There's a custom among science fiction writers that a story — a "hard SF" story, anyway — should only contain one element of "magic." By magic we mean some effect which is impossible under our current understanding of the universe. Or, if you're really strict, some effect which would be impossible to create with any technology we know of.
So nanotech medical robots are not magic, because we can already make simple autonomous robots and we're starting to do engineering at very small scales. Medical nanobots are speculative technology and may not become available for many decades, but it would be hard to find anyone who considers them impossible.
Faster-than-light travel, teleportation, time travel, and antigravity are magic. They all violate various natural laws, or require materials like "negative matter"* which nobody has the slightest idea how to create. They're about as scientifically plausible as Harry Potter's magic spells.
If those things are magic, what are they doing in science fiction stories, especially so-called "hard SF" stories? Well, there's two reasons for that.
The first reason is that sometimes the magic turns real. When H.G. Wells wrote about atomic power in The World Set Free (1914), nobody had any idea how to actually go about causing a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. "Splitting the atom" was almost a byword for something impossible. (Any Greek classicist would nod in approval.) Thirty years later, nuclear fission was a proven technology.
There are other examples. Semiconductors would have been magic in the 1930s. Rockets shouldn't have been magic, as the basic physics is pretty straightforward, but the New York Times pooh-poohed Robert Goddard's proposal to launch rockets beyond the Earth's atmosphere in 1921, and didn't get around to printing a retraction until 1969.
But of course that's a pretty thin justification, really. "Our understanding of the universe might change and this magic stuff I made up could come true." It happens, but it's not the way to bet.
The second reason to use "magic" is a bit more practical: a touch of magic in a science fiction story allows the author to tell stories that would otherwise be impossible.
Take faster-than-light travel. I'm writing a novel right now about a starship crew visiting a distant star system using an FTL drive I worked out. It follows sciencey-seeming rules, but it's basically magic. Why'd I do it? Why not send my space voyagers off in a relativistic spacecraft instead?
Well, there's some problems with that. While the mad geniuses of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop want to launch probes to Alpha Centauri some time this century, they're talking about something with a mass measured in single-digit grams. Even the lunatic optimists at JPL envisioned launching something no bigger than one ton. There's no way I could send a crew of humans on a mission like that.
I don't anticipate relativistic spacecraft for several centuries, at least. And by the time they become feasible, all the other changes going on will make human society — and even human anatomy and psychology — unrecognizable to present-day humans. So I have the choice of either assuming an unrealistically static society over the next four or five hundred years, or of using magic to send some near-future characters (who think and act in a way that I and my readers can understand) off to the stars.
It gets worse if you want to tell stories about time travel. Right now the only even theoretically possible way to travel in time is to pass very close to a rotating black hole. Which means any time travelers have to be those super-advanced post-human space travelers from the previous paragraph. Which means the story would be about hard-to-understand future people interacting with hard-to-understand people in the past. Which means present-day people won't want to read it.
So: magic. But I try to limit myself. In the present book FTL travel is the only wave of the wand, and I want to stick to that.
*Not the same thing as antimatter. You can buy antimatter right now if you have a few billion dollars to spare. It's not magic, just pricey.
For a mix of stories with and without magic, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!
Good points. I sometimes, not often, allow myself time travel and FTL. Mostly not, tho.
Posted by: Gregory Benford | 03/03/2018 at 07:40 PM