Scientists in Science Fiction: Enlightenment and After

Abstract

It is thirty years or so since scientists in general became aware of the image-making powers of science fiction. In the middle to late 1950s it was common to argue that science fiction ‘of the more responsible sort’ could be used to propagate scientific knowledge and to help recruit adolescents into the scientific professions. Scientists began to wonder whether they ought not to be represented more favourably in a genre which was rapidly spreading from books and magazines to new outlets in comics, cinema, radio and television. Typical of the time was a paper by the astronomer Patrick Moore which inspired a lengthy debate at the 1955 UNESCO conference on the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Moore argued that each country should set up a science fiction selection board, so that novels distinguished by ‘scientific soundness’ (together with a category of scientifically unsound novels thought to possess ‘wholesome’ qualities of literary merit) could be given a stamp of approval. If this were done, science fiction could play a useful part in the propagation of knowledge, thanks to its ability to reach readers in urgent need of instruction who seldom if ever read a factual work.¹