Pseudoscience, if it is applied to real life, may leave people poorer and unhappier. If they are unlucky, it may well leave them dead. Moreover, it may impoverish, immiserate, or kill unfortunate kinfolk of the gullible or those under the rule of those who believed some egregious crackpottery.
But there is an upside1. Even completely bonkers pseudoscience can be wonderfully inspirational for a hard-working science fiction author. Embracing a single impossible idea for the sake of a story is widely held as acceptable behavior. The results can surprise and delight2!
Consider the following works based on pseudoscience. Some I would consider very, very good; others are at least interesting.
Ancient Astronauts
As anyone who has filled the empty hours on public transit with dissection apps on their phone can attest, under the skin humans are commonplace tetrapods, their interior structure homologous with that of a tetrapod lineage that can be tracked back through the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years. In other words, humans are a very local product. Nevertheless, the idea that humans came from somewhere else can be narratively useful.
Take for example Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish setting. She posits that humans originated on Hain, not Earth. Hain peopled a great many planets, sometimes modifying the settlers for reasons now unclear3. Among other benefits, this allowed Le Guin to play with the consequences of altering one significant element of human biology while leaving the rest untouched. In the setting of her The Left Hand of Darkness, Gethenians have no fixed sex, which has profound consequences for their culture.
Young Earth Creationism
The physical evidence strongly supports the belief that the Earth is billions of years old. However, for reasons I am certain my editors would strongly prefer me not to dwell upon4, certain groups find an ancient Earth philosophically unacceptable and have poured vast efforts into alternative models. Still, the rocks say what the rocks say. Happily for science fiction, authors need not be bound by overwhelming evidence.
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy plays with the notion of an Earth whose age is illusory. Hitchhikers’ Earth is a creation of comparatively recent vintage, built for a very special purpose. Alas for human self-regard, that purpose had nothing to do with us. And alas for the original architects, Earth was destroyed just before it reached its goal. Which, to be fair, is how they should have expected events to play out in a Douglas Adams novel.
Parapsychology
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if by sheer force of will we could communicate with distant people, levitate heavy objects, or transport ourselves from one location to another? Alas, despite J.B. Rhine’s efforts to show otherwise5, parapsychology is pure bunkum not supported by the evidence. Humans are forced to rely on functional but unromantic technological solutions such as phones, forklifts, and airplanes.
Nevertheless, narrative universes in which humans possess vast mental powers are super-cool. Examples abound. Anne McCaffrey’s To Ride Pegasus is set in a world where paranormal powers are real and useful. The North American Center for Parapsychic Talents struggles to deal ethically and safely with the consequences of that fact.
Fortean Phenomena
Dissatisfied with conventional science for various reasons, Charles Fort methodically documented apparent anomalies which, when taken together suggested vast lacunae in human understanding of the world. Fort’s sincerity is debatable. Perhaps Forteanism was Fort’s coping mechanism for life’s absurdities. Nevertheless, his acolytes took Fort quite seriously.
Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier may have been inspired by Fort’s thesis that “the Earth is a farm; we are someone else’s property.” If not, it is still a useful demonstration of what one author can do with such a notion. In Sinister Barrier, a wave of inexplicable deaths and sudden suicides strikes America’s brain trust. Are foreign powers6 targeting America? The truth is far worse.
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories provide many benefits. A confusing world becomes explicable thanks to a straightforward model. Adherents can take comfort from knowing that they are important enough to be schemed against and from the belief that they are among the cognoscenti in the know.
It’s true that such beliefs, when pitted against real-world facts, turn out to lack any explicative or predictive power. That is no problem for the true believers; the media and the powerful have obviously been corrupted by conspiracies that are even more pervasive than previously believed.
After dealing with all too many crank letters, Playboy Forum editors Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea posed the question “What if all of the conspiracy theories, even the mutually exclusive ones, were true?” The answer was Wilson and Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy, a stupendously 1970s tour of a world filled with plots, a world where They are very much out to get You.
