruthless opposite principle, casts a pseudo-Christian battle between Christ and Satan onto a galactic stage.

不過這一段他又搬出 Clarke 的第三定律，認定 Clarke 完全否定 'Catholic' SF 的存在；所有的科幻終歸是 'Protestant-humanist' SF 一系。

By asserting that this opposition of 'Protestant/humanist' technology and 'Catholic' magic is radically constitutive of science fiction (and necessarily, therefore, by contradistinguishing SF from Fantasy) I may be reminding readers of Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' (Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1969). But it hardly needs pointing out that far from co-opting magic into SF, Clarke's statement reduces all 'magic' to technological reality; what seems at first glance to be miraculous becomes, when properly analysed, only technological, albeit technology of a wonderfully advanced sort. In other words, Clarke in effect denies 'Catholic' SF altogether; for him 'Catholic' SF is always and inevitably 'Protestant-humanist' SF in disguise; something entirely appropriate to Clarke's own SF corpus, where the apparently 'transcendent' (for instance, the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey) is later rationalised in materialist, technological terms (in the three sequels to that work).

因此，科幻與奇幻的差異就不再只是科學與魔法的區別，而在於奇幻受聖禮約束。

In other words, I am suggesting here a modification to the crude distinction between 'magical' Fantasy and 'scientific' SF. It is not the fact that Fantasy is magical as much that distinguishes it from SF. It is the fact that it is sacramental. Fantasy is supernatural, SF extraordinary, and there is the world of difference between the two. Once we accept that a 'wizard' is a form of priest, we see that there is always a priest in Fantasy. This priestly role is almost always taken (in effect) by a technological artefact in SF.

To sum up: it is the argument of the present Critical History that post-1600 SF has been intimately shaped by this dialectic between 'magic' and 'technology'. Indeed, the subdivisions of the field popular among fans in fact map out positions

p. xv

on the line from magical to technological, 'Hard SF' aligning itself closer to the latter term, 'Soft SF' to the former. ……

以下兩段是戰文，戰得還滿有意思的：

…… To say that Lucian would probably not understand Delany's Dhalgren is only to say that forms evolve and change, and that full comprehension requires a certain attention to these changes and evolutions. Science fiction has certainly evolved, but the fact does not deprive its earlier manifestations of a place in the tradition of SF; and it is that tradition that this study seeks to explore, along the lines outlined in the previous paragraph.

It seems to me, having read many critical-historical works about SF in preparation for the study, that critics exclude SF written before 1927 (or 1870, or 1818, as the case may be) not because there is a coherent rationale for limiting SF to works written after such a date, but rather because the individual critics prefer the later writing, and don't really enjoy so-called 'proto-science fiction'. …… it is the thesis of this study that present-day SF is still being influenced substantively by the determining cultural dialectic out of which it arose four centuries ago.