The above works are a very small sample of the pseudoscience-based confections that SF authors have published. Quite possibly I’ve neglected your favourite examples of pseudoscience-inspired works. If so, feel free to entertain us all in comments below.
- Well, there’s another upside. Pseudoscience can make a few con artists extremely rich. As can fortunetelling, astrology, cults, etc. Human gullibility in general is a real moneymaker.
- Sometimes the only reader who was surprised and delighted by stories based on pseudoscience was John W. Campbell, Jr. but he paid reliably and well.
- The notion that the ancient Hain were colossal jerks seems reasonable. That would explain why they did the things they did and why their colonies cut off contact with Hain/were abandoned by Hain for hundreds of thousands of years.
- My editors can take comfort in my decision to stick to books by dead authors, thus moving pseudoscientific responses to climate change in general and Fallen Angels in particular off the board. Also omitted, A. E. van Vogt. He had a hard life; documenting his efforts to fill the hole left by the Mennonite upbringing from which he distanced himself feels like bullying.
- Alfred Bester explained away the lack of evidence by positing that parapsychological powers require extreme, life-threatening circumstances to trigger. Don’t try this at home.
- Sinister Barrier was published in 1939 and its treatment of non-Americans, Asians in particular, has [understatement font] not aged well [/understatement font].
Ooh, I’ve read three of these! Also heard of the Russell but not the McCaffrey (I haven’t read much of her work generally, alas). One novel I liked a lot that took on both paranormal powers and ancient astronauts is Daniel Pinkwater’s Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, written at the height of the 1970’s mania for both subjects. Pinkwater does an excellent job of debunking the real-world purveyors of both, while slyly “explaining” what’s really behind these phenomena.
Great topic. I found the Illuminatus trilogy just too much, but I think I got through two of them.
Van Vogt’s Null-A novels are my favorite.
Von Daniken’s books really belong here, but of course he claimed they weren’t fiction.
_Fallen Angels_ was literally the last Niven/Pournelle I managed to read (a portion of!)
I enjoyed the Illuminatus books a lot more in the 1970s, when lead-paint-eating wackaloons didn’t seem to have taken over public discourse to the degree they have today. Of course, they probably had, just not where I could see it.
Isn’t Niven’s Protector an ancient-astronaut premise of sorts, with humans being a neotenous Pak Protector colony or something?
Star Trek toyed with the idea of humans being seeded in “Return to Tomorrow,” when Sargon suggested that his humanoid species may have been the ancestors of most humanoids including us, but the show’s science advisors must have set them straight, since Dr. Mulhall points out that scientific evidence supports the idea of humans evolving independently on Earth (though Spock suggests it might be true of Vulcans). ST:TNG’s “The Chase,” which inspired the story arc of the current, final season of Star Trek: Discovery, managed to come up with the one credible way of positing an alien origin for humans: the Progenitors seeded Earth four billion years ago, so that all life on Earth descended from that origin, instead of humans being the odd ones out.
Stargate SG-1 initially handled the idea fairly well by claiming the humanoid Ancients evolved on Earth 3 million years ago, built a civilization, became starfarers, then came back hundreds of thousands of years ago and tweaked Homo sapiens‘s evolution so that we’d replicate their appearance. Unfortunately, they later threw out that relatively plausible idea in favor of the premise that the Ancients had actually been colonists from another galaxy. Finally, they claimed that all life in the Galaxy had been created at the same time by a godlike Ancient device, which is sort of like the Progenitor idea in that it justifies all life on Earth having common genetics, but it totally conflicts with the chronology of the fossil record.
Yes, humans in Known Space are an off-shoot of ETs from a core-ward planet, despite humans clearly being terrestrial-model tetrapods and despite it being a setting point that each planet arrives at its own sets of body plans. Most intelligent beings might be descended from Slaver food yeast but that doesn’t mean they solved the skeleton problem the same way.
The obvious solution is hominins are from Earth, someone moved some to Pak homework and tinkered with them, then something in the Pak library pointed the Pak towards their forgotten homeworld. And when I say someone, I mean “Outsiders”.
Gosh. That sounds almost like a Known Space spinoff tale… A Darker Geometry
My someone was a tnuctipun. https://mindstalk.net/tnuctipak.html
The Outsiders would be happy to answer that question for you – for a price. How many vigintillion stars [the Niven money unit] do you have on hand?
This obvious solution is similar to the one that gets used the DK Moran’s Tales of the Continuing Time. Aliens thought early humans (Neanderthals? My memory is unclear.) had potential, so they grabbed a bunch to use as servants, modifying them to be more to their tastes. These slaves later overthrow their masters and when even later internal strife leads to a need for a place to exile the losing side to, they take them back to their ancestral homeworld, Earth, where they interbreed with the local variety of humanity, resulting in us.
“The notion that the ancient Hain were colossal jerks seems reasonable.”
Everyone in a LeGuin story is far too polite to mention this, but it’s by far the most economical explanation.
I read Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites at an impressionable age. Looking back at it now I’m impressed by the number of different pseudosciences he managed to combine into one story.
Wilson wrote an allegedly nonfiction book in which he claimed pi is a rational number, so…
Little Black Example: Traveller, holding true to its harder-end-of-pulp-SF roots, dabbles in this sort of thing, occasionally straight but not always:
terroristsfreedom fighters canonically exist, but there have been earlier versions of the canon [1] in which they might have been real (and either homegrown or a Zhodani front), defunct but occasionally locally recreated by bored political science majors who went on to either growing up or being incarcerated, a creation of Imperial agents provocateurs, a complete myth, or (my favorite) all of the above.[1] The nice thing about canon, of course, is that it changes however and whenever a writer wants it to.
There’s a brief comment in The Left Hand of Darkness, saying there’s evidence that the Terran colony was an experiment, to see what would happen if a Hainish colony was placed on a world with native but non-sapient hominids. That’s offered as support for the idea that the Gethenians were an experiment, an idea that the narrator (of that bit) finds disturbing.
A lot of SF from the 1930’s and 1940’s appears to show the influence of eugenics, which was then considered a legitimate branch of biology. It was most frequently manifest in stories of “homo superior,” either through “selective breeding,” as in the Lensman series or Heinlein’s “Howard Families” stories, or “natural selection,” such as in Heinlein’s novella “Gulf.”
What happens in the Lensmen or Howard Families stories is not eugenics and breeding for preferred genetic characteristics is perfectly valid science – ask any animal breeder. Or farmer.
Heinlein’s Lost Legacy fits this bill.
But–Charles Fort never mentioned wombats . . .
It’s funny you should mention a Joe Karns book, he said foreshadowingly.
James Hogan’s Cradle of Saturn is a showpiece of Velikovskian pseudo-science, but the rot was becoming obvious well before that. His politics overtook any grounding that he had in true science. This contrarianism extended to his later non-fiction writing as well.
Pity – he showed in Inherit the Stars that he knew better. That book may have had its flaws (sch as suggesting that the Moon had only recently become paired with the Earth – well, I guess that was a pretty big one), but it was an interesting puzzle-piece.
Had I read Inherit the Stars as a teenager, I think I could have just enjoyed the puzzle (which was cool), but alas, I read it as a grad student who was more literate in research credit and systemic sexism and was gob-smacked by the scene where 1) one of the scientists explains how he decoded the journal without any reference to the female assistant who found the key and 2) the narration flips to said female assistant who is inexplicably content to not have been given an iota of credit.
Not that this an example of pseudoscience, but I’ve never encountered anyone else who has read this book, so I’m taking the opportunity to vent my frustration.
You’re quite right. I read it just before I started grad school and was caught up in the puzzle, not noticing the human interactions so much.
I’m surprised that Hogan got away with this, though. Even back then.
Hogan’s career arc is depressing.
That there is a market for the sort of late-career work he produced is even more depressing.
You mention Hitchhikers Guide as a Young Earth Creationist book. I don’t remember that. But Pratchett did use that as an idea in a different novel, Strata.
Jeffrey Ford’s The Physiognomy was based on phrenology.
There was a wonderful Creationist Conspiracy Story I read years ago (sadly, I cannot recall the title or the author). The narrator is talking about conspiracy theorist he knew (“he had convinced himself that there were no less than seven groups who had agents planted on the grassy knoll with orders to appear that they had deliberately missed”). The conspiracy is that Creationism is the Reality and Satan has been planting clues to turn us away from God by believing in Evolution. (“You mean Evolution is a Communist conspiracy?” “No, I mean Communism is an Evolutionist conspiracy!”) In the end, the conspiracy theorist is struck dead by a bolt of lightning even though there is not a cloud in the sky.
The book — and even before that the radio show — made clear during the that Earth was constructed to find the Ultimate Question (the one to which “42” is the answer). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Synopsis.
I would love to know how to find that Creation Conspiracy story….
The Hitchhiker’s Guide artificial construction of Earth millions of years ago is “young” compared with the billions of years the evidence suggests, but not compared to the 6000 years or so typically accepted by biblical literalists.
Conspiracy theory isn’t pseudo-science; it’s a shared delusion.
In any case, one could argue that without pseudo-science, there’s no SF.
“In any case, one could argue that without pseudo-science, there’s no SF.”
And one would be wrong. Much science fiction is based on the best scientific theory of its day; for instance, Jules Verne strove to make his scientific romances as accurate as possible, though a lot of the scientific beliefs of the era later proved wrong.
If you’re suggesting an equivalence between the conjectural science of SF and pseudoscience, the two are different things. For one, SF doesn’t claim its speculations are true in real life, while pseudoscience does. For another, the fictional science in SF is generally extrapolated from known science and evidence; even Mary Shelley based Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments on real studies in galvanism, and the Martian canals in early 20th-century SF were based on what Percival Lowell believed he’d actually seen through a telescope. Pseudoscience, by contrast, is based on a rejection of evidence except that which supports a preconceived notion.
The Urban Legion Trilogy posits that all urban legends are true, that one conspiracy lurks behind everything from 5G to bananas, and that human evolution has been manipulated for nefarious purposes. Like the Illuminatus! trilogy, it makes fun of pseudoscience, religion, and conspiracies, and like Men In Black, it does so with a matter-of-fact delivery.
Although I once had to explain to someone from out of town at an Orycon at an Urban Legends panel that yes, we really did blow up a dead whale, and directed her to the video.
There’s also the recent animated show Inside Job, where all of the conspiracy theories out there are 100% true.
Except Flat Earthism, which is just laughably Wrong.
Flath Earthism was a joke by Rand that rapidly became unfunny
Eric Frank Russell was quite openly a devotee of Charles Fort – I’m fairly sure he credited Fort for the original idea behind Sinister Barrier. Following that story’s publication in the first issue of Unknown, he would go on to contribute a couple of essays on Fortean themes – the sort of thing that I categorize as “ostensibly non-fiction”. In “Spontaneous Frogation”, an account of a rain of frogs in Liverpool, he is kind enough to offer some sort of reasonable explanation… but his essay “Over the Border” takes a much more alarming turn. The “border” here is the dividing line between timid realists and visionary thinkers like, well, Fort and Russell. Unoriginal thinkers like myself would not conclude, given some vague tales about unexplained booming noises and unusual weather in the English Channel, that water-dwelling people from Venus were trsvelling there to test atomic bombs for their own obscure purposes, but Russell proves it. Proves it with geometric logic, I tell you.
I once read part of a collection of essays on science by John W Campbell. His ability to be authoritatively wrong on many subjects was comprehensive. I didn’t finish the entire collection. His belief in crackpot psuedoscience like reactionless drives was almost funny, but he also firmly believed in “scientific racism” and that rant was a lot harder stomach.
Dear editors, it’s upbringING. (Though it is different with the Uplift.)
Let’s see. Spaceships that accelerate to faster-than-light speeds with finite energy sources fueling them. Time machines that let you pick a date past or future by twirling a knob to the right position. Humans that fall into black holes and come out intact somewhere distant. Consciousness as something you can upload to (and download from) a computer. Traveling to alternate realities based on different “choices” made by your mind, or maybe just by some mysterious quantum events (not necessarily whether or not you forgot to pick up the dry cleaning yesterday). Human immortality (as opposed to slight life extension). Nanotech “swarms” that are controlled (at least to start) by human programming. Tech billionaires that save the world with their brilliant ideas. That one gene tweak (or meme tweak) that will turn humans from self-centered, genocidal monsters into sweet-tempered, rational communitarians.
It’s more difficult to think of SF that isn’t inspired by pseudoscience. Unless one wants to establish a gradient between pseudoscience and “plain bad science”. I’d still like to think that interplanetary travel within our solar system is not yet a ridiculous premise, but it’s getting harder.
As I said above, there’s a fundamental difference between fanciful science fiction, which does not claim to be true in real life, and pseudoscience, which does. What makes something pseudoscience is that it’s promoted as actual scientific fact despite having no basis in evidence or reason.
This thread is about works of fiction that are inspired by unscientific doctrines promoted as fact in real life, such as psionics and ancient astronauts, whether because the author genuinely believes they’re scientifically valid (e.g. John W. Campbell or Anne McCaffrey believing in psionics) or simply because the author finds it entertaining to tell a story pretending it’s valid (as with the Illuminatus trilogy). That’s different from knowingly making something up for the sake of entertainment.
It’s also different from presenting valid science inaccurately, as in most of your examples. Black holes, computers, and genetic engineering do exist, even if a story takes a flexible approach to the details of their workings for the sake of the fiction. That’s not pseudoscience, it’s just artistic license applied to real science.
I was amused while reading 1974’s Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow: A Discursive Symposium* that editor Reginald Bretnor segued seamlessly from denouncing hippies, the New Wave, racial agitators, academics of the wrong kind, and irrational ivory-tower pseudoscience to endorsing General Semantics.
Speaking of Bretnor, I picked up his 1953 Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future, I assumed that as it predated New Wave SF, it wouldn’t not have Bretnor’s usual tirades against New Wave. Alas, the current edition reprints the 1979 edition, into which Bretnor inserted complaints about New Wave SF.
* Which is worth tracking down, if only as a snapshot of SF at a very specific time.
There was a rather grumpy “Mundane SF” movement about 20 years ago but among the problems its proponents encountered was the fact its most vocal supporters didn’t seem qualified to write or even comment usefully on Mundane SF. E.g. holding up Neuromancer as the sort of alien and space-colony-free SF they wanted, when Neuromancer has both (off-stage) aliens and space habitats.
Well, all movements are wrong, but some movements are entertaining as they thrash around trying to deny that. Maybe being grumpy works against being entertaining in the more than short term?
I would settle for scale-appropriate SF, and I think some authors have attempted that. Don’t imagine terraforming another world within a single human lifetime. Don’t treat traveling to the stars like it will be a transcontinental airline flight, where you don’t have to pack much (like, an entire ecosystem, for example) and you can eventually pop back home for tea with Mum (without her having died of old age long before). Don’t imagine military action in deep space that will sound familiar to Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin readers. Even when you stay on or near earth, don’t imagine using quantities of energy that we can’t come close to obtaining now despite the wonderfully efficient fossil fuels that we’re slowly exhausting. In too many stories we’re giving technology magical properties (and calling it science fiction) in order to keep the human scale and small planet scale that lets us tell very familiar stories.
Following those rules would seem to disallow SF all together. And true science, such as solar electricity.
Regarding conspiracy theory, there’s the Red Dwarf episode “Tikka to Ride”, where Lister et al use time travel to make a curry run. Instead, they end up in Dallas on November 22 1963, where they unwittingly prevent the Kennedy assassination.
See also Circumpolar! by Richard Lupoff, which combines “Flat Earth” and “Hollow Earth” theories, on an Earth that is shaped like a fat pancake with the continents spread across one “side” and a vast ice wall girdling the equator. On the “other side” are the Lost Continent of Mu, Swartalheim, and other mythical lands, and with a hole running from pole to pole. The story involves an air-race in 1927 to fly around the Earth, with one team (made up of Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hugues and Amelia Earhart) attempting to fly over the equatorial ice wall, while the other team (Manfred and Lothar Von Richtofen) attempt to fly through the polar hole.
Going the other way around, when H.P. Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness, continental drift (which is expounded in the text as being absolutely true) was widely regarded as crackpot pseudoscience, or at the very least highly suspect.
I recommend checking out Kenneth Hite’s Suppressed Transmissions, which offers advice on using pseudoscience in fiction (mostly for RPG scenarios, though it’s useful for other forms of fiction).
Weber’s Dahak series has ancient aliens who are actually humans (IIRC the really ancient humans terraformed Earth and that’s why we fit in to the ecology) and also includes the ‘fake moon’ parody conspiracy theory, the original Moon having been destroyed and replaced by an enormous spaceship.
Steven White did the Blood of the Heroes books, in which time travelers meet ancient aliens posing as gods who made the heroes of Greek myth by genetic engineering. They were stranded and running out if resources, hence why they were gone by the present. I only ever read the first one, I don’t know if it ever addresses any other mythologies.
James Blish’s first novel, Jack of Eagles aka ESPer (1952). Rhine-handwaving psi powers that can be ‘tuned in’ or jammed with electronic hardware… the old “it’s only paranormal because our physics hasn’t caught up with our wild talents” shuffle, deployed in a noir-ish gangster plot.
Serious pair of thumbs up for note [5], referencing the Bester novel, The Stars My Destination. Tied with Halderman’s Forever War and Card’s Ender’s Game for my fave SF novel.
Of course the classic pseudoscience that so many SF works really on is FTL travel. Which is in the same category as ESP, but who knows how many physicists (who really should known better) have wasted countless hours coming up with fanciful ways to get around the inevitable limit that is c.
That’s not a valid comparison at all, and it’s an insult to the theoretical physicists who have spent decades researching exotic spacetime metrics such as wormholes and warp bubbles. Pseudoscience is superstition that claims to be scientific but has no actual grounding in the scientific method, mathematics, or evidence. Believers in pseudoscience insist their beliefs are actually true and want others to believe it too. Spacetime metrics such as Kip Thorne’s wormholes and Miguel Alcubierre’s warp bubbles are solutions of Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, firmly grounded in one of the most consistently and solidly proven theories in all of physics. And the work of coming up with these equations is an exercise in theoretical physics only. The point is not to claim that these things are actually achievable, merely to examine the hypotheticals and their ramifications in order to refine our understanding of the math and physics. When physicists say “It would require a form of exotic matter to achieve this effect,” they’re not saying exotic matter can exist, they’re just saying its existence would be the only thing that could allow the effect, which is essentially confirming that the effect cannot actually happen — at least, not unless a later theorist comes up with a physically valid way to approximate its properties, e.g. with the Casimir effect, or to bypass the need for it altogether. But theoreticians aren’t interested in practical applications, only in the pure physics and math.
More to the point, SF writers don’t use FTL because we actually believe it can happen, any more than Aaron Sorkin actually believed that Jed Bartlet was President of the United States, or any more than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby actually believed in Norse gods like Thor and Odin. We use FTL because it’s a convenient plot device for telling the stories we want to tell. It’s not pseudoscience, it’s artistic license. We’re not trying to convince our audience to believe these things are real, we’re just trying to entertain them.
The Points series, begun by Melissa Scott and her late partner Lisa Barnett, is set in a Renaissance-esque world in which a complicated solar system produces a complicated but accurate form of astrology. I think it’s a fabulous series which has been unjustly ignored.
Good Omens also plays games with Young Earth creationism, of course:
“Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.
This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.
The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven’t seen yet.”
As for conspiracies, there’s always Grant Morrion’s The Invisibles.
You could make the case that Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile and Milieu Trilogy are based quite explicitly on two categories of pseudoscience: first, the existence of “metapsychic” phenomena; second, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s attempt to integrate Catholic belief with evolution. May starts with the idea that both are true, explicitly referring to both Rhine and de Chardin repeatedly throughout